Sanctuary Line

by Jane Urquhart

  Yes, I said, knowing that Mandy could only have stood outside that world, that desire.

  And you said, as if sensing my thoughts, “Our worlds could only have intersected there, you know, Mandy’s and mine, on some base or another. It didn’t really matter where that base might be … Petawawa, Kandahar. But, oddly, it was Kandahar that cracked me open spiritually.”

  I wondered why you said oddly and asked.

  “Because I am a Muslim and there I was in a Muslim country. It wasn’t until I was in the Middle East that I discovered that no matter where I went, I would always be a displaced Muslim.” And yet you told me, in the midst of that displacement, there was this music of communion. The call to prayer.

  “And Mandy wasn’t like you.”

  “How could she be?” You looked around the room, then outside the window. “This is what made her.”

  “So you couldn’t love her.” Mandy was vivid in my mind. He has never once told me he loves me.

  You were silent, but your distress was visible on your face. “Of course I loved her,” you said, “but we were never going to be able to enter each other’s lives once our tours of duty were over.” There were no tears now that made what you were saying even more desperate. “How could I talk to her about that love and at the same time know that I would never bring her fully into my life? This stone house, these meadows, orchards full of flowering trees created her. That, and growing up without ever once having to ask yourself where you belonged.” Your elbows were resting on the kitchen table and your hands were raised. You held them, palm inwards, about ten inches apart, as if you were indicating the measurement of something.

  “I wish – and you don’t know how much I wish – you had told Mandy that.”

  “Liz,” you said, looking away from me, your voice soft, “I didn’t have to tell Mandy that. She already knew.”

  I stood up and crossed to your side of the table. I took your hand, and you rose to your feet. “Look out the window, Vahil,” I said. “The cultivated landscape of this farm has decayed so completely now it is difficult to believe that the fields and orchards ever existed outside of my own memories, my own imagination.”

  You turned and walked with me toward the kitchen window. You stood in front of the glass with me slightly behind you. You looked out, glanced back in my direction, and looked out again. “Yes,” you said. “Mandy told me that after her father had left …”

  And then I told you everything else, long into the night.

  It is almost three weeks since you were here and I have been busy measuring wings, an activity that might seem to be exotic but that is in fact rather tedious. I’m ashamed to say that one monarch can seem much like another once a hundred or so have passed through my hands. Still, I know that the tags we use, which only very infrequently furnish the information we want, could prevent the butterfly from reaching its destination if that butterfly is too small or too frail to carry one, so these measurements are important. Chance, after all, is more powerful than destiny, or so it seems, and we scientists want to do everything we can to thwart risk.

  A pileated woodpecker has taken up residence in the woods behind the research station, and during the day he spends his time not far from the window of my lab, doggedly and noisily demolishing the logs along the shore, searching for ants. Whenever a jet airliner flies far overhead, or if a small plane buzzes by, the bird stops working, looks up, and follows its path across the sky, as if he believes that he and the aircraft are part of the same species. With the exception of the ants in the logs, nothing moving at ground level catches his attention, only these noisy airborne machines.

  The first phase of a monarch’s mating behaviour is entirely airborne and makes up that lilting dance we have all seen in early summer, the two specimens circling each other, their wings astir, their movements so cadenced it is possible to believe that what we are watching is music made visible. They are caught in the enchantment of courtship and the spell is as beautiful and as transient as youth. The next stage occurs when the male brings the female down to the ground level, where the pair remain locked together for up to an hour. After that, the female causes the astonishing metamorphoses to begin. She lays her eggs on a milkweed leaf and a caterpillar is born, an uncomfortable organism that will struggle out of its own skin several times before beginning to spin the cloth in which it will enclose itself, entering the smooth, green, and gradually hardening season of the pupa. Each of these small, firm caskets is so seeded with genetic memory, the emerging monarch will, even as its wings are stiffening in the sun, know the tree where it must congregate with its fellows and the route of the migration it must make.

  The butterfly tree on the edge of Sanctuary Line was empty of wings when I woke up this morning. In spite of my profession, the enormous number of monarchs had taken me by surprise a few days previously. As if some ancient god had passed by in the night, lighting ten thousand small orange tapers before disappearing once again into antiquity, all of earth’s vitality was confined to that one tree. Everything else was filled with the kind of stillness that follows an early September sunrise, the great lake reflecting the sky, the birds strangely silent.

  I returned to the house to find the camera, but what you will see in the photograph I am sending may look to you only like the turning of the leaves, the arrival of autumn. There seems to be no way to capture and hold on to that evidence of the perfect communion among these creatures of like mind and similar purpose. Perhaps all this is not unlike the Hage you told me about, the tree a mosque, and that one particular mountain in Mexico a kind of Mecca. The monarchs who have just left my shore will only take their journey once, but all through their development, perhaps from the moment of conception, their cells have known that they must make the effort required to reach that holy ground. The Mexicans who watch their arrival, I’ve been told, believe that they are witnessing the annual return of the souls of their beloved dead.

