Little wonder that she’d wanted him dead, as it was common knowledge that for years he’d been supporting a mistress, a younger woman named Honey Halpern, whom he’d installed in a gingerbread cottage on Lake Huron. For a decade, my grandmother, betrayed, humiliated, had prayed for my grandfather’s death, dreaming all the while of retiring to the West Coast on the strength of their small savings. She’d come to Canada as a young girl, following the death of her mother. Her father, a German watchmaker, had wanted to make a fresh start in the New World. The passage with him to Canada over glittering seas in a first-class ship cabin was, she said, the happiest and most vivid memory of her childhood. As she grew old, she’d begun to long for the sight of the ocean. She’d spoken of blue waters, white boat sails, the smell of salt air, perfume of blossoming peach trees.
But when her husband’s will was read, she learned that she was penniless. He’d squandered every cent on the lakeside mistress. The house had been mortgaged. The butchery was in debt. She wore the look now of someone stunned by her fate. In her lifetime, she’d journeyed from Munich to Toronto to Kitchener to this subsistence Huron County farm. Deeper and deeper into the narrow heart of Ontario she’d come. But she was a practical woman. Even as she looked out at the soulless landscape, breathed in the corrosive dust of the country, heard the crickets singing tunelessly in the long grass, she said she was grateful at least to have escaped the reek of the butchery, the sweet heavy smell of slaughter, of ripe flesh and rapid spoilage.
They say that, the morning I howled, the parlour curtains lifted in the spring breeze, revealing, beyond them, the apple tree shimmering, its blossoms suspended in the air like a snowdrift, snow in spring. The blossoms had burst forth overnight with a sudden rush of heat. On her way out to the fields, my mother paused to remark on it.
“It’s a sign,” she said. “It flowers like that only once in a decade.”
Out in the barnyard, the four boys had hitched up the horses, climbed onto the flatbed wagon and waited now for my parents to appear. My sisters, carrying the day’s lunch in wicker baskets, joined them there. Once the wagon had rattled off, my grandmother, her arms light and hollow as reeds, lifted me from the cradle. Hush, she whispered. Hush. But evidently I wouldn’t be silenced. Out in the fields, my mother was seen raising her head again and again, turning her face toward the distant house, listening to the sounds carried on the May winds.
“She’s still crying.”
“It’s only the crows you hear,” my father told her. “It’s only the wind.”
“No, it’s the child. That howling will be the death of me.”
It had been a cold and rainless spring and the corn and barley were going in late. The steel plough blade tore into the dry soil and the horses’ hooves, big as flatirons, hammered the packed earth, throwing up clouds of dust that drifted and settled like sand across the fields. At noon the ploughing party halted directly north of the house, took shelter from the sun beneath a maple tree in spring leaf, ate a lunch of cold chicken, loaves of fresh bread, potato salad, gallon jars of preserved beans, baking-powder biscuits spread with peach jam, Thermoses of steaming tea. When they returned home at five o’clock, they immediately noticed the stillness in the house. The fire had gone down, which was a blessing, as the day had warmed to July temperatures and all the windows stood closed, making the house hot and airless as a tomb.
“She’s quiet at last,” said my mother with relief, pulling off her boots at the kitchen door. Then she noticed that no preparations had been made for dinner. On the kitchen table lay three unplucked chickens, bunches of spring carrots awaiting scrubbing, potatoes with the skins unpeeled. A row of loaf tins, bread dough spilling over their sides, stood unbaked on the counter. Entering the front room, she found my grandmother’s brittle body crumpled on the floor, her head dashed, heavy as a stone, against the hearth, on her brow a welt the size of a plum.
My dead grandmother may have tried to sing me a lullaby, and the more she sang, her voice an antique whistle in her throat, the more lustily I’d cried. Unable to calm me, unnerved by this child shouting brazenly at life, she’d suffered a stroke. Together we’d pitched forward like a pair of divers, my grandmother’s cheek pressed at last against the rough flagstone, the radiant apple tree outside the window reflected in her eyeglasses, twin images shining in the small round lenses as though cast there from within her head, a photographic projection. The spill forced her porcelain teeth out, shot them across the hearth. In the corner of her mouth, a ruby scab had formed. Tumbling like a soft bundle of rags across the rug, I’d survived the fall unharmed. The bottle containing the milk my mother had expressed before going out had rolled across the room and lay now against the wood bin.
