Cardinal Divide

by Nina Newington

  He ought to have a dog. The thought is picked out in crisp lettering in my mind. “Would you like a dog again, Dad?”

  His eyebrows lift. “I was just thinking, ‘Where’s Moss?’ But I’m too old for a new dog. I’d worry, what would become of him?”

  “I’d take him.”

  “City life’s no life for a border collie.”

  “Or Victor and Manfred would.”

  It’s his turn to look at me. “What’ll you do, Meg, with this place? Do you know?”

  I open my mouth to say ‘no’ which would be the truth only nothing comes out and I close my mouth again.

  Now he’s really looking at me. “What brought you here today?”

  “Let’s walk,” I say. “I did need to apologize but you’re right, that’s not all.”

  It’s so strong now it’s like a guitar thrumming in my gut, the feeling something is going to happen.

  We walk. Slowly. Slow as walking with a donkey, back when we had a couple to guard the sheep. Viola and Malvolio. Nothing walks so slow as a donkey. Except two donkeys. Dad and Moss would be moving the flock. It was my job to follow, leading the donkeys. They never did like Moss. ‘Donkeys will kill a dog,’ Dad said. He rode across the land, getting further and further ahead. I’d see Moss loop out on an outrun, drop to a crouch. If the wind was blowing the right way I’d hear Dad’s whistles, the occasional ‘Lie down. Lie down, sir.’

  At last we’re on the little bluff above the river. Dad sits down on the bench, pats the seat. I leave the usual space between us. In the opposite bank I make out a seam of coal. Coal in the banks in Edmonton too. “There are old coal mines under the golf course near my house.” Dad’s head swivels to me and I realize I spoke the words out loud. “Tunnelled in from the river bank. One day the third hole putting green sank. All that perfect grass looking up at the sky from eight feet down.”

  I look at Dad. “I’ve spent the last month trying to make the ground under my feet solid, getting mad every time I have to face the fact that it isn’t. I’ve been so focused on what I can’t trust I forgot what I can trust.”

  He’s gazing out across the gorge. “Go on.”

  “The day I got sober, it wasn’t anything I planned. It wasn’t a better day or a worse day. Somehow, I was ready. I was done. I didn’t decide, I recognized. It was like a door opened up in front of me and I could walk through it and I did. You could say that was a decision but it felt like an acknowledgement. Of something that was somehow already true. Does that make sense?”

  Slowly Dad nods. “Yes. Yes, it does.”

  “There’s a new person working at Dreamcatcher. She’s ... I think she’s like the heroes you talked about. She decides and she acts. She bends the world to her will. Doesn’t have much patience for the rest of us. I’ve been stamping my foot, wanting the world to do what I want, feeling like a failure because I can’t seem to make it happen. Somehow, listening to her talk, I remembered there’s a different version that’s more like the experience I had getting sober. You know what to do when it’s the right time but you’re not making things happen.”

  “There’s a lot you can’t make happen,” Dad says, “however much you want to.”

  Neither of us seems to have any more to say. So there we are, side by side on the bench, looking out at the mountains. After a bit Dad pats the pockets of his jacket, a red and black chequered wool Mackinaw. It smells of hay and lanolin, wet dog and something else. The yellow brown stains on the front. I can see him, scrawny lamb slick from birth gripped against his belly. He snips the umbilical cord, sets the scissors on the window ledge, picks up the open jar of dark liquid. Dangling the cut end over the jar he presses jar to belly, tips back lamb and jar together. Iodine coats the cord and, if the lamb squirms, quite a bit else. Mum retired this jacket years ago, judging that one particular lambing had stained it past redemption.

  He pulls something out of the pocket. “Do you mind?” He opens his hand to reveal an old brier pipe.

  I stare at it, at him, and start to laugh.

  “What’s so funny? The other day I thought how I missed my pipe. So I dug it out. I never did throw it away.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Even found an old tin of baccy.” He slips off his glove, reaches for the inside pocket. “I’m too old for it to kill me now. Too late to set you a bad example.” He grins.

  “And how is it?”

