“If he’d loved you,” I said, “he’d have signed the draft will.”
She agreed to my condition: In exchange for the five thousand dollars, she’d leave Simplicity. She’d forget about the lawsuit.
“I know Noah didn’t have savings. I know you’ve got only your old-age pension. This should help you a little with your financial hardship,” I said. “I don’t want to see your face again.”
“I’ll go and live with my daughter in Toronto,” she said. “I’ll travel. I’ve always wanted to see Spain.”
I pictured her sitting at the opera in Toronto with her tall thin sober daughter. I saw Goodie dressed like a Spanish queen on a deck of cards, in heavy red robes embroidered with gold.
Look to the future, Goodie had told the bridge group so many times. Look to the future. Forget the past. Never look back.
April 22
Dear girls,
…We’re having an uncommon spring. Every day dawns hot and dry and windless, with a high transparent sky. The thermometer has climbed to 26 degrees Celsius, a record for April. The whippoorwills sing in the mornings and the cardinals flit in and out of the trees. Sometimes, standing at the kitchen window, I spot a male of the species, bright as a rose on a branch, but mostly it’s only the dull females I see, disappointing in their modest fawn plumage. Never mind.
Overnight, the leaves broke forth. They sparkled for a few days like jewellery on the branches, before unfolding and hanging, limp and tender and apple green in the intense sun. There are no breezes. No whisperings high up in the maple limbs. Only a strange silence as though the world is waiting for life to start anew.
Today I carried home from the bakery a small square box tied up with fine string. I was climbing a hill when I heard the unmistakable approach of Canada geese. The sound filled me with thoughts of your father. I wondered if he was resting comfortably somewhere, restored to health, ten-fingered, watching their smooth flight and enjoying their low tuneless cry, an orchestra of oboes. Is it not almost a sin against nature, against hope, against happiness, not to look up at a flock of Canada geese as it passes?
I stopped in my tracks, threw my head back and peered skyward so passionately that I lost my balance. I felt myself falling sideways, backward, pictured my head coming down on the curb and neatly cracking open just as my grandmother’s had on the hearth three-quarters of a century ago when I was a shouting infant. Fortunately, there was someone nearby to break my fall. I felt a pair of small hands the size of a child’s but marvellously strong forcing me upright. Turning, I recognized the tiny red-haired woman. We hung on to each other for a moment, gently, joyfully, our ancient ankles locked against the incline of the hill, each of us with a bird-light hand grasping the other’s wrist, hers shaking with a palsied excitement that quickened my blood.
So you do exist! I cried, relieved. I went looking for you, I said, at the public library and they told me I’d imagined you.
Did you ever find your children? she asked.
No, I said. Finally I stopped looking for them and now I feel much better. My husband — I told her — my husband died.
They do that, she said. Now you’re free…
April 23
Dear girls,
…I’ve noticed that Harry Lang’s burlap sacking is still stretched on its wooden stakes around all his shrubs, his one lame arm keeping him from pulling the winter enclosures down…
April 29
Dear girls,
…Won’t you come, I said to the miniature woman the day the appearance of the Canada geese threw me unexpectedly into her arms. Won’t you come to my house and help me eat the cake in this box? It’s my birthday, you see, and I’ve no one to share it with.
She sat in my corner chair, her red hair a fire beneath my reading lamp, her bones so small, so delicately worked that she might have been a man-made thing, a doll out of a shop. She was the tiniest woman I’d ever seen, the only woman I knew smaller than myself.
Which birthday is this? she asked, raising a forkful of cake to her lips.
Seventy-five.
That’s young.
Yes.
What’s this? she asked, peering through her bifocals at the stack of unsent letters beside my easy chair. I’d finally removed them from beneath my pillow because their rustling when I tossed and turned was too great a disturbance to my sleep.
Oh, just a brief correspondence with my children, I told her. I’m sorry the letters are finished, though. I did find the writing of them a catharsis.
They look intriguing, she said.
