Dropped Threads 2 (2 page)

End Notes

Losing Paul:
                   A Memoir

Jane Urquhart

That summer evening, the phone was not working—probably a bad connection, interference from someone operating machinery in the village or perhaps a distant August storm. I remember that the receiver seemed to melt in my hand as he told me the job in Toronto was not working out, that he was going out with some friends for a beer, that he would begin the 150-kilometre drive home in an hour or so. It would be longer than that, I knew, because this had happened before, the beer or two with his friends after a disappointment. Not often, but enough times that I knew what to expect. At best, he wouldn’t be home until after midnight. Still, something about the difficulty of hearing his voice, something about the way I had to ask him to repeat what he was saying, caused the anger I might have felt to be replaced by a twitch of fear.

The sense that the phone was melting in my hand—that’s what I remember most. That and the fact that I was wearing green shorts and a tank top because it was so hot, and my bare feet were absorbing the relative coolness of my grandmother’s linoleum floor.

We had been living in my grandmother’s empty house in an Ontario village ever since our return from Nova Scotia a month before because we had no money to live anywhere else. The art college he had attended in the East had arranged this Toronto job that was not working out, a job in a fine arts print studio where he hoped to use his skills as a lithographer. But the studio in question seemed to believe he was there to work free, as an apprentice or an intern. By the time he made the call on that August evening, we were so poor that we had been living for three days on raspberries, which, despite neglect, continued to flourish in my grandmother’s abandoned garden.

I had described to him the profusion of this garden in its prime: snapdragons, hollyhocks, gladioli and sunflowers on the one side, tidy rows of beans, carrots, potatoes and peas on the other. He had been impressed—especially by the news of vegetables—as we were both pretty tired of the raspberries. Fortunately, I had relatives in and around the village who had been feeding us fairly regularly since we’d come back from the East. Also fortunately, we were young, bound to each other in the twin-like, telepathic intimacy that only the young seem able to muster, and not overly frightened about what might come next because we were fairly certain something would. He managed, until that evening, to have a job, and I would likely get one soon.

During the five or six years I had known him, he had acquired a variety of skills, and although we were young when we’d met he already had a repertoire of talents that greatly impressed me. He knew how to cook and how to darn socks, for instance (two activities I had not yet mastered), and he knew how to carry out certain tasks I associated with a far-gone time: how to saddle and bridle a horse, how to bank up a coal furnace, how to dye clothing in bright colours to make them seem new again. He could make a split-rail fence and boil down maple syrup in the woods, roast chestnuts and make Dutch pea soup. We were young, but we’d been married for almost five years, and there had been other periods of scarcity we had emerged from unscathed: the time he had miraculously been taken on as a repair person in a shop full of Swiss violin makers, for example, because he could tell from the shape of a musical instrument how it would sound. Or the time out East when I had miraculously been hired as assistant to the information officer for the Royal Canadian Navy, despite the fact that I had spent the previous three years enthusiastically and publicly objecting to military activities and should not have passed the security test. We had a car and, for the time being, a roof. We had the relatives and the raspberries and a credit card that we were using only for the gas he needed to drive back and forth to Toronto. It was summer, and our life together so far, much of it spent as students, had led us to believe that nothing really begins until September. “Drive carefully,” I said before I put down the phone. Those were the last words I ever spoke to him.

My grandmother’s house was in many ways a testimonial to absent men. In the active part of her life, my grandmother had risen every morning at five-thirty to make breakfast for six sons, one husband and one hired hand. She had two daughters as well—one of them was my mother—but in the stories I told myself about my grandmother’s labours, the daughters were never part of the collective that she cooked for. In my imagination, and very likely in reality, they were often at her side peeling potatoes or stirring the porridge or removing warm, aromatic bread from the oven of the wood stove that still dominated the kitchen, where I had been talking on the phone. They were placing cutlery and dishes on the table and waiting for the men and the boys to come through the door after completing a series of masculine outdoor chores.