  It is another clear morning. I have just returned from the wood lot, which is almost impenetrable because no animals, wild or otherwise, are able to graze there anymore. Nevertheless, it is somewhat accessible at the northeast corner where the stream enters it. So I took off my shoes and socks and walked in the water between the bank of what Teo and I called our river, just as we used to do so many years ago. There aren’t as many small brown trout now, but I did spot one or two, darting away from my ankles, and once I swore I saw one of Teo’s temporary islands, but it turned out to be merely a spot where a fallen branch had caused the stream to silt up to such an extent that the soil was visible above the waterline. I had no paper with me, could make no boats, but of course I remembered the boats.

  I have found that it is almost impossible to read A Child’s Garden of Verses more than once without unconsciously memorizing a poem or two. This is also true of me and Emily Dickinson. As I walked in that water, then, approaching the bright openness of the lake that glittered in the sun beyond the trees, these two nineteenth-century voices were, side by side, debating in my mind, neither wanting to win their argument. Stevenson said:

  Dark brown is the river.

  Golden is the sand.

  It flows along for ever,

  With trees on either hand.

  And Dickinson replied:

  Adrift! A little boat adrift!

  And night is coming down!

  Will no one guide a little boat

  Unto the nearest town?

  Neruda was in my head then. His shipwrecked love.

  When I visited The Golden Field yesterday, I took along one of the photos of the tree at the end of the lane. My mother held it in her hand for a long time before rising to search for her glasses so that she could examine it more closely. Once she had settled back into her chair and had given the picture another long look, she gazed at me with an expression of sadness. “Once, when I walked down to the end of the lane to see the butterflies, I recall the Mexican boy, Teo, standing beside that tree. He was alone and so was I. ‘From
my country’ – I think that’s what he said – ‘from my country.’ It’s astonishing how well I remember that. At first I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. He was quite small then, hardly knew any English. I suddenly realized he was talking about the butterflies.” She paused. “He was Stanley’s child, you know. I suppose Stanley must have had real feelings for her …” She was silent again, for a few moments, seeming to search for Dolores’s name. “And the boy,” she added. “I am sure that he loved Teo.”

  Slowly I sat down on the one antique sofa my mother had taken with her when she left the house. I noticed that the curved piece of wood on the arm of the sofa was beginning to separate from the upholstery. That will have to be fixed, I thought. Some day, that will have to be fixed.

  I hadn’t known. Mandy’s voice was a phantom in my ear. I didn’t know, okay? I didn’t know! Her own lack of knowledge at the time was about the beginnings of a hidden teenage love, and yet something as simple as the way I slammed a car door could bring all that hiding and all that love to her attention, even in the midst of her own distress. How could some part of me not have known about this: the shared cells, the genetic inheritance? And the way my uncle insisted that we include Teo, make him one of us. One of my cousins, I thought now. Season after season, my uncle would have carried this secret with him. All those years while he was telling his stories, another parallel story would have been developing and growing in the shape of a child he would rarely see and would eventually lose completely as a result of the same, impossible love that created that child.

  “Have you always known?” I asked, though I could barely speak.

  “I saw Stanley once with the boy and there was” – she was having difficulty – “there was something there I couldn’t identify. I saw him touch the child’s hair.”

  “That couldn’t be all. He must have said something.”

  “No. That morning I told you about, that morning beside the tree, the boy held his hands up, fingers open, as he tried to get me to understand that it was all of the butterflies he was referring to. I had spent hours of my own childhood prying hands just like those from the rungs of ladders and the branches of trees, coaxing Stanley down.” She was looking at her own similar hands, now decades older than my uncle’s, and a half a century older than Teo’s had been. “The hands,” she said, “right down to the shape of the fingernails, were exactly the same.”

  So there was the crucial observation. But hypotheses always precede both observations and conclusions. I decided not to ask about that. Hypotheses, after all, can often manifest themselves as uncomfortably dark questions. She wouldn’t want to remember her suspicions, to talk about them.

  “Teo,” I said.

  “No, he didn’t know. Certainly not.” She shifted in her chair. “But why talk about that?”

  I knew I was not expected to answer this question.

  “Even after Stanley disappeared,” my mother said, “Sadie believed that what she had discovered – the woman – could simply not have been important to him.” She paused, then added, “But she was important. I heard him once call her Mariposa, and his tone and the way he looked at her when he used that name made me understand.”

  Listening to my mother, I remembered something from that wretched night, something I had caught for just a moment in my uncle’s expression before he turned away and faced the wall. I now realized that what I had glimpsed was the remains of passion and the arrival of horror and weakness and fear. And all of this overlaid by shame. His knowledge of his own weakness, his inability to act in the presence of his son, had allowed that shame to own him. He was frozen in place as he had been on a ladder at twelve years of age with the apples and the leaves and his own father’s anger all around him.

