Season of Fury and Wonder

by Sharon Butala

  He shook his head, no, firmly. “His demise is…was imminent. Mine is not.”

  Neither of us spoke about it again, but I could not, for the life of me, understand how we – mother and son – had come to this conversation. At the door, he leaned toward me to plant a dry kiss on one cheek. I clutched his arm, pulling him against me, but after a second, wrenching hard so that I lost my balance and almost fell, he wrested himself away from me.

  After Herald’s distressing visit, although harder for me than it used to be, I put on my coat, went outside, crossed the street to the park, and began to stroll the empty paths, empty because it was twilight on a frigid, late-fall day, and those who had something better to do – apparently nearly everybody – were off doing it. The park was hushed; I thought it an unnatural hush, but welcomed it for its near-magical beauty, as if the air itself had visible texture and the tiniest winking glitter throughout it, and because to be walking in beauty, like the poet said, was so precious and rare, even though I walked in only a small, city park, surrounded by multi-storey buildings, and a neglected park at that. And any of the personal beauty Byron was writing of had long ago departed from me.

  I had entered into a denser part of the park, where the trees were bigger and older, and the fallen leaves coating the ground beneath them, once vibrant reds, oranges and gold, were dried and dusty, decaying at their edges and beginning to rot. Before too long, thoughts of Alex’s death and Herald’s approaching one began to leave me and my mind reached that space where there seem to be no thoughts at all. It was then that I saw a wolf squeezing its way out from a dark crevice in the base of a large deciduous tree at the edge of the path, and I thought, in quick fear, to stop walking, perhaps to turn back. But the wolf didn’t even notice much less threaten me, and trotted off in the other direction, and thus my fear passed as quickly as it had come. The wolf paid no attention to me, it didn’t appear dangerous; it seemed, if anything, to be companionable, more like a pet than a fearsome wild animal, as if, had it passed by you, you might safely reach out and stroke its thick fur. But later, when I was back home, its strange appearance in such an unheard-of way and in such a place where there are no wolves, made me pause, and consider carefully.

  In the days when Herald was a young professor turning out papers and then books, he was careful to send me copies of his writings which, to his surprise, I always read, but he didn’t know that I then went on to read more deeply in whatever area his most recent paper or book was about. Thus, I knew that wolves are, in Roman mythology, guardians, not proponents of evil as they are in most other mythologies, (although not in the Cree vision). In Norwegian myths, the monstrous wolf Fenris (or Fenrir) had to be chained in the bowels of the earth and when he breaks free, I have read – as apparently he is expected to one day do – he will devour the sun and cause the end of times.

  Although the wolf I had just seen was of ordinary size and colour, as a prophetic animal he might indeed have been struggling his way up from the bowels of the earth, up through the roots of the tree and then emerging from a sort of slit in the trunk – not a cut, but a natural (or most unnatural) place that opened for him. I saw only darkness in the trunk and him twisting and pushing his way out. I knew even then that as an old woman my second sight was growing stronger: I was becoming better and better able to see the spirit world and I was indeed frightened, not by my ability, but by what I saw and all that I could no longer deny lay behind it.

  In the weeks before the raven incident, the Americans, in a rage against ‘the elites’, (meaning anybody who knows anything – shades of the Red Guards!) elected a president whose ramblings, as well as being untruthful more often than not, frequently defied reason. I saw him as the purveyor of the original, many-formed mythological Lord of Chaos himself. Of course, I couldn’t help but remember my dead husband Ed (who hated my saying things like “lord of chaos” as ridiculously excessive) in his later years, yelling at the television set, “Apocalypse Now!” (not that I think he had ever seen that film, and, as he didn’t read, he certainly never read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness). I suppose I told him about the connection and about the movie’s version of Conrad’s story. In any case, he certainly knew what it meant. I am in some ways glad that he died without ever seeing this president thing happening. It might have killed him.

  But now, thinking yet again of the raven, for the first time in a concrete way, I faced directly the fact that Alex was the last of my lovers; he was my last lover in this life. I liked the sound of that; it gave his death dignity, I thought. I lived to testify that he was a good deal more than just another old geezer croaking his way into nothingness. I remembered again the nothingness in the bird’s eye; that I stared at it as long as I dared and no spark of life came from it, although I knew it to be alive and capable of murderous aggression.

