Sanctuary Line

by Jane Urquhart

  I noticed a few monarchs on that spring day while I waited for the first, and perhaps the only, time for a military funeral cortege to appear beneath me. The butterflies were feeding on the milkweed growing on the grassy slope that bends toward the highway. This was unusual. It was the middle of May. They should have been heading toward the lake by then, preparing to mate, lay their eggs, and die.

  It is odd, now that I think of it, that the name of a destination is sometimes used to define a thoroughfare regardless of the direction in which you choose to move along it. Sanctuary Line, for example, bears its title whether you are driving toward Sanctuary Point or leaving it behind and travelling toward the town, the highway, the rest of the world, as if you are pulling one known place with you further and further into unfamiliarity.

  The summer I was sixteen and practising for my driver’s test, I drove that road so often there wasn’t a bump or a pothole I was not intimately familiar with. The car, my mother’s Buick, was painted a soft yellow and had bucket seats and air conditioning that flowed from two vents into the interior. I, however, preferred the windows to be rolled down so that I could hear the crunch of gravel beneath the tires and feel the way the incoming air moved the hair at the back of my head. I also liked the way the sound of that wind changed, became surflike, as the car passed by the honeysuckle and sumac bushes that appeared in generous clusters here and there along the route.

  If you turn left at the first intersection and drive in a northerly direction away from Sanctuary Line, you pass through two minor intersections before eventually arriving at the old Talbot Road, or the King’s Highway Number Two as it was then called. If you drive in a westerly direction, the line itself bends to the north, eventually travelling over the freeway I just spoke about and into the back townships. I was not permitted to drive north. My mother had a healthy respect for those two intersections as well as for the law: I did not yet have a driver’s licence and shouldn’t, therefore, have been driving at all. If I chose, however, I could drive south, and then southeast to the spot where the line turns to enter the sandy lanes and marshes and beaches of the sanctuary. This part of the road still feels like home to me because, all through my childhood, I had explored these areas on foot and by bicycle. I knew it so well, I could have written an essay about the various gradations of gravel, how there were two firm tracks created by the passage of cars, and how the fine dust at the edges softened the wildflowers and weeds that grew there. I could also have described the irregular rectangles of the fence wire and the rough cedar posts this wire was attached to. Various animals in the fields were familiar to me as well – those patient herds that turned to regard us when we were children, walking or cycling by, our peanut butter sandwiches in the carrier baskets between the handlebars of bikes that ultimately were left to rust behind the woodlot, and may still be rusting there for all I know.

  One Sunday in mid-August of the summer I was learning to drive, I found Teo standing on the side of the road about a half a mile from the farm. He watched the car approach and then lifted his hand, palm outwards, the gesture more like a blessing than a request. I came to a halt, and without speaking he opened the door and climbed inside, changing the atmosphere of the interior completely with his entry. There was nothing I could think of to say. He would have known I wasn’t permitted to travel far, that the drive would not take either of us anywhere in particular. I turned on the radio to fill the silence. Songs about hunger and pain and lost love played as I drove, looking straight ahead, aware all the while that this boy was staring at my profile. Despite the rolled-down windows, the temperature inside the car became uncomfortably warm. Shafts of afternoon sun moved from his side to my side as I slowly took the curves of the road, until, on one of these curves, Teo’s brown hand covered my white hand on the wheel. When I pulled away, he said he would like to learn to drive, and that he would be careful.

  Even now, I find it difficult to understand why I was so shaken, so disturbed by that one brief touch. Was it the trance engendered by the increasing heat in the car? Was it the songs on the radio? As if I had known I would always do this, I relinquished my place at the wheel and all of the power that attended that place. I stopped and we opened the doors, stepped out of the car, and crossed each other’s paths behind the vehicle without making eye contact in the exchange.

  He was a natural, though an exaggeratedly cautious driver – I wondered if it was his first experience behind the wheel, but I didn’t ask. There was something about his complete focus on the road, his utter absorption coupled with his nervousness that made him seem older and more impenetrable to me, almost ancient. I looked at his hands, strong and thick. In the intense light I saw that dust from the fields had covered his smooth neck and beautiful forearms like down. His perfect skin caused me discomfort, almost fear, though I wouldn’t have been able to say where this discomfort and fear came from or what it meant. I hoped that we wouldn’t pass anyone I knew.

  After about five minutes he very carefully manoeuvred the car over to the side of the road, a soft grey cloud rising behind us. “We will change back now,” he said, though he did not take his hands off the wheel and neither of us moved. He was looking straight ahead, as if he had seen something in the distance that pained him. “I am sick with love for you,” he said.

  “No,” I said, and the word sounded loud in my ears. “No you’re not.”

  “Full of love illness.”

  “No,” I repeated.

  He did not look at me. He left the keys in the ignition, opened the door of the car, closed it quietly behind him, and walked away.

