I was surprised to find a number almost at once, but before I dialed it I thought I had better check on the bird one more time. There it was, the leg now secured in its beak, with those giant claws, the spread of each easily the size of one of my hands, perched in almost the same place, still facing toward the expanse of roof (as I looked out over the city) but about five feet to my right and above me, and its one large – in the clear light – buff-coloured eye that I could see, staring right at me. I saw at once that the leg in the bird’s beak wasn’t its own. Behind the raven, well out of range of what I could see from against the wall, were other birds whose running and sporadic thuds I continued to hear.
The raven stared at me with its one round eye, and I stared back, hoping for, I think, some kind of message from it, some sign of – could it be humanity? – in its gaze, but I saw nothing, just that flat beige-tan circle, and maybe a tiny dark dot in its middle. Its gaze was unflinching and the very blankness of its stare combined with its relentlessness chilled and alarmed me. In a sudden rush of fear that the raven might attack me, and as I had seen that it was intact and not in need of help, I shut the door and locked it, and hours passed before I looked out again. All was quiet by then, and the raven was gone.
Unlike most old women who complain that they haven’t a man of any type left in their lives, and all they see now that they are old is other old women, I have been left only with men. The first is my son Herald who, since I have fulfilled my role by giving birth to him and raising him to late adolescence, though he loved me once, now cares nothing for me, and who has busied himself year by year with wiping me out of his world. Herald has never married. Other than me, there have been no women in his life, so he has given me no grandchildren, and is the only one left of my family. He is an anthropologist and sometimes a comparative religionist and teaches at a university in Montreal, although he is close to retirement (I still think of him as about thirty) and after he does retire, will probably stay home and write books, which is more or less what he is doing now. Once in a while, on his trips across the country to this university or that, he stops off for a short visit with me. Otherwise, I no longer see him, and have succeeded, after years of trying, to move him from the forefront of my mind to somewhere much further back, so that his absence from my life long ago stopped causing me such suffering.
The other is my friend, Alex Sealy, whom I have also not seen in a couple of years, although we continue to talk on the phone now and then. A couple of weeks after the raven incident, my phone rang, which it seldom does any more, and it was Alex’s oldest son calling to tell me that Alex had passed away. I grew angry, wanting to interrupt and say, “died,” but managed to refrain. It was all I could do to remain polite and properly grateful that he had taken the time to call me and also, to give me the time and place of Alex’s interment, which of course, as it’s taking place in Toronto and I am in Calgary, I won’t attend.
“In case you are ever in the city and want to visit his…” Here I lost track: he used some term that meant the place where the urn containing his ashes would be placed. Is it a columbarium? Or is that a medical test? Such an unwieldly term, a holdover from the Latin, I suppose. I hung up quickly, not even bothering to write down the information the son, Josh I think, had just given me. I said to the now dead phone, “I would have come for a proper funeral.” But that was probably not true either. The uneasiness I hadn’t been able to shake since what I had taken to calling ‘the raven incident,’ stemmed from my knowledge that, in all cultures I know of, the raven is a bird of prophecy.
Alex had been a friend of my husband’s with whom I’d once had a flirtation. It was nothing more than that, but we were attracted to one another to such a degree that we both went out of our way to hide it whenever my husband, Ed, was around. When Alex finally married Elizabeth, a girl I’d barely known, Ed and I didn’t go to his wedding although we had planned to, because Ed had a nasty flu, and Herald, just a baby, was running a fever, and I was too worried about him to go away overnight. Shortly afterward, Alex and a pregnant Elizabeth moved away to Toronto, too far for us to travel to without a very good reason.
Years passed, as they have a tendency to do, and Alex had been married maybe a dozen years, Ed and I closer to twenty. I was in Winnipeg at a nursing conference – I am an emergency room nurse-manager, or used to be, and was there to deliver a paper on streamlining services – and, as I walked down the hall of the hotel where we were all staying, a door ahead of me opened, and out came Alex. As if there was something magical about our meeting, that is, it felt predestined (we told each other in a mutual attempt at exoneration) or more simply, why fight it; it was meant to be.
He was there on business too, though not medical; he was an engineer, and he was also alone. What can I say? It was such a long time ago and we were, if not exactly young, still in the prime of life, Ed had become the original fuddy-duddy, as we used to say, and Alex and I were as attracted to one another as we had ever been. I am not quite ashamed to say that we had dinner and then spent the night together in his room. The next morning he left for home as did I. A few years later Ed died, and I moved into an apartment and then, a couple of years after that, having finally accepted that Ed wouldn’t be coming back, into this condo.
