The Wife Tree

by Dorothy Speak

You look just like a soldier, William, I said, meaning to inspire him.

  But he only answered grimly, I survived the military uniform, Morgan, but this one is sure to kill me…

  December 17

  William, of course, found the fingers that autumn when he was digging in the garden. He took them to Morris and said, “You buried them on me, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “You did. Don’t lie to me. How else would they get there?”

  When I say that William found the fingers, I mean that he found the bones. The bones were intact, the joints still operative. The rotting flesh, soft and stinking, had fallen cleanly away, like overripe fruit from a peach stone, leaving the bones white and cured as archaeological specimens.

  “I didn’t do it, Dad,” Morris insisted. “I swear to God I never found the fingers. If I’d’ve found them, I’d’ve run back to the hospital with them.”

  “You’re a goddamned liar,” William said and he tore off his belt and began striking Morris with it.

  “Stop, William,” I said.

  But he kept it up until he ran out of energy and Morris’s arms, wrapped round his head for protection like a bird’s wings, were red and raw from the blows and the hard, walnut-sized carbuncle on the back of his neck had split open and was weeping, oozing yellow, like a broken egg yolk.

  “How do you know these are your bones?” I asked William.

  “Look,” he said, and he laid them out in the palm of his hand. “They’re a perfect fit,” he said, and I couldn’t argue with him. And this was just when we’d reached the point where he was no longer jolted from his sleep every night, yearning for the fingers like a starving man craving the pure, life-giving flesh of white bread. But that night he awakened and searched once more among the folds of the sheets for them.

  December 18

  I haven’t spoken of Katherine.

  Today, when I was fumbling in my purse in search of the house keys, something bright leapt out at my eye from the low bushes beside the porch. Descending into the snow, I saw the cotoneaster gay with berries. Armed with a pair of William’s pruning shears, I crept around the foundations of the house and into the remote corners of the yard, marvelling at the rich display of hardy shrubs in full leaf against the fresh snow. Guided by my fingers, I snipped randomly at branches of bearberry, winter creeper, holly, japanese euonymus and carried them indoors, thinking I’d fashion a wreath for William’s hospital door because the nameless woman who sometimes sits beside his hospital bed has sent nothing to cheer him up at The Cedars. I bent a clothes hanger to form a hoop and, acting by feel and by instinct, wove my cuttings around it, enjoying the texture of the rough bark, of the tough glossy leaves, the hard dry berries, the perfume of the sap. I twined branches of vein red dogwood around the arrangement like a life-giving circulatory system. But then I thought: If William sees this wreath, he’ll know I’ve assaulted his shrubs and pruned away at their perfect shapes and the rage he’ll feel could bring on another stroke. Putting on my coat, I carried the wreath across town to Katherine’s grave.

  “You must come and get this daughter of yours,” said a nun many years ago, calling in October from the residence where Katherine had gone to live while she studied medicine in Toronto. “She won’t come out of her room. She’s not attending classes. We think she must be very unhappy. Her door is locked. We can’t take responsibility. Come now and take her away. We need the space for a serious student.”

  Three times the month before, Katherine had arrived on our porch carrying her suitcases.

  “I can’t cope,” she told us. “I’m in over my head. I can’t understand what the professors are saying. The material is too difficult. The math and the science. Everyone else seems to pick them up so quickly. I’ve fallen far behind already. I wasn’t meant to do this. Let me come home.”

  “You can’t come back here. Where will that get you?” said William. All through the summer before Katherine had left for school, he’d been bragging to people, “My daughter is going to be a doctor.”

  “Nobody with any guts runs away like this,” he told Katherine in September, turning her around even while she had one foot raised to fall on our threshold.

  “Let her stay a day or two,” I begged him. “It won’t hurt.”

  “If I do that,” he told me, “she’ll never go back.”

  In October, we’d no choice but to go to Toronto and fetch her. It was a long silent drive back to Simplicity.

  “We’re not quitters in this family,” William lectured her when we got her into the house. “You know we have a rule about that. In this family, once you start something, you finish it.”