  “Stale but”—he’s tamping dark tobacco into the bowl with his thumb—“delicious.”

  “Well then, stop what you’re doing.”

  “What?” His thumb pauses.

  I pull the packet out of my coat pocket and pass it to him.

  He turns it over in his hands. The cellophane crinkles. He’s nonplussed for once. “But how did you ...”

  “I didn’t. It was a ridiculous urge that came over me. The last two days I’ve been in an odd zone.”

  “Balkan Sobranie, no less.” He fumbles for the tab, pulls and unwraps the cellophane. Holds the package to his nose, eyes closed. When he opens them he says, “One of the bravest men I ever met smoked this. Officer in the war. Jimmy Bowdoin-Smith. I’d never met anyone who laughed with such delight at the beauty and the absurdity of the world. Even there. Mud and rats and mustard gas. You’d think he was on a picnic, horsing around on the grass in the sunshine. He found a buttercup behind a shell-shattered old barn, held it under my chin.”

  I can’t picture the scene then remember: “When you were a girl.”

  “When I was a girl.” He taps out the pipe on the arm of the bench, fingers the old tobacco for embers before sweeping it to the ground. He packs the bowl with the new tobacco, holds a match to it, draws the flame down into the bowl.

  I watch it dip and straighten, dip and straighten. All the while the flame crawls down the wooden stem of the match. At the last minute he shakes it out, crushes the tip between finger and thumb, then he puts the spent match in his pocket. The tobacco glows in the bowl. He exhales a blue, fragrant cloud, aiming it away from me but it curls back and I breathe it in too. It’s rich and dark as forest duff. I look sideways at Dad. He’s gazing at the mountains, face calm.

  The sun’s warm on my back. This bench is better placed than the old one, out of the wind in a slight hollow. To my left wild asparagus fronds whisper in the breeze. Bleached and desiccated, they’re still recognizable. In June we’d munch the slender shoots, raw and sweetly crisp. Somehow, in the busyness of the ranch he always made time to show me things like that. I glance at him again. One gnarled hand is wrapped around the pipe, the other resting on the head of the cane. The skin, always leathery brown, is paler now with the silvery sheen of driftwood, so little between air and bone. Thin as garlic skin, purple veins showing through. His hand at rest on the smooth black handle which is so dense it doesn’t looks like wood. Strangely heavy. It felt like rock not wood, the cane.

  ‘What’s this?’

  Mum looked up from the kitchen counter, flour on her hands. Mum in a pale blue apron, glasses slipping down her nose, knuckling them back up to look.

  ‘Put that back please, Meg.’

  ‘But ...’

  ‘Put it back. Now.’

  Looking at the long, dark shaft I’m giddy, as if the river bank, Dad, bench, asparagus, all are turning around it. The mountains, the ground at my feet. All turning, slow then faster, round the ebony shaft. I grip the bench, sun-warmed wood under my fingers, try to pull my eyes from the cane but it’s the middle. The middle is dark. The middle is dark. The words spread through my mind, a stain spreading across water. Everything now is glittering about the black and silver and I’m shivering. It’s evil, something evil. Evil. Evil. I’m so cold and it’s in me. Get it out. Get it out. My hands are clawing at the wood. I hear them scrabbling and a voice, Meg, Meg. Evil, evil. I’m gasping, pulling away from the hand on my arm. The cane. The cane is on the ground. I slip from the bench. I’m kneeling by the black wood. I bring my head down hard. Something grips my shoulder,
hauls me back.

  “Meg. Stop this. Now.” Voice like a whip crack.

  I stop. Everything stops. I can hear my own breathing, ragged. Dad’s too, rasping. His hand that stopped me. Christ, I was about to slam my head on the ground.

  “Dad, what just happened?” My voice is shaking.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  I close my eyes, steady my breathing. When I open them the cane is there, lying on the dusty ground, a stick of dark wood with tarnished silver tips.

