I sensed someone behind me, then felt my long hair gripped painfully at my nape and I was guided so roughly across the uneven floor that I nearly tripped over my own feet. The figure turned me around and pinned me against a bank of potato sacks stacked in a corner. In the pitch black, I could see nothing. Something hard and cold was then pressed against my throat, cutting off my voice, and I knew it was Lance’s steel hook. He lifted my skirts and then I felt a great stab, like that of a knife, as he forced himself inside me, his breath tight, anguished, excited in his throat.
My own wind cut off, I grew dizzy with shock, lack of oxygen. From the house drifted the cheerful music of the kitchen radio, a fiddle playing a lively jig, floating down to me through the trap door. Lance’s thrusts drove me into the wall of potatoes, bruising as stones against my back. Then it was finished, as abruptly as it had begun. As Lance collapsed against me, I felt the humidity of his shirt, his chest and soft gut pressing into me, and his face, hot and slippery against my cheek.
“You breathe a word of this to anyone,” he whispered, “and I’ll take this hook and sink it into your soft little neck and rip you open from top to bottom. Do you understand?” Then he slipped away. My legs gave out and I slid to the earth floor, unable for some moments even to move.
“What took you so long?” my mother asked suspiciously when I came in at last, carrying the vegetables. “Why is your dress covered with earth?”
I saw Lance watching me from a corner of the kitchen. “My lamp went out,” I stammered. “I tripped in the dark.”
After that, I tried to escape my daily visits to the root cellar by telling my mother that the lamp going out had made me afraid of the dark, but she said, “Do you think I believe that? You’re getting lazy as a pet coon, that’s all.”
This was February, a time when the days were short and the men were underfoot in the house, there being little farm work to occupy them other than milking the cows, feeding the livestock, doing a little butchering when we needed more meat. They passed the time playing cards, listening to the radio, or dozing like kings around the pot-bellied stove. Watching for his moment, Lance was able a dozen times to slip out to the root cellar after me, unnoticed, and no matter how I struggled against him, he got me in his grip and pressed himself upon me, my back hard against the mountain of potatoes, my nostrils filled with the smells of the damp earth walls, the root vegetables. By May, I was pregnant.
In the meantime, I’d been escorted to a few church dances by Billy Bond, a local boy of seventeen with a fresh and innocent face, the only child of a woman widowed when her husband, clearing a field, was crushed by a falling elm tree. Billy was the centre of her affections.
“My son is a gentleman,” she said to my parents, her face glowing with love and pride the first time Billy asked permission to drive me home. “Morgan will be safe with him. You’ve nothing to fear.” In the church hall, Billy was attentive, inquiring after my comforts. Was I hungry? he wanted to know. Tired? In need of fresh air? He brought me punch and a piece of cake, found a chair for me to sit down on. Outside of dancing, he never so much as touched me.
In August, I discovered, just above my pubic bone, the formation of a hard growth, the size of a lemon, and I knew that time was running out and that I must make Billy believe I was carrying his child.
One Sunday, I asked Billy to take me to Lake Huron. Because of his chores, we got a late start and it was close to dusk when we arrived. As we neared the lake, the quantity of pine forest lining the road increased, forming a dark tunnel around us. We left the horse and buggy on the edge of a cliff and descended eighty wooden steps to the deserted beach. Swallows circled crazily above the shore, their wings silver in the setting sun.
In the shelter of some bushes, I pressed myself against him and eagerly kissed his mouth and soon we were lying together on the warm sand among the seagull feathers and the flat, polished beach stones and the massive pieces of bleached driftwood, entire root systems of trees washed up there like dinosaurs migrated from some ancient shore. One hundred feet into the lake, waves lapped in and out of a sunken freighter, its prow pointed at the sky.
I didn’t tell my parents about the pregnancy, but at the end of September my father came to me and said, “Where did this baby come from? Is it Billy’s?”
“He’ll marry me,” I said.
He went into their bedroom and came out carrying his hunting rifle. “I’ll kill that son of a bitch,” he threatened but my mother told him, “Put the gun away. Do you want to hang for murdering that stupid boy?”
My parents refused to hear a word about marriage. “That’s not an answer to anything. Have you any idea the disgrace this would bring if the priest found out? Not just your father and me, but your sisters and brothers too? All of us would be shamed. It wouldn’t take long for word to get around. Everyone in the countryside would be talking about us. No, you’ve got to go away.”
Early in October, my father drove me to Kitchener. It was Indian summer. I have a vivid memory of that buggy ride, the hot breezes of the afternoon, the dry, dusty roads, the falling leaves. Seated on the bench beside my father, I rode along, devastated by the painful beauty of the afternoon.
We arrived at a vast, fortresslike building in grey stone, with corner towers, a crenellated roofline, a thick wooden door, the home of an order of two hundred nuns. My father left me with one of the sisters who silently led me through many corridors into the heart of the convent. She indicated a small windowless room, a closet really, behind the kitchen, where there was a cot for me to sleep on. Leading me to a vast steel sink, she handed me a potato peeler.