  When I came back from my walk, I knew I was shielding myself from the meaning of what I had seen in the park, but I was tired out from the day and from Herald’s visit, and was trying not to think about how I would probably never see him again, either. I fought with that knowledge, too: it weighed so very heavily on me, and my personal sorrows on the one hand, and the prophecies of the mythological world on the other, wrestled with each other, tormenting me.

  I turned on the television news: War in Syria; terrorism in Turkey, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, and spreading everywhere; an earthquake in Italy, or was it Chile or Peru? even one, startlingly, in Nunavut. Another mass shooting underway in the United States and one in France; cholera breaking out in Haiti and Bangladesh; wildfires consuming Israeli, Australian and Californian cities; the life-giving forests vanishing from South America and elsewhere; polar bears dying out in the north, icebergs melting, and the great birds everywhere being exterminated. But the wolf had seemed simple and harmless, absolutely unthreatening, and never even bothered to look at me.

  Yet the legend of Fenrir says that because he looked normal and harmless, at first the gods allowed him to roam freely about the meadows. But legend said that this wolf was destined to kill the highest god Odin so they decided to bind him with chains and put him away in a safe place forever. Did they know that one day Fenrir would escape to swallow the sun? I thought then, only: It has begun.

  PANSY

  Inspired by Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case”, 1905

  Since my accident last year, I don’t drive anymore. So the other day, as I was trundling my ever-humiliating shopping cart home from the grocery store, as I waited for a green light, I found myself gazing idly down the traffic-clogged avenue all the way south to where it climbed a long hill, and at the peak abruptly disappeared from view. An intense longing pierced me, as if in my moment of unfocused reverie something I didn’t know was in there had seized its chance to thrust its way into my solar plexus and on upward, fiercely, into my heart. The sensation, intense enough to be unendurable, weakened almost at once so that I could breathe, but in that brief time, the air had changed around me, and I could see the particles of light.

  The signal changed to green then; I was able to collect myself enough to cross the street, grocery cart and all, and step up onto the sidewalk on the other side. But I had to go a few feet before the air smoothed itself out, and the din of modern city life returned to my hearing. How odd it was to me to identify this powerful but ill-defined hunger as homesickness, for in all my life I have never had a home. At least, not in the sense that other people do.

  I suppose this was the real reason I decided to attend Gerry’s funeral, not because I cared about Gerry, or for the sake of his wife Debbie, a girl with whom I’d once gone to school, or his kids whose names I don’t even know. I never met one of them. By the time they married, I’d been gone from Auburn for years, having run away at sixteen, unable to wait another second for my real life to begin. At first I didn’t keep in touch with anybody, but as the years passed, and maybe it was after my divorce from Aaron, I started sending the occasional Christmas card to my cousin, Roxanne, or a postcard to this or tha
t school friend from wherever I happened to find myself. I’d begun to add a return address, just a postal box number in a nearby city, where I kept an apartment and eventually settled after my retirement. After that, people sometimes started to keep me up to date on what they were doing. That was how I knew, years ago, that Gerry had gotten re-married. But now I didn’t even know what he had died of; an anonymous person had sent me the newspaper clipping about his death but it didn’t say, and Roxanne claimed not to know. Probably the usual: cancer, heart failure, stroke, dementia. He was the most ordinary of men; I can’t imagine him dying of some rare disease.

  When I got out of my taxi at Roxanne’s house, she was standing in her open doorway, leaning on a walker that held a small oxygen canister in its basket, the tubing running up her chest and clipping onto her nose. I hadn’t seen her in at least twenty years, the last time when she was travelling and had dropped in to see me in Vancouver where I was then temporarily located, and I was shocked at the way she looked. It wasn’t so much that she had put on weight as it was that she had lost any shape at all, as if her skin had stopped its job of restraining and shaping, so that she was more like an hourglass where gravity had pulled everything to the bottom. It looked like she had whole-body elephantiasis or, it occurred to me, was maybe wearing some heavy medical apparatus under her flowered muumuu. “Roxanne,” I cried as I struggled up the wide front steps to the verandah and an arm that didn’t appear to be attached to a person reached out from behind Roxie to hold the door open.

