Sanctuary Line

by Jane Urquhart

  This is the key to the playhouse

  In the woods by the pebbly shore,

  Its winter now, I wonder if

  There’s snow about the door?

  I wonder if the flower-sprigged cups

  And plates sit on their shelf,

  And if my little painted chair

  Is rocking by itself?

  We had only just become aware enough of the differences of gender to want to segregate ourselves and stake out territories: the boys had their tree houses, the girls had their forts. The orange crates became the furniture of leafy, green rooms, the dented pots and colourful plates were argued over and often stolen during raids on one fort, or tree house, or another. A turquoise plate, I remember, was much coveted, and once, when it was firmly in my possession and therefore on its way to the girls’ fort, the boy, who by then I knew was called Teo, pointed to it and said, “From my country, from Mexico.” I think it must have been the first time that I had heard him speak, certainly the first time that I remember hearing his voice. Before that, he was simply a rather odd and not altogether successful adjunct to the boys, often running just behind them, as if struggling to keep up, but really slowing his gait in deference to their knowledge of his differences, and his suspicion, well founded, that they really wanted little to do with him. It was my uncle who had taken him out of the bunkhouse and placed him in our midst. There were no explanations. “This is Teo,” he had said. “He is learning English. Play with him.”

  This was so like my uncle. There was an educator fighting strong within him, born partly, I suspect, during the time just after his high-school graduation when my grandparents were alive and in full control of the farm. Needing winter work, he had taught for a season or two in one of the sparsely populated and ill-equipped one-room schools that still stood at the time on thin-grassed one-acre lots here and there in the county. He was sentimental about that small episode of his life and once that very summer took us, Teo included, on an expedition ten miles to the north. I expect he wanted to drive out there alone; maybe he was hoping for a moment of private communion with the past. But we had tagged after him as he strode toward the truck, whining and arguing our case until he relented. He told Mandy and I to get in the cab, and the boys to hop in the back, and we drove out to a mostly abandoned place called Red Cloud, where an empty, weathered schoolhouse creaked in the wind. When we were all inside, my uncle walked up and down in front of the broken blackboard like a ghost, not speaking and tossing the one stub of chalk that had remained on the narrow wooden ledge. Teo watched him, I remember, with frank curiosity in his brown eyes, and for the first time I wondered what school was like where Mexicans lived. Were there large brick buildings, with two classrooms for each grade level, in every Mexican neighbourhood, or did this boy have to take a yellow bus each day to the kind of smaller rural schools my cousins attended? Maybe his school would be like the bunkhouses on the farm, roughly painted, with thin walls, rickety windows, and no playground. Once it had occurred to me that there might not be a playground, I decided not to ask the question that had been forming in my mind. Teo continued to regard my uncle, his gaze following the rise and fall of the chalk.

  My cousins were busily removing glass inkwells from the wooden desks that had wrought-iron sides and looked like my grandmother’s treadle sewing machine. Shane was even examining the bottoms of the inkwells for the D surrounded by a triangle, which would indicate that they were made at the Dominion Glass Works and were truly Canadian. I imagine he wanted to take a few home to please his mother. “Put them back,” my uncle finally said. “Someday someone will see how wrong they have been to close these schools and they’ll need everything to be in place.” Even at nine years old I knew this was ridiculous, the building hadn’t been occupied for decades, but my uncle often appeared to authentically believe in such resurrections, his modernity and interest in progress notwithstanding.

  He walked to the few shelves of the school library after that and began leafing through the mouldy books, Teo following and hovering, the rest of us lifting the lids of wooden desks, then letting them bang down again, reading the initials and names carved into the varnished oak.

  Through the west windows, far off, you could see Red Cloud Graveyard, the odd flash of an upright stone, white among a scant gathering of poplars, practically invisible unless you knew it was there. “Cholera,” my uncle said, explaining the presence of the graveyard in the small woods at a distance from what would have been the village, when a village still existed. “An epidemic,” he added. The boys could not be kept from it then, this information making it so much more interesting than the other graveyards we had known. They ran out the door, leaving Mandy, Kath, and me with my uncle. Teo hesitated, looked out one of the windows until, anxious, I suppose, to conform, he went outside to be with the boy cousins, who had been momentarily distracted by the discovery of a cow skull in the long grass not far from the open door.

  I could see Teo bend over the bone, feigning interest, wanting to be part of the group, while the other boys did their best to ignore him, forming a circle that was difficult for him to penetrate. He took a few tentative steps back toward the building and that one moment of retreat unleashed something in Don, who was the eldest. Te-oh, Don began to sing, mimicking the Harry Belafonte song that had been popular some years back, and that my uncle sometimes sang at parties, Te-e-e-oh, Daylight come and I wanna go ho-ome. In no time the others joined in. Te-oh, they chanted, Te-e-e-oh.

