Cardinal Divide

by Nina Newington

“That’s him on the bookcase, isn’t it?” I can summon the face of the beetle browed, heavy jawed young man. Other than the wedding picture and the photograph of Dad and me by the North Saskatchewan river, he’s the only other human photograph.

  “Did she ever go back?”

  “Once, after her father died. To lay a wreath on her mother’s grave.”

  I can feel Dad’s eyes on me.

  “And?”

  “To make sure the old bastard was really dead.”

  “Mum said that?”

  “She did.”

  “When was that?”

  “A few years after the end of the war. Early fifties.”

  Chapter Fifty Four

  NINE TIMES OUT of ten.

  Lying upstairs, sliver of moon glittering through the windows. Waxing or waning? Dad can tell. Mum. Mum getting up out of this bed, going down to the kitchen.

  She lay there like a stick.

  Cane like a black snake.

  The evil inside her.

  Shit.

  I can’t lie here in this room thinking these thoughts.

  In the kitchen I turn on the light over the table. Walk over to the door jamb. High gloss white, chipped along the edges.

  A creak behind me. I spin around, heart hammering. Creak, tap, creak.

  Dad’s hair is standing up like a woodpecker’s crest. He’s wearing the old woollen dressing gown, coarse as a horse blanket, striped pyjama legs showing over battered slippers. He’s halfway across the living room

  “I’m alright, Dad. I just couldn’t sleep.” The relief in his face makes my throat ache. “I’ll make myself a hot drink.”

  At home I’d make bread. I put the kettle on. When I hear the bedroom door click I go over to the bookcase with the photographs, pick up the one of Mum’s brother. He’s holding the yoke of an ox, the ox as pale as he is dark, a ponderous, ghostly presence. Together they regard the camera. In the background are a weathered barn and an elderberry bush laden with dark clusters of fruit. I study it for a while but I have no idea what is in their eyes. I put it down and pick up Mum and Dad’s wedding photograph in its silver frame.

  Back in bed, pillow plumped behind me, inhaling the thin smell of peppermint which always makes me think of a mountain stream, I examine the photo. There’s Mum, heart-shaped face pale in the frame of dark hair. She’s wearing a white dress with lace around her shoulders. ‘Lace from Montreal,’ she told me, ‘made by nuns. The dress I made myself.’ The only colour comes from her lips, which have been painted a carmine red in the photograph, and Dad’s hair, coloured a golden yellow. His eyes are crinkled as if he’s looking into the sun. He’s wearing an almost suit. Jacket and trousers the same dark grey or navy but you can tell the fabric is different. A narrow tie with a diamond pattern. He’s standing ramrod straight, one hand on Mum’s shoulder where she sits, dress furled around her feet. I hold the photograph further away. He’s dense with himself. A furry golden animal, vibrating with happiness. She’s more removed, looking out from further inside herself.

  Behind them rises a jagged line of mountains, snow caps tinged pink by an imaginary dawn, the sky forget-me-not blue. One of three possible backdrops the photographer’s studio offered. I never asked her what the others were. Perhaps she would have preferred a flowery meadow or a seaside scene. I wish I’d asked. I look at her face again. I didn’t know her. Not really. I could have, if she’d let me. Why didn’t she tell me?

  It’s not hard to answer that. The few women her age I’ve known in AA all talked about the silence and the shame. Sober, she became the woman she thought she was supposed to be. Only the dancing ... I keep staring at her as if I can make her look back at me. Slowly my mind slides closer to what happened this afternoon. I don’t think it was mine, that feeling of being so bad inside. But was it really Mum? Some residue clinging to the cane? A visitation? It sounds ridiculous.

  I put the photograph down on the shelf behind the bed and turn out the light. Lie back. Let it. Let it come. You can’t see the moon through the windows any more but light lingers on the horizon. Inside the room there are pools of deeper shadow. I try to empty my mind. Focus on the breath. Witness my thoughts. Feelings. Images. Nothing.

