Remembering the Bones (16 page)

H
aw! Haw!

The crow laughs. My sole companion on this journey. Though the dead are all around me.

Caw! Caw!

It bobs on the pine, is drawn to the tallest tree, hops to a short branch that is bare of needles. It fusses, hops higher and stills. It bobs its head again, makes a plaintive
Tchweet
and stares straight ahead. Does it see my rescuers?

I believe I’ve been sleeping. It’s useless to tell myself I need water. Think of Aunt Fred. The rubbing of hands turned to repeated washing—
Wash your hands, put on your nightgown; look not so pale!
Oh, it was a thorough waste, her obsession, all that water going down the drain. But it was a ritual she was compelled to act out. I sometimes wondered if it had to do with Uncle Fred holding their sons’ heads under the pump. Maybe Aunt Fred didn’t agree with the punishment but did not object strenuously enough. The pump water didn’t seem to do my cousins any harm. They turned out to be normal human
beings like anyone else. All retired now, shoe salesman, roofer, banker. Though now that I think of it, the fourth became a dowser, a water diviner, and suffers from ulcers. And so life goes on.

After Uncle Fred died, Aunt Fred began to return more frequently to Wilna Creek. Because Uncle Fred had worked for the railroad, she had a lifetime pass to ride the trains. Phil cautioned me that Aunt Fred’s doctor had advised the four sons to keep quiet about the handwashing. They’d been told that to bring attention to the ritual would cause it to get worse. When she visited, we were expected to keep a supply of soft towels and lotion at hand, to help prevent her skin from breaking down. The son who was the shoe salesman phoned Phil to pass on the advice. We did what we were told, ready to support. But Aunt Fred surprised me one day. She looked up from the sink where she was running cold water over her fingers—which had become stiff and red and raw. She turned off the tap and said sadly, “You know, Georgie, having to do all this handwashing is enough to make me weep. Maybe I did things badly and have to atone.”

She still liked to come at Christmas and Thanksgiving, but she arrived the day after each holiday, after she’d already celebrated with the families of her sons. Before Ally moved, we took turns picking her up at the station. “Dark meat arriving,” we told each other on the telephone. “Dark meat arriving on the train.”

I wish Aunt Fred were around now. I used to phone her every couple of weeks and listen while she talked about her sons and their wives. When the conversation slowed, she said, “Well, that’s it. That’s all there is to report. Nothing much.” She did tell me on the phone that Uncle Fred’s spirit sometimes came
to sit on the edge of their bed. She could see the depression in the blankets and feel the mattress sink under his weight. At the moment of his death, she told me, they had held hands, ring fingers touching. His last words were, “Do you see, Freddie? Over there.” She turned to look but saw nothing except the dresser pushed against the wall. When she turned back, the tempestuous love of her life was gone.

My entire body is stiff, no matter how much I try to move. I’d like to have Grand Dan’s shawl, fringeless or not. I could pull it over my head and that would help. I’d feel safe, comforted. My rescuers would find me wrapped in a black shroud. But there is little comfort here. I’ll be swallowed by the root and no one will ever know I’ve been in the ravine. Branches will send out shoots from my limbs, foliage will spring from my bones.

Why do I think of the kitten that died for its trouble after crawling out of the creek? Everything seems sad. The universe is not in order. There must be something I can laugh at. I’m damaged, hard-pressed to conjure, too weak to envisage laughter. Can’t swallow the image right now.

Nonetheless, laughter is necessary to our species. It keeps us alive longer, or so I’ve been told.

Knock, knock. Who’s there?

It’s the Happy Gang!

Well, come on in!

How naive we were. A separate radio world existed in another, separate time. Thank heavens for the CBC. And there was
Fibber McGee and Molly.
Uncle Fred enjoyed that program, and so did Mr. Holmes.

Sometimes it’s difficult to find people to laugh with, and that is the truth. Ally and I still laugh, even though it’s over the
phone. She’s had her own gallery in Boca Raton for twenty-five years and says she’ll never retire. She calls the gallery Snow.