  I could feel a subtle panic rising in me and looked toward my uncle for some kind of intervention or at least a reaction. But he had a geography book in his hands, and the unusual lopsided squint his expression sometimes took when he was absorbed and gone from us, and I knew he was paying no attention at all to the boys in the yard. Teo himself slowly climbed the three decaying steps that led back into the schoolroom, then discretely moved to the other side of the open door, where he knew they couldn’t see him. He looked at me, probably because I was watching him. “Not my country,” he said, “the song.”

  That was the second thing I remember him saying aloud.

  My uncle glanced up at that moment and walked toward the boy, the book still in his hands. “This is your country,” he said, pointing out the map of Mexico he had been studying. Then he led the boy to a globe that stood on a scarred table on the other side of the room. “It is here as well,” he said, “and this is where you are right now.” I couldn’t see the globe clearly from where I was standing but knew they would be looking at the chain of Great Lakes and the fist of James Bay punching down from the north. If Teo had been acquainted with maps in the past he made no indication of this, appeared instead to be interested and pleased to be shown something by my uncle, happy to stand in the warmth of his attention. He twirled the globe, which wobbled on its old stand. He, too, it seemed, longed for my uncle’s approval.

  I should say something about the globe that Teo twirled with his small brown fingers. Not too long ago, cleaning out a corner cupboard in this old house, I came across the teachers’ log from Red Cloud School and began, before my evening meal, to read it. I don’t remember my uncle taking anything home with him that day so he must have gone back to retrieve it once he realized that the little building was doomed, that no one was ever coming back. The log was begun by a teacher, a Mr. Quinn, in about 1900. The man himself was a bit of a historian and provided a litany of the school’s adventures since the 1840s: the raising of money for the schoolhouse construction, the volunteer labour, the first trustees, and original teachers and pupils. But when writing about his own tenure, the central drama focused on the decision to purchase and then the eventual arrival of the globe. “The children,” he stated, “were given a holiday because of the excitement and because they could not be kept from the object of their attention. I sent them outside to play and then allowed them, one by one, to enter the school that they might be allowed five minutes each to look at the new wonder. It was,” he wrote, “as if this one obj
ect was bringing the world to them.”

  Outside the window were the fields and meadows of what I thought of then as my ancestral countryside, though, as I have since learned, it was the ancestral countryside of a more legitimate tribe, one that had been gone for a long time, leaving in its wake two words, Red Cloud: a name stolen and then anglicized by those who came later and pushed that tribe out. Recently, there has been a lot of talk in the biological community about species that have invaded the Great Lakes area, zebra mussels, for example, and a particular kind of Mexican “ladybug,” that, according to the experts, “doesn’t belong here and is upsetting what remains of the ecosystem.” What does belong here? I wonder at such times. Do we?

  “Here.” My uncle snapped the book shut and passed it to the boy. “Keep it, take it home with you.” It was unclear to me, and perhaps to Teo, whether he meant to the bunkhouses or to Mexico, though by then the bunkhouses and Mexican schools had amalgamated in my imagination and I wondered if perhaps my uncle was making a donation to what might very well be classrooms that contained no books at all.

  I looked out the window into the mid-August afternoon. The boys were running through a grassy area in which grew brown-eyed Susan, Queen Anne’s lace, bachelor’s buttons, and other wildflowers named by colonists. They were cantering through long grass toward the distant graveyard and the horizon, which is always such a dominant feature in this flat county. How odd that I can see that scene so clearly now, the various flowers, the boys’ striped T-shirts. Often that whole epoch seems so far from me that I cannot conjure it at all. Sometimes my only connection to it is the map made by the fine lines on a monarch’s wing. Still, in those days, I would never have examined such a wing carefully enough to know it resembled a map.

  “But everything stay,” said Teo slowly, reminding my uncle, the English difficult in his mouth.

  “Everything should stay,” said my uncle, emphasizing the conditional. “But it doesn’t.”

  As I’ve said, now that she is gone, I’ve begun to read the books Mandy left behind in this house. I wish I had done this earlier; I would have known her and understood her better if I had. I might have become acquainted with the hesitancy, the frailty of spirit that attends certain kinds of love, as well as the baffling tenacity of a passion as difficult as Mandy’s appeared to be. If I had read just one book of love poetry, her relationship could possibly have come into focus for me, and maybe I would have seen that certain lovers need to commemorate the knotted feelings, the emotional confusion. And yet, her longing to examine the relationship, to give some kind of voice to it, rode side by side with her desire to protect the secret at the centre of the intimacy. There was, you see, always this sense that naming her lover would be a kind of betrayal, regardless of circumstances. “The loved one is rarely identified in poetry,” she once told me, “and it is that discretion that gives the reader permission to be moved, to own the sentiment.” Sadly, it’s only now, late at night, with these new thoughts and phrases speaking to me, that I have begun to comprehend what she meant.