  Katherine sat on the sofa in her coat, head bowed, unpacked bags at her feet, like a wayfarer still in transit.

  “You were on a scholarship,” William berated her. “You were handed your future on a silver platter. I have grade eight, and I was lucky to get that far, on the prairie. Those were the Depression years. Nobody had the luxury of an education, least of all a farm boy. I was never offered anything for free. I would have given my eye teeth to go further in school. You’ve squandered your chances now. You’ve thrown away that scholarship. That was money. Did you ever think of that? Money in the hand. You’re nothing but a quitter.”

  “William, don’t,” I said.

  “A quitter!”

  Katherine was the child we conceived after William came out of hiding following the war, when my letter shamed him, a fugitive from his responsibilities, and brought him home. He’d had no words of greeting for me on his arrival, but I felt that conscription and the loss of his store and the weight of the whole bloody war bore down on me, a killing burden, when he climbed onto me that night. I lay there stoically, thinking, I suppose this is a small price to pay for three square meals a day, while with each angry thrust he said his bitter goodbyes to prairie life, spilling into me all his anguish at being tied now to Lily and me, for what were we to him, against the pure everlasting horizon, the heroic sweep of the Saskatchewan he so loved?

  In the daytime, Katherine retreated to a corner chair in our bedroom, where the breezes of October lifted the window sheers and licked at the pages of a copy of Hamlet open on her knee. Soon all the crimson and yellow and orange leaves had fallen and the tree limbs were naked and I went around closing the windows of the house. Down in the cellar, I threw shovelfuls of coal into the belly of the iron furnace, which was like an old tree growing in the middle of the basement, its branches snaking across the ceiling. Climbing back up the stairs, I felt grounded by the sight of Katherine’s quiet figure in the chair, filled up by her presence, as though she were living in my womb again.

  Then one day when I went outside to hang the wash on the clothesline, I felt the first cold snowflakes of winter spinning down, large and wet and soft against my face, my neck, my hands. We’ll be happy in this house, Katherine and I, I thought hopefully, as I hooked the clothespins onto the sheets and shot the line out across the yard. We’ll be safe in our warm cocoon. But, back in the house, carrying the empty laundry basket past the bedroom door, I glanced in at the small form of Katherine bent over her book and saw myself the winter I came home after giving birth in the convent. The recognition gave me such a pain in my chest that I had to grip the frame of the kitchen doorway for support.

  I made a pot of tea, carried a plate of dream cake in to Katherine.

  “Won’t you tell me how you’re feeling?” I said. “Are you sad? Are you angry? Are you disappointed? How do you feel?”

  She looked back at me, her gaze steady. “I just want to read this book, Mom,” she answered simply. In her face, I searched for signs of panic, despair, self-destruction but saw only wisdom. I thought: I must listen to this girl. I must watch her closely because somehow she’s going to point for me a way out of the life I’ve been leading.

  Gradually snow covered the ground. On their journey up the street after school, the children’s footsteps, their voices, were muffled, absorbed by th
e snowbanks, the white roads. Christmas was approaching. Harry Lang climbed up on a ladder and wound lights around his tree. Every evening, while the family watched television, Katherine sat in our bedroom with the door closed and listened to the radio.

  “What’s she doing in there?” William asked me.

  “She’s — she’s recovering,” I said.

  “Recovering from what?” he asked angrily.

  “William, not so loud.”

  “She left school. She quit. She got what she wanted, didn’t she? Are we supposed to feel sorry for her now?”

  “She’s paralyzed by her failure.”

  “Paralyzed, my foot. She’s spoiled, that’s all.”

  “Shhh! She’ll hear you!”

  “Why doesn’t she do something with her life? She’s got to stop feeling sorry for herself. When is she going to get up off her behind and find a job?”

  The next day, Katherine went downtown and found work as a typist in a lawyer’s office housed in a restored Victorian mansion. Our house seemed quite empty the day she started working. All morning, passing the bedroom door with my baskets of wet laundry, my duster and sponge mop, I kept glancing over at the chair, expecting to see her there. After lunch, loneliness rose in my chest like a tidal wave and I had to get out. I walked across town, came to the lawyer’s office, stopped for a moment to admire its handsome lacquered door, its gleaming brass kickplate, its arched windows rising taller than a man.

