Swing Low (10 page)

Elvira, I believe, was the exclusive member of her own Order of Good Cheer, and from time to time I would tentatively enter its domain. A certain freedom of spirit accompanied her through life, and with it, I believe, a sense of security in the world. I don’t know if she was born with it or if she acquired it over the years. Her home was generally a happy and prosperous one, and her parents loved her very much. She has told me many times that she felt that love consistently and that she carried it with her like a talisman through life. But there was sadness too, of course. Of the thirteen children (she was the thirteenth) born to her parents, six died before the age of two years and were buried all in a row with small stone markers in a cemetery not far from her home. Her mother, a quiet and pious woman, had not been her father’s first choice, apparently, and had been stood up by him a few times before they eventually married, only because the woman he had really wanted to marry was forbidden by her brothers to have anything to do with him. He’d been a bit of a rascal in his youth, though a charming, irresistible one with a huge appetite for life and a generosity of spirit that became legendary in the town. Elvira’s mother, who had been pregnant for most of her married life, died of
high blood pressure when Elvira was fifteen years old. Elvira finished her grade twelve in Winnipeg, at a private Mennonite Bible college, where she was known as a rebel: funny, wild, and independent. Her school yearbook describes her as “a girl who drinks life to the lees!” She told me it was the loneliest year of her life. She was so unhappy that she intentionally avoided crossing bridges so she wouldn’t be tempted to throw herself into the river and drown. Afterwards, her older brothers encouraged her to attend Bible school for a year in Omaha (birthplace of Marlon Brando, incidentally).

M
R. TOEWS! IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT YOU STOP WRITING NOW! The nurse is angry. Why? Am I littering? Am I clamouring for attention? YOU’RE ACTING LIKE A CHILD! Well, it wasn’t my idea to glue Popsicle sticks to a doily, was it?

As a child I felt it was my responsibility to be someone who would not bring more pain to my parents. I thought I had the ability to control my father’s quiet sadness and my mother’s drinking by bringing no extra hardship whatsoever to their lives. That school photograph of our kindergarten class was taken when I was five years old, shortly after my brother was born. I have said that my hair was slicked into place with that most universal of well-meaning gestures,
a dab of my mother’s spit. It’s not true. My mother, that morning of the school photo, was sleeping late after a long night of drinking and crying, and my father, overwhelmed as usual, had left early for work. Before leaving he had left a bun with honey on a plate for me, and had laid out my favourite beige sweater with the horizontal stripes, the one seen in the photo, on the table beside the bun. I vaguely remember standing in front of the mirror and staring at myself for what seemed like hours, trying to muster up the courage to spit on my finger and rub it on my head.

I don’t recall having succeeded, but in the photo my hair is definitely slicked over to the side, and I imagine my teacher would have done it herself. I wonder what Elvira was doing that morning to prepare for the class photo. Chin-ups likely, considering how she seems to have muscled her way to the forefront of the shot.

I don’t remember my parents being especially happy, or if they were, for a fleeting moment here or there, I felt in my heart that it wouldn’t last, that it was unreliable, and I would become suspicious, wondering why it was there in the first place. My parent’s brief bouts of happiness always had a ring of doom to them, at least to me, and whenever they occurred, instead of revelling in them I would brace myself for the inevitable aftermath of gloom.

I have had feelings of deep joy in my life, feelings of contentment, and pride, but only twice, perhaps, in my life have I felt free. That is, free to enjoy the moment with nothing in my mind other than the feeling of being free.

The first time it happened, as I have mentioned earlier, was when, while experiencing the effects of ether, I imagined
myself to be somersaulting through the hospital walls. But because it was a drug-induced feeling, I tend to discount its validity. Therefore my one and only taste of absolute freedom, as I recall, occurred while skating with Elvira at the old school in Bristol, six miles southwest of Steinbach. This was the site of my first teaching job, after graduating from normal school. The Bristol school had two rooms, four grades in each. I taught the lower grades, from one to four. In the winter, I built a skating rink in the field next to the school, where my students and I spent many happy hours at play. While I was teaching in Bristol, I lived at home with my parents in Steinbach, and Elvira lived in Winnipeg, in the residence at Grace Hospital, where she was studying to become a nurse.

