by Mary Lawson
For some reason that released the tears. She cried soundlessly, the tears running down into her ears and out of them again and down onto the pillow. She cried as she hadn’t cried since she was a small child and possibly not even then. She cried for the photographs. The other contents of her suitcase were nothing, but she didn’t see how she could manage without the photographs. She needed them: they were all she had of home; they told her who she was.
She knew she was being ridiculous, that photographs were only bits of paper, but the tears rolled on. The more they rolled the more there seemed to be to cry for. She cried for her incomprehensible father behind his closed door and for her mother, who once had been the whole and sufficient centre of her life. She cried for Patrick, who loved her more than she loved him, and for Adam, whose small round weight she could still feel in her arms. She cried because everything had gone wrong and it was her own fault and she was alone in this sodden, wretched country where she didn’t know one single soul. She cried because she had no clean underwear to put on in the morning and because the people here were so peculiar and wore such ridiculous clothes and because everyone thought she was American and blamed her for the war in Vietnam. She cried because six feet away two people were making love and she simply could not imagine anyone doing such a thing, knowingly, in front of someone else. And finally she cried because she wanted to go home to Canada, where she belonged, and knew that she would not.
She cried herself to sleep, like a child, and in the morning, when she judged by the silence that the others had either left or were intending to sleep all day, she got up and washed her face and went out to have a Chelsea bun for breakfast and buy a toothbrush and some underwear and find herself a job.
CHAPTER FIVE
Edward
Struan, January 1969
I appear to have unleashed a ghost. Since hearing my father’s voice a week ago I cannot get rid of him. I keep seeing little snapshots of him, always in a rage. Last night I woke in the small hours certain that he was standing over my bed. I switched on the bedside light and of course there was no one, but there was no question of going back to sleep so I got up and went down to the kitchen (checking under the door that the light was not on, meaning Tom was not there) and sat unable to read or even to think while the hands on the kitchen clock inched around. I kept seeing his face. He had a vertical vein in the middle of his forehead that used to swell and go purple when he was angry. I was terrified of it when I was small; I thought it might burst. That was what I kept seeing last night. My father’s face; that vein, engorged with blood.
After an hour or so the cold drove me back to bed but that was the end of sleep for the night. And today at the bank, every time there was a lull in my activities, back he came.
This evening, in the hope that it might help vanquish his image if I replaced it with my mother’s, I got out what remains of her diaries—the ones that survived the fire. I keep them in two box files in the cupboard in my study. I read the ones from her childhood after her death but I’ve never been able to bring myself to read the rest for fear of what I might find.
Strictly speaking, only the ones from her childhood are proper diaries—notebooks in the conventional dated form. The writings from her adulthood, of which only enough to fill a slim brown folder survived, seem to be her thoughts and fears over the course of many years, scribbled on scraps of paper and tied together with coarse brown string. At times paper must have been hard to come by because many are written on pages torn from other things—the margins of the Daily Nugget or the Temiskaming Speaker, for instance—and the entries are in such a cramped, hurried hand that they speak of desperation. In some cases she has written lines on top of one another so that they are impossible to decipher. I can only think she must have written them in the dark.
That is a disturbing image: my mother in her nightgown creeping out to the kitchen in the dead of night, groping in the darkness for the newspaper and pencil she would have put aside for the purpose, spreading the paper on the kitchen table, feeling for the edge of it, blindly positioning her pencil and then writing, writing, the words pouring out.
There is no point thinking about it. Much better just to stick to the childhood diaries; they are anything but grim.
She began writing a diary on her sixth birthday, which, coincidentally, was the day her family set out for the North. Her mother gave her a hardback notebook as a birthday present and suggested she start by keeping a record of the trip. I know that because the first entry says so, in my mother’s neat, childish hand. The spelling is suspiciously good, so I imagine she had some help with that.
5th June 1901
My name is Elizabeth Anne Marie Stewart. All of that is my own name. I am six and this is my birthday present and two pencils. Mother says I may write about the journey. I will be the chronicler, Mother says. But I may write whatever I want. We are going to New Ontario because it is very nice there and we will have a bigger farm and so will Uncle Alf and Aunt Janet, theirs will be beside ours. All of us are going from both families but not the rest of the family. There will be four parents and eleven children and Tipper our dog and four horses and Hercules, grandfather’s ox, because he doesn’t need him anymore and six cows and twelve chickens. The chickens will be in a box but they will be able to breathe. I have to go now. Goodbye.
Elizabeth Anne Marie Stewart
She told me a little about that trip. Told me in person, I mean. I remember the occasion vividly because it was on my own sixth birthday and she had just presented me with a diary of my own. No doubt she hoped that I would find it a source of pleasure in the good times and a solace in the bad as she had done, but our family circumstances at the time and my feelings about them were beyond my ability to put into words, so the diary stayed blank. I suppose you could say I am keeping one now, though that wasn’t my intention when I started writing this. I was merely hoping that the discipline of putting words down on paper would help me sort out my thoughts. I’m using an old bank ledger. It seems appropriate, somehow. “Balancing the books.”