  For hours I wandered up and down the wide boulevards of the neighbourhood, past the great brick houses and the Armouries and the classical library with its row of six columns, their leafy capitals etched with snow. In the December streets wreaths and coloured lights had begun to appear. I saw municipal workers climbing up onto extension ladders to string tinsel garlands, red plastic bells above the lanes of traffic. I followed Princess Street, George Street, Canterbury Street until the silent descent of snowflakes in the deep parks and the desertion of the winter avenues at three o’clock on such a wet, grey, heavy afternoon were harder to bear than the emptiness that awaited me at home. Passing once more the lawyer’s offices, my toes numb with the damp and the cold, I longed to enter the vestibule with its amber windows and say: My daughter works here but I promise not to distract her. I’ve just come in because of the cold. Won’t you let me sit for a while here in the waiting room until I feel alive again?

  Then one mild Saturday in January when Katherine and I were walking home from the grocery store, we met on the sidewalk a man pulling two blond toddlers in a handsome red sled. It was Katherine’s employer. He was short, stocky, relaxed, kind-looking, with a long nose, bright blue eyes, a weekend stubble. He’d been out wandering there in the streets, pulling these twins, over in our poor neighbourhood where, finely dressed in a leather jacket with a beaver collar, soft kid gloves, he’d no real business. His eyes slid away from mine.

  “I was hoping you were out walking,” he said, smiling at Katherine, almost able to hide his disappointment at not finding her alone. “Mary’s been called away unexpectedly. Her mother’s sick. It’s just me and the kids for the next few weeks.”

  He was no child. He must have been in his mid-thirties, old enough to know how destructive a dalliance can be. I wanted, against my better instincts, to trust him. I thought that, by virtue of his wealth, he understood levels of contentment that I couldn’t even imagine, that he had quantities of happiness to give away.

  Embarrassed by my shabby coat, by the holes in my wool gloves, I moved a few steps along the snowy sidewalk, my gaze turned away, pretending not to observe, waiting patiently. Our arms were full of paper grocery bags. I stood there shifting the weight and wondering when Katherine and this lawyer would finish talking so that we could go home and unburden ourselves. She was nervous and smiling and not herself. I’d never seen her more lovely. Of all my girls, she was the most beautiful. I noticed that her thick auburn hair had begun again to shine with health, that her ivory skin glowed. On the way home, I wanted to say to her: You’ve lain down with this man, haven’t you? In motel rooms or in some privacy you’ve found in his offices? And though I saw that she and I were now splitting apart like two human cells, that her future would have nothing to do with mine, that she wouldn’t, after all, lead me wisely, joyously, out of my life, my heart leapt with happiness for her.

  Did Katherine see the recklessness, the envy, the consent in my face that afternoon as we walked home from the store? The following day, Sunday, she didn’t come home to sleep. I lay awake all night, picturing her in the lawyer’s fine stone house, in a bed with the smell of another woman’s skin on the sheets. Very early on Monday morning, Katherine — perhaps distracted with happiness, with passion — came in, unwisely, just as William was leaving for work.

  “Where were you?” he demanded.

  She stood in the front hall with a dusting of snowflakes on her shoulders and her winter boots still on her feet. She unbuttoned her coat and turned to hang it up on one of the long row of hooks.

  “You look at me when I’m talking to you!” William shouted. “You’ve got a helluva nerve! Do you know what time it is? Where were you last night? Were you sleeping with that bastard?”

  “Oh, William,” I said sadly.

  “Were you?”

  “He’s not a bastard,” Katherine answered him evenly.

  “I’ll go over there and kill that son of a bitch,” William said. In his government uniform, he looked like a shouting soldier.

  “She’s an adult, William,” I said. “She’s making a free choice.”

  “Not while she lives under my roof, she’s not! You quit that job,” he warned Katherine. “You stop seeing him or get out of this house!”

