I take my bowl and my cup of tea over to the worrying window, prop them against the sill. Together they make a small cloud of steam against the pane. I stand there, observe the silence, the closest thing I do to prayer these days, and watch while the sun proceeds red and brilliant on the southeast horizon, not far from the new well where the cattle are lining up already at the trough. I hear another vehicle on the road, this time with a siren flashing, see it barrel down the middle towards Bob Taylor’s place. An ambulance. I put my tea down with a thunk, almost knock my porridge off the sill. It’s been years since I’ve seen an emergency vehicle on this road. Not since Hans Mueller’s wife took ill.
The lightning is making another jagged scrawl across the sky. The trees bending flat, dancing limbo in the wind. Strange weather. The steers jerk up their heads, step on the toes of their fellows, the thunder and the siren rippling through the herd like a small unnatural eruption.
I know something bad has happened. Nature, whether human or elemental has struck a blow.
VERA PAWLUK
When they bring her in, I’ve just got on shift. We haven’t even had a report yet. Bob Taylor is with the ambulance. She’s on a stretcher. The first thing we notice are her clothes hanging by a few shards of fabric on her body and the back of her shirt blown off by force. Her work boots have separated, tops from bottoms. Then we see the markings around her head, neck, and shoulders. “Arborescence,” the doctor remarks, “distinctive of lightning strike.” A minute later we find the puncture wound at the back of the neck where the lightning has entered her body. Instinctively, I reach down and close her eyelids.
Bob has tried resuscitation, as has the emergency crew all the way in the ambulance, but there was no response. The doctor is puzzled. She must have been leaning forward or crouching. Was she gardening?
Bob sputters, twists his hands, tries to speak, stops. Tries again, flaps his elbows, folds his head to his chest.
Suddenly it dawns on me. “She was witching for water.”
The doctor looks up, Bob unfolds himself and nods.
She told me after the meeting last night at the hotel that she was off early today to find a well. She hadn’t said for whom.
The doctor wants to know how I knew her. “She was a friend from church,” I say quickly.
And I was kind of like a daughter to her, I thought to myself, the shock just starting to register. “She had no family to speak of,” I say aloud. And finally the most obvious connection, “We were neighbours.”
With that he signs the death certificate. Cardiac arrest due to lightning strike. “Better take care of arrangements,” he says, watching me closely, glancing at Bob and back to me. “If you need the day . . . it’s still early in here. We’ll be able to cover for you.” In the entrance-glass afterwards I see my face has turned as white as a doctor’s coat.
Bob wants to call the funeral home, but I say, “Listen, Annie left me instructions. She wanted a home laying-out.”
His eyes bug out.
“Years ago now,” I hesitate. “When she was very sick,” I halt again, “and I was looking after her, and she thought she might die, she told me what she wanted.”
“If I ever end up in the Emerg,” Annie had told me.
“Oh you’re far too healthy,” I’d said to her. “You’re as strong as an ox.”
I thought of this now as Bob Taylor stood in front of me looking beside himself.
“Bob. Don’t blame yourself.” I touch his arm to emphasize the point.
Her voice was low and guttural at the time and weary. “If I drop dead, I want you to take charge of laying me out. I don’t want any embalmer, especially any male getting close to my internal organs. Between you and Florence, you’ll know what to do. No needles injected, no stitching or cutting or stretching to make me look better than I was in real life. Put me in the ground whole. Understand?”
Annie had never had a doctor or not one that I knew of. And she didn’t trust them anymore than she trusted priests, from what I could tell. She didn’t trust anyone in the health care professions, she said. But she trusted me because she knew my father and because she knew me since I was a child.
“Sure, Annie,” I’d said. “Of course. No embalming. I’ll talk to Florence if it comes to that.”
“She wanted her women friends,” I repeat now, looking up at Bob.
“Okay.” Bob squares his shoulders, takes a deep breath. “I can call Florence.”