The boys grew up eventually, stopped coming through the door, went off to wars or city jobs or farms of their own. Two of them had died. My grandfather and the hired man had died as well, the former from a heart attack while pitching hay in the barn, the latter following an accident involving a horse. My grandmother was not a woman given to cleaning up after death, and as a result the house was crammed with male paraphernalia. Shaving brushes and suspenders and important papers stuffed into cubbyholes of the rolltop desk. Air force and army uniforms in the closets. Marbles and comics and model planes in the drawers of pine dressers. Books about mechanical engineering and animal husbandry on various shelves. Baseball cards. A pile of
Farmer’s Almanacs
from the forties and fifties. Election campaign buttons. And lots of practical clothes: workboots, jackets and rain gear. Even the hired man’s plaid shirts remained in his trunk in the storeroom. And my grandfather’s clothes were still in the room where we had chosen to sleep. It had been startling at first to see my young husband’s jeans hanging on a hook beside my dead grandfather’s overalls, but after a few days I had become used to the sight.

By eleven o’clock, I was fairly convinced that this was going to be a night when he didn’t come home until very late, or very early, as the case might be. I had passed the time since the phone call in a number of ways. I was reading
The Diviners
by Margaret Laurence, and that had distracted me for a while. I was also working on a quilt that my grandmother had left unfinished, adding by hand appliquéd images from her life—the red brick church, the farmhouse, one of her dogs—to what was otherwise a standard Dresden plate design. That night I began to work on an apple tree: a pedestal of dark brown surmounted by a green cloud-like shape decorated with bright red apples. My grandmother had left the quilt unfinished when she moved into a small privately run nursing home, when she could no longer cope with the house. I would be leaving both the quilt and
The Diviners
unfinished for quite another reason. Both the book and the sewing would bring the long summer night, and my waiting through it, back to my memory so vividly that I would simply not be able to face either the apple tree or Morag’s tortuous development as a writer.

At three o’clock in the morning, I found myself standing by the window in the storeroom, looking out into the dark night toward the end of the village where, from that vantage point, the by-now very intermittent lights of the cars on the main road could be seen. I was playing a game that I had played in the past when I waited for him at night in places where I had a view of the road. The sixth set of lights would be his, I would guess, and then I would begin counting. At this hour, the counting would take a long time, as often thirty minutes would pass before anything at all would appear. Then, quite unexpectedly, two or three vehicles would move by in rapid succession. These were most often trucks making mysterious journeys to towns and villages farther north. In the stillness of the night, I could hear them gearing down as they descended the hill near where some of my relatives lived. Each time I heard the sixth vehicle gear down, I would experience extreme disappointment, as if my young husband knew he was supposed to be the sixth set of lights and had decided deliberately to disappoint me. How could you let me down like this? I remember whispering into the window glass. Then I would remember the phone call, how I hadn’t been able to hear what he was saying, and the twitch of fear would return.

The storeroom was filled with fascinating things. As well as the dead hired man’s trunk, there were boxes of old Christmas cards, birth and death announcements, letters of condolence, some hatboxes filled with hats my grandmother had worn at one time or another to the same red brick church I had sewn onto her unfinished quilt. There were several other cardboard boxes that held such items as embroidered christening gowns and crocheted baby bonnets and one long, flat box that contained my grandmother’s wedding gown, still beautiful but slightly yellowed by time. Often during my childhood, I had dressed up in this gown while the relatives had discussed important, adult things in the kitchen below. There I sat, gorgeously attired, sorting through the many buttons and buckles contained in an old cookie tin, hoping to find a diamond ring nobody else knew about. Of course this never happened, though at the bottom of the tin I once discovered a rhinestone clasp that my grandmother said was used to decorate a shoe.

I thought about these things now and then as I waited for another set of lights. I also thought about the mud pies I made years before in the woodshed with an earthen floor that was directly below the storeroom. Eventually I decided that I should lie down, that if I went to sleep I might be wakened by the sound of his footsteps on the stairs.

I did lie down, but I didn’t go to sleep. The only thing that changed was that instead of waiting for car lights I was now waiting for footsteps. The heat was still intense. It was four-thirty in the morning.

It had never occurred to me that I would be a twenty-four-year-old widow, though by the time the policeman arrived at first light I knew exactly what he was going to say to me. The bedroom in which we slept—my grandmother and grandfather’s bedroom—was a long, low room under the eaves and had two small windows placed in opposite walls, almost at floor level. Because the house was situated on the bend and was slightly elevated, we could see the road moving off in two directions from these windows. I remember lying on my grandmother’s bed, still in my green shorts and tank top, watching with a pounding heart as the police car slowly approached the house. When it passed by the driveway without turning in, I experienced a huge wave of relief. Short-lived, however, because I could see through the opposite window that the police car had stopped and was executing a U-turn halfway down the village street. Then, very slowly, it whispered back toward me, making the approach to my grandmother’s front door.