  They have been here for a long, long time, these volumes, ever since Mandy graduated from the military college and went out into a world so transient it was impossible to cart books with her from posting to posting. There are the usual classics, some of which even I was forced to read in the one English course required for my undergraduate degree in biochemistry. The Mill on the Floss, Jane Eyre, The Mayor of Casterbridge. But there is a good deal of poetry as well, a world I have ignored until now, though I admit that Mandy tried now and then to make me enter it. I began by reading Robert Frost, as she said I should, because as she pointed out he is both profound and easy to understand, especially for those of us who know farms or who come from farming stock. Most of Mandy’s poetry books are paperbacks, but those written by Frost are hardcover editions, complete with dust jackets, and I was surprised to discover my uncle’s name, rather than Mandy’s, on the flyleaf of each collection. But then I remembered how often literature surfaced in the tales of the great-greats, as if some of them had been afflicted by it in one way or another. One of them was known as “the ex-reader,” for example. The other night, a line or two from Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” struck me as being the perfect epitaph to inscribe on my uncle’s grave, if he had a grave. Something like:

  For I have had too much

  Of apple-picking: I am overtired

  Of the great harvest I myself desired.

  Once during that long-forgotten summer, or a summer just like it, when Teo was suddenly one of us, my uncle took it into his head that one of the many ways the boy could learn English was to participate – albeit informally – in square dancing. None of us children, and certainly not one other adult, could come close to matching my uncle’s enthusiasm for such bizarre activities. But because we loved him, we all dutifully gathered near the portable record player he had first hauled out into the yard and then attached by a series of extension cords to the power in the house. Teo and I were required to be partners, which meant holding hands and embarrassed us both, while Kath was paired with Shane, Mandy with Peter, and Paul with Don, which, in turn, embarrassed them.

  Because it was the close of the afternoon, the mothers, as we called them, were sitting on the porch facing the lake, smoking cigarettes and drinking gin and tonics. My uncle rarely instigated an act for which he did not want an audience, and this was to be no exception. I remember him calling his wife, urging her to leave the veranda. “C’mon, Sadie,” he was shouting, and then again when there was no response from her. “C’mon, Sadie. And you too, Beth, get over here.” His unacknowledged voice began to sound a bit tired, some of the eagerness fading from it as the women continued to ignore him.

  Teo’s mother and the man we knew was her brother were standing at the edge of one of the orchards, on the other side of the fence, watching. Though they were still wearing their green cotton overalls and brown sunhats, work was over for the day. She must have come to collect her child for the evening meal only to be presented with this odd partnering and the sound, coming from the record player, of a man’s voice chanting nonsense over music. She just stood there beside her brother, the trees and ladders behind her, a tentative smile on her face. Teo looked in her direction but likely felt unable to leave the weird ritual into which he had been introduced. At that moment my own mother rounded the corner of the house and moved to the fence where the woman and her brother stood, greeting them quietly with a nod, from the opposite side. The brother disappeared back into the orchard. A bang of a screen door announced my aunt’s withdrawal indoors. No one spoke. The sound of the waves on the beach stones mixed in a strange way with the artificial sounds coming from the scratchy record, and I remember thinking, while Teo and I stood very still, that recorded music played outdoors brought something tinny and almost unpleasant with it into a space where it had never before been heard.

  All of this presents itself as a tableau in my mind, but one that eventually breaks apart into slow action moving toward full chaos. My uncle followed Teo’s gaze and settled on the Mexican woman who was Teo’s mother. “Dolores!” he shouted. “Come and join the dance!” She hesitated, then did as she was told, climbing awkwardly over the fence near which my mother stood, seemingly impassive, not looking at us or the Mexican woman entering our territory. Teo made an involuntary movement, one that travelled up my own arm, and I could tell that his instinct was to run to his mother and that he was holding that instinct back.

  What, I now wonder, made my uncle believe that hearing lines such as star through, pass through, circle round the track, drive through, pull through, box the gnat would help to teach a child English? But perhaps he knew more about this boy than I did at the time. Perhaps he felt that language married to music and gesture might nudge the child toward speech.

  What resulted was a kind of pandemonium. Dolores was the only one among us who could master a dance step – my uncle was either pulling notes out of his pocket or sending her into one whirling
pirouette after another, while the old record player skipped and repeated. My cousin Shane began to breakdance in a clownish way. My mother bent over in laughter. Mandy broke away from Peter and began to fight with Shane, rolling in a tangle on the grass. Teo and I stood entirely still, dutifully holding hands, quiet in the midst of this, looking at each other, then shyly looking away, as children will.

  My aunt burst into this peculiar miracle play like a cop breaking into an after-hours club, her face flushed with sun and gin. All she had to do was walk toward the fracas, her arms folded across her silk blouse, for the momentum of the group to falter and stall. We children, knowing we were not permitted to make noise before her morning alarm went off at eight o’clock, and that she had on occasion been able, at seven o’clock, to hear us roll over in our beds three rooms away, were particularly sensitive to her approach. As were all the Mexican workers. Teo immediately dropped my hand, and he and his mother walked quickly toward the field, hastily climbing the fence, sensing their exemption from exclusion was over. My mother unfolded from her clench of laughter. My uncle, however, more fervently involved than the rest of us, was chanting along with the calls on the recording: Swing your partner round and round, turn your corner upside-down. Then he stopped, looked up from his notes. “Where’d she go?” He laughed. “What happened to my partner?”