“Maybe Daisy too.”
“Okay. I’ll call them both.”
“See if they can meet us at the hotel in half an hour. Ask Florence to bring some clean clothes. She has a key for Annie’s. We can follow in my car.
“And Bob, she knew the dangers of the elements better than any of us. It must have been her time.”
He manages to nod; I give him a big hug.
“Give me twenty minutes. I’ll start the last offices.”
As soon as I’ve said it, I know I shouldn’t have. Bob blanches.
“What I mean,” I say, rushing to explain, “I’m going to dress the body for transfer. It’s routine. Once you’ve made the calls, get yourself a coffee.” And I wave him through the doors and down the hall to the cafeteria.
I pull the hospital drapes shut, lay down my bundle of towels, cotton batten, and scissors, and stand for a minute in silence. It is something I have witnessed before of the dead, the feeling of the spirit leaving the body. “Dear Annie,” I manage, resting my hands on the top of her head. Then slowly I start to cut off scraps of denim and what remains of Annie’s plaid shirt. She’s always worn such colourful plaids, always overalls, and nothing underneath. Suddenly a fresh rose falls out of one torn pocket. No stem, just the bloom. I pick it up carefully and lay it with her valuables, grab a sponge and water and some antibacterial soap and wash her body quickly as if it were any body and not that of a close friend. There will be time to grieve later, to wash her again and more deliberately among friends. Here for fear of infection and there for the chance to touch her body one last time.
I stuff all the orifices with cotton batting. Wrap the head in towels. Wrap the wrists in gauze then tie them together in front. Leave the silver band that was on her left ring finger. Dress her in a nightgown, the newest and best fit I can find in the linen room. She is thinner than she seemed in real life, bonier than I expect. I fill in the mortuary tag, “Majestic Hotel.” Give the address: Railroad and Main. List all the items Bob has found nearby that had escaped her shredded backpack — flags, small hammer, jack knife, water bottle, notebook, wallet, rosary, and rose — place them in a large Ziploc bag and tie the tag to her right big toe.
ANNIE
First thing when we got to his yard, Bob brought me a rose from his garden the colour of sunrise, placed it in my hands. I breathed it in. So many delicate skies. My nana brought roses with her on the boat. Several varieties, clippings from the coast of Cornwall, wild and tame, some from ruined estates, their gardens all that remained. They might have come from Arabia or Persia she liked to say. She kept them fed in a special pot her mother had given her, fitted with a lid of leather, holes poked through to anchor the stems. She poured a bit of her water ration into the pot every day, laced it up tight again afterwards. She treated that pot like a baby, carried it with her wherever she went on board, made sure it got heat and light. The stems grew roots on the crossing. She planted them that spring full of high hopes: damask, gallica, alba, bourbon, and rugosa. What she must have thought that first year in Canada. Cornwall milder yet than London, roses till Christmas. Her winter garden in the western territories, white: a few wild berries, bare bushes, the ground frozen solid. All of the roses perished that first winter but one. A white rugosa still thrives on the old place and blooms gloriously every summer. Even in drought. And then she learned about the shrub roses bred here and the pink wild rose and traded with neighbours who had brought their own gardens with them too, and crossed the pollens and did the grafting herself.
; Bob wanted me to witch a well for his late wife’s rose project. At first I had pangs of conscience about that. All the farmers trying to grow animals, grow grain, grow food. But then I thought of my nana, how hard she worked to grow the roses in her yard. The cups of dishwater she would feed them at night, the basins of handwashing water. Nothing wasted. They were emblems of beauty; fiery badges of loss, remembrance, what Bob wanted too. So I resolved to go help him find water.
Nana taught me to witch when I was still a child, before I was even in school. She made me aware, casual-like of the forces. She picked up a willow switch and pretended to tell a tale. “A nice young couple,” she said. “Just new to the district. Starting out on nothing. He loves her dearly. All the fullness and roundness of her. She has eyes for no one but him. She’s going to have a baby. Three months gone already. And they need your help. They’ve asked you for a well.”