You can read my scrawl?
It’s rich with experience, she answered. May I? she asked, her hand falling on my opus.
Of course.
She lifted the collection of one hundred or more pages from the table and placed them on her lap.
They’re only about my life, I said.
She leafed through the pile, her fingers trembling so much that the pages seemed alive.
Why did you never mail them to your daughters? she asked.
They contain a great burden, I told her.
With my background, she told me, a small excitement rising in her voice, with my library experience, I could help you to edit these.
Edit? I said, puzzled.
Organize them into a book, she explained. A memoir. I wouldn’t tamper with the substance, you understand. I’d respect the content. What I’d be looking at would be grammar, punctuation, consistency of spelling. Perhaps suggesting some sort of framework to give them shape. I’m retired now, as you know. I’m looking for a project. Something to keep my mind alive. I could also deal with anything new you might give me.
New? But my story is finished.
Are you sure? she asked. Are you quite certain there isn’t more? Could you go back and fill in the gaps? There always seem to be blanks in life that could be reconsidered, don’t you find? Why should you stop writing now, just because you’re alone?…
May 1
“Is this a good day to bury the ashes?” Morris asked me. “That’s a fifty-mile-an-hour wind out there, Mom.”
“You’re here and we’ve got them,” I told him, “and I don’t want to keep them in the house. I’m all dressed up.” I’d brought out of mothballs my green wool suit to look good for William. It hung on my thin shoulders as shapelessly as from a wire hanger. I’d put on stockings, my Sunday shoes. I’d slept in rollers, teased and sprayed my hair.
“I did you a big favour going down and getting these ashes,” Morris had told me when he returned from the funeral parlour with what looked like a shoebox, an ordinary rubber band holding it closed. “Considering how I feel,” he said. “This is wrong, Mom. I don’t know why we couldn’t have just buried Dad. I don’t know why you had to cremate him. It’s a desecration. A violation of the human body. The human body is a temple of the soul.”
“It’s not a temple of the soul after death,” I said. “That is, if you believe in the soul at all.”
“I don’t know how you could do this to Dad.”
“It’s what your father requested.”
“Well, what did he say about disposing of the ashes? Didn’t he say he wanted them sprinkled on the Trans-Canada Highway? Didn’t he say he liked the idea of the transport trucks picking the ashes up on their tires and carrying them all the way out to Saskatchewan?”
“Maybe he was joking.”
“How can you say that? How can you say in one breath that we have to respect his wish to be cremated but not his request to have the ashes disposed of the way he asked?”
“I don’t know,” I said, torn. “I don’t know. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I’ve always found the 401 so — bleak. Haven’t you? Bleak and soulless. A wasteland? The thought of your father’s ashes blowing around out there in that wilderness — it — it sends chills down my spine. And I feel — I feel like I want him close to me for a little while longer. His gardens were so important to him. I’m almost sure he’d be pleased. They say
that ash makes wonderful fertilizer.”
“Well, you’ll have to carry this,” he said, handing me the box. “I don’t even like to touch it. It’s against my religion. And you’ll have to dig it all in by yourself. I can’t help you. I wouldn’t feel right.”
I slipped the elastic band off the box, lifted the lid.
“This is him?” I said, disappointed perhaps by the small quantity of ash, by the absence of familiar lineaments, something to tell me this was indeed my husband. My hand darted into the box involuntarily. I withdrew it just in time, uncertain of decorum. Would touching William’s remains be considered disrespectful, like poking at someone’s private parts? I was intrigued by the calcified lumps lying in the otherwise powdery ash, imagining these to be knuckles, teeth, vertebrae that had stubbornly resisted the fire.
