A Hard Witching

by Jacqueline Baker

  Perpetua’s inability to love Joe (or anyone else she had met—there had certainly been opportunities) was the result of a too-happy childhood; this she knew. Looking back, she recalled none of the petty tensions and jealousies, none of the potentially grave, deep-rooted resentments that she knew sprouted in other families. There had been quarrels and sometimes tears, even the occasional fit of temper (Martin, once, after an argument with their father—Perpetua could not now remember over what—had broken his knuckle taking a swing at the barn wall), but these had been rare and short-lived and, once past, entirely forgotten. What made possible these easy family relations, she could not suppose. But the lack of conflict and strife neither amazed nor puzzled her—after all, her own marriage had rolled along easily for fifty-five years. Rather, it was the absolute, unshakeably deep love that Magda and Martin and Perpetua and their mother and father had all seemed to feel for one another, and only for one another. Even now, when she conjured up an image of Martin, sickly always, with his too-skinny legs, walking to school through ditches bloated yellow with buffalo beans, or the unbeautiful Magda coaxing a kitten to take milk from a saucer in the little sunless back porch, she felt that huge swelling of her heart, at once so agonizing and so tender. And she was keenly aware, yet again, that she had never once had this feeling for Joe.

  She liked to believe Joe had never known. She had certainly always done her best to conceal it from him. She had cooked his meals and washed his clothes and once, before they were married, when all things still seemed possible, she had danced with him under the stars on a summer night choked with the scent of hot sand and wolf willow and sage. She had held his hand and changed his sour sheets when he lay delirious with rheumatic fever, she had worked beside him in the field and in the corrals, and they had prayed every Sunday shoulder to shoulder in the little church at Johnsborough. She had lain next to him each night, peaceful or tired, sometimes angry. She had stayed, after all. And been happy, more or less. Back then, she had still had Magda and Martin and, for a few years after her mother’s death, her father. And that had been enough.

  Perpetua supposed her parents were to blame. Somehow, they had produced a tight iron band of love that could not be expanded or reshaped or broken. They were good people, unexceptional people. Perpetua’s father was a quiet man, a German, from Odessa, given to long absences, days sometimes, out in the hills, from which he would return peaceful and oddly rested—younger-looking, as though the sandy blasts of wind across the land had polished him smooth, like a stone. He could read and write German fluently—an unusual ability, she learned later, for a man of his background and means. He took the German papers and read each one carefully all the way through, puzzling his forehead in the light from the coal stove as though solving some unpleasant mystery. And on Sunday mornings without fail, until the children were too old for him to do so, he would take each of them in turn on his knee—Magda and then Martin and then Perpetua—and he would tell them in German, You are the light of my heart. And then, while the children stood grinning expectantly, he would rise and wrap their mother’s thickened waist in his big hands and whisper something in her ear—they never knew what, but they could tell by the look on her face it had to be the same thing each time. And she would smile and put the palm of her hand just so across his lips, as if she had placed a kiss there. She seemed to do this secretly, as she seemed to do all things, almost as though she worked some sort of magic in the everyday acts of living—in coaxing hot brown loaves of bread from the oven; or conjuring from that terrible gritty earth string beans fat and green as elves’ stockings; or polishing the scuffed pine-board floor to a shine that made Martin giddy with sliding in his stocking feet, and Perpetua and Magda foolish with imagined dancing shoes and shimmering satin gowns the colour of birds’ eggs. She was a large woman, broad-shouldered and wide through the hips, but she moved quickly and lightly, with the grace of love upon her limbs. No one outside the family would have called her beautiful. But there she was, nevertheless, soft and sudden and full-blown for them all like the wild roses by the gate in summer. And love, love, it was as if someone had dreamed them.

