But he could go no further. I stepped closer to the bed. He tried again. “I can’t…” but once more his voice trailed away. His eyes bulged with concentration and I sensed the pressure of the message trapped in his head, pushing like water against a dam. He looked at me with a small bewildered smile, his eyes filled with fear, his face cleaved down the centre like an earthquake’s rift. Which half, I wondered, is the man I know?
“What is it you want, William?” I asked quietly. “Tell me. I’m listening. What can I get you?”
He said what sounded like kitchen kitchen kitchen. With his finger he drew a U shape over and over on the table.
“A letter? The letter U? A cup? A curved road?” I said, perplexed that I could not understand this new language of his. “Write it down, William,” I urged, drawing a pencil and paper from my purse. He took the pencil, looked at it, puzzled, tried to put it in his mouth. Seeing this, I felt a wind blow through me, cold as the wind that cut through William in the prairie winters, turning his bones to ice. I took the pencil from him, noticed my own hands shaking as I wrote William in capitals on the paper and showed it to him. He stared at it without recognition. Beneath it I wrote Morgan in even larger letters, but he didn’t understand that either and I saw for myself how meaningless the two words looked, stacked one on top of the other. William sighed and stared out the window. Following his gaze, I wondered what he saw out there, if he could still remember the words sky clouds trees.
“Maybe, William,” I said, offering a thin hope, “maybe if we put your teeth in, you might be able to speak more clearly.” Then he glared at me, his face turning very red and he swept the supper tray from the table. The dishes crashed down, soft foods sliding across the floor, metal lids rolling cheerfully into the corners of the room.
“Ge out!” he shouted at me. “Ge out!” And I wondered: What exactly had the ICU nurse meant when she said William was out of danger?
Now that William is awake, I wondered on my way out of the hospital, now that he’s conscious and seemingly strong and able to lose his temper, will they ask me to bring him home? And if they do, how will I haul the weight of his stricken frame around with me? And why, I thought, should I be made to shoulder this burden, when it seems to me I’ve spent so much of my life doing my level best to keep him healthy, moving his whisky bottle around the house while — searching for it — he ransacked one cupboard after another? And denying him, in recent years, egg yolks and red meat, on the doctor’s orders, while he fought me every step of the way?
Dear girls,
…The thought of your father’s paralysis makes me picture my brother Thomas, who fell in the barnyard at the age of fourteen and hit his head on a stone. After that, he wasn’t able to walk, but lay day after day on a cot in the kitchen, requiring more and more of my mother’s time as a paralysis crept through his body. A blond boy with my father’s shy smile and gentle temperament, he never complained. One day, my mother asked my father to put a cot for Thomas in their bedroom.
We can’t have that boy sleeping with us, he objected.
I have to be able to keep an eye on him, she said.
He sleeps solid enough. He never calls you at night. Leave the door open if you want. You’ll hear him if he needs you.
I said I want him close to me.
We need privacy. I’m not allowed to touch you any more and now you want to bring the family in to sleep with us.
What’s more important to you? she demanded. Privacy, or your own son’s comfort?
Why don’t we just put him in the bed between us, with his dead legs? my father asked, the first I’d ever seen him angry. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? That’d make you happy.
Maybe it would.
You haven’t looked at me since that boy fell.
He needs me.
What makes you think I don’t?
For the love of God, you’re a grown man. You can take care of yourself. I wash your clothes and cook your food. What more do you want? Do I have to spoon-feed you too?
I wouldn’t mind if you did, he admitted.
Oh, grow up, why don’t you? Now, will you carry him up to our room, or will I have to ask one of the boys to do it?
