To house and garden, field and lawn,
The meadow-gates we swang upon,
To pump and stable, tree and swing,
Goodbye, goodbye, to everything!
My mother was the sibling in her generation who had, through marriage, taken the first tentative step into the domain of business, professions, and cities. The next generation – all those cousins – would follow her with enthusiasm. There is no one, no one left. I live in a landscape where absence confronts me daily. But my uncle’s disappearance – his departure to nowhere – was the most dramatic, and the most deliberate: the most final abdication of them all.
Moving around the house, I often pass by the roll-top desk, which was my uncle’s and his father’s before him, and his grandfather’s before that, and I know that the accounts he tried to keep during that last summer still lie, untouched, in the drawers. I have not opened the files, not wanting to go anywhere near this evidence of my uncle’s last, sad attempts to maintain some kind of order. The list of Mexican workers is hidden in there, I suppose, and if I were to examine the paper it is written on, I would likely discover the boy’s last name, which, incredibly, I had no notion of at the time. And all the preparations for buses, and the pick up from and delivery to the airport cargo terminal, are in there as well, I expect, yellowing in darkness. Quite likely there are some earlier, ancestral documents pertaining to this farm in one of the desk folders. In the top left-hand drawers, no doubt reeking of mould, lies the Essex County phonebook from 1986, the tradespeople named in its pages perhaps retired or dead now, and a listing of small businesses that have likely vanished into air. There is also a harmonica my uncle sometimes played and a timetable for trains that no longer stop at the abandoned station and probably a schedule of Saturday events for the Sanctuary Point Summer Dance Pavilion, which closed and then was burned by vandals at least fifteen years ago.
I once tried to find the cargo terminal at the city airport in an effort to understand what it must have been like for Teo to arrive and depart from there, being human and not, therefore, technically cargo; what it would be like to be picked up and delivered like office supplies, or mufflers for cars, or, I suppose, more accurately, farm equipment, then transported from the shipper to the receiver. But that airport is so large now, and the cargo terminals so numerous, it was impossible to tell one industrial building from another. That’s the way it is: terminals, orchards, and dance halls, all gone now, or lost, or just indistinguishable among the clutter of everything that follows. “I wanted to stop it,” my uncle said the following morning, his voice hoarse, almost a whisper, “but what could I do?” Was he talking to himself or to me? Should I have answered? Could I have dug even the briefest of responses out of my teenaged heart? We turned from each other then, my uncle and I, both of us disappearing in our own private way into the abrupt end of the summer. No more apples on the bough, no more swimming in the lake.
Goodbye, goodbye, to everything.
Every few days I visit my mother at the seniors’ residence in the nearby town. This is, in part, so that we can talk about the past, or at least those aspects of the past she is willing to discuss, and in part because I am at least as lonely as she is. I miss Mandy, though her leaves had been sporadic and our time together often fractured by her need to please everyone. I miss the long, trans-oceanic phone conversations we had in the middle of her night or mine, even though she often placed the calls because she could no longer bear the suffering brought to her by the man she was involved with, and sometimes, I admit, I resented her inability to stray from that subject. Now that I am living in this place, I miss the children we all used to be before everything broke apart, and I miss the children who should have replaced us but haven’t.
The Golden Field is not really objectionable as these places go, and I am not as put off as I thought I might be when I park my car in the lot, pass through the entrance, and walk down the hall to the door with my mother’s name, Beth Crane, printed on a small card and thumbtacked into the wood. I was baptized Elizabeth in honour of my mother, but she was always called Beth and I was always simply Liz. Crane, of course, was my father’s name, which separated both of us just a little from my mother’s family, the Butlers, but not so much that that family would not always be home to us. This was not entirely because of my father’s death, though I’m sure it would have had a certain amount to do with it. There was a saying among us, “You can marry into the Butler family, but you can never marry out of it.” In the case of my uncle’s wife, Aunt Sadie, a Butler herself and second cousin to her husband, the problem would never have come up. She, by the way, also lived at The Golden Field for a few years before her impending death made my mother want to bring her back to this house. But she was in a different wing, one that is not so pleasant to visit.