  Only later, much later, did Perpetua realize her loving family had not taught love, but only collected it and stored it selfishly, like the bushel baskets of potatoes and mealy apples in the root cellar. No, they did not teach love. What they taught was this: everything for the family. And just the family. No friends to go visiting on a Saturday afternoon in December, no skating parties, no fall suppers; no group picnics at the river with baskets of other women’s roast chicken and pickles and chokecherry strudels; no brandings, as they did not graze their cattle in the community pasture at the Sand Hills. Not even church, for they prayed at home, led by their father in German from the great black Bible brought from the old country. Always just the five of them. Yes, her parents were certainly to blame. When Perpetua thought this, she always paused uncomfortably over the word blame. But when she considered the effect of their love, it seemed that a little blame was necessary.

  For many years, Perpetua had thought this failure to love was something wrong only in her. Then she had received a letter from Magda, poor Magda, alone in Saskatoon with a child, on the edge of her first divorce, who had written, Tell me how it feels to go to bed each night and wake up each morning beside the man you love (she had underlined love). I feel sickened and empty. And my child, who is flesh and blood, asleep in the next room, her I can’t even speak of, can’t even look at some days without shame. And Perpetua had read the letter twice over and wept terribly, big wrenching sobs, her apron up over her face and her shoulders shaking as though her body would break itself apart—wept, not for her husband, whom she did not love, nor for the children she had never had, whom she could not love either, but for poor Magda, whom she did love. She had wept that way until it was time for Joe’s supper, and then, seeing him step heavily across the yard, she had slipped the letter into the breadbox, washed her face and greeted him, as she did each day, with a smile and a kiss.

  And that letter had made everything clear. This is how it would always be. Magda, ending her marriage because she was waiting for love; Martin, never married, alone for years on their parents’ farm; and Perpetua, married to a man she did not love. It was tragic. And terribly unfair. But, nevertheless, it was. Now, past seventy, with her parents and Magda long since buried in the little Catholic cemetery on the outskirts of town, and Martin rarely able to know her anymore, and only Joe to fill her days, it seemed a thing beyond worrying about, this love.

  So when she looked out the window that Wednesday morning to see a woman in a yellow hat talking to Joe by his woodworking shop, she was taken aback by the great swelling that expanded her old ribs. The feeling came so suddenly and so powerfully that she stepped away from the back door and sank into a kitchen chair, her head swimming with the impossible emotion that trembled her fingers and sheathed her body in a fine layer of sweat. Her knees threatened to give way beneath her, not for Joe, but for the woman in the yellow hat. It took her a few moments to reassure herself that it was not Magda who stood awkwardly among Joe’s larkspur, but Magda’s daughter, Myra, who had written weeks ago that she might be passing through. Perpetua had not seen Myra since before Magda’s divorce, not since Myra had gone off to live with her father in Manitoba. But that had been almost thirty years ago. The woman standing in the garden was not that rather homely, rather unhappy little girl she had known, but a woman approaching middle age, a woman who, for all Perpetua’s rationalizing, was Magda, was Magda’s blood, as she once said, Magda’s body—with the same swelling thighs and narrow shoulders, the same straight yellow hair, the same uneasy stance, the stance of someone slightly cowed by the acceptance of her own graceless appearance. Perpetua had consumed all this detail in a flash as she’d looked briefly out the back door, seeing first Joe standing and nodding, clearly pleased with this visitor (so rare now), and then the woman in the yellow hat, wearing a white skirt and a striped blouse, holdin
g a big straw shopping bag over one shoulder (did she mean to stay?).