“This is where you’ll work seven days a week. Get up early. Cook the porridge. Peel and chop the vegetables for lunch. Help with the bread making. Help with the cooking. Wash the dishes. Sweep the floor. Don’t show your face in the refectory. You’re not to be seen there. Many of our community would find the sight of your belly offensive. Do your work well. Pray. Maybe while you’re here you can begin to atone for your sin.”
For four months, I didn’t set foot outside the convent because I hadn’t a coat generous enough to wrap around my girth, but through a window above the sinks I was able to note the arrival of snow, the deepening of winter, the visitation of blue jays at a feeder. On Sundays, a nun led me along a dark underground passage to the chapel, indicated that I should sit in a back pew and handed me a black scarf with which to cover my head.
“Make yourself invisible. Keep your mouth closed. We don’t want to hear any singing from the likes of you.”
Despite my circumstances, I gradually grew optimistic about the baby, because I saw that it distinguished me from the nuns, for whom the evidence of a new life growing seemed so repugnant. Their bodies shrouded in black, their whispers and oblique glances of disapproval when they passed the kitchen door, their habitually bitter faces only made me pity them and begin to carry my swelling body with dignity, even with pride. Lying in bed at night with my fingers spread across my bare belly as though it were a crystal ball, I felt its power, like that of a glowing planet. Feeling the child kick with life, I resolved to slip out of the convent at the first sign of labour, give birth to the baby in an alley somewhere, run away with the infant, raise it on my own.
But I hadn’t anticipated the crippling force of labour. When it came in the middle of the night, I cried out in surprise and dismay, because, doubled over with the contractions, I knew that I couldn’t possibly escape. My wails brought the nuns running. My door flew open and in the pale lamplight there was a swish of dark skirts. Hands came forward, received the baby. I saw a brief glimmer of slippery skin, that was all. The child was carried off into the dark corridors of the convent, passed impersonally by hands disciplined never to love anything physical, never to touch their own body, face, breasts, thighs with anything like pleasure or joy or acceptance. Then came the delivery of the afterbirth, one of the nursing sisters sponging and mopping. “You’ve made quite a ruckus, haven’t you?” she s
aid. “Everyone’s awake now, in the middle of the night. I hope you’re satisfied. And you might have given us some warning. Look at the mess you’ve made.”
My father was summoned to fetch me. He said not a word when I climbed into the buggy, but only tucked the wool blanket around my ankles, snapped the reins, clicked his tongue to get the horses moving. The wagon gave a jerk and we set off for home.
I’d never in my life felt worthy. I’d once heard my mother say, “Every new baby is just another mouth to feed.” Even when I sang, I understood that my voice — the only thing that lifted me up out of the ordinary — was a gift from God in which I’d no right to take pride, that it was not my property but the instrument of my mother and of the nuns at school and others who sent me, egoless, up onto soapboxes or church hall stages or into choir lofts to entertain strangers. On the journey home, my body, without its familiar weight of child, seemed worthless, such a poor and utterly hollow object that I prayed this feeling of emptiness would somehow kill me before we reached the farm. I kept thinking: before the next crossroad, before the next letter box, before another silo comes into view, surely I’ll be crushed to death by this burden of sorrow.
Billy Bond had gone away. Far from keeping the whole affair a secret, Lance had run him out of the county. I heard that Billy was living now on the east coast, working on an uncle’s fishing boat. I pictured him sitting on glassy waters, waiting patiently for the fishnets to fill up with the sea’s bounty, like a pregnant woman’s swelling belly, with plenty of time on his hands to think and to calculate the months and the timing of the baby’s birth and to understand that the child born in the convent was not his own.
Billy’s mother was struck blind the day Lance drove him off. The doctors said it was the trauma of losing her son that blinded her and that eventually her sight might return, but it never did.
Dear girls,
…I was looking tonight on the kitchen calendar at the picture of the Sacred Heart with the neon halo floating like a spaceship above his head, and I thought: What use to the elderly is this healthy, eternally adolescent Christ, who, as though he drinks from the fountain of youth, will never have his face pitted by the chemical dusts of war or suffer a thrombosis or be struck dumb by a stroke or be forced to wear an adult diaper or require blood thinners or a mickey of rye whisky before supper so that he might forget for a few hours who he is? Thinking this, I turned the calendar over so that his expression of sweet sorrow was pressed hard against the repeating watering cans on the faded wallpaper. Damn this Christ, I say, with his forbearance and his head tilted so gently, so coyly that you can see he understands nothing! Damn my mother and her love only for Thomas! Damn all the handless men and the men who must cut down trees…
November 15
Dear girls,
…The warm temperatures are melting the snow and late today the two mounds in your father’s garden where I buried the flower bulbs reappeared and rose up like a woman’s breasts to warm themselves in the weak winter sun…
Last night I had a dream in which I was running down a dark country road, pursued by a man. Though the farms sweeping away on either side of me were dormant, their fields blanketed with winter snow, I could tell that this was the poor miserable broken countryside of my childhood with its rocky fruitless soil. On and on I ran, looking for our farmhouse, while the male figure behind me drew closer, the sweet smell of liquor on his breath. Clad in only a cotton dress and pinafore, I felt very cold. It was a great long time of running and searching before I recognized our own modest barn and silo and, with relief, turned up the lane. But the passage was unploughed and I began to trip and fall in the deep snow, getting up each time and struggling further, spurred on by the distant sight of my mother standing in a bright window. I was rapidly wearying because, though young, I had only my old senior’s heart to keep me going.