Odd to think of those two women alone, and then together, only on and off. My aunt remained alone in the house after her sons left for university and Mandy went to the military college, until my mother retired from her city job and joined her. Then they were together here, until my aunt’s dementia became unmanageable and Mandy and the boys found a place for her in the wing I just mentioned. After my aunt died, my mother stayed for a while in this house, and could still be here if she wanted to be.
I often think of my aunt, and when I do, I think of the striking woman she was during those early summers and not of the woman she became – the sad, confused woman in that wing. Fiercely intelligent and very American, she brought a combination of practicality and panache into a modestly eccentric Canadian world when she left northern Ohio and crossed the lake in order to marry my uncle. She brought other things as well to a family that had been content to muddle along in the fieldstone farmhouse their ancestors had built two generations before. She brought ambition. And she brought taste.
There was almost nothing she couldn’t do with the interior or exterior of a house, or with the gardens surrounding that house. According to my mother, my aunt painstakingly restored the “important” architectural features installed by their colonial forebears – she had respect, after all, and a sense of history – and ruthlessly disposed of those features she considered to be unimportant. She removed all the flowered wallpaper and painted the rooms pale yellow with white trim. She ripped up the linoleum and had the wide pine floors beneath sanded and varnished. She dug out all of my grandmother’s spirea and forsythia bushes and planted roses, lilies, delphinium, and other gorgeous flowers and shrubs whose names only she knew. She took the quilts off the beds, hung the best ones on the walls, and threw those that were too worn into the trash. She had the old lane graded and filled in with white gravel. She had the lawns rolled.
Hers was not a conventional beauty. She was tall, almost rangy, and her face was slightly angular, but part of my mother’s admiration for her was attached to what she did with what she had been given: even at her most casual she exhibited a variety of style no one in rural Ontario had been able to muster. My mother admired my aunt’s mind, as well. All those years on the farm she had kept the books, and began, right after she took up residence, to “knock some sense,” as my mother would have it, into my uncle’s head. The one thing that she couldn’t do was make tomatoes and strawberry plants bear fruit twice in one season. It took my uncle’s lust for risk, and his scientific mind — a mind you could say I have inherited — to do that. But would this have even happened without his wife? My mother thinks not. Sadie was the daughter of the more successful American branch of the family, she once told me, implying that, as such, she brought all the expectations of their flourishing fruit empire with her across the lake.
About two years ago my mother announced that it was time for her to move to The Golden Field. When I asked her why — she was only seventy-three and in good health, so I was genuinely shocked — she looked surprised, then simply said, “There are people there.” I was a bit hurt by this; we both knew that I would begin to work at the sanctuary a month or so later and had no intention of living an
ywhere else. I was close to tears when we were packing up the few things she took with her, though I said nothing. My mother, however, did say something as she was making her last exit out the door leading to the porch. “Now you’ll have your own life,” she remarked. I sense that my mother wanted me to lean more toward crowds, or to become part of a community. Perhaps she was worried about me leaving the university faculty where, for ten years, I had participated in the easily accessible, though in my case not particularly intimate, social world that existed there. Looking out the back bedroom window that rainy day, though, when I had returned from settling my mother into her three small rooms, I found the flat, opaque wash covering the seemingly empty distant townships mildly comforting, as if it were a painting of my own character. I am a solitary, I thought. I cannot attend fringe festivals, protest marches, council meetings, or engage in any kind of team sport without feeling herded, trapped, and forced to perform. This was where I belonged.
