The Wife Tree

by Dorothy Speak

  Louise

  December 12

  Dear girls,

  …Today on my daily walk, I found myself approaching what I was almost certain was the towering Victorian house where Dr. Peter Merchant makes his office and home. Just as I drew abreast of it, a woman came stumbling down the icy porch steps. I could hear her weeping uncontrollably. When she reached the sidewalk, I touched her shoulder.

  Have you just gone blind? I asked. Her hands, covering her face, fluttered like two thin old birds.

  I don’t even know where I am, she said, or how to get home.

  I’ll hail you a cab, I told her.

  But I want to die, she said.

  You mustn’t feel alone, I told her. There’s an army of us out here. People with oceans of blood raging behind their eyes.

  I stepped off the sidewalk and thrust my arm into the sky, blind myself to whether there was a cab in the vicinity. Yet, I held my ground, like the Statue of Liberty with her torch uplifted, every bit as solid and fearless while, behind me, the blinded woman trembled fearfully like an immigrant about to enter a foreign country. Suddenly a car swung toward us, throwing a wave of slush against our ankles. I opened the door and guided the woman in.

  I can’t go on, she told me.

  It’s not as bad as it seems, I reassured her. You’ll find ways of knowing the world that you never imagined possible. Here. I think I have a pen with me. I’ll scribble down my phone number. Get someone to read it for you. You must call me. Remember what I said! I shouted after her as the cab pulled away. An army of us!…

  December 13

  Dear girls,

  Today I went back to the library hoping to wish the miniature woman the best of the season. In the tiled foyer they’ve erected a thirty-foot Christmas tree, soaring up as though alive, fresh and piney, through the winding staircase, which is woven with fragrant boughs and splashed with red velvet bows. I climbed round and round, up past the tinselled branches toward a noise like a tropical rain, then realized it was only the steady music of the young library patrons on the computer keyboards. I searched near the shelves of oversized books and in and out among the expensive mahogany stacks but nowhere could I find the trembly woman with the wobbly head. I went to a young man planted behind a desk, clicking away at his computer.

  There was a small elderly woman here once, I told him, able to lift immense books. She helped me search for my children.

  He looked at me as though I were not only insane but too ancient to have children lost in a library.

  There was never an old woman here, he told me.

  With red hair? I insisted. A full head of it? Marvellously thick? Copper bright? She was tiny and energetic. Courageous, I added, though I’m not sure this younger generation understands the word.

  Nobody like that, he answered.

  You must be new, then, I told him, not to have seen her. Have you just started here?

  Lady, he said impatiently, I’ve been working a year in this section and I’ve never seen anybody like that. I know all the staff we’ve got. This isn’t a big place. There are only a dozen of us. Anyway, they wouldn’t have kept somebody that old on. They got rid of all the throwbacks when the computers arrived. Out with the old, in with the new. We’re modern here now. We need young people. People with self-confidence and up-to-date skills and energy.

  Had my previous visit been a dream? I went to the window and looked out onto the courtyard, searching for the woman with the cold stone breasts, remembering the naked curve of her back, the long smooth valley of her spine, her white buttocks like two firm globes, her hair twisted in a heavy marble braid. But I saw nothing other than benches, thick as coffins now with their cargo of snow. I returned to the young man.

  Was there never a stone statue out there? I asked him. Bending to her bath? I know I saw one.

  Are you feeling all right? the boy said. Do you think you should go home and lie down? He was dismissive, like all the young people these days, who seem to think they invented Life. He was very tall. His big feet jutted out from under the desk, in danger of tripping patrons going by. If he’d unfolded himself from his chair I’m sure he would have stood nearly seven feet.

  Do you ever get up from that desk and help people find things? I asked him.