“You wouldn’t believe how many Canadians are down here, George. They don’t admit it, but they miss winter. They drift through the door in December and January and February and clean the place out. My paintings make them long for home. I can’t keep up.” Yes, Ally and I laugh, though she lives far away. “There’s still a place for you at the villa,” she told me. “The groundwork has been laid. Even security is looked after. Last summer, Trick installed an alarm system that is fail-safe. We hired a cleaning woman, too, so you won’t have to scrub floors.” She paused. “But it will still be your job to set the table.”

Yes, we do laugh. And she’s become more modern than I. She sends e-mail messages to Case. How I wish Ally were here now, to drag me up. We’d laugh and weep in each other’s arms. And then she would put a cellphone to her ear and dial 911.

I wonder if it’s midday. I hear the long call of a bird, followed by
ptew, ptew, ptew
, as if it were spitting something out. Something distasteful that’s stuck in its craw. Or maybe it’s uttering a bad-bird oath. I’m somewhere in Elizabeth’s kingdom, bird. Fly away and bring back help. This bruised and battered slug is on its journey—and that’s about as far as self-pity will reach. I’ve survived eighty years—I might or might not be eighty; my birthday might or might not have come and gone. I am not planning to make my exit in a gully. And I stink.

Well, I’m the only one here, and the stink has happened without my compliance. I’ve already suffered the discomfort, the indignity of wetting myself. But what else am I to do?

“
Lazarus did stinketh
,” Ally and I read to each other.

One childhood summer when we were visiting Aunt and Uncle Fred, our uncle chanted:

Wherever you may be

Let your wind blow free.

Aunt Fred looked over her shoulder from the kitchen counter and said, in her nasal voice, “Don’t ask him for the last two lines. And forget everything he tells you, before you go home.”

She and Uncle Fred laughed, “Haw Haw.” But Ally and I wanted to know. Was it something taboo? Anything to do with taboos set us off. We did not have to be told which subjects were forbidden. “
Verboten
,” Uncle Fred said with a mock-frown. It was not proper to speak of one’s bodily functions in our house, but such conversations were acceptable in his. I already knew that what I read in Grandfather’s books about what happened inside our bodies had no connection with real family life. Outside, we pressed our cousins to tell us the end of the rhyme, but they’d been warned to keep quiet.

Well I stink now, and that’s all there is to it.

Phil once told me that complete strangers approach her to report their bowel habits. I did not believe this until I picked her up one day at the Haven and drove her to the mall. It was a hot summer day and we were in the parking lot and she was pushing her walker towards the entrance when a man stopped us and asked her, not me, the location of the nearest washroom. “I’m a visitor here,” he said. “My wife is in the car and has to go number two.” He shrugged at Phil as if they had an understanding, and added, “When you gotta go, you gotta go.”

I thought we could do without the details, but Phil took the request in stride and pointed to the end of the mall. She
was used to this. “Give anyone of my generation two minutes, and you’ll hear news of their bowels,” she said. “Your generation, too, for that matter.” But in keeping with her Edwardian upbringing, her own intestinal news is private.

I’ve made progress again, crow, in case you haven’t noticed. But my chest feels dense and dangerous. I’m beginning to understand the pain that Harry lived through—died through. Sometimes I think he wanted to punish me because it was he who was dying and not I. But that is another story.

Did Lazarus learn anything after his second chance, or did he not? Learning is changed behaviour, but how shall we ever know? Have I learned anything over the decades—or do I keep treading the same pathways, pulling the covers over my head when the going gets tough?

I must not dwell on my sorry state while I’m waiting.

Waiting for what? Waiting for whom?

For Harry to step forward and draw the pillow?

For Godot?

They sat on the stage, those tramps. But went nowhere. Still, I laughed. At times in that play, I did laugh. And kept my eye on the other theatre-goers, to ensure that they weren’t letting our Case down because of her choice of play.

At the Queen’s Lunch there will be smiles and laughter all around. Do the washrooms in the palace have taps of gold? I’ll never know. Nor will I know what wines Lilibet chose for our birthday, or if lunch was served on solid silver plates, or how tender was the beef. It was my desire to sit at one of the tables where, early in the day, footmen climb up and wear special slippers to polish the tabletop in preparation for the guests, removing every last mote of dust.

Or perhaps there are circular tables, with celebrants divided into equal groups. I’ll have caused a shortage, an uneven number. Was this reported to the Queen? Did Philip lean over Lilibet’s shoulder and quietly make a remark about the missing person?