No, he answered grudgingly. No, I’ll do it…
Dear girls,
…I’ve visited your father every day since he fell and at the close of each evening I’ve made a great X on my calendar, where the young Christ draws back his flaps of velvety chest muscle like theatre curtains to reveal his heart with its necklace of thorns. Tonight I thought: If Christ were like William and me, with our feebly beating organs, would he so carelessly lay bare his heart to the public eye? Or would he keep it cloaked and protected, precious as a golden pear inside its encasings of lung and flesh? But this foolish heart-exposing Christ is all the company I have in the evenings. And now that I know that your father can’t read or write as well as being unable to speak, I wonder how we’ll ever communicate with each other, unless we invent a symbolic language, gesturing to this and to that, just as the young anemic Jesus on the calendar points a long significant finger at his dripping heart…
Dear girls,
…Is it not a little ironic that all his life your father has thirsted so for knowledge and now, since his stroke, he doesn’t even know his own name?…
November 5
Dear girls,
… I now make it a point to venture outdoors each afternoon just at four o’clock. The sunsets in Simplicity are glorious this autumn, the finest in my memory. I journey up and down the streets enjoying the fragile light, intoxicated by the sweet air. The freedom to follow a path of my choosing, to set my own pace brings me deep satisfaction. I see the orange light shining along my limbs like a reviving fire and somehow feel I’m being brought back to life…
A dry wind has been blowing for days and the fallen leaves, which for weeks have lain splendid, moist and plastic beneath the trees, nearly alive, are now curled up in drifts and crunch like seashells beneath my feet. The sky presses down and sometimes there are black clouds boiling out of the West, but so far we’ve had no snow. Tonight, when I mounted the hill from the hospital, my heart, conditioned now to the slope, beat less frantically, my blood flowed less thickly than a month ago, the soles of my shoes taking the rise with ease. Arriving home, I found Harry Lang toiling outdoors, screening his Japanese maples and his rhododendrons within loose cages of rough burlap and wood stakes.
“Your yard looks like a refugee encampment, Harry,” I said.
Conte stopped me on the driveway.
“Lovely warm day, Morgan,” he said cheerfully. “Probably one of our last. Temperature’s supposed to drop fast tonight. You can feel it already. How are things at the hospital?”
“William is improving bit by bit,” I said. “We’ll get through this, Conte.”
“That’s the spirit, Morgan,” he said approvingly, and I marched bravely, mechanically up the driveway, rather like one of those stiff, robotic soldiers in William’s war documentaries, with their arms and penises on the rise.
I set the evening paper as usual beside William’s chair. A month’s issues now await him and I’m afraid that by the time he comes home, such a faulty tower of news will greet him that he’ll have another stroke just thinking about all the world’s weighty matters he must sort out.
Harry Lang knocked on my door before supper.
“I just wanted you to know, Morgan,” he said, standing with me in the narrow front hall, “I wanted to alert you to the frost warning for tonight. If there’s anything fragile in William’s garden, you may want to cover it up with a section of newspaper. You seem to have no shortage of it here,” he said, observing the stacks of newspapers with a mixture of curiosity and alarm.
“That’s good advice, Harry,” I answered, “but I don’t dare disturb William’s papers. They’re sacred to him. He’ll want to read every article, every word. He’ll be very upset when he comes home if he finds he’s missed any news.”
“How is
he, Morgan?”
“They’ve moved him out of intensive care.”
“He’ll be coming home, then?”
“Very soon, I should think,” I lied.
“Conte and I have been talking about paying him a little visit.”
“I’ll let you know when he’s ready. Soon he’ll be like the old William you knew.”
Harry smiled. “That’s wonderful news, Morgan. We’ll have to have a homecoming for him, won’t we? In the meantime, are there any problems I can help with? Furnace okay? No taps leaking? Storm windows that need to go up before the snow flies?”
When I departed for the hospital this morning, I’d noticed Harry up on a ladder, washing his own windows, with Heather assisting from below, passing him cloths and a bottle of Windex. Seeing them together, I’d wondered: What would it be like never to have borne a child, so that you could still believe the love between a man and a woman is the greatest joy on this earth?
“Anything cumbersome needs to be carried out to the curb on garbage day?” Harry asked me.
“You shouldn’t be lifting heavy things, Harry.”