  He said, This is a self-serve area. People are expected to use the terminals and find their own books. We’re not required to lift anything heavy. It’s in the union contract…

  December 14

  Yesterday afternoon the temperature dropped to twenty-five below and every hour the roof beams cracked and shouted with the cold until it seemed the whole house would split apart. After supper, I went from room to room closing the curtains to hold the heat inside. Upstairs in the rear bedroom, I looked down onto the backyard and saw the sinuous branches of the felled Wife Tree glazed with moonlight. It made me think of the day many years ago when William pruned her back hard, destroying forever her lovely shape.

  We had an early spring that year and in April William could smell the damp thawed earth, the fragrant soil. It was a perfume that always drove him wild, made him yearn for the prairie. At the time he was employed at Dominion Textiles, riding a bike to work at seven each morning because the car had been repossessed, coasting downhill into the dappled light of the historic town sleeping still beneath the giant maples. Gliding down into those quiet streets, past the venerable turreted and towered and shuttered and weather-vaned houses. Past the blood-red-steepled and copper-roofed churches. Past the war monument and the stone fences and the grand old parks. Past the cemetery and into the turn-of-the-century working-class soot-stained row housing and over the railway tracks to the cluster of factories.

  “Those factory walls,” he’d tell me every night, anguished, pacing the kitchen. “There’s no natural light. The place is nearly windowless. I can’t stand it. I grew up with a sky overhead the size of — of heaven, Morgan. I feel like I’m going to explode when I’m in there. I’m not made for indoor work.”

  One day he arrived home in the middle of the afternoon with a bloody nose.

  “What are you doing home early?” I asked him. “What’s happened?”

  “I’ve been let go,” he said, avoiding my eyes.

  “Why is your nose bleeding? Were you in another fight?”

  “I had a little dust-up,” he admitted sheepishly.

  “Who started it this time? Was it you again? Did you take the first swing?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I suppose someone just looked at you the wrong way. That was all. It doesn’t take much, does it?”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “Well, I am. I’ve got five dollars in my purse. That’s all the money we have.”

  “I’ll find something else.”

  “Where? Where will you find it? Men are losing their jobs everywhere and you throw yours away over a fight. In the meantime, what do you expect me to feed our children? What will we eat?”

  “Potatoes, Morgan,” he said. “We can always survive on potatoes.”

  Over the following weeks, he showed no sign of looking for a job. One morning I put on my hat and coat.

  “Where are you going?” he asked me.

  “There’s a Mass at ten o’clock,” I told him. “I’m going to church and pray that you’ll find work.”

  “Oh, prayer will do us a lot of good,” he said sarcastically. “That’ll save the day, won’t it? Maybe you should write to the pope.”

  He went down to the basement, returned with shears, the power saw.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  “I’ve got some pruning to take care of,” he said. “The Wife Tree needs cutting back.”

  “What’s wrong with her?” I asked. “Her shape is perfect the way it is.”

  “She’s spreading too much. She’s throwing shade on the Man Tree.”

  “But she’s in flower. This isn’t the time to prune her.”

  The girls had left for school, ex
cept for Merilee, who was sleeping off a hangover. She’d come home late, sick from an evening in a tavern. She was sixteen, drinking under the legal age, using borrowed identification. William had taken the strap to her before she went to bed, striking her on the palms of her hands. It was the first time he’d strapped anyone other than Morris.

  “Why is Morris still home?” I asked William before leaving for church.

  “I need him to help me with the pruning.”

  “He shouldn’t miss school,” I protested. “He needs educating just as much as the girls.”

  “A day off won’t hurt him. Nothing stays in that head of his, anyway.”

  I set off for church. The last thing I saw when I looked over my shoulder was Morris gripping the ladder with his big hands while William ascended it, carrying the power saw, his head disappearing into the branches of the Wife Tree, into the recesses of her fragrant blooms.

  “Hold the ladder still!” I heard him bark at Morris as I walked away down the street. “I said, hold it steady, goddamn it!”