Not knowing how missing I am.

T
here was a long period in my life when I did not laugh, could not laugh. When laughter finally did come, it had all the markings of sorrow.

Harry began to talk about death several months before his illness became apparent. Leaves swirled in the air behind him as he stood at the back door and told me he’d dreamed of a clock bursting into flames. He looked away. “It was a dream of elation,” he said. “I felt elation from flames devouring the clock. It was the energy of all that burning.” He stared up at our own kitchen clock as if expecting smoke to pour out of it while we looked on.

He might have been telling me that his pain had begun. Was I listening? Was Case? She hadn’t lived at home for a good many years then, and was not around to see the daily signs.

Harry made a move to find a doctor. His previous physician had died, and he’d had no checkup for years. He had an aversion to the medical profession, and who could blame him? There was a new clinic in town—at the end of the north
mall—and one Saturday after we shopped for groceries, he drove home by a circuitous route and diverted into the mall, pretending it was on our way. He got out of the car and walked towards the clinic while I waited. He appeared to be reading signs. When he returned, he wrote something on a piece of paper. I asked if he was looking for a tattoo parlour, and he told me to mind my business. I was joking, but that’s the way things were between us after the clock dream. That’s the way things were if the subject had anything to do with Harry’s pain. Elation was not a factor.

The name Harry wrote down was Dr. Harcourt Rhea. He didn’t trust initials, was old-fashioned enough not to want a woman doctor. When he booked an appointment and went for a checkup—I did not learn this until later—he did not report his symptoms. The new doctor told him he was fine. A month later, Harry collapsed to his knees on the kitchen floor. I called the ambulance and met Dr. Rhea in Emergency. We shook hands and he said, “If only he had described his symptoms earlier, Mrs. Witley. The history is everything, everything. He should have told me.” He referred Harry to a surgeon, Dr. Labrie, who operated the same day.

Harry had a complete bowel occlusion, cancer of the colon. When I asked him later why he hadn’t reported his symptoms, he said, “If Harcourt Rhea is as good as the certificates on his wall say he is, he should have been able to figure it out for himself.”

Several weeks after surgery, Harry was called to the surgeon’s office for a follow-up appointment. He asked if I would accompany him, a surprise to me, because he’d been secretive at every stage. I thought he might be too weak to drive, so I got behind the wheel and drove him down the hill.

It was the first week of December, and snow had been falling all week. The storm was over, but the temperature had dropped to thirty-below, a still, cold day. The sky looked as if someone in need of hope had erased a thin line of cloud to allow a slit for the sun. There were shoppers in town; the landscape was white; loops of garlands decorated lampposts along Main Street. I had shovelled a layer of snow from the driveway in the morning—the snowplow had done the heavy work—and as I leaned into the handle of the shovel, I thought: With what ease do we do such things in this land. Throw on a jacket, twine a scarf around the neck, stride through below-zero temperatures as if we’ve done so all our lives. And we have. We’ve learned to tighten an extra button, to be more careful of foot. But we get outside no matter how old we are and, if we’re able, we shovel snow. No wonder Ally creates nothing but winter in her art. Whiteness is engraved like permanent hoarfrost in our brains.

Because of the slit in the clouds, long rays of sun began to pour through just as Harry and I approached the medical building. I felt encouraged for the first time in weeks. I manoeuvred the car around a massive hill of snow that had been plowed to the edge of the parking lot, and drove down a ramp to find a space underground. I did not want to park outside because I was concerned that Harry might lose his balance. When I turned off the engine, he looked at me as if the two of us were facing a moment of truth. He told me that Dr. Labrie wanted to discuss the results of tests and biopsies, including a biopsy of the liver. He was to be given his prognosis.

Harry was wearing his thick coat, but he had lost weight and the shoulders and sleeves were too big for him. He held a cane in one hand; I had bought it for him while he was still in hospital. We took the elevator to the third floor and, when his name
was called, he surprised me again by asking me to accompany him to the inner office. “To hear the verdict,” he said. That’s what he called it: the verdict.