  I switch the light on again. Turn around in bed so I’m facing the bookshelf. Slide the backrest board to one side. The shelves are almost empty. Mum’s Bible and assorted religious tracts are all that are left on the top shelf. Dad’s books are downstairs now. Mum’s books don’t even fill the whole shelf. They’re kept upright by the old tin pencil box. I pull out the box, letting the books topple. A tin box with a red salamander painted on the lid, it’s the only thing my mother brought from Nova Scotia. Or so she said. An oblong tin, rusting at the corners, it once contained pencils, pencils stacked neat as logs on a truck, uniform, orange, hexagonal, unsharpened, not yet worn or chewed, a box of new pencils which to her held the promise of a world away from the men who slept in the woods under piles of branches, who came asking for soap in the spring. Soap to gnaw and unbind themselves after living all winter on cornmeal. I remember that, how she said the word cornmeal, as if in that one word was bound all the misery and poverty of those thin, grimy, constipated men.

  Nothing but a dirt farm on the North Mountain. Not even a weir to catch herring. I grew up without a mother to speak of. Mum left behind after her sisters went to work in the factories in Saint John. How she wanted to go with them. They laughed. Told me it was my turn now. They were going where there was work and if I missed them I could wave to them across the Bay when I wasn’t too busy skivvying for Dad and the boys.

  Port Lorne. The name forlorn as the gulls’ cries. The frigid Fundy. Massive tides piling into the Bay, sucking back out, stranding boats on the sea’s bottom, trapping the unwary. I imagined it all: the unkind sisters, the stroke-dumbed mother, the reek of the man’s moonshine, his hard hands. Wet woollens steaming by the cook-stove, the boys off in the woods with their father when they were scarcely old enough to hold up an axe. The father missing two fingers from his left hand, how the stumps of the fingers went white when it was cold, how he stamped his feet and clapped his mutilated hand against his thigh. A tall man with a handlebar moustache, Donald was his name, and Frankie and John and Ronald and my mother Polly and Jean and Enid the oldest.

  It was Frankie she felt bad about leaving. Frankie, the baby of the family, with his heavy, patient face. But I don’t know anything about his life. There were really just a few stories, told and retold. It was true, what I said to Heather. Geography was more important than people. Summer storms blundering out of the south; the Nor’easter that dropped three feet of snow so the men had to dig the road out all the way down to the Valley before the ploughs could get up. Salt-laden gales hissing across the Bay, piercing the children’s clothes as they walked the two miles to school. Snow on the windowsills inside the house. How the Valley with its railroad and tea dances scorned the Mountain.

  I pictured a mountain like our mountains, grand and gleaming and remote, Mum and her people camped on the slopes like the nomadic herdsmen of Mongolia I had seen in a photograph at school. But when I asked if it was higher than our mountains, the mountain she lived on, she laughed and said the North Mountain was nothing but a hogback seventy miles long, a glorified doorstop between the Valley and the Bay.

  Then she’d be on to the West which was the future of Canada. The East was what you left behind if you had the spirit and gumption to get out.

  I pick up the photo again. On the brown paper backing is stamped: Edgar McKenzie, Photographer, Rocky Mountain House, Alberta. 26th June, 1935. Mum would have been twenty-four.

  I turn the photo over, study the young woman. ‘I was always good at arithmetic.’ Mum keeping the books. At the kitchen table, sharpening her pencil. Keeping the farm on the straight and narrow. Only so much Dad was allowed to lose before she’d shut down the latest scheme.

  It wasn’t that Dad was a bad farmer. He’d have a good idea, make money for a bit but then othe
r people would pile in, produce too much and the price would drop. Except for the ostriches. They never worked out. Cost too much to over-winter and besides, where was the market for ostrich meat?

  ‘Vancouver,’ Dad said.

  ‘It’s certainly not Edmonton.’

  ‘People in Vancouver, they like something exotic. Don’t they?’ He looked at me.

  I’d come back to make my amends, a couple of years sober. Mum caught my eye, shook her head. I never thought I’d be so happy to hear them bickering again. The mild, familiar skirmishes. The rock solid unit of them. Mum, always the voice of caution and sense. Except now there’s Mum shrieking, beating her head bloody. Mum with bottles everywhere. Mum with ten thousand dollars to leave me in a codicil to her will I’m pretty sure Dad knew nothing about until the day in the lawyer’s office.