  “I’m losing it, Dad. I don’t ...” I gulp.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Breathe. “It was the cane. I was looking at it and suddenly everything began to revolve around it. The dark axle. The middle of everything is evil, that’s what I was thinking. The evil was in me. I was frantic to get it out. I was about to bang my head on the ground. It was the only thing I could think to do. To make it stop. The feeling. Of being evil. I can feel its cold breath on my skin, just thinking the thought.”

  “What were you thinking about before that?”

  “Finding the cane in the pantry, asking Mum about it. She wouldn’t answer, just made me put it back.”

  He’s silent, staring at the mountains. After a minute he picks up the stick, rests his hands on the crook again. “Have you ever done that before, banged your head?”

  “No. Not that I remember. It was the weirdest feeling. I had to do it. It was, well, it was like being possessed.” I try to sound casual, reasonable, like my feet are firmly back in the world where that’s a delusion. “I have been feeling weird. Almost like being on acid. They say you can get flashbacks. Or maybe I just ... I don’t know ... got the idea in my mind. A client came in yesterday who bangs his head.”

  I glance at Dad. He’s squinting at the ground, a funny look on his face.

  “What is it?”

  He shakes his head, one quick back and forth.

  “Dad, please. I don’t know what’s happening. Since Tuesday night I’ve had such a feeling that something was going to happen. Today, the tobacco, for God’s sake. I had no idea you’d taken up the pipe again. Either I’m losing my mind or ...” I stop.

  “Polly believed that cane was evil.”

  “Why?”

  When I bring the tea in he’s staring out of the window. His eyes swivel to me when I sit down.

  “I don’t know what’s happening any more than you do, Meg. But there are things I know. You’d better know them too. Your mother. She went through a bad patch. The year before you came. One night something woke me. She was in the kitchen in her nightgown in the dark, banging her head against the doorjamb. She’d split her forehead. Blood on her face, on the paint. I tried to pull her away. She fought me. Finally I said, ‘Polly, stop it,’ loud and slow and she did. Came and sat next to me like a little child. She sat on the sofa. I wet a towel, cleaned her up. I was scared.

  “‘Tell me. Tell me what’s wrong.’

  “‘There’s something bad inside me. I have to make it go away.’”

  He stops. I must have been staring at him.

  “That’s how it felt. Exactly how it felt. Go on.”

  “There’s not much to tell. She’d been withdrawn for a couple of days. When I, when I touched her”—he glances at me. I nod—“she lay there like a stick of wood. I stopped. Asked her what was wrong? She shook her head. It was as if she wasn’t there.”

  “Did she do it again?”

  “Several times that year.”

  “And after I came?”

  He shakes his head. “She decided she had been possessed. When she joined that church. The pastor liked the idea. They all did. It’s a strenuous sect. They enjoyed the exorcism very much.”

  “She kept the cane.”

  “To remind herself.”

  “Of what?”

  “That Satan is always nearby, biding his time.”

  “Why did she think the cane was evil?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “But you have an idea?”

  Dad’s eyes drift over to the front window. Victor is walking across the yard carrying a tray. The wind nips at his scarf, whisks away the steam from a covered bowl.

  Chapter Fifty Two

  “TELL ME ABOUT Mum.”

  Dad’s in his Morris chair, hands resting on the oak arms. I sit in the other armchair. He studies me. I refuse to feel as if I’m twelve years old. “What do you want, Meg?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He waits.

  “I want the truth, Dad. I have no idea what happened earlier. With the cane. If that was something that came from me or if, somehow, it was Mum’s. I need to know.”

  He goes on looking at me. I stare back at him. At last he tips his head sideways. “All right. Your mother.”

  “Why don’t you call her Polly?”

  He looks surprised, then relieved. “Polly then. Polly wasn’t always the way you knew her. She only got religion a couple of months before you arrived. If you hadn’t come I don’t know if she would have stuck with it. You were proof that she was on the right track. She’d become angry, you see, that she couldn’t have children, being married to me.”

  I stare at him. “But Dad, that can’t have been news to her.” I blush.

  “The change of life, it set something off in her. Sorrow I suppose but it came out as anger. She blamed me. If she hadn’t married me she could have had a normal life. I understood that.”

  “But she chose you. She knew what she was doing.”