My mother’s corner apartment is on the ground level and has sliding doors that one can open in the warmer months for a breeze and gain access to a private patio. I fill her bird feeders and watch the sparrows come and go. The window on the opposite side looks out to the kind of semi-urban sprawl common now to country locations, and sometimes, as she talks, I gaze out at pizza parlours and laundromats rather than shrubbery and birds. An odd combination: these memories of her life at the farm, those birds in winter sunlight, this place named for an acre of farmland in deference to the agricultural “seniors” it was built to house. And then a convenience store, a car wash, office supplies.
About six months ago I asked her outright if she remembered Teo. She had been speaking about Mandy, whose death had greatly disturbed her. “Such a lovely girl,” she was saying, “and so clever, so competent. Her father would have been proud.”
Proud of what? I wondered. Her ability to survive him, at least temporarily? “Do you remember the Mexican boy?” I asked.
To my amazement my mother shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said and turned to watch a couple of birds at the feeder. “I think that may be a thrush of some kind or another.” She reached for the binoculars she always kept on the windowsill, but by the time she had them in her hand, whatever it was had vanished.
“Of course you remember,” I said, almost angrily, though the words came out sounding more patronizing than angry. “He came with the Mexican workers.”
“So many Mexicans,” she said, “every summer. Sometimes the same ones, but often they were different. Didn’t your Uncle Stanley use school portables for their sleeping quarters? Yes, I think he did — at least at first, when he hadn’t yet decided whether to keep them.”
I myself had not known this. The first Mexicans had arrived at the farm two years before I was born so I recalled only permanent bunkhouses and one or two trailers.
“Teo,” I said. “His name was Teo.”
“Stanley had a dog named Tim,” my mother said. “Smartest animal ever born. He could play soccer and did so, I remember, with you and your cousins.” She laughed. “He could bounce the ball right off the top of his head, that dog. Mandy was very cut up when he had to be put down. The boys too. Even your Aunt Sadie admitted that –”
“I remember Tim,” I interrupted, “but Teo is who I am referring to. Teo played with the dog, he played with us. He came with his mother, every summer.” There was no response. “His mother’s name was Dolores,” I said. “She was a foreman, remember?”
“Apples,” my mother said. “I often wondered what the world did with all those apples. Your grandmother still hung them on strings to dry them, to preserve them. I don’t suppose anyone does that anymore.” A faint visual memory of the wooden sills of my grandmother’s bedroom windows came into my mind. And an audio memory of cluster flies buzzing there, the summer after she had died and the room was no longer in use. I had known her only in my early childhood.
“Please remember Teo,” I said quietly. “Please say that you remember Teo.”
My mother got up slowly from her chair and walked into her tiny kitchen, returning with a damp cloth in her hand. The sun had revealed a tea stain on one of her end tables, and she began to work away at that now, her back toward me, her thin arm moving rapidly back and forth.
“Please,” I repeated, aware of a child in me, whining. “Just say it.”
She turned toward me then, her look cheerful, kind, her hair backlit by the winter sun. “What was that, dear?” she said.
“God, Mom.” I looked at her hand on the cloth. The veins under the skin were like mauve sinews. “Think about it. Think about Teo.” I was aware that my voice was rising.
“Oh that.” She folded the cloth twice. “No, dear, I don’t think so.”
The whining child in me was turning into a teenager, and I could feel myself wanting to storm out the door, car keys in my fist, the desire to burn rubber in the parking lot hot in my blood. I suppressed all this, however, and let her have her way, allowing her once again to tell me about the preservation of apples, the making of applesauce, and the trip taken each autumn to the cider factory with a wagon filled with windfalls. I permitted her to ask again about the house, whether I had had the eavestroughs cleaned, the storm windows installed, the lawn furniture put safely away for winter storage. But finally the teenager won, and I reached for my coat.
As I was about to leave, my mother asked about the monarchs. “How are your butterflies, Liz?”
“Gone,” I said, yanking on my gloves. “It’s winter now. Or have you forgotten that as well?”