  Perpetua rose slowly and went back to the window, but both Joe and the woman (she could not, no matter how she tried, think of her as Myra) had disappeared. Perpetua felt a small quiver of panic before she realized that Joe had no doubt invited her into his workshop. They were probably standing right now beneath all those neat rows of jars he’d glued by their lids to the low ceiling, to hold nails and screws and bolts; she was probably smelling wood shavings and pretending to admire (or genuinely admiring) his carvings: tiny cowboy boots and miniature horses, trains and racing cars and semi trucks (these latter mostly for children around town, and now their children). She would ask politely if he’d done the enormous, elaborately carved slab of varnished cedar out front that announced Dunworkin, and below that, in smaller letters, Joseph and Perpetua Resch. He could keep her there for hours, pointing out the intricacies of detail in a boot or a wheel or a horse’s mane, the character of each different wood—the soft, cheap convenience of knotty pine or the hard, red richness of cherry (bloodwood, he called it), so rare and expensive out west—the grain, the weight, the variations in colour and texture, the shine that could be brought to any piece through sanding. How one could make even the softest wood gleam like marble. He could keep her there all night. But just as Perpetua was deciding whether or not to go out to them (she rarely left the house now, not much at all since the surgery), they both appeared at the doorway to the workshop. Joe pointed toward the kitchen, and the woman looked up, shading her eyes. Perpetua stepped back from the window, even though they probably could not see her. She knew what Joe had said as he pointed: “Your Auntie Pet’s up at the house there. Go on up. She’ll be real glad you’re here.”

  So Perpetua busied herself around the kitchen, wiping the already spotless counters, moving canisters a fraction of an inch into alignment, her hands shaking, and all the time thinking, Magda, Magda.

  And then the doorbell.

  “Come in,” she called pleasantly, as if half-surprised.

  When the woman opened the screen door and stepped into the air-conditioned kitchen on a wave of hot, dry heat, with all that sunlight still streaming in ribbons from her yellow hat, Perpetua came slowly toward her, trying as much as possible to hide the limp from the surgery, trying to swallow that terrible lump in her throat. She took a breath and tried to smile, holding her hands out. “Well, well, look at this,” she began to say, but before she had finished, the woman turned away and covered her face with her big red hands. Magda’s hands.

  Perpetua took her in an awkward embrace. The woman held the tips of her fingers pressed to her eyes. “What is it, dear?” Perpetua asked (she could not say Myra). “Tell me. What’s wrong?”

  The woman shook her head, still half-turned away, returned Perpetua’s embrace with one fumbling, fleshy arm that smelled faintly of geraniums. The woman shook her head, lifted her crumpled face as though in a tremendous effort to stop her tears. She shook her head again and said something that Perpetua could not hear, and in spite of the fact that she hated to do it, Perpetua said, “What? What’s that?” and the woman repeated herself. Perpetua thought it was either “Glad to come back” or “Sad to come back.” Impossible to ask again.

  The woman was embarrassed, Perpetua could see, so she said, “Come in,” and walked her slow, rolling walk to the table, knowing it would give the woman a moment to pull herself together before she followed. Perpetua sat down first, folding her hands in her lap to still the trembling, then looked across the table as the woman pulled out a chair for herself, planted the heavy straw bag with great care at her feet and adjusted the waistband of her skirt. She removed her hat, lifting it too daintily for her hands, with two fingers at each side of the brim, and finally raised her face, gave that same crumpled smile. And it was Magda’s face, streaky red and swollen from the tears and the heat—Magda, who had never been beautiful but who could look at you with a kind of light in her eyes that would set your very bones gently humming. Perpetua stared at the woman, so hungry for that feeling, just one small glimmer, that she almost reached across the table and grasped her by the shoulders to bring her closer. Perpetua looked, and she saw no light there. And then the woman was not Magda, but only Myra, with the red and swollen and lightless eyes. Perpetua felt her heart spill over again, not for Magda now, but finally, after all this time, for Myra. This woman. How could it be?

  “So,” Myra was saying, her voice soft and trembling, “it’s been a long time.”

  Perpetua could barely catch the words. These last years, her hearing had been growing gradually worse, was so bad now that all conversation had a strange, dreamy quality. She leaned forward a little, working her hands in her lap, forcing the awful clenching of her heart to subside.

  “How are you?” Myra asked. “What’s going on with you these days?”