“I’m strong as an ox, Morgan,” he said, rapping his chest firmly with a fist, making a sound like a deep drum. “Retirement has recharged my batteries. I’ve never felt more alive. I’m getting my second wind.”
For a full month now, I’ve been living amid William’s populace of flower bulbs, knowing I daren’t touch them for fear of mixing up the various tribes. Tonight I stole a bit of free space on the table to set down my knife and fork. I began to pick up the little yellow labels William had brought home with the bulbs, each giving the recommended depth of planting, the height of growth, the moment of blooming, the names of the various cultivars. I read: Queen of the Night. Miranda. Elegant Lady. Clara Brett. Princess Charmante. Madame Lefebvre. Stella. Jacqueline. Temple of Beauty. Naked Lady. Had William, sorting his bulbs the day of the stroke, fingering their fleshy masses, their smooth white curves, imagined the women who inspired these names, pictured their pale thighs, their firm bellies?
I thought, then, of William’s anger in the hospital and before I could stop myself, I reached out my arm and swept all the naked ladies off the table. They bounced and rolled across the linoleum floor and into the far corners of the kitchen. Dear God! I thought. Now what have I done? William will murder me for this. Because all his ivory women were dashed together now, the bulbs no larger than my thumbnail tossed in among those as big as a hen’s egg, and I felt my heart thumping very hard. Then I remembered what Harry Lang had said about the frost and I knew I must bury the bulbs at once, before the earth froze and William came home and saw my handiwork.
I went out into the backyard, which is enclosed by hedges, grown now the height of a man. Passing the Man and Wife Trees, the sackful of bulbs thrown over my shoulder, I smelled the sweet perfume of the Man Tree’s fallen apples as they softened in the long grass. William would be angry if he saw this, I thought, because the decaying apples are a blight on his healthy lawn. Since his retirement, William’s been as devoted to the yard and gardens as a man smitten by a new lover. Solemnly he sows his seed, his gestures tender, ardent, shaking with wonder.
I crossed the lawn beneath the branches of many trees randomly planted over the years by William. Because he grew up on the prairie — where the earth is flat or sometimes gently rolling, but everywhere bald and cruel, spare as bone, shelterless — William has all his life had a deep hunger for trees. But so many trees on such a small property have heaved the ground so that tonight I feared turning my old ankles in the lumpy grass or tripping on exposed roots twisting like snakes across the lawn.
“Too many trees, William,” I’ve warned him over the years. “Haven’t you noticed how their roots have ruptured the basement walls? The foundations of the house are crumbling.”
Tonight, I looked up and saw the Man Tree reaching into the sky. At the tips, his branches looked fragile, thin as wires. How would they survive the icy winds of winter? The fruitless Wife Tree, late to turn colour, had stood for many days at the absolute zenith of her glory, with nary a leaf lost, but the week’s winds had now stripped her branches. I looked down at her fallen leaves, layers and layers of them, like all the days of a life, cast there, one upon the other, without shape now or rhyme or reason.
I set the heavy sack of bulbs down and knelt in the cold grass. On my hands and knees before William’s flower beds, I stabbed at the soil with a trowel. Excavating two broad, shallow holes, I threw the bulbs in willy-nilly, all the sizes and shapes tumbling together, and pushed the loose earth over top, the rich soil oily in my hands, its cold funky smell filling my nostrils. My old knees were shouting with pain by the time I concluded the burial and I thought for a moment that I wouldn’t be able to straighten them and get up. Moments later, just as I was turning toward the house, I heard weeping coming through the hedge, from a corner of the McTavish place.
“Vivien!” I called out. “Vivien, is that you?” But then I thought: What a fool you are, Morgan! If it’s Vivien, she can’t hear you. Then I wondered: How is it that Vivien has the voice to weep but not to speak? I turned my back on the grief and crept along to my own house, not wanting in my heart of hearts to know of anyone’s tears.