  Back at the house I crashed into the bedroom where Mandy was reading and angrily shook open and then kicked closed drawers as I looked for a swimsuit. I could feel Mandy’s eyes on me and her unasked questions in the air, but I ignored her as I yanked on the suit when I found it and walked quickly out of the house toward the cold shock of the lake. I swam with strength, moving away from the shore, for ten minutes or more before I began to tread water. Looking back at my uncle’s farm I could see the neat rows of fruit trees, the fields behind them, and, in the distance the flat, dusty townships where some of the elder relatives lived. I was far enough away that the blue roofs of the house, the barn, the bunkhouses, and the other outbuildings were miniaturized and contained, as if the whole farm were a picture on a wall. The four trucks lined up neatly beside the storage barn looked like toys, the lawn furniture as if it were intended for a dollhouse.

  The words that Teo had so awkwardly spoken had separated me from the collective embrace of that well-ordered demesne: from my cousins and aunts and uncles, from the bins of apples and the multiple trees on which they grew, from the rituals of bedtime, and the calm that always visited me when I woke beside that familiar window on summer mornings. Even the slight elevation of land that my uncle had told us was once the shore of some ancient and unknowable great lake, a forebear of the lake I was moving in now, was withdrawing into an irretrievable prehistory. It all seemed sad and distant and locked forever in a past I would now only remember and could never again experience. I told myself I had no idea what Teo had meant, and yet everything about me was responding in an unfamiliar and alarming way. I knew I was changed, but I could not, would not, name the cause of the alteration.

  How much of first love – perhaps any love – is developed in isolation and absence. You could completely remove one of the players from the table and nothing much would shift, imagination being what it is. And how strange that early love becomes, once it enters the house the imagination has made for it. It turns and turns in the mind; the young person it attaches itself to becomes lost, unreachable. Had it been simpler for me, less sudden, with the daily-ness of ordinary events to ground it, I might have been able to remain present in my own life. But, as it was, everything around me was going to be remote, I could feel it, for the remaining weeks of that summer. I both resented this and was astonished and awakened by it. Eleven words and one touch and I was taken hosta
ge. My self, as I had believed that I had known her, was never going to be available to me again.

  And yet, when I myself re-entered the bedroom, there was Mandy, as curious and engaged as ever, and as watchful and knowing. I had been in the lake too long, had swum too far, my dark hair was darker now, pasted to my skull and clinging to my neck. And Mandy, bathed in the yellow tranquility of her room and in the late-afternoon sun, was golden in a way I would never be, her mother’s perfect features just slightly rearranged on her face so that her expression was generous and inclusive. She invited everyone she cared about in. She kept nothing out.

  “What’s with you?” she said, examining me closely.

  Whatever this new distance was, even Mandy, someone I had talked with in this room about everything, sometimes almost until dawn, was not going to be able to break into it. Me aparté, I thought, remembering the child that Teo used to be. “So what are you reading?” I asked, glancing at the book that lay open on her long, tanned legs.

  “Next year’s English … a book for that. Lord Jim. A boy book, I think. But I like it.”

  There would come a day when I would lose Mandy to her own darker seclusion; to ambition and to love; to what I would come to see as her own love and someone else’s ambition, though she herself would never present it to me in that way. But for now she sat on the bed in her cutoff shorts, her legs crossed, a quizzical look on her face, and a book about the poison of ambition and invasion and colonization resting on her lap.

  Mandy, articulate and poised in every other facet of her life, was brought to silence and uncertainty in the presence of the man who meant so much to her. “Silenced” was the way she described it to me, the listener, the one with whom she was never silent. “Silenced,” she added, “because there is one place I will never be able to go with him, something elemental and essential about him that I will never have any real access to.”

  I often wondered if everything she said to me might not better have been said to him, that she could have given him at least a chance to know the one part of her he had no access to: the anguish, the grief. Impossible, she said, when I mentioned this once. His life was cluttered and complicated. He was already concerned about the military’s rules about intimate relationships. Added to this were war strategies, the movement of troops, staking out the enemy, statements to the press. All of his mental and much of his physical energy went into this. What was left over he hoarded for his extended family, who, though most often far away, brought their own troubles and triumphs to his table.

  He had once told her that she was his oasis, an apt metaphor for a desert warrior, this man whom I came to think of as Mister Military. But what can an oasis do but remain silently in place, reflecting the sky until, now and then, it is required to act as a mirror for the one who comes to drink there, sating his thirst and blocking out the light? I was convinced she was blinded and darkened by him, then left alone, disoriented in the stark desert daylight with everything around her in sharp focus. A knife glinting in the sun, a rifle in her hands. And the responsibility for her own platoon of cocksure and frightened young men was in her hands as well. How did she deal with all that in the midst of her absorption? It seemed to me from what she said that he tossed her aside like a rag, but in serial fashion, over and over again. Yet when he returned to her, and from what I understood she was never sure he would return, he would be fully present, as if he had never discarded her at all. She knew he was able to carry this engagement with him wherever he went: into friendship and into the theatre of war. There was a tense alertness about him, she said, which was as necessary for staying alive in the life he’d chosen as it was necessary for advancing forward. She wanted to develop her own skills of vigilance, but the fact of him broke apart her concentration. She was always attached to him in her mind; rerunning endearments, lovemaking, quarrels, entrances, exits, while the whole world exploded around her practically unnoticed. It was not the best recipe for survival.