  “No, it was as it should be,” my mother was saying. “I’m sure of it. No one else knew.” She looked at me for several moments. “Except Dolores, of course,” she said, stating the obvious but, more important, naming my uncle’s lover for the first time.

  Dolores likely would have been the first to hear the sounds, the first to permit the faint noise of approaching footsteps to gain precedence over the surf sound of his hands in her hair or his whisper, their heartbeats. Being of a temperament more watchful, more careful than his, she would have stiffened slightly in his embrace. Would he have noticed this? Or had he entered too fully into pleasure. And the drinking would have put him at a remove. Not from her, never from her, but from the rest of the world, which was, of course, its function. It would be the rest of the world, the rest of his life that was approaching now, sensed by her, forgotten for the time being by him. The full brunt of this life, soon to come to the door, bringing anger and sorrow and everything he had tried to sidestep with it.

  It was the end of summer. The butterflies were gathering. The cicadas had lifted up their nocturnal tambourines, had been heard, identified, and commented on, and then absorbed into a thrumming darkness that could be ignored and slept through. There were other sounds, of course, a breeze in the pines, a freight train in the distance, the soft beat of the waves against the shore. There was the sound of their limbs moving on the sheets as well, so subtle it was like a finger moving over paper. And there would have been the occasional random illumination, a quick glance of radiance from the lighthouse on the point, the moon between two banks of clouds. A single lamp might have been burning in the bunkhouse where someone who could not sleep was writing a letter destined to be read in a kitchen in a faraway country.

  This grief, this anger had been pacing the paths of the farm for years, moving from room to room, field to field, looking for a spot to settle, something to name; somewhere to stop and take root and become a monstrous dark flower. And even as this blossom was seeded, would my uncle have been murmuring the secret name Mariposa he sometimes called her, this woman who was now alert in his arms? Would she have been able to receive the endearment? It is one of the things I now think about: whether she was able to salvage one memory of tenderness, or whether what happened next removed all tenderness and even its memory from her life.

  She would have known for some time that she had nothing more to give him – but she would have continued to give anyway while he gradually withdrew further and further into desperate garrulousness and eager social engagement with everyone else who was around him. During those last years, he might have half-committed to a meeting and then not appeared, and not have told her that he wouldn’t be appearing. She would be left alone then, in the trailer beside the bunkhouse with the ghost of him and a bottle of wine, brushing her dark hair, because she knew he loved it.

  On those nights she must have come to know herself as one who has been made solitary by longing. A person absent from both ongoing parties, the one that unfolded so naturally among her own people and the other enacted in the house she had no access to. Once or twice, from the trailer windows, she must have seen him walk out to the garden, talking softly to one woman or another, their cigarettes glowing in the dark, heard their quiet, relaxed laughter. And if he visited her after, she would have feared that he was bringing that woman with him to her bed.

  Sometimes she would have wanted to break with him but would find herself unable to tear the love and compassion out of her heart. And then there would have been the warmth of him, for he was a caring man, the gentleness of his touch, the way their bodies had come over the years to know each other so that they would drift in and out of a kind of sleep even while fully aroused and in the midst of love.

  Her brother, also a fruit picker, would not have understood the summer change in her and would likely tell her so. She would use the absence of her sisters, worry about their elderly father, anything at all to explain her sudden bouts of silent preoccupation. She was never going to betray him, her seasonal lover. Whether her son noticed, I will never come to know, but she must have wondered if he would some day sense the submission that was born in her each summer, her willingness to leave herself unprotected. “Amor,” she had said that night. “
Love,” my mother said yesterday afternoon, remembering Teo.

  When I thought of Teo and Mandy as I walked the stream today, and later when I stood near the lake where Mandy loved to swim, we were all still children and there was no darkness attached to us. Nothing had been ruined in any of us – not even in my uncle, my aunt. Then I thought of you, Vahil, how at the same time you would have been alone in your Ottawa childhood, your otherness made clear to you daily, how you would take the journey to the Middle East only to have your otherness made clear to you there as well. Those hopeful, informal sessions of prayers that you held, and still hold, and the comfort you receive from them. I thought of all this.

  All the tough evolutions, the shedding of various skins, followed by those difficult migrations, over great stretches of open water, and across vast tracts of land, to and from Mexico, or America, or Kandahar. That longing we have to bring it all together into one well-organized cellular structure, and then the heartbreaking suspicion that, with the best of intentions, we never really can. Remember, unlike that of their predecessors, who live only six weeks, mating and dying en route to the north, the fourth generation of monarchs is the strongest, lasting a full nine months so that they can return to the place where they started, overwinter, and mate, and begin the whole process again.

  The games of summer are over. Soon it will be time for the routine of winter to enter life in the manner of such things, the way it always does. Time for schools and jobs. Time for adulthood and responsibilities. The field and the lab. The finches at my mother’s winter feeder. Migrations to softer or harder places. Tours of duty.