“Oh Liz …” There was sadness in her voice and a distant expression on her face, and I could tell she felt that after all this time I should accept her discretion and develop some of my own. But I was having none of it. I wanted to punch right through her reticence and lay the whole story out on the coffee table near her knees. I wanted her to confirm, not deny, my resentment.
The boy called Teo became one of us, quite unexpectedly, one summer when we were still children but no longer so young that we were required to stay close to the house. Mandy would have been eight and I would have been almost ten, the boys, a few years older. Our cousins from the town — Kath, a year younger than Mandy, and Kath’s two brothers, Peter and Paul, contemporaries of my uncle’s boys, Don and Shane — were big enough to bicycle down to the farm almost daily in order to swim, build forts in the woodlot and pastures, and take roles in increasingly complicated fantasies based on our collective devouring of the Hardy Boys mysteries and precocious Mandy’s reading of Oliver Twist. Their own father, my other uncle, Harold, had once attempted to make a living as a tobacco farmer, but the enterprise had proved so costly and eventually so risky that he sold his farm and kilns and went into an auction business. He was the bifurcating one, my Uncle Stan told us, would have been a keeper had everything not gone to the dogs, meaning had the lighthouses not been automated. Still, in spite of his otherness, I dutifully called him Uncle Harold and felt some pride when I watched him perform on the block, the gift of Irish oratory strong in him, selling off item by item, I now see, the detritus of the very world that had produced him. Cast-iron pots, wooden shovels, hutch cupboards, quilts, coal-oil lamps, spool bedsteads, wall clocks, sometimes even cutters and carriages. On and on, weekend after weekend, these now redundant former essentials were gathered together and then scattered like seeds in a strong wind, moving sometimes out of the county but always out of context as they were replaced by plastic, plywood, stainless steel. I remember oxen yokes, sleigh bells, strange dark oil paintings, ladder-back chairs, and infinite varieties of china plates, cups, and saucers. All are dispersed now, gone to God knows where.
Sometimes my aunt (taking Mandy and me with her) would attend these events, having heard that “a particularly good piece” was going to be on the block. She would return with a pressed-glass tumbler or goblet for the collection she was amassing. The glass was displayed on specially built shelves in the house, and admired but never used
. We children learned some of the patterns, by osmosis, I expect, not being all that interested in the objects themselves: Nova Scotia Grape, Butterfly and Fan, Diamond and Sunburst, Apple Blossom. My uncle, who couldn’t leave the family’s history out of anything, told us stories about the Canadian glass houses or glass works of the nineteenth century, claiming that one of the more obscure old great-greats was a blower in the Mallorytown Manufactory. Every Labour Day, he said, there were magnificent parades in that town, during which the glass-blowers would march in battalions, row after row, wearing glass hats and carrying glass walking sticks, sometimes even glass rolling pins and glass hatchets. I came to doubt that tale in my adulthood, along with many others my uncle told, and was therefore startled when leafing through a book on the history of glass one evening a few months ago to find that it was indeed true! The Glass Bottle Blowers’ Association of the United States and Canada was both powerful and proud and enjoyed showing off even the most whimsical of its wares. My aunt would collect only Canadian glass, which was surprising in that she was American by birth and by sensibility. Perhaps it was her way of claiming some of the heritage of the country where she had chosen to live her adult life.
Teo, as I’ve said, came to my attention during a summer when we were all between the ages of eight and twelve and our games had become more elaborate and geographically scattered. During the warm, bright hours of those seasons, the rest of our lives utterly disappeared as we children closed ranks, became almost tribal, our imaginations looping around one another’s. My auctioneer uncle would sometimes arrive with what he called “failed job lots” from one auction or another, wooden orange crates filled with cracked dishes and rusty tableware that Mandy and I — and Kath when she was there – were given full access to in the assumption that we would want to play house. Because she was reading The Children’s Treasury of Poetry, Mandy once recited two verses of a poem she had found in those pages, the lines causing us to pause while we sorted china and wonder how the poet knew about our secret:
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