  “At least tell me his name,” I’d say to her in exasperation during phone calls in the middle of the day or the night, or here at the house in the room we had shared since childhood.

  She told me she couldn’t do that. When I asked her why, she said she had promised that she wouldn’t. I concluded he was married but couldn’t bring myself to ask her.

  What she did tell me was that they were rarely together, unless they were together in a darkened space. The intimacy was so intense it could only unfold within the parameters of a rented and utterly neutral room. Dozens of these meetings took place across the Middle East, inside the walls of American hotel chains, which resembled to a fault the rooms of the same American hotel chains they had visited when she was still at the Canadian Forces Base in Petawawa, where they’d first met. Nothing ever changed, she said, presenting this, to my astonishment, as a positive thing. There could be an ancient city under aerial bombardment or a snow-filled meadow in serene Ontario outside the window, but it was still the same room, the same relationship. It neither advanced nor retreated, so any time they met could have been the previous time or the next time. Except, I suspected, when she demanded more from him, and then it would have become a bad time. He would have closed completely, I imagined. This man who minutes before had been holding her and touching her with great tenderness would no doubt gather up his things and leave the room as if there was nothing at all between them. She told me that with the exception of one significant time, he made certain that their leaves did not overlap so there would be no question as to whether he and Mandy might have two days or even a meal together. He didn’t believe in love tokens. You’re not a child, he told her. You’re an adult and an officer, insinuating that she had chosen this as much as he had, which was of course true and therefore would be more humiliating than an unfair accusation. But Mandy admired his candour. I want him to be brutally honest with me, she said. Sounds like he’s just being brutal, I replied.

  He made it clear that she could talk about this with no one, not knowing how much she talked about it with me. Perhaps he wasn’t even aware that I existed. This was a secret, apparently, that made all military and state secrets pale in comparison, a piece of information so volatile, according to him, that it defied classification. None of Mandy’s fellow officers and no one in the lower ranks knew anything about it, though I suspected, in spite of the rules, a not insignificant percentage of them were likely involved in affairs of their own. But not with a senior officer, she said when I pointed this out.

  I told her I didn’t care who he was or how far he was up the food chain, he was using her.

  For the past year, since Mandy’s death, whenever I see a military spokesman on the television – they are always men – I’ve wondered if it was him. I’ve scrutinized the features of man after man on the screen, uniform after uniform, searching for the kind of coldness of purpose that would override any kind of personal relationship: a single-mindedness that would rule out warmth, connection.

  “So, he’s married,” I finally said. “Mister superior officer is married.”

  “If only it were that uncomplicated,” she told me, ignoring my obvious disdain for rank. “If he were married, or if I knew for certain he was using me, I could live with it, or maybe without it. As it is …” She didn’t continue the sentence. She would never define what it was.

  And yet, in spite of all this, in spite of the uncertainty, Mandy clearly believed he was a saint. Both men and women were mesmerized by him, she told me, and obeyed his orders without question or complaint. And they talked about him, she told me. They talked about him all the time while she stood in their midst. I pictured her, clothed in regulation camouflage khaki, appearing to be as prurient and detached as anyone else. So she would hear the gossip about what he might or might not be doing with other women, about who among the young officers had become his latest discoveries, who was the best new strategist, engineer, or warrior. He knew who would go far because he was part of the decision-making process that determined who
would go far, and she came to feel she would never be among the chosen. But standing in close proximity to the chosen, eating and drinking with them in the Officers Mess, she watched them grow and blossom under the warmth of his attention. And his affection, she added, defending him.

  When someone, anyone died, his empathy and stalwart grief unified the whole corps, and when he spoke about the particular death it would be as if no one had ever died before. His reaction was utterly personal and heartfelt, a crack in his voice, the large heart of him remarkably visible. It was impossible, Mandy said, not to be moved by his words, his demeanour, the sudden humility in him. It was impossible not to want to throw oneself back into the fray. And, I suspected, impossible not to want to die so that he would talk about you with his voice broken and his heart exposed.

  She told me that they did take one unofficial journey together. He wanted to visit the Canadian battle sites in Italy where their company, the Seaforth Highlanders, had served in the Second World War. Their leaves had somehow overlapped, and she had flown to Rome and taken a train from there to some village or another, far enough from Canadian war graveyards that there was scant likelihood that anyone from home would be there, though, as she told me he had said, there was always a chance. It wasn’t perfect, she confessed. It had rained the whole time, and the place itself, bombed in the Second World War, though interesting in spots, was so filled with cement apartment houses, she said it had the feel of an ancient town being eaten alive by the present. That was the poet in Mandy speaking, and I wondered whether she had conveyed this observation to him.