We’d had a week of gentle rains, fine drizzles that, on my afternoon walks, cleansed my face and hands like a healing bath. Now, Morris and I went outside, stepping across the softened ground, which heaved and sweated after the days of warm rain, releasing its powerful gases. There was indeed a fierce wind. It blew hot, out of the West, with the lonely sigh of the prairie in its throat. It bent the trees double and flattened the long spring grass. It pressed my suit against my old slack thighs, my rocky pelvis. It lifted the hair from my forehead, which was no longer the splendid curve I vainly displayed the year I travelled out to visit Alfreda in wartime, but a shrivelled naked stretch of bone, like the elderly battered hairless cracked scalp of an antique porcelain doll.
As we rounded the corner of the house, the prairie wind snatched the lid off the box and threw it up into my face, blinding me temporarily, striking me hard on the bridge of my nose. But I managed to clap it back down with the palm of my hand before any of the ashes could escape.
It was a Saturday. We could hear the neighbourhood children out on the street throwing balls and turning skipping ropes and riding their bikes round and round like circus performers, their shining caps of hair golden in the sun. Morris, to give him credit, had dressed up for the occasion too, in a blazer and striped tie. Looking like a pair of churchgoers, we passed out of the shadow of the house into the sunshine. When we came abreast of the Man Tree, I tripped on one of its roots rearing up out of the earth and nearly went down. I heard the ash sliding inside the box, the rocky deposits rattling against the cardboard sides.
“Watch it, Mom!” barked Morris, who caught my elbow in his big evangelist’s hand, gripping with the force of all his holy convictions, sending shooting pains up my arm. “Are you okay? Can you see the footing?”
“Of course I can,” I said, though in fact these days the ground beneath my feet seems an untrustworthy support, a dark blur.
We moved on, Morris bearing his hefty bible under his arm and myself carrying William, no great burden now that he was ash. My nose still stung from the flying shoebox lid, causing my eyes to tear. My old blind feet seemed to strike every obstacle before me, roots leaping up like serpents everywhere, so that my weak ankles rolled as though on ball bearings and my knees buckled and I jerked across the grass like a faulty mechanical doll. Grateful for Morris’s presence, for his strong hand supporting my elbow, for the heat of his body penetrating the fine wool of my sleeve — like it or not, he was my only close next of kin now — I pressed on into the same alien wind that had swept me along the prairie road to William’s tarpaper store half a century before.
Though I was fearful of my knees locking, of toppling over into the garden, I knelt down on the cool ground, in the long damp grass, my ankle burning from the twist it had taken. Morris handed me a trowel and I sank the blade into the glistening earth, found it loose, oily with nutrients. Its intense fragrance nearly knocked me over. This soil was William’s creation, the blackest, richest, most pungent earth he could concoct by hauling in manure, compost, mulch. He used to brag that he had the deepest, darkest, most powerful soil on the street, possibly in the city. The richest soil this side of the prairie, he said. Gripping the trowel, I turned the earth over, digging deep even while I shouldered the gale.
Something fluttered past my head. At first I thought it was a small creature — a hummingbird? — flown up mysteriously out of the soil, out of the hole I was creating. But then there were more of them, hundreds, lifted out of the earth by the wind, grazing my cheek as they fluttered by, whispering past my ear. Enough of them swirling up now to form a funnel, rising like a twister and then soaring skyward in a gay arc.
“Mom!” Morris cried. “Mom! Stop digging!”
But I kept probing and turning, not catching on to what was happening, digging and digging in amazement, giddy, bewildered, until I realized that this was my money, swirling past my face, my nest egg, flying away from me now like hundreds — thousands — of hatched birds. I’d forgotten about burying it in the garden and now the prairie wind was carrying it away. My trowel had opened up the wet and rotting brown banker’s wrapper, releasing my fortune to the skies.
“Jesus Christ!” Morris shouted. He dropped his bible and ran across the lawn, leaping shamelessly, snatching the bills out of the air and stuffing them into his pockets. I turned and watched him go.