  Although it was late April and warm, with the heat of the day rising, it seemed, right out of the earth, the season in the church was still winter, the stained glass windows shutting out the perfume of the rhododendrons and the song of the chickadees. The icy pew pressed against my thighs, cold radiated off the terrazzo floors. The clanging communion bell shook the poor frigid barefoot saints on the walls, their blue toes curling over shallow ledges. Looking up at the naked Christ on the Cross, I saw the bronze blood pouring from his lanced side, saw it blooming like orchids in the palms of his hands.

  At the altar rail, the priest pressed the brittle host onto my tongue. It snapped in two, melting like snow in my mouth. I thought of the white blossoms of the Wife Tree and pictured the petals, loosened by William’s assault, snowing down on Morris. Gazing up at the fresh wound in Christ’s side, at the fleshy opening, I suddenly had a premonition of disaster. I saw the power saw slip from William’s hands, fly toward Morris, slice his head in two, like a watermelon cleanly split open, its red meaty fruit glistening. Leaving the church, I hurried home, the papery taste of the communion host still fresh on my tongue.

  Behind the house I found the Wife Tree cut back hard, like a woman with her long hair sheared off. As I’d feared, the yard was deserted, the ladder toppled over, ribbons of blood decorating its rungs and spattered against the slender tree trunk. With her healthy branches scattered all around me, their tiny petals thrown across the long grass, I wept until I thought I’d split down the middle like a tree struck by lightning. I stood beneath the Wife Tree and shed what felt like a lifetime of tears. And yet, for what did I weep? For the Wife Tree’s dismemberment, the destruction of her beauty? For the idea of Morris with his poor small brain split open: for my lost son? Did I weep because we never love, do we, until it’s too late? Or because my husband was bent on injury?

  Finally, when I felt cleansed, destroyed by my own tears, I heard a footstep rustle in the long grass and, whirling around, I found Morris before me, whole and unharmed, his head in one piece. Not dead at all.

  You might have thought that, when this son of mine miraculously appeared, sound and unmaimed, my tears of grief would have swelled into a cataract of joy, that I would have thrown myself at him like a lover or at least reached up and, wondrous, touched his head where I’d imagined it cleaved in two. But at the sight of him, the sorrows dried up in me like a desert lake and my grieving heart turned to sand.

  “Morris, what is this blood?” I asked him as we stood under the dismembered Wife Tree.

  “There was an accident,” he said. “The saw slipped. Have you seen Merilee? She was supposed to look for Dad’s fingers. He reached too far, Mom. I said to him, ‘Shouldn’t we move the ladder over, Dad? You’re going to fall.’ I could see it wasn’t safe. ‘Just let me get this one last branch,’ he said. It was a high one he wanted. I couldn’t hold him. The ladder started to tilt. Everything toppled. The fingers were sheared off. They flew past my ear like hummingbirds. You should have seen the blood, Mom. Dad was wild with the pain. I got him into the house. Sat him down in the kitchen and called a taxi.

  “When he caught sight of Dad’s hand, the driver didn’t want to let us into the cab. ‘What the hell?’ he said. ‘You never said nuthin’ about blood,’ he said. He tried to lock the door, to keep us out. But I forced my way in and made the bastard drive. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said when he saw the blood on his car seat. ‘You sons o’ bitches!’ he shouted at us and took a corner on two wheels.”

  Morris looked tired, weary as an old man, his face streaked with blood, his clothes stained red. The Wife Tree’s white flower petals were caught in his big ears and inside his shirt collar.

  “When they saw Dad’s hand, the nurses in Emergency stampeded us like a herd of cattle,” he said. “They gave Dad a shot to ease the pain, something strong. Morphine maybe. It calmed him down pretty fast. He started to float away. That scared me a little. I thought he might drift off for good. I wanted to stick with him but they closed the operating-room door in my face. In a little while a man came out wearing gloves and a mask. An Indian. Not from Canada. From India, I mean. And I thought: I hope Dad didn’t catch sight of this guy before he went under.