Eventually Alex called to find out how I was doing without Ed and to tell me that he and Elizabeth had split up, that the kids were grown and gone, and she had gone back to Medicine Hat to live. (I remember looking up the name, Medicine Hat, to find it probably refers to the head-covering of an aboriginal shaman. Herald may have succeeded in extracting himself from me, but as time passes, I seem to absorb more of him.) Alex had moved into a bachelor condo in downtown Toronto, and had no intentions of ever marrying again.
Another two or three years passed, during which we spoke only rarely, and then, one day, Alex phoned me.
“I’ve had enough of the fast life in downtown Toronto,” he said, not laughing. “I want to be able to go hiking in the mountains; I want to have trees around me, to see the occasional bear or elk or moose.” I wanted to tell him that for these things downtown Calgary wasn’t much better than downtown Toronto, but this turned out to be unnecessary: he found an acreage west and south of town, not too far out, and moved there. By this time, I was sixty-seven and he was seventy and the fact of our ages was finally beginning to sink in. We saw each other now and then, and although our relationship was erotic, it was more pleasant than passionate, as it had been in our youth.
He was adamant though: we would not be moving in together, much less getting married, which annoyed me mightily, first, because of his apparent assumption that I was assuming we would get married and second, because – I suspect I had harboured some hopes – he had just informed me that we wouldn’t be. Now I think he was right about each of us continuing to live on our own. As a consequence, I got busy with my friends and my volunteer activities, which began to take up most of my time, and traveled with my girlfriends – “the old babes,” as Alex used to call them until I pointed out that they were younger than he was, which quite took him aback, although in the end, he said, “I guess they are!” and seemed, with this realization, to undergo a bit of a spiritual re-thinking, although of what exactly it consisted, I don’t know.
After a while, as one or the other of my women friends got sick in ways that would only get worse, so that our holidays dwindled and ceased, and as Alex was still out there on the acreage, building bird houses and keeping bees and what-not, I began to think: why should the life of an old person be a poor copy of the life of a young one? As if to be an old person was merely to be a failed young one. And then I began to wonder what the life of an old person could be on its own, as if there had never been a young person, with her ceaseless activity, her endless drama from excessive weeping to equally excessive excitement, inside this wrinkled and shapeless exterior. I asked Alex on one of his increasingly infrequent visits.
“Interesting thought,” he said. “Let’s see. If I wer
e born the way I am now; if there were no young people in the world, only aged ones with their debilities and incapacities….”
“They wouldn’t be debilities and incapacities,” we both said at once. “They’d be normal,” I added. “We’d have to establish a whole new set of…I don’t know…purposes?”
He said, “What are your purposes when you’re young? Mostly just to be happy,” answering himself. “But to be happy when you’re young means finding a partner, getting an education, and then a job, being successful, and so on.”
“Only the happy one still applies in old age,” I said.
“Happy? No, I don’t think so.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “Define happy.”
“Let’s not be ridiculous,” he said. I bristled.
“Patriarchal scum.”
“Bitch, crone, hag,” he said to me. We could carry on in this manner for a good five minutes, and often had, but this time we agreed to both shut up and eat our dinners before they got cold. He had once told me in all seriousness that I was becoming a witch – “in the old-fashioned sense,” he hastened to point out. I inquired as to his meaning.
“Someone who can see into the future and make prophecies,” he told me. “Someone who can see the spirit world before she joins it.”
I laughed at him and changed the subject although even then I could feel it coming true. But it doesn’t do to have such a reputation. They don’t burn you at the stake anymore; they just lock you up in an asylum, or else they drug you so heavily you might as well be locked up. Or dead.
I used to have friends who called themselves witches and who met in covens where they stood around in circles chanting and lighting candles and waving around sticks of incense. They were alert enough to know that I have some natural facility for the spirit world that they were always going on about, but whenever they asked me to join them, I laughed at them, always being careful to deny that I had any such abilities.
“Calgary is a terrible city for witchcraft,” I used to tell them. “It’s too commercialized and money-loving. Go to Victoria. I hear there are lots of your kind there.” I had a friend who told me she had moved away from Victoria for that very reason, because random witches floating around the city had picked up on her vibes as a ‘sensitive’ and kept knocking on her door – perfect strangers, she told me – and asking her to join them, and she had gotten very sick of the whole business and moved to Kelowna. She claimed never to have been a practitioner, and died some years ago under mysterious circumstances. It could have been suicide for all I know, but might have been something else. Witches are a jealous lot, and what they can do at a long distance you would not believe.
Later, as Alex and I were lounging on the sofa in front of my fake fireplace – fake because no wood, coal or ashes are involved – he said, “Of course, that could never happen because where would the babies come from?”
“If we didn’t have happy, what would we have?”
“What we have now: hanging around waiting for the axe to fall.”