But back to my birthday. By some fluke, my siblings—I was the third of five at that stage—were either asleep or elsewhere and it was just the two of us, which was special in itself. Mother was darning socks. I recall watching the swift, neat movements of her hands while she talked. Every now and then she would get up to check something on the stove and each time before sitting down again she would reach behind her and press both hands into the small of her back. I remember asking if her back was hurting and her smiling at me and saying, “It’s just this baby,” and in the morning I had another sister.
That day, though, it was just the two of us and she was telling me about her own sixth birthday. I remember trying to imagine her the same age as myself and finding it impossible.
As pioneer journeys go, theirs wasn’t particularly arduous. They moved from Southern Ontario to the North, a matter of four hundred miles or so, taking days rather than weeks. But moving all your worldly goods was quite a procedure back then, especially if those goods included livestock. Transportation, where there was any, was primitive. From my mother’s entries it appears that the journey involved three trains, a steamboat and several long hauls along bush roads by horse (or ox) and cart. The diary is low on fact—place names and the like—and I wish she had recorded more description of the route, but still it gives a picture. She seems to have been principally interested in the welfare of the livestock. The entry for the sixth of June 1901, for instance—day two of the trip, in the middle of which they evidently had to change trains—reads:
The trains are really noisy and steamy and sometimes they blow out soot and sparks and the cows don’t like them and Hercules really, really hates them. Father and Uncle Alf and the engine driver and the fireman had to push all of them on and off both times and Hercules stepped on the engine driver and he was really cross and hit him with a stick. I think it was mean because Hercules was just scared.
Her descriptions of t
he accommodation they had to endure en route are similarly low on fact—again not a single place name—and high on impressions. The first night was dominated by bedbugs; nothing else gets a mention. The second was spent in a barn with a leaky roof during what was clearly, from my mother’s description, the worst thunderstorm since the dawn of time. On the third night they slept on the floor of a railway station.
But nobody could sleep—my mother wrote—because of the mosquitoes and because Tipper kept barking. He was outside with the cows and Father said he was imagining bears and Charlie said maybe he wasn’t imagining them and what if it was a grizzly and Father said, well we have the rifles, and Uncle Alf said if it was a grizzly we should just give him the rifles and run and Father laughed. But I could hear the cows and horses and Hercules moving about and I think they were scared. But this morning they were all there, I counted them. But the mosquitoes are really big and there are millions of them, Charlie clapped his hands together and he killed eleven with one clap and when you have to go to the toilet behind a bush they get all over your bare bits so Mother came and stood behind me and brushed them off and I did the same for her and for Lily and Susan. I really, really hate mosquitoes.
The final train they took must have been the lumber train to the southern end of Lake Temiskaming. It was literally the end of the line as far as either rail or road went back then. In winter, when the lake froze over, the ice acted as a road but in summer you could proceed farther north only by boat, so the two families and their long-suffering livestock would have had to unload themselves from the train yet again and then reload everything onto a steamer for the trip up the lake.
Mother’s entry for that day is embellished with a drawing of herself and her family on the boat. Artistically it would win no prizes but she clearly took time over it and was at pains not to leave anyone or anything out. Animals and people are all mixed together: four adults, eleven children, one dog, six cows, four horses, an ox and a large box presumably containing the chickens. All but the chickens are standing at the rail and looking out over the lake. In reality I’m sure this couldn’t have been the case—the livestock would have been down in the hold—but in my mother’s mind they were all together. It reminds me of Noah’s Ark.
That first diary of hers, chronicling the family’s journey and most of their first year in the North, is one of only four from her childhood that survived the fire unscathed. The only reason any of them did is because Mother had hidden them under the floorboards in the kitchen. I found them when I went back to the blackened ruins of our home a couple of weeks after the fire, to see if anything of value remained. The floorboards, which had been mostly burned away, had rested on rows of joists, which in turn rested directly on the rock and hard-packed earth beneath, and the gap between the joists was just large enough to contain her precious bundles. There must have been quite a few of them—there were four stacks and from the charred remains I reckon each stack was eight to ten inches high. The fire destroyed all but the bottom inch or so and some of those were badly singed at the edges. Her first diary was at the very bottom of a stack. It must have been particularly precious to her because it was wrapped in several layers of newspaper and then a piece of burlap sacking. When I unearthed it from the rubble my hands came out grey with ash. I remember thinking they looked like the hands of the dead.
As I said, I got out the diaries in the hope that they would exorcise my father’s ghost, but in fact they had the opposite effect. They merely reminded me of how that brief, perfect interlude with my mother ended, my father slamming into the house unexpectedly early, purple-faced and stinking of drink, having no doubt been fired from or walked out of yet another job. When he saw my mother and me sitting there, he began shouting at her, calling her a whore, a slut, an ugly, lazy bitch, right there in front of me. Afterwards, when he had gone and it was safe to speak, she said quietly, looking down into her lap, “You mustn’t think he means those things, Edward. It’s just the liquor talking.”