  “But you could tell he was kind, this doctor. He pulled his face mask down to talk to me. I saw that his lips were lavender. His teeth were white as pearls. He smiled at me and put a hand gently on my shoulder. He said, ‘You’re the son? Did you see the accident? Were you there? How did it happen? Have you any idea if the fingers are intact? Is there someone who could find them? Somebody still at the scene? Tell them to look well. It’s worth a careful search. There’s a good possibility we could sew them back on. Those severed endings seek each other. They want to fuse. The human body, you know, is quite miraculous.’

  “The kitchen,” Morris told me apologetically. “It’s a mess. I’m sorry. We were in there making a tourniquet. There’s blood everywhere. Someone’ll have to clean it up.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “What the hell happened to Merilee?” he said, looking toward the house, his brow furrowed. “She was supposed to call the hospital. I phoned over and told her to go out and look for the fingers in the grass. I guess she didn’t find anything. Jesus Christ,” he said, pressing his forehead against the trunk of the Wife Tree. Was this the first time I’d noticed his thinness? The washboard chest, the slouch of his shoulders?

  “How many fingers?” I asked.

  “Three,” he said. “Three and a half, I guess.”

  “Did he have to prune so many branches?”

  “I told him he was going too far. I told him he was destroying the tree, but that only made him more determined.”

  At the hospital that night, William said, “I’m so tired, Morgan. I feel as if I’ve lived my whole life today.” He sighed and looked out the window, his jaw tightening with anger. “If Morris had held that goddamned ladder steady —”

  “You can’t blame him, William,” I said.

  “If he had a brain in his head, if he could pay attention for more than two minutes.”

  “William, can’t you just leave him alone?”

  “They wheeled me into the operating room, Morgan,” he told me later. “The lights were so bright in there, I thought it must be heaven. By that time I was off my head with the morphine. They put a goddamned Indian onto me.”

  “Oh, William,” I sighed wearily.

  “What kind of training do you think he’d have? India’s practically a Third World country, Morgan. Do you know what the hospitals are like over there? Primitive. Full of germs. Why would they put a brown bastard like that in a Canadian hospital? Haven’t we got enough white doctors around here to take care of us? ‘Don’t let that Indian son of a bitch near me,’ I warned them just before they put me under.”

  December 15

  Dear girls,

  …As I told you, I don’t go to Sunday Mass any more and as a rule I don’t ve
nture anywhere near the church on my daily walks, not wanting to think of all the hours, the years of my life I wasted on my knees worrying about my soul while forgetting about my heart. But today, distracted by your father’s condition, I found myself approaching the church rectory. At that moment, who should come out of the front door but Anna Six! I hadn’t seen her since I was cut out of the bridge group. At one time, blaming myself for every slight and damage and betrayal that might occur in my life, I’d have run guiltily in the opposite direction, ashamed of the passion that made me throw the paperweight. But today I quickened my pace and gained on her. Anna! I said from behind, in a kindly tone.

  She whirled around, her face swept with fear. She gulped air.

  I can’t talk to you, Morgan, she told me breathlessly. It’s the group, she said, glancing nervously up and down the street. The group would accuse me of breaking rank.

  But I only wanted to say hello, I said. I wanted to apologize for the broken window.

  It’s a risk, she said. It’s a risk even to be seen with you. It’s Goodie, she said.

  She’s suing me, I told her, for the stitches in her temple.

  There’s more to it than that, Anna said. Oh, dear, I’m not supposed to discuss it. There’s so much you don’t know, Morgan, she said, hurrying away. So much you don’t know…

  December 16

  Dear girls,

  …Your father wept when I left him at the hospital after he lost his fingers. I’m sorry, Morgan, he said.

  Hush, William, I told him.

  I’m sorry. I’m sorry, he repeated over and over. What was he sorry for? For his violation of the Wife Tree? For the lost fingers? Or for something else, something we’d misplaced together a long time before but neither of us could name?