The year was 1912. I was the eighth child. Two of my brothers were already adolescents. Now they crowded in behind my mother, awkward as cattle, cumbersome in the narrow room, inarticulate, smelling powerfully of the sweat of their labour, big boys already growing fleshy, acquiring farmers’ guts, their necks reddened by the day’s strong sun. The three girls pressed in behind them, the hems of their dresses heavy with dust, hair plastered to their hot faces, long sleeves and wide straw hats worn to protect their milky skins from the sun’s rays because of my mother’s vow, “No girl of mine is ever going to turn dark as a nigger.”
My father sighed with exhaustion. Things had gone wrong out in the fields. A plough handle had snapped, an old horse had collapsed, another had lost its shoe, the spring soil was unyielding as stone. There’d been shouting and they’d all come inside hot and defeated and murderous and now there was this dead body to contend with.
In the room hung the ripe smell of the old woman. Not the smell of death but simply of this woman’s elderly flesh, a mouldering odour they’d been inhaling for years without noticing it, a strange fruity rot rising out of the yellow folds of her ancient skin. Had the stench of the butchery invaded her pores, hung there long after she closed its door behind her?
“She was the only gentle thing left in my life,” my mother, looking down at her, said. “She was my last connection with the city.”
My mother’s breasts, at five in the afternoon, were hardened and painful with their bounty of milk. She was a tall, robust German. She’d learned to get up out of bed directly after childbirth to bake half a dozen loaves of bread and as many pies for the threshers’ noonday meal. She could peel potatoes, wash dishes, put up canning, juggling jars of boiling vinegar, and hold a baby safely in the crook of her arm all the while. Now, in the window behind her, the apple tree that had so filled her with hope shimmered. Within twenty-four hours, the petals would drop.
The sun began to set. The house grew dim. When my mother didn’t move to pick me up, my father, a soft-spoken man with thin blond hair and ears large as monarch butterflies, stepped forward in his earthy overalls and reached for me. Unaccustomed to handling babies, he held me at arm’s length, like a leaky bucket. Turning, he thrust me at my oldest sister, Alfreda, a brainy gat-toothed girl studying that spring for her Normal School exams. My mother went to the pantry, opened her bodice, pumped breast milk into a bottle. Alfreda, school books spread open before her on the kitchen table, pushed the rubber nipple into my mouth, never lifting her eyes from the text, her breath singing through the spaces in her great square teeth.
I’m told that, for a month, my mother didn’t go near me. She couldn’t bring herself to pick me up. A mother’s touch is as familiar to an infant as the landscape of the womb. I ached for the physical power, for the knowledge of myself contained in my mother’s strong hands, which had defined me from the moment I’d emerged from her belly. Since birth, I’d been sleeping in my parents’ bed. I’d grown accustomed, in the darkness, to their deep unconscious breathing, to the sound of their coupling, to the rocking of the mattress as my father rode my mother. He may have been shy and docile, but, a man of his generation, he knew his rights in bed. Only through breast-feeding had my mother avoided a pregnancy a year. Now, exiled to a crad
le in a corner of the kitchen, I had an oblique view in daytime of my mother moving from stove to sink, erect, a woman whose face had lost its softness, her jawline now lean as a trowel, her eyes hollow with grief. They say that, all that month, while the petals in the orchard snowed from the trees, I didn’t once cry. I learned to be silent, not to draw criticism, to be obedient, to submit.
“If I never hear another sound from that child, it’ll be too soon,” my mother said.