  “Pansy!” Roxanne replied, her voice tremulous. When she hugged me, letting go of her walker for just one second, I could feel a minute but steady electrical tremor running through her arms and hands, as if her nerves had forgotten how to rest. But she smelled sweet, like a baby, and her smooth grey cap was neat and held back from her face with shiny pins, and I was relieved – to my own surprise – because I thought it meant she was getting good care, and having years ago done a doc on the mistreatment of elders, I am always sensitive to the possibility.

  “This is Alice.”

  Alice, the rest of the body belonging to the arm, stepped out and, using her body to hold open the door, said, “Greetings, Mrs. Pomeroy! I hope your trip went well.” She looked about sixty, and was dressed in gaudy runners, rumpled khaki pants and a green nurse’s smock. She helped Roxanne back herself away from the door, and me to enter, taking my bag and saying, “I’ll just run this up to your room while you get yourselves settled.” This was easier said than done, at least for Roxanne, but never mind.

  In that instant of greeting I had seen that Alice was old enough to remember me from my days as the host of a daytime television talk show, that she was just a bit intimidated to meet me. The Pansy Pomeroy Show: ten years it ran and the minute I got a wrinkle it was history. But that was quite a while ago now – my stardom and its accompanying power – so I’m frankly surprised when anybody remembers me, but this crisp little light still flicks on when they do, before it once again flickers out. Today my show would be called, maybe, just Pansy Pomeroy, or, Pansy Pomeroy and Friends, or Pansy Pomeroy Talks!

  “Pardon?” We were seated across from each other, a polished coffee table between us, on matching pink sofas with leaf designs outlined in silver on them that looked brand new. I had to hope that Roxanne hadn’t seen my smile.

  “How was your trip?” she repeated in that same quivering voice.

  “Ah! You know – crowded, ill-mannered people, smelly – oh, let’s not be boring. How are you?” Her smile faded when I said this, and she looked down at her knees.

  “As you see.” Her tone was pleasant, as if we were discussing the weather. I had forgotten how annoying she always was in her goodie-two-shoes, Pollyanna-ish way. “I am dying, of course, Pansy.” Oddly, she lifted her eyes from her knees to meet mine, and smiled at me as she spoke. “Let’s not be cute.”

  “I was not being cute,” I said, not meaning to sound injured. “I did not know. How is a person to know if she isn’t told?” Roxanne was either suppressing a laugh, or a curse; I couldn’t tell.

  But, there it was again, the old back and forth; wanting to quarrel, trying not to, quarrelling anyway, two old broads with pills and their oxygen and their walkers – well, I was determined not to have a walker on this trip so I left it behind, and I am not on oxygen – and here we still are, sparring verbally. Now, there would have been a good name for my show: Sparring with Pansy Pomeroy! Oh, give it up. They are all stupid names for a non-existent television show.

  “Well, I’m not,” I said, meaning, not dying. Roxie opened her mouth but closed it again without speaking, pressing her lips together.

  “I use a wheelchair when I go out, so I’ve hired a handicap van to take us to the funeral tomorrow,” she said. It was my turn to purse my lips. “I’d appreciate it if you’d swallow your pride and ride with me.”

  “Of course, I will,” I said. Some things can’t be avoided; I’ve learned at least that over the years. When I divorced Aaron I had to face a lot of things, although I tried to get my lawyer to handle everything. Pansy, he said to me, some things cannot be avoided.

  “How true that is,” Roxanne said, laughing in a way that hovered between the wry and outright bitterness, and I realized I had said that bit about not being able to avoid some things aloud.

  “I was thinking about Aaron,” I said, aware how stiff I sounded. “Or rather, Charles.”

  “Charles?” She seemed puzzled.

  “My second husband.”

  “Oh, come on, Pansy. I know he was your third.”