  “Did she? Do any of us?”

  “I don’t know,” I say at last, “but Dad, to blame you. That’s crazy.”

  He takes a deep breath. “She was crazy by then. In a way. She was drinking all the time.”

  “Mum never touched a drop.”

  “After she got religion.”

  “She was an alcoholic?” I stare at him.

  “At the end. She drank a little, when we met. Stopped when we got married. After the war she started again. Just a glass now and then. It was fun. She was fun. But then it changed. She didn’t drink every day but when she did ...”

  He shrugs. “Toward the end there, seemed it packed a hell of a wallop, whatever she drank. It wasn’t that much, or so I thought. One day I came into the kitchen, there was a little white ring on the counter. I stared at it a while then I opened the flour bin, reached my hand down into the flour. It was cool, soft. My fingers touched something hard and smooth. I found bottles in the woodpile, behind the laundry soap, in the basket of mending. That night I told her what I’d found. She pretended she didn’t know what I was talking about. Then she told me it was my fault. If she had a normal life she wouldn’t have to drink. Then she cried, promised she would stop.

  “It got worse and worse. That’s when she started banging her head. I’d wake up in the night. Find her by the back door.”

  He stops, looks at me.

  I take a deep breath. “It’s alright. I asked you. Go on.”

  He lifts his shoulders, drops them. “I’d stop her. Sometimes she’d be meek, like a little child. Other times she’d start shrieking. Shrieking at me. How I’d ruined her life. Blood trickling down her face. Wouldn’t let me clean her up. Wouldn’t sleep in the same bed with me. I felt bad. That our life together wasn’t making her happy. To put it mildly. But I got pretty sick of it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Me? Ran the ranch. Went for long rides.”

  “About Mum?”

  “Nothing. It was bigger than both of us. That’s what I came to. It wasn’t my fault. Wasn’t her fault. Not the drinking, not the other stuff. The remorse she felt was real. The contempt she felt for herself. She barely went out. Which was good because the one time a neighbour woman saw her forehead all split and bruised, she started giving me funny looks.”

  “Jesus, Dad. You must have been scared. Scared she’d give you away.”

  He studies me for a moment. “I was.”

  “And you must ha
ve felt very alone.”

  He nods.

  “Did you ever talk about it to anybody?”

  “Moira, once. She’d been married to a Native fellow, long back, went crazy with the drink.”

  “The trapper we went to see?”

  He nods. His eyelids are drooping.

  “You need your nap, don’t you?”

  I lean back, look out of the window, eyes travelling the line of mountains. Mum an alcoholic. It’s not quite as shocking as it should be. But Mum banging her head. Then me. And the cane. There are too many pieces shifting about.

  Mum. I picture the triangle of her face, wavy black hair shot with threads of silver. The pinch of her mouth. It was always there, that tension. White knuckle alcoholic, staying sober without the program? With religion though. Something to take the edge off. But it didn’t quite.

  I look around the living room, so familiar it’s hard to see it, the worn furniture, the wallpaper with little blue forget-me-nots. I thought they were happy. Sadness washes over me. The two of them locked in their dance, alone inside the bubble of their secret. Like the little glass dome someone showed me once, when you shook it two skaters twirled around and around while snow flakes floated down.

  Pushing open the storm door, an icy wind greets me. I reach back in, borrow Dad’s tartan scarf. Why didn’t Mum tell me? We could have gone to meetings together. Head down, eyes watering, I try to picture her standing up front, telling her war stories. Laughter as she lists the places she hid bottles

  Shit, it’s cold. Maybe just a turn around the yard. Banging from the machine shed, a trickle of smoke from the chimney. Where Mum raised the meat chickens every summer. My job to clean out after. Crap machines, Dad called them. He liked the laying hens. Gave them the run of the barn. Mum and Dad. Ben and Polly. The clack of Mum’s heels on the living room floor. Feet flying, her head and arms stayed completely still. She’d be sweating, though, when Dad laid down his bow. They’d smile at each other. There was always some kind of juice between them.

  She lay there like a stick of wood.