She and I were supposedly dating at this time, although, at least for me, the quality of our dates left much to be desired. Our “dates” consisted of attending the Wednesday-evening service together at the new Mennonite church on Beverley Street, in the city’s west end. Afterwards, I would walk her home to her dorm and then drive all the way to Steinbach in my father’s car, thinking of the clever things I should have said but didn’t. I was only nineteen years old and I longed for more contact with Elvira, but nurses’ training in those days was a gruelling, rigid program that allowed very little free time. Dating, especially, was discouraged because hospitals were not interested in training women to become nurses if, in the process, they were going to fall in love and get married. In those days, most married women did not work outside the home. Elvira has told me that while she was in training, she and all the other young
women had to report to their dorm mother when they required sanitary napkins. This way the natural cycle of each woman could be tracked and, during fertile days, their chores at the residence could be doubled in an effort to prevent them from leaving the hospital grounds on dates. Of course, if a woman required no sanitary napkins for any length of time, it was assumed that she was pregnant and she was immediately expelled from the program.

Occasionally, if she was very lucky, Elvira was allowed to leave the premises for a longer period than was required to attend a church service. On one of these occasions it was arranged that I would pick her up in the car that I had bought for my parents (but had to ask for permission to use) and bring her out to Bristol, where we would spend the evening skating together.

It was a night in February, I believe, and mild enough that she and I could hold hands without wearing gloves. There we were in the middle of nowhere, really, alone in a field, in the dark, gliding around and around and around, nineteen years old and so in love with each other. We could see the outline of the little school and the moon and the ice beneath us and each other and that was all. Our lives, in that moment, were perfect. I was a teacher, she would soon be a nurse, we would get married in the church we had attended all our lives, build a home, and have children.

But it was more than this and perhaps the opposite of it that contributed to my feeling of being free. I don’t know what it was exactly, if it was that I knew I would be leaving my parents’ home soon, or that I felt in that moment finally at home in the world, or if it was because I was in
between lives in a way, not a child under my parents’ control, not too much anyway, and not yet a father and husband but just somehow existing outside of everybody’s expectations. I sometimes wonder if at that moment somebody had come and tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I would be interested in walking away then, just walking off into the darkness alone, away from life as I knew it, with no plan whatsoever, what I would have said.

There was something about that feeling of absolute freedom that scared me and yet made me feel more alive than I’d ever felt before. I wonder if, later on in life, my rigid adherence to rules and conventional standards was a means of protecting myself from myself, from making sure I didn’t follow that little voice and walk away. Not because I didn’t love Elvira but because I also loved that feeling I had experienced on the ice.

Is it a self-destructive urge, I wonder, to want to walk away from everything you know and love, or not? Is depression in part a result of not feeling at home in this world, and blaming yourself for it? Is it similar to a battered woman’s belief that she is the cause of her own misery, that somehow she brought the abuse upon herself, and if only she were a better wife, it might stop? Does a depressed person say to himself, if only I were a better human being I wouldn’t feel depressed, or does he say, if only the world were a nicer place I might get out of bed?

Is depression nothing but anger turned inwards, as some say? Does it stem from a childhood loss? From a genetic propensity? From self-hatred? From an inability to be oneself? From having no purpose? From an inability to be free?
From a fear of freedom? From the desire to be free and confined at the same time? From choking on a peanut as a two-year-old?

Perhaps depression is caused by asking oneself too many unanswerable questions.

I recall an article I read yesterday in the
Free Press
re a young man’s interview with the police. He had left his room and stabbed a fellow in the parking lot of his apartment block. I don’t know why I did it, he told the cops. My head was so full of thoughts I couldn’t make sense of anything. The only thing I felt was lonely. One minute I was lying in my bed trying to imagine the feeling of being loved by wrapping my own arms around myself, like this, and the next I’ve stabbed a man. I think I think too much, he said.

I had never planned for this to happen. I want to scream but I fear I’d only end up scaring myself further.

I
dread my brother’s visits.
I am supposed to talk to him about myself. I’m afraid I’ll say something that will get me in trouble. This is a hospital, not a hotel, and E. is in the city resting. They say. Write. This is my brother’s hospital. The girls say I’ll be out very soon.