  All day Monday, the lawyer didn’t call to ask why Katherine hadn’t shown up for work, perhaps reading the answer in her absence. I sensed her listening, in vain, for the ring of the phone. Late in the afternoon, I sat on a stool at her knee and took her hand in mine. She looked suddenly old. Overnight, she’d changed from a young woman into an old child and this old child was filling the rooms of the house with her numbness, her asphyxiating sorrow.

  “What do you suppose this lawyer is thinking now?” I asked her gently. “What do you imagine he wants?”

  She just turned her face away from me and said, “I don’t know. Oh, Mom, stop asking me questions. I don’t know the answers. I don’t have any answers to anything.”

  “Can you call this man? Can you speak to him?” I persisted. “Can you find out what his intentions are? Because you probably think he loves you. And possibly he does.”

  I said “love” not because I believed in it but because I knew she was holding on to the word like spring water cupped in the hands. Any false word or move, any doubt, and the precious liquid might trickle away wastefully between her young fingers.

  “Are you in love with this man?” I pressed her. “Is he in love with you? Would he leave his wife for you, do you think? Do you feel you’re earning enough money to move out, get your own room somewhere? Have you thought about that? Because you probably can’t give up this man, at least not immediately, and clearly you can’t stay here. Staying here with your father would be very destructive for you. You must get out as soon as you can.”

  “Well, what’s she decided?” William, arriving home from work that night at six o’clock, indicated our closed bedroom door. “Is she in there? Did she go in to work today?”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “It’s finished, then?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I’d like to hear her say the words.”

  “Oh, William, leave her alone. Don’t belabour the point. You got what you wanted, didn’t you? Are you happy now?” I asked, but he only scowled at me and went to wash up for supper.

  That night the temperature outside plummeted to twenty below zero. At two a.m., when I went from bed to bed checking to see if all the children were warmly covered, I noticed Katherine’s absence. I assumed she’d slipp
ed away to meet the lawyer, to discuss the future. In the morning I descended the cellar stairs as usual to shovel coal into the furnace. Moments later, standing at the kitchen window to watch the sun come up, my ankles burning with the dry heat blasting out of the radiators, I flipped open my cigarette lighter and was striking the spark wheel when I noticed a dark figure prostrate near the curb.

  Running outside in my slippers and housecoat, I found Katherine lying in the snow. It must have been the simplest thing she could think of, a slow, uncomplicated finish requiring only patience, stoicism to carry it out. It had been a moon-filled night and the stars were at their most brilliant, as they often seem to be just before the sun comes up and the moon sinks. I lifted Katherine’s stiff shoulders and rested them on my lap and wept and felt the snow melting against my fifty-two-year-old knees.

  Down the street a car door slammed, headlights flashed on: someone going off to work on an ordinary Tuesday morning. The paper boy came along in the dark with his canvas bag on his shoulder and stood a yard away, shuffling to keep his feet warm and looking at me with a paper boy’s deep passive knowledge of solitude, of the follies, the griefs, the sins of pre-dawn neighbourhoods and illuminated houses, their windows naked to the passerby. He was a homely boy, his thick black hair cut all around in a bowl shape.

  “You’ll get cold kneeling there,” he told me, no reference to Katherine, as if to say: She’s dead. You can’t revive her. Accept it. Move on. This is the task of paper boys: to keep moving. “You better go inside,” he told me, his breath hanging between us, a frozen cloud.

  Just then Conte — alerted to my trouble by the presence of the loitering newsboy? — ran out of his house.

  “Move along now,” he chided the young man. “Don’t stand there staring. It’s none of your business. Go on. Get out of here.”

  Conte gripped me by the shoulders and when he found he couldn’t pull me away from Katherine, he ran and pounded on our front door and woke William up. William came out in his pyjamas and wept in the sub-zero temperatures when he saw Katherine dead. He lifted her frozen body out of the snow and turned away. From the porch, with Katherine stiff as an ice sculpture in his arms, he shouted, “Morgan, get up out of that snow. What use are you to anyone, kneeling there? Go into the house. Put some clothes on. See to the children,” and I went in, past Conte, who stood on the lower step, his chin on his chest.