  I took a deep breath, not this again. “For god sake,” I said. “We were married, what? Six, eight months?”

  “I think it was more like two years.”

  “It was not.”

  After that we didn’t say much for a bit; Roxanne fiddled with her oxygen tubing and I tried to think of something neutral to say. Then Alice brought in a tea tray complete with a plate of cookies and a glossy cake decorated with purple and yellow sugar pansies, at which I felt a twinge of something, or would have, but I was thinking of Charles, near the end when he was ill. Whenever we left the house he had to ride around in a wheelchair. Especially how he was in airports. The minute he hit the wheelchair and some attractive young woman paid to be charming would take charge of the apparatus with him in it, he would get the look on his face of a small child being taken care of by an attentive, loving mother – trusting, innocently smug, this captain of industry, this monster capable of such small, precise cruelty to his staff and his family – and seeing it, I would want to beat him on his overly-large head with my carry-on. Yet his kids, who were permanently in his thrall pretty much no matter what he did, kept on accepting his undeserved rage, his deliberately cruel sallies at them that he occasionally – if he was being nice – pretended was only wit.

  I was his third and last wife; I got what was left after the children got their bequests, the goodies, you might say, and I have no guilt about it; I earned every penny. Both his ex-wives, women I didn’t even know, tried to warn me not to marry him. I deliberately misunderstood them – thought they were merely jealous – but I should have listened. Whether I was willing to admit it or not, he was part of the plan that I’m beginning to see guided me from the day I realized that I was pretty enough and smart enough to make my way to the top. I hadn’t reckoned on the necessity of luck. When I was young, I spat in the eye of luck.

  “It’s hard, isn’t it,” I said. Roxie looked up questioningly from the cake that she was cutting shakily with a china-handled, silver knife that must have been her mother’s.

  “Nothing special,” I said. “Everything.” She was carefully moving a slice to a tea plate. “No, that our mothers are dead.” Now she was trying to lift the teapot to fill our cups, but she was taking so long that I realized that, full, it was too heavy for her. We didn’t look at each other or speak as I poured and then sat back again.

  “I think of mine every single day without fail,” Ro
xanne said. “I cannot get her out of my head. It is the strangest thing, given that she has been dead for nearly forty years, and that I’m over eighty myself. I mean, do you think about Aunt Rebecca?” I was reluctant to give such a notion any credence, which Roxy must have known because she went on, “Of course, you didn’t see her after you left home, did you?”

  “I came to Auburn to see her when she was in the hospital,” I said. “I was in the middle of a project. I had to get back right away. A lot of money and jobs were riding on that project.” I sighed; it was sort of true. Roxie dropped her head as if it were too heavy to hold up. “I told her I’d come back in a few days, but when I finally managed to get things into shape so I could leave, she was gone. Stella and Bob were with her though.” I added this last quickly. “They were always closer to her – you know that. And I came back for her funeral.”

  Now I was imagining getting up the church steps with the wheelchair, but Roxy said, “I’ve arranged for one of the funeral director’s staff to meet us at the lift so we don’t have to worry about the stairs.”

  “I can climb stairs perfectly well,” I said.

  “Honestly,” she said, but that was all. A silence followed during which I wanted to ask what had killed Gerry – if she knew – but I was trying to think how to guide a conversation to where the answer would reveal itself without my having to ask, when out of the blue, suddenly smiling at me, Roxy said, “I remember when you wanted to be a ballet dancer.”

  She is the only one who knows that. When we were about eight, other than her, only my mother knew of my foolish dream. My mother, of course, was the first to label the notion foolish. It was foolish because nobody, including me, had ever seen a ballet dancer, never mind a ballet, and had no specific idea what a ballet dancer actually did. It was then that her father and mine went into a short-lived business together, our families were together a lot then, and for that time, we became best friends. But then the business went broke, there was some unpleasantness about it and we were kept apart after that until my father died. So it was the pale tutu, the taut, slender legs, the feet en pointe (although I would be an adult before I knew that term) in the stiff satin slippers, the bare shoulders, and the glistening hair-covering which I would learn was called by the unlovely name of snood that took my breath away.