Born in 1878, she was an only and rebellious butcher’s child. My father, a farmer’s son, had met her at a church dance and married her because she had skin like snow and large dark eyes and because she looked strong as an ox. The day of the stroke she was only thirty-four, but I was the finish of children for her. She knew it, standing beside my father in the cemetery, gazing down at my grandmother’s pine coffin. And he, sensing a resolution forming like a meaty tumour within her, may have suspected that she’d never allow him to touch her again.
But was I really, as my mother often described me, the youngest murderer in the world? How can anyone be sure that it was in fact my howling that killed my grandmother? Is it not possible that on that May afternoon, sealed within the airless farmhouse, a fine widow’s sweat breaking out of her old pores, she’d begun to think about Honey Halpern? Had she pictured the young mistress sitting, not twenty miles from this very farm, on a cottage porch surrounded by its lush growth of ferns, cooled by an offshore breeze, a view before her of wheeling gulls, glittering waters, late reflective sunsets — the precise vista my grandmother had envisaged for herself? And is it not possible that, the more she thought about Honey Halpern, the more embittered she became and the harder she rocked until finally an artery in her brain ruptured like a faulty garden hose and she pitched to her death?
Today, listening to the song of the newborns in the maternity ward, I thought about how, as an infant, I’d had lungs powerful enough to knock an old woman to the floor. Now I’ve grown so timid that this afternoon when a nurse asked me, “Are you Mr. Hazzard’s wife?” I answered timidly, “Yes, I am,” and my voice came out in barely a whisper.
Dear girls,
…Do you remember the Christmas Day when your father was going on and on at the dinner table about the political situation in Israel?
Who is Golda Meir? I asked him, not because I truly wanted to know but because I couldn’t think of another way to tell him that he was boring you children to death on that festive occasion. Your father, who never liked to be interrupted, puffed up with rage.
How can you not know who Golda Meir is? he shouted at me. Why don’t you read the paper?
I don’t have time, William, I told him.
I’ll bet you couldn’t find Israel on a map, he said. You’re a stupid woman, Morgan. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!
In the ensuing silence I continued to dish up the Christmas pudding, ladling the brown sauce over each portion and passing them along, though the tears were flooding down my face. I felt all your eyes on me, even the littlest ones seated on the bench behind the table and the baby in her high chair with the grease from the pope’s nose dripping down her chin. I couldn’t bear to look at your faces all turned my way, while the plum pudding, forgotten, cooled in your bowls. I was afraid what I’d see in your expressions was agreement.
And later that evening, it somehow pained me to see the balsam tree heavy with tinsel in a corner of the living room and the cheap new trinkets lying beneath it and the coloured lights out on Harry Lang’s blue spruce and the frozen white and indigo night, picturesque beyond the windows as a greeting card. And your father, seeing me already in my nightgown at nine o’clock on Christmas evening, demanded, What’s this?
I have a headache, William.
Oh, another one, he came back sarcastically. However, when he finally retired to bed just before midnight, he whispered softly, a little repentantly, in my ear, Merry Christmas, Morgan, but I pretended to sleep.
October 27
Dear girls,
…Are you taking your medications, Mrs. Hazzard? Dr. Pilgrim asked me the night your father fell. He placed his hand on my shoulder as though I were a child and not a quarter-century older than he. Sometimes these crises make us forget, he said. You must preserve your health. Mr. Hazzard will need your support if he’s to recover.
And so I’ve been faithful in taking my dozen pills each morning with a glass of orange juice. Lazix for fluid retention. Vasotec for blood pressure. Digoxin for tachycardia. Aspirin to thin the blood. Zantac for stomach ulcer. Robaxisol for pain from bone breaks. Isomex to build the bones. Ocuvite to nourish the eyes. Indocin for arthritis. A potassium binder. A multivitamin. A calcium supplement.