  Chapter Fifty Five

  “WILL YOU TELL me what you know about Mum’s childhood? I don’t care if it’s stuff I already know.”

  “Of course.” He pushes back his half-eaten bowl of oatmeal. “She grew up on land that sloped down to the Bay of Fundy. They raised peas and beans for a cash crop. And apples that were shipped to England in barrels. Sold cream. Cut saw-logs in the winter. Her mother taught school before she married. She came from somewhere else, the mother.”

  “Do you know where?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t think Polly ever told me. If she did, I don’t remember.”

  “She had a stroke, right, that left her pretty much a vegetable?”

  “Yes. When Polly was eight. Frankie was three. The older sisters took over the housekeeping. Mostly there was enough to eat but I don’t think there was much love or kindness.”

  “When they were leaving home, going to work in a factory, Mum wanted to go with them.” I stop, look at Dad.

  After a moment he says, “They laughed at her, told her it was her turn now.”

  “She told me that too, in those exact words.” I take a breath. “Did she ever say anything that suggested her father ... that he sexually abused her?”

  Dad doesn’t look shocked or even surprised. “She never said anything explicitly, but after her mother died, which was a couple of years after her sisters left home, her aunt—her father’s sister—gave her money for the fare to Saint John. Because it wasn’t right for a young girl to be alone in a houseful of men.”

  “That’s what the aunt said?”

  “According to Polly. She had a powerful hatred for her father. ‘He thought he was God.’ I remember her saying that. ‘Everything and everyone was his to do what he wanted with.’”

  “The ... the head banging. At work there are clients ... It’s pretty much always connected ...”

  I can’t believe I’m having this conversation here, with Dad, about Mum.

  “He was a brutal man, I know that much.”

  “An alcoholic?”

  “I’d say so.”

  He’s thinking about something in particular. “What is it?”

  “A story I wish I’d never heard.”

  “Tell me.”

  “There are things you hear that you can’t forget.”

  “Please tell me.”

  He studies me for a moment. “Very well. She’d had a bit to drink when she told me this. When she was nine a neighbour’s child came over, little blonde pug-faced thing clutching two whole dollars which was a lot of money in those days. She wanted to buy a heifer calf. They were standing by the pen with the calves. ‘I’d like that one,’ the girl said, pointing to a pretty little creature with black speckles in the white blaze. Polly’s father picked up a mallet, walked up to the calf, hit it between the eyes. Killed it outright. Threw it on the manure pile. Little girl ran off crying.”

  “Why? Why did he do that?” I feel sick.

  “I don’t know. Polly said he didn’t like the girl wanting to buy one of his calves.”

  “Jesus.”

  “She only ever told me that story once.” He’s watching me.

  “Are there more?”

  “No.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Not much else to say, is there? Are you all right?”

  I can see a little blonde girl’s face, eyes widening. The shock. An older dark-haired girl watching.

  “More or less.”

  “I’ve never forgotten.” His voice is quiet.

  “No,” I say, “I don’t think I will either. But I did ask you to tell me.” Neither of us says anything for a bit. At last I ask, “How old was she when she got out of there?”

  “Sixteen. She didn’t go to Saint John, she went to Montreal. She’d heard there was more work in the factories there. She only had her grade six. Her father made her leave school when the sisters left home. Claimed there was too much to do in the house. Besides, he didn’t see the point of educating girls.”

  Dad’s levering himself up from his chair.

  “It doesn’t quite add up,” I say. “She’d have been what, eleven, twelve at the end of grade six. I suppose she could have been held back in school but I don’t think so.”

  He shakes his head. “She won prizes in arithmetic.”

  “The pencil box?”

  He nods.

  “So if she left home when her mother died and that was two years after the sisters left, she’d have been thirteen or fourteen, not sixteen.”

  “I never spotted that.”

  “That’s awfully young to be out on your own. How old was she when you first met her?”