She wouldn’t wear shoes when she did it. Her skirts flowing around her. Her hair in a bunch on the top of her head. Her eyes closed.
She kept the wormwood and mint and bee balm and heal-all hanging in bundles from her kitchen ceiling, my ceiling now. The local people came to her. She had the hands for curing and for divining. She told me that back in the Old Country the wells were blessed every year, dressed in flowers, sung to, worshipped. That water was gift.
“Think of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God,” she told me. She kept a shrine to the Virgin, all her roses, the fruit trees in the back of the house, dedicated to her.
Then she said, touching her body where her womb would be: “Listen for the sea.”
There comes a moment when you’re witching when you know you’ve found water. Something jolts you awake and pushes you back. The forked branch rises and bangs you in the chest. Something goes out of you. It’s the force of life.
It’s the same when someone close dies — you can feel it — something brings you up short, knocks the breath out of you. It’s like there’s a hole in the world and you know a fellow creature has passed. Someone you have loved. Or a birth, the sheer violence of life coming into this world. What Kelsey will be undergoing soon. Witchers feel these things more than others.
KELSEY SANDS
At first it was so fun. We’d go to these bush parties, dance all night, make out. Everything was electric, intense. Like nothing I’d ever felt before. The meth makes me feel like I am this big, wonderful person and my life is a fist of fireworks exploding.
After that, straight is boring. School, home, b-o-r-i-n-g, I tell my mom. I come home in the day time when she’s at work. Crash, shower and leave again. I’m never hungry and I feel skinny for the first time in my life. After a while though we quit dancing and we quit making out. We were just out of it all the time. Kristian started to get paranoid.
One morning I woke up sick and puked my guts out and the next, and the next. When I went to the school nurse, she gave me a blue stick to pee on. It came up pink and then a plus sign. We did the test twice. Two days apart.
“Pregnant,” she pronounced. “You’re pregnant.” Her eyebrows caved in. She had this big worried look on her face.
When I told Kristian, he just freaked out.
“Weren’t you taking something?”
Like it was all up to me.
“You could have used a condom, but you were too high to put one on, like I asked you.”
“I can’t support a baby,” he says. “I don’t have my fucking life together yet and you don’t either.”
But I don’t want to party any more. Something captivates me about this little person growing inside me. Something smaller than me, larger than me. I want to protect it.
I try to talk to my mom. “I’m in real trouble. I’m scared.”
Her eyes go right to the place. She can tell from the way I’m holding my belly with my hands, protective-like, and she says, “I’ve busted my back for you and this is what I get to show for it? Failing at school and knocked up at fifteen?”
My mom cooks at an old folks’ home in Victoire. She hates it but it’s all she can get with a grade-ten education. She works twelve-hour shifts, four days on, four days off. She makes seventeen bucks an hour.
“I warned you about that Mueller kid. I warned you about the crowd he runs with.”
“Mom—”
“I don’t want to talk to you right now. Get out of my sight. I wanted—” she hides her face in her hands. I hate it when she cries. “I wanted more for you!”
And I ran into the yard and squirrelled up under one of Miss Annie’s lilac bushes.
I used to think it was that easy. You fall in love. You have babies. You set up house. That’s what you talk about with your best friends. At noon hours now, I watch the little kids across from the high school in Victoire play fort, play house, play Red Rover. Think how it wasn’t long ago that I was that age. How it’s all changing.
ANNIE
For decades now, I’ve avoided the church when Leo Belanger’s passed through on bishop duties, made myself scarce.
I don’t know how to explain this to Jack, feel illiterate in the language of love. When I open my mouth to begin, all the fear rushes into me: Less-than. Keep-the-secrets, Annie. Temptress-made-invisible. Spooked, I want to say. Ashamed, still. A bottle of whisky, all it would take to obliterate the bishop’s young face inside of me, the reproach in his voice. The erasure would be instantaneous. And so I say nothing.