Since your father’s fall, I find I choke on the pills. My throat contracts, rebels, coughs them back up at me. They begin to dissolve, bitter as hemlock on my tongue. I try again, pour down more juice. Large as stones, they lodged yesterday in my esophagus, clinging like barnacles to the dark, humid walls, resisting the rush of fluid. And it seems to me that, if my body is so dysfunctional, if these pills are all that keep my heart beating, my blood flowing freely, my femur from snapping like a wishbone, wouldn’t it be better to give up on the machine altogether?…
October 28
Dear girls,
…Dr. Pilgrim is in fact a hobby sheep farmer. Whenever we went for our appointments, your father was always full of questions about the extent of his acreage, the size of the sheep herd, the success of the spring lambing, the quality of the wool each year, the price fresh mutton would fetch. I wish he’d invite me out there someday, Morgan, he used to say longingly, I’d love to go. And the more I think of it, the more I believe your father had grown to love Dr. Pilgrim like the son Morris never turned out to be…
Dear girls,
…As your father continues to sleep, I’m uncertain what to make of his apparent tranquility. For surely his soul is imprisoned within his lifeless body, with no voice now that he’s mute, so that it can converse only with itself and that, I think, must be a difficult dialogue indeed…
October 29
Dear girls,
…Yesterday, on my way to the hospital, I came upon an old man in a thin grey cardigan, raking leaves and stuffing them into a big plastic bag.
A lot of stooping, I said sympathetically, pausing to talk to him. He straightened up. He had a rather jagged white moustache, a widower’s hump on his back.
It didn’t used to be this way, he said. Do you remember the bonfires?
Oh, yes, I answered.
End of October, he recalled fondly, early November. We’d all come out on the same night and light ’em up. Bonfires all up and down the street. It was a beautiful sight. Illuminated the entire city. Neighbourhood children running around, excited. On a cool fall night, the heat from the flames on our faces. The smell of burning leaves — that bittersweet perfume — I’ll never forget it.
It was a simpler time, I agreed.
Life seemed purer back then, he said.
But it’s a relief — don’t you find — to outgrow innocence? I asked. He shook his head.
All the glory of the old days is gone, he said. All the imagination. Now they want us to use these bags. Everything these days has to be packaged. In the old days, I would have gathered up the leaves, piled them, burned them, swept up the ash and put it on my gardens to fertilize the next spring’s flowers. It was a perfect cycle. It made sense. Now they come with their trucks and cart the leaves away and God knows where they end up. Glad my wife didn’t live to see the changes.
She’s gone?
A year ago. Diabetes. Our kids flew the coop long before. All that’s left now is me and the leaves.
We stood together on the sidewalk, enjoying the heat of the day. The sun fell on our narrow shoulders, our weathered hands…
I’ve become so used to my daily excursions to the hospital that it hardly seems possible I ever had an existence other than this. I’d completely forgotten that the small celebrations of life are st
ill glowing like candles in these darkening days. I seem to have missed Thanksgiving altogether, though something inside me says I’ve more to be grateful for this year than at any other time of my life. On my journey to the hospital one day this week, I saw a skeleton in a house window, taunting me with its sardonic grin. My eyesight is so feeble that I was frightened by it, thinking for an irrational moment that it was William mocking me, for he’s grown alarmingly thin. Then I realized that, of course, Halloween was nearly upon us. Hadn’t I noticed pumpkins piled in grocery store bins or carved and grinning on household verandas? Still, I couldn’t shake the notion that this leering skeleton was a bad omen. Clammy with fear, I rushed to the hospital and up to William’s room. There he was still, breathing shallowly but quite alive. I reached out and touched his feet, found them cold as stones. He’s lost weight on his diet of clear, life-sustaining fluids and his false teeth lie in an envelope somewhere, leaving his face quite hollowed out and foreign. I sat at his window, which gave me a view of trees raining leaves.
“The Man Tree is completely naked now, William,” I finally said to fill the silence. After all these years of listening, it seems it’s my turn to speak. “And the Wife Tree has turned orange and gold at last and it’s amazing the way she shines forth on her own, now that he’s all stripped down.” But then I realized this wasn’t an appropriate thing to say and for a moment I hoped that William was deaf as well as mute and hadn’t heard my foolish words.
It was at that very instant, however, that his eyes began to flutter and he opened them fully. I rose from my chair, my knees trembling.
The Wife Tree Page 5