Soon I heard shouting in the street, a cry going up, as at a baseball game, screams of joy, and later I heard that the children, seeing the airborne money, had dropped their balls and skipping ropes and thrown their bicycles down onto the pavement. They’d run after the flying cash, pursuing the green twenty-dollar bills, which were delicate in their colouring as spring leaves, twisting and lifting and spiralling in the wind. The children clattered down the street, reaching into the sky with their small fingers.
May 2
Dear girls,
…Yesterday afternoon there was a knock on the front door. I went and opened it.
You again, I said. On the porch stood my policeman. Please come in, I told him. He sprang over the threshold and removed his hat. You seem different somehow, I said.
I’ve met a woman, he replied. A wonderful woman with three children. She’s older than I am by about ten years. She owns the china shop downtown. I met her one day when her store was robbed. We fell in love. It didn’t take long. A few days. A few hours. I never knew that something so important could happen so fast. She says I’m a simple man and she’s been looking for someone simple all her life. We’re not going to marry, he told me.
I’m glad to hear that, I said.
He smiled at me, sheepish, mischievous. We’re going to live in sin, he said.
I envy you, I told him. Is she beautiful?
Almost, he replied. Can I bring her to see you? I think you’d like her.
I await your visit, I told him.
I’ve come about the money, he said. The flying twenties. We got a report down at the station that there was a fortune blowing down this street. They sent me over to investigate. People said the bills came from this direction.
Some of them, I told him, flew right over the house.
We heard, he said, about children climbing trees to pick them out of the branches like fruit. It was your money, then? Of course there’s no law against disposing of your assets that way, but incidents like this always raise the question of ill-gotten gains.
I assure you, it was all legitimately mine.
Are you going to try to recover it?
From the children? Oh no! I don’t see how I could do that. Think how happy they must be with their new fortunes. Finders keepers…
Where has the trowel gone? I asked Morris when we’d returned to the business of the ashes. I knelt once more on the May earth, in the fragrant, heaving, prolific spring your father so longed to enjoy. Again I thrust the trowel into the soil, and dumped the ashes in. Some of them, picked up by the stubborn wind, blew across the grass, like a dusting of snow. I turned and watched your father’s airborne ashes fly, my mouth open as though to speak. Surely there was something more I’d meant to say to him. Was my surprise simply the knowledge that I’d never lie beside him again, even i
n burial, even here in this garden? Because I’ve been thinking a great deal about Katherine these days. I hear her speaking to me, now that her voice is no longer drowned out by your father’s shouting. And I’ve decided that when I die I want my own ashes sprinkled on her grave.
I bent to my task of returning your father to the earth. But dig as I might, I couldn’t seem to bury the calcified chunks. They kept rising rebelliously to the surface like stones in farm soil.
I’d like to read something from the Scriptures, Morris told me, retrieving his bible from the long grass. If that’s all right with you, he said.
If you find it absolutely necessary, I told him. If it’ll make you happy, I said, feeling, still, a little astonished, a little dismayed that it was Morris, this unnoticed preacher son of mine, who was with me now, on this spring day, to bury my husband.
He turned the crisp gilded pages of his bible, held them down against the force of the wind.
There are many rooms in my father’s house;
if there were not, I should have told you.
I am going now to prepare a place for you,
and after I have gone
and prepared you a place
I shall return to take you with me;
so that where I am
you may be too.
May 3
Dear girls,
…It’s Mr. Burns calling, a voice said on the phone the other day.
Mr. Burns? I repeated.
Down at the bank? said the voice. The manager? he said. You came to see me twice? I read in the paper about your money blowing away. You promised me that you’d keep it in a safe place.
What could be safer than the earth? I asked.
I want to help you, he said. Your assets. They’ve obviously diminished somewhat, with this little wind accident. I know you still have your pension cheques and your RRSPs, but one day they too may be depleted. I have a comfortable life, he said, and no dependants. No wife or children, as you know. No parents to care for. They died fifteen years ago and left me their estate. I have the resources to help you financially. If you’ll allow me. If you run out of money, if you need to go into a home, whenever the time comes, I’d like to assist.
The Wife Tree Page 27