As I drew closer, I heard music coming from the house and realized it was my own voice singing “Girl of the Golden West.” In the window, my mother was youthful again in her sea blue party dress with the hem cut to look like the waves of the ocean. I fell once more. Only then did I realize that there was a great weight in my pocket pulling me down, and I thought: I must rid myself of these heavy potatoes so that I can get up and run on. But then I noticed that the pocket of my pinafore was soaked with blood. I reached in and drew out a hand amputated at the wrist. Then I knew, of course, that my pursuer was Lance. Struggling to my feet, I shouted, There it is! Take it! I never wanted it anyway! I never wanted to even touch it! and threw the hand as far as I could across the snowy field. But it wasn’t the hand that Lance wanted. He grabbed me by my long hair and pulled me to the ground. My mother, seeing him bear down on me, reached up and drew the curtains closed.
November 16
Dear girls,
…A part of me died when the nuns spirited the baby away in the convent and I remember thinking at the time: Why didn’t I just kill myself before the child was ever born? Because if I had, the baby would have remained sheltered within me and we could have been buried together, its new head tucked safely in my belly, its limbs smooth and firm and young and fruitful and waxy as a meaty flower bulb, its arms and legs folded around themselves like the lobes of a tuber.
I never told you that after I came home from the convent I refused to go to church. I woke up the first Sunday morning and knew I couldn’t face the judgment of the congregation. To avoid Mass, I feigned sickness but my mother, pressing her hand to my forehead, said, You’re about as sick as I am. There’s nothing wrong with you.
When I refused to put on my coat, she made my father take his belt to me. He struck me on the thighs, the arms, his face all the while brimming with apology and shame. On the way into town in the buggy, my skin burned from the blows as though it was on fire. Spring was coming. Along the road, pussy willows bloomed in the ditches. It pained me to see the primula flowering out of the shrinking snow, the tiny purple, red and yellow petals like drops of pure pigment. When we reached the church, its thick stone walls heated by the March sun, I saw the warmed earth newly exposed around the foundations and I thought: How will I ever endure this season of birth?…
November 17
Dear girls,
…I’ve taken one of your father’s thick markers and blacked out all the Sundays remaining on the calendar. I haven’t attended Mass since the stroke. It’s not simply that your father is no longer handy to drive me to church or that, being estranged now from the bridge club, I can’t ring up Goodie or Anna or Muriel for a backup lift. No, transportation isn’t the problem. I’m robust enough now to walk to Mass if I wanted to, my daily excursions having strengthened my physique, so that my calves have turned to iron and my heart pulses like a well-tuned engine. I’ve no doubt that I could cover the two-mile distance to church on foot without my lungs giving out. But I find I’ve no heart any more for the hollow, repetitious prayers of the liturgy. The flickering candles, the ringing bells, the perfume of the chrysanthemum bouquets, the clouds of sweet incense, the gleaming torso of the bronze crucified Christ — all the clever accessories, the decor of Mass, no longer have the power to distract me from the absence of God in church. When I awake on Sundays, I wish that I were tramping with you through some tropical rain forest or clinging to a steep Himalayan slope, where the tedious peeling of Simplicity’s church bells, the sight of its soaring stone spires, and the cavalcades of cars carrying believers fitted out in their Sunday best to morning worship were not at hand to rebuke me for throwing my faith away…
November 18
“Do you remember,” I said to William, because his silence has made me think that his mind is a blank slate on which I’m free to document the past, “do you remember when I came out west on a holiday to visit my sister Alfreda during the war?”
I reminded William that I’d travelled west on the train in a private compartment with four suitcases and three striped hat boxes at my feet. I read The Lamp Is Heavy, smoked one cigarette after another, drank
lukewarm tea made with water straight from the tap. For a while, these comforts helped me to stave off feelings of gloom. But once the dense bottle-green forest of northern Ontario had slipped behind us, the sight of the prairie began to weigh down on me like a stone. Nothing Alfreda had said had prepared me for a landscape so unforgiving, so bereft of the rises and hollows we surely associate with the haven of our mothers’ bodies, the depressions and swells of breasts, belly, hips, collarbones, shoulders, small of the back.
The days passed and the train rocked and swayed and I thought that by now surely we’d crossed the earth. Finally, the sight of the flat, soulless country brought me to a realization: I was thirty years old and unmarried and destined to be a spinster. And understanding this, my breathing became so suppressed and my lungs so deprived of oxygen that I grew light-headed. My economical cabinet and everything in it — the efficient corner wash basin, the fold-down bed, the neat metal fittings, the rattling steel door — began to tip and whirl. I brought out my rosary, but even the brave sound of my own voice firing off a string of Hail Marys couldn’t dispel the panic I felt when I turned and saw the endless shimmering fields, the devastating horizon, the vacuous prairie sky.
The Wife Tree Page 10