That wasn’t so. I knew that even then. She was trying to protect me from the truth. It wasn’t the liquor talking, it was my father’s true self. The liquor merely loosened his tongue.
Anyway, I put the diaries away again, back in their box files. Since then I’ve been trying to concentrate on Rome, with mixed success.
A better night. But the here and now keeps demanding attention in the most irritating way. I had no clean shirts this morning. When I spoke to Emily about it she looked baffled, then said she would be doing laundry today. All very well, but I was reduced to wearing a dirty shirt to work.
And that is by no means the most serious thing she has forgotten lately. Last week, we ran out of food. Incredible but true. We live virtually in the centre of town. Not only is the grocery store nearby, but it will deliver groceries to your door; all you have to do is pick up the phone.
I didn’t realize we were running low. It is not my job to oversee the day-to-day running of the house and in any case, for several years now—since Megan left, in fact—I have been having my meals at the bank during the week. Harper’s restaurant is less than a hundred yards from the bank and Susan Harper is a significantly better cook than Emily, so I pick up coffee and a bran muffin on my way to work and then Jean, my secretary, gets me a sandwich at lunchtime and one of their hot beef (or pork or chicken) dinners, neatly double-wrapped in foil, at five o’clock. I eat in solitary splendour in my office when everyone else has gone. It means I get half an hour’s peace at the end of the day, which is a bonus, but it also means that I don’t know what the rest of the family is eating except on weekends.
Last Saturday—day one of our most recent blizzard—I noticed at lunchtime that amongst other things we had run out of bread, but I assumed Emily had arranged for Marshall’s to deliver groceries that afternoon. It turned out she had not. She had no idea the fridge was empty. I didn’t realize this until six in the evening, by which time it was too late to do anything about it.
I went up to her room—Emily and I do not share a room, Emily and the newest arrival share a room; I have my own room at the far end of the hall—and found her in bed, cradling the baby and looking as if she were posing for a painting of the Madonna and Child. Emily always becomes distinctly strange in the aftermath of childbirth. It’s as if her universe shrinks right down until it contains nothing but herself and the baby. She makes a little nest in the bed and settles down in it as if she were hatching an egg and simply stays there. The rest of us might as well not exist. Formerly it didn’t matter much because Megan was here to pick up the pieces, but it matters now. The other children, especially Adam, being so young, are not toys to be discarded on the arrival of a new model.
I asked if she was feeling all right—obviously if she was sick it was a different story—and she said yes. I confess I was relieved; I would not relish calling in John Christopherson, given what he said when Adam was born about Emily not being strong enough to have more children. I found it hard to meet his eye when he came to deliver this one.
I asked what she expected us to have for supper and she looked up at me with that blank expression of hers as if the question had never crossed her mind. I have wondered before now if Emily’s vagueness is deliberate—an excuse for not taking her duties seriously. It’s impossible to tell. I noticed there was an open packet of biscuits beside her bed, which helped explain why she wasn’t hungry herself. (Curiously, they were the same as the ones I keep in my desk. I would have sworn Emily and I had absolutely nothing in common, but it turns out I would have been wrong: we both like digestives.)
I pointed out that it was half past six, that we were hungry and there was nothing in the fridge but two eggs and a carrot. I don’t think my tone was particularly sharp, but she abruptly started to cry, silently, looking down at the baby, the tears running down her face and dripping onto his head.
I said tiredly, “Emily, for heaven’s sake.” I hadn’t meant to upset her.
There was a box of Kleenex on the bedside
table. I offered her one and she took it and wiped the baby’s face and then her own. When she had pulled herself together I tried again. I asked as patiently as I could why she hadn’t arranged for Mrs. Whatever-her-name-is to come in every day and help until she felt stronger. At that she seemed to gather her wits and said that Mrs. Whatever had phoned to say that she was sick but hoped to be back soon.
Clearly there was nothing to be done until after the weekend. I suggested carefully, gently, that on Monday morning she should make a few phone calls, first to arrange for Marshall’s to deliver some food and second to find someone to come in each day and deal with the housework until Mrs. Whatever gets back. I asked if she thought she could manage to do those two things and she said yes.
I said, “As for the rest of the weekend, we will manage somehow, so don’t worry about that.” As if there were any question of her worrying about it.
Sometimes I cannot help comparing Emily with my mother, who had ten children, virtually no money and an abusive fool for a husband, but who nevertheless managed to have a proper meal on the table every day of our lives.
I suppose that isn’t fair. My mother was a remarkable woman.
On my way downstairs I met Tom coming up, carrying a large cardboard box and closely followed by Adam. The stairs are narrow and we all stood aside for each other in that awkward way people do in doorways.
“Come on, then,” I said. They came up past me—cautiously, it seemed to me, though there’s an outside chance they were being polite. Tom had obviously been out—his face was mottled with cold and there was snow in his hair.