“Honestly,” I said. “For a smart man you say dumb things.”
“Nobody can solve this problem,” he said, in something that I might have called an anguished tone. “When you can’t make babies, and you can’t work, and you’re not interested in curling, bowling, skydiving, travelling, or scrapbooking, what the hell are you going to do?”
“Read,” I said. “Study. Think. Walk in nature.”
“Well, that’s original.”
What could I do but sigh, because, of course, he was right. “There are things that it is impossible to learn when you are young, no matter how much you read and study.” I could feel him turning his head to look at me; he was still a handsome man, even at eighty. But, I thought, so what?
“I’ll give you that,” he said at last, and we both sat staring into the gas-fueled fire.
That night may have been the last time he stayed over, but of course by then we would sleep in separate rooms, or else lay side by side in my big bed that I’d never rid myself of since Ed died, though I often thought of it, maybe holding hands, or he might touch my face with his fingertips, inquiringly, as it were. “I am well,” I would whisper, and he would breathe gently in through his nose and turn on his side, away from me, companionably, as if we’d been married for many years and loved each other in a way the young know nothing about. Why do people not think that is a good way to be?
After the conversation with Alex’s son ended, I said out loud, conversationally, as if to alleviate the weight on my chest the news of Alex’s death had brought, “There was a killing on my roof.” I would have said “murder,” but that is a word reserved for crows, (groups of ravens are an ‘unkindness’ – who makes this stuff up?) and anyway, it satisfied nothing and brought me no information. But still, the eye that refused to open into meaning for me, the ruffled wings, throat and tail, the glossy black body that, where it wasn’t fat and full, was jagged and unkempt, all gave me the shivers, and I couldn’t – I could not – believe that the encounter had been meaningless. But because the bird was so big and the incident so shocking, I felt it couldn’t be an omen of merely the death of one old, ill person. I even wondered, in a more fanciful moment, if it could be signaling something as monstrous as an approaching terrorist attack on this oil-and-gas city. But I still couldn’t shake off the amorphous tension, even dread, the raven incident had left me with.
Hadn’t I loved the man? In those early months when he had come back from Toronto, hadn’t I swooned for him like a sixteen-year-old girl? And years later when he got his diagnosis and left me to go back to where his children were so they could care for him, didn’t I roll in my bed in an agony of longing for him? I blush to think of it. But still, the idea of an entire raven killing being required to bring me this news struck me as outlandish. After all, Alex had been gone from Calgary a couple of years; sometimes Parkinson’s moves slowly and sometimes it doesn’t, but I’m pretty sure that prophecy doesn’t move backward. You’d always be right, but there would be no point in it.
Yesterday, my anthropologist son Herald, secondarily a comparative religionist, was in Calgary briefly in order to give a lecture at the university; this I found out only when he knocked unexpectedly at my door. His very arrival being something far out of the normal and causing me, at the same time, distress and something close to joy, I had to search about for something to say to him beyond the usual small talk. I asked him the meaning of the raven incident.
“Stop reading so much,” he said. “You only upset yourself.” He was wearing a queer electronic device hanging around his neck and when I asked him what it was for, he said, “I have developed an auditory disease and I am now nearly deaf and soon will be totally so.”
To tell me such a thing without any warning at all! I don’t imagine he could see any change in me at this news, but my heart skipped a beat or two (something it has begun to do now and then) and, for a minute, I had trouble getting my breath. He was once again my two-year-old boy I would do anything to protect. All I could think of, though I tried not to, was of the raven on my roof which had fixed me with that blank yet seeing eye.
Then Herald said, “I may as well tell you now, Mother, that I’ve been diagnosed with prostate cancer.” I knew at once by the calm, even casual, way he told me that he was saying he had been given a death sentence, and I must say that I began to wonder why I was living so unpleasantly long, while he was dying at such an early age. Strangely, at this second piece of bad news, although I could hear the beat of my own heart in my ears, I seemed to have passed into another level of alertness and did not have to struggle for breath. Before I could respond, though, he changed the subject.
“You should know that I have a partner. His name is Tobias. He has been diagnosed with a rare, rapidly-moving, motor neuron disease, and has contacted one of those death groups. We talked about a suicide pact, but decided against it because I want to finish my book first, and he is already in crisis
and must act as soon as possible. I’m not sure he will be there when I get back.” How much he looked, at that moment, like his father, as Ed lay dying. I had to look away. “It’s too bad,” Herald went on, “because we had hoped to be there to nurse each other through to the end.” A wave of pure pity swept through me, sorrow for my child – sorrow and pity I knew he would reject at once – he is my son, after all.
I said, “I will go back with you and nurse you.”
Season of Fury and Wonder Page 5