  “It was 1934.”

  “So she was twenty-three?”

  “That’s about right.”

  “And she was the cook at the lumber camp?”

  “Yes.” He picks up the cane.

  “What did she do between leaving home and when you met?”

  “It’s time for my morning pipe.”

  Chapter Fifty Six

  “THE TEN YEARS before you and Mum met, what do you know about them?”

  “Very little. We mostly talked about our plans.”

  “You didn’t talk about the past at all?”

  He gazes blandly back at me. I already called him a coward. Am I going to call him a liar now?

  “The cane,” I say at last, “did she have that when you met?”

  “Yes.”

  I wait. Okay. Time to change the subject. “The money Mum left me. Did you know she was going to do that?”

  After a moment he shakes his head.

  “Dad, please don’t play games with me. I’m not that tightly wrapped right now.”

  After a moment he says, “I had no idea she had that kind of money. But then Polly was always secretive about money. When I found the bottles, realized how much she was drinking, I wanted to know where she got the money for that.” He shakes his head. “She flew into such a rage.”

  It’s as if his eyes have sunk back into his head. The bare rock ridge of his nose stands out, the grooves from nose to mouth scored deep.

  “You got between her and her booze.”

  The skin around his eyes looks bruised. My chest unfolds, soft white wings spreading. The swollen, aching tenderness I get at work. In meetings. “Oh Dad.”

  He shrugs. “I gave up asking. We never went hungry. The bills were paid. The farm books were kept up, that’s for sure. She knew to a nickel what I spent on fence wire.”

  The faint, familiar whiff of a well-aged resentment makes the love so strong it hurts.

  His eyes roam around the living room. Eventually they turn to me. “The will the lawyer read wasn’t the will he drew up the day Polly and I went in there together.”

  “Were you upset?”

  “Mm.”

  He’s got the deciding look.

  “I do want to know.”

  “You’ve learned a thing or two, that place you work.”

  “Tell me. Please.”

  “Very well. I don’t see how she could have saved up that much money over the years we were married. She did work part-time at the Cash and C
arry then at the Co-op and she was always thrifty but ...” He shrugs.

  “You mean she had some money before you met?”

  He nods. “The way we got our first quarter section. It wasn’t quite as simple as the story Polly always told. We were working for an old rancher. He had no money to pay us but he had land, that much was true. We had precious little money, or so I thought, but we could work. By God we worked for the old bastard. Each week he subtracted the wages we didn’t get from the amount we’d agreed the land was worth. Only the land was worth less and less as the thirties wore on. At least we didn’t go hungry. Part of the deal, we got a piglet each spring and we could plant up the vegetable garden, take half, he got the other half.

  “What we didn’t know was he’d borrowed money from the bank. Against the land we were supposedly buying. Foreclosure notice came. Old man was mad as hell. Only thing that gave him any comfort was the idea we’d be out our wages. Polly demanded to know how much he owed the bank. He told her it wasn’t any of her business but she kept after him. Finally he told her. It was a quarter the amount we’d agreed the land was worth. She told him we’d pay that amount plus ten dollars. He laughed at her. Raw-boned old bastard, laugh like a jackdaw. He told her we didn’t have a pot to piss in or else what were we doing working for him like dogs? She said he’d see the colour of our money in the bank where we could watch him pay off the mortgage. He kicked and hollered but in the end he sold us the land for forty dollars over the amount he owed the bank.

  “I don’t know where that money came from. We’d pooled everything we’d saved from the time in the lumber camp plus some I had from selling a claim I’d staked. I was sure it wasn’t enough but she said I was mistaken. I was so happy we were getting the land I didn’t think that much about it at the time. I spent every spare minute planning the house I was going to build us. A log cabin. I turned it around and around in my mind. Where the door should be. The window. We had the window already. Polly would split spruce shingles for the roof. I marked the trees I was going to fell. We went on working for the old man but now we were working for tools and equipment. Mostly it was the broken old stuff. Nobody ever threw anything away in those days. Christ, I collected bent nails, straightened them out.