2
MIKE PAWLAK
This here is a canvas of the townsite of Majestic or what’s left of it. Used to be a few hundred people living here; the census last year said the population was ninety-eight. It’s hard to know the lived-in quarters from the abandoned because they look about the same. Houses with weathered paint and sagging porches. Trailers with missing windows, patched with cellophane, crumbling on their blocks. Fences leaning, stop signs shot through. The whole place has gone literally to the dogs that run loose through the village. Still there’s a kind of dignity to it, a tribute to a time when the outlook was more prosperous.
I’ve always wanted to paint but it’s not the kind of thing a grown man says out loud around here. It could be tolerated in a female or an old geezer. Women are prone to flighty ideas and old men to sentiment, but even so, there has never been another painter in Majestic. Not one that I knew about at least. I haven’t even told Vera. Only Alex knows and that was by accident.
This painting here is my best friend Alex MacIver’s home place three years ago, just before the drought. A barley bumper crop out back. No one knew then what we were on the edge of. See these nice straight barns, all the fine, big cattle, English Poll Hereford-Angus cross. Baldy, we call them. Black with white patches on their face and body. I breed the toughest cows in the country. They can survive any kind of weather. Alex is one of my best customers. He crept up on me early one morning as I was sketching in my truck, scared the living daylights outta me, but he’s been my biggest booster ever since. Pushed me to get it all down. Told me his grandmother was a trained artist back in Ontario. He has some of her pencil drawings hanging in his living room.
I set up a work table in the machine shed, near the furnace. Installed a fan, roughed in a new vent. I started last winter — afternoons after all the farm chores were done, I’d slip in there, away from the phone and the cattle.
Vera’s a nurse at the hospital in Victoire, working all kinds of shifts. When she asks what I’ve been up to — Oh, just puttering or cleaning up the shop. Instead I am on the internet, ordering paper, pencils, paint, learning how to mix pigments and to layer paint, how to stretch canvas and make a frame, how to care for the brushes made from pig’s bristle and marten tails. Annie Gallagher might suspect: she runs the post office out of the hotel. But she’s the kind of person you can count on to keep a secret.
The painting books call my style folk art. That’s because there’s no perspective. Just by looking, you’re right there. That’s how it is living here. Just by being, you’re in the picture.
See this dark oil, this was one of my first. The old elevator, long torn down. I was still a kid when they quit using it. Not enough traffic to justify the expense. Fire trap, they said. Sold it for salvage. Can’t find wood like that anywhere anymore: Douglas fir from the mountains, virgin forest. Twelve-by-twelves and ten-by-tens, some of them solid beams. Can’t find construction like that anyhow. The way planks were fitted together like a puzzle: two-by-tens, two-by-eights, two-by-sixes, and two-by-fours stacked for strength, built to hold tons.
And this painting’s of the railway station. Been no train through here in forty years. Solid cedar and it’s still standing. Soon they’ll be tearing this station down and it will be gone too. People have forgotten where their daily bread comes from. But here’s something the city folk will still try to buy — this picture a testament — the nostalgia of country life, the dream of going places and starting fresh.
This was Old Man Brown’s house. Eaton’s two-storey, thirty by thirty. Came prepackaged on the train eighty-five years ago. Douglas fir and cedar plank let to weather naturally. Sagging in a couple of places but most of it standing as square as the day it was raised. The dovetailing and cross-hatching still in place. A fine house with diamond cut-out windows, Edwardian casements, turn-of-the-century craft. Not much left like that in these parts. The town do-gooders tore it down this spring — part of their beautification project, to make Majestic a more attractive tourist destination. I argued that the only tourists we get ride ATVS through private land or travel the hardtop into town each week to deal in drugs and neither would notice the change.
The Death of Annie the Water Witcher by Lightning Page 2