  And before Perpetua could stop herself, she said, surprised at the sudden feebleness of her voice, “Nothing good. Joe had a heart attack last summer”—she thought Myra said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know”—“and I had surgery on my leg, and they put a pin in that’s giving me a lot of trouble, it’s painful, I don’t sleep much anymore.” And then she thought, Why did I say that? I didn’t mean to say that. How terrible I must sound to her.

  Myra said, “I’m sorry,” again, and then, “Uncle Joe looks good. How is he?”

  “What?” Perpetua said. “Joe?”

  Myra raised her voice a little, leaned forward also. “Yes, how is he? He looks good.”

  “Yes.” Perpetua nodded. “He’s good. He’s the same.”

  “He keeps busy out there, I guess.”

  “Yes,” Perpetua said, “he keeps busy.”

  She thought of Joe in his workshop, every day now since he’d retired, puttering around, sawing and sanding and patiently scraping. He wouldn’t admit it, but his eyes were going. He wasn’t as good anymore with the fine detail.

  “He didn’t know me,” Myra said, pushing out a little laugh. “I guess he wouldn’t. He thought I was selling something.”

  Perpetua smiled and nodded. “Yes, they come around sometimes. Always selling something.” She shrugged. “We never buy. Just from the Hutterites.”

  The woman nodded, leaned her elbows on the table, took them off again. “And how,” she said, “how is Joe’s family? He has a sister, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Perpetua said, thinking how strange it was that Myra should remember that. “In Medicine Hat. We don’t see her much now. She’s busy. With the grandchildren.”

  “Oh,” Myra said, “she has grandchildren?”

  “What?”

  “She has grandchildren?”

  “Yes. Great-grandchildren now. Two of them. Joe has pictures up,” she said, rising slowly and leading Myra into the living room. Her hands had stopped trembling, but she was so conscious of the nearness of Myra’s breath and her arms behind her that she still felt a little flutter of her heart. She wanted to touch her again, but it would seem strange. Myra would wonder. So instead, she pointed to where the pictures stood on a little shelf, all of them, in their brassy frames.

  “There’s more,” she said, “out in the shop, all their school pictures. Joe probably showed you. Don’t ask me their names. There’s too many now.”

  Myra looked at the pictures, each in turn, making polite comments Perpetua did not always hear. She wished Myra would remember to speak up. She didn’t like to keep asking her to repeat. Myra paused over a big black and white one in a wooden frame.

  “That one,” Perpetua said, “is me. And Joe. Our wedding picture.” Stupid. Of course it was their wedding, Myra could see that.

  Myra picked it up. “You were lovely.”

  “Oh,” Perpetua said, shrugging. She knew she was not.

  Myra placed the photograph gently on its doily, then picked up a small blurry snapshot of Magda and Martin sitting on one of their father’s horses—Shotgun, Perpetua thought, though she couldn’t really remem
ber.

  “This is Mother, isn’t it,” Myra said, pausing.

  Perpetua wondered if she saw herself in that face. Surely she must, she must have pictures of her own. Wouldn’t she?

  “And Uncle Martin,” Myra said. “How is he?”

  Perpetua was about to say, Not good, but instead she said, “The same,” and wiped a bit of dust away from the frame with her thumb.

  “I’d like to see him,” Myra said. “Is he still on the farm?”

  Perpetua looked up in surprise. “No,” she said, “he’s in the home. For years now.”

  “Oh,” Myra said, and put the picture down on the shelf.

  She is ashamed, Perpetua thought, she thinks she should know these things. How could she know? She had been lost to them all for years, to Magda even. To Magda most of all.

  “Your father,” Perpetua asked then, because she felt she should, “how is he?”

  “Fine. In Brandon still. With Lois. They’re fine.”

  The stepmother, Perpetua remembered. The one who’d sent Magda Christmas cards faithfully, each year, with a brief letter and a picture of Myra standing posed in front of their upright piano, always the same pose, to show how much she’d grown. Lois, a stranger, who knew more about Magda’s daughter than Magda herself did. It was too sad. Perpetua would not let herself think about it any longer.