Half an hour later, sitting down with my baked potato and my shakers of salt and pepper, I paused suddenly with a forkful of hot white flesh halfway to my mouth, for outside I saw large, startling snowflakes falling through the sky. I went then to the calendar and saw that, in all my parade of Xs across the days, I’d forgotten about the change of seasons. Snow in November isn’t unheard of in these parts, but it’s also not common. What was the meaning of this early winter? With the soundless falling of the snow, the house was eerily silent, silent as William in his hospital bed, as though his aphasia had spread its tonguelessness, reaching across the city blocks to stifle these rooms.
I don’t care. No no no no no. I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care.
Dear girls,
…I can’t believe, your father once told me, I can’t believe that through all the tedious, useless jobs I’ve done all my life and all the years I’ve wasted in this goddamned province, I allowed myself to get distracted. I forgot that the only important thing in life is soil.
To hear you talk, William, I told him, you’d think the West was the Promised Land, where everything was good and happy, but I remember it as a treeless wasteland with a wind that flattened everything alive.
You’ve kept me here in Ontario all this time, Morgan, he said, but somehow I’ll find my way back to prairie soil…
Dear girls,
…It’s astonishing to me how populated the world has become, the number of people I encounter now that I’m out on the streets, their faces, still legible to me, each suggesting its own story…
November 6
Dear girls,
…I’ve begun to venture further afield, confident that my new ability to recognize landmarks will help me find my way home again. Last week I paid a visit to the town library. Did you know that the library has been renovated and enlarged, with marble floors laid down in geometric patterns of black and white? The entrance is now below ground level and to get at the books you have to rise and rise round a great curved stair until you feel dizzy. You would approve of the changes I’m sure, all the rows of computers with young people tapping away like mad and thick carpet everywhere to absorb the tiny galloping sound of their communicating. There’s wall after wall of mahogany shelf, so much money all of this must have cost and all spent simply to store words. Where is the circle of beautiful old pillars that used to be here? I wanted to ask. And the pink rotunda soaring above them? And wasn’t there once a brick fireplace in a corner?
In Reference I asked for picture books of Nepal and Brazil and Indonesia and Germany and I sat down in a leather armchair at a vast cherry table with a flawless mirror finish I was terrified of scratching. While I waited, I looked out at a small landscaped courtyard containing
miniature boxwood hedges and curving stone pathways. I saw a statue of a woman whose garments had slipped down low around her hips so that the snow was softly falling on her bare shoulders and her marble breasts.
A librarian began to bring me books. She was the tiniest woman I’d ever seen, not much more than four feet high, with a head of thick strawberry curls. She suffered from a palsy. Her hands and body trembled alarmingly and her head teetered so precariously on her neck that I thought it might roll off and go bouncing across the new wall-to-wall. I wondered if it was indeed a palsy that made her shake, or only a reaction to the slick new floors and the smart shelves and the arrival in the library of technology. She brought me book after book, each one larger than the one before.
Watching her struggling so hard to keep up with the new personality of the library, I asked: Have they not devised something to help you transport these heavy books? Some sort of conveyor belt or book elevator or crane? A block and tackle? One would think they’d be capable of that, being so clever about everything else. But the woman only gave me a little stoic smile and went to fetch more volumes, stacking them so high that soon I couldn’t see past them. They cast a wide shadow across me, cutting out my reading light, and I had to cry in a loud whisper, Stop! Stop! That’s enough! Don’t bring me any more!
I opened the covers of these books, some of them nearly as large as the tabletop, and I turned the vast glossy pages showing the Brazilian rain forest and the coffee plantations of Indonesia and the Brandenburg Gate. When I came to a picture of a street market in Nepal, the woman brought me a magnifying glass and I peered closely at all the faces, thinking I might recognize one of you girls among the shoppers for brass and spices and silks. I found nothing familiar, only smelled those hundreds of olive-skinned bodies pressed together in the heat. People like to say that it’s a small world, but of course it’s a very big one. I looked at the rubber forests and at the mountains and oceans separating us and knew there was no way I could ever lure you home over such exotic distances.
The Wife Tree Page 7