When we entered, Labrie was standing by the window and staring out at the hill of snow. He was a man of Harry’s height but younger, in his fifties. Slender hands, reddish-brown hair, a jaw designed to store weariness. I knew the look. I also knew that if Ally were to draw this picture, she would prop a skull and crossbones behind him, on top of the snow. The slope of the snowbank would be shaped like a question mark.

Labrie’s lips moved in a grimace and I thought of my father, Mr. Holmes. We shook hands and he gestured towards two chairs set close together.

“I’m here to get a clean bill of health,” Harry said, and sat down. He tried to smile.

Labrie did not return the smile. The results were on papers spread before him. He was sorry not to have better news. If only one lobe of the liver were affected, he might be able to operate and remove it, he said. In Harry’s case, the entire liver was cancerous. Unable to stop myself, I recited silently,
lobus Spigelii.
I hadn’t thought of the anatomy of the liver for years, and was astonished at how memory could surprise me when it was least welcome.

Both lungs were also affected. Harry did not ask to see the chest X-rays, though they were blatantly displayed on the wall cabinet, lit from behind. Instead, as if compelled to act a part in a B movie in which he’d been given a role, he blurted out, “How long do I have?”

Labrie looked more pained than Harry. “It’s difficult to predict,” he said. “Three months, maybe four. I’m sorry.” He wrote a prescription for pain and handed it across the desk.

I kept my tears inside. I watched my Harry, the man who had rounded the hood of a car to bring me flowers. I watched my once lean and healthy husband push himself up off the armrests to a standing position. He shoved the prescription deep into his pocket, shifted his weight to the cane and waited until his thinner, weaker self rebalanced. He extended his right hand and wished Labrie the best of the season. He thanked him, and I thought,
He’s thanking him for news of his impending death.

If only social conventions would break down. I’d have preferred to see Harry run amok, shout in anger, throw himself into the snowbank outside. He saved that for later. In Labrie’s office, he bowed slightly and turned to leave. I wanted to hold his hand tightly, never let go, but he needed his hand for the cane. The other, he kept rigid at his side.

When we reached the elevator, he leaned, straightened, and shuffled. For a moment, I had an alarming flashback to the hotel in Syracuse, when his body weight had collapsed against me. This time, the motion was side to side, a dance, a soft-shoe. More of a rocking motion than a dance, but a soft-shoe nonetheless, performed with the help of his cane.

He smiled his old smile and I was deceived into thinking the moment would last. I reached for his arm when we were back in the basement, but he pulled away and walked ahead of me, aiming for the car. The legs that had danced on the third floor no longer supported him. This time, they buckled. It happened so quickly, we were both taken by surprise. But instead of falling to concrete, Harry took a short run—counting on momentum—and landed with his upper body slumped over the hood. He lay sprawled there, his head turned in my direction, his cheek resting against cold metal. He was smiling
to himself and I knew it was because he hadn’t needed me. He pushed himself up and held me back. With his cane stumping before him, he managed four or five Charlie Chaplin steps and inched along the side of the car. He opened the door and fell into the passenger seat. His entire body was shaking.

I wish the day had ended there. But Harry wanted his prescription filled, and insisted on stopping at the pharmacy.

“Let me drop you off at home first,” I said. “It won’t take me a moment to come back down the hill.”

But it had to be done that minute. He barked, “Pull over, park here, stop, oh stop the damned car. Go and get the pills and tell them to hurry up.”

I had to talk to myself to control my fury.
He has a right to be angry, Georgie. Twenty minutes ago he was advised that the medical world has run out of solutions. You’d be angry, too.

He glared through the windshield when I returned with his pills.

Compassion
, I told myself.
Exercise restraint. Harry is going to die. This is not a contest of wills.

When I started the car again, he shouted, “Where do you think you’re going? Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“Turn left, dammit, it’s faster this way.”

“I always go home this way.”

His voice broke. “Why are you doing this to me?” And then he gave up. “Drive any way you want. I don’t have the strength to fight you.”

To fight me.

I kept hearing,
Why are you doing this to me?
The words had come out as a sob. It was the capitulation that frightened me. Even though he was fighting himself, the capitulation let
me know that we were locked in. The two of us cried, silently, all the way up the hill. When we reached home, Harry went upstairs.

That was the way things were after our visit to Dr. Labrie. Each of us entrenched in separate miseries.