The Age of Water Lilies (25 page)

What should she do about it? It looked so peaceful there in its hidden shelter behind the logs. A few strands of seaweed were caught on the skull.

She did nothing. She walked through the cemetery, thinking if she saw a caretaker, she would tell him. But what if he thought she was to blame somehow. Her brothers told ghost stories about people who dug up bodies and fished out their livers and suppose she was accused of having done this very thing? Her parents would be so angry. She couldn't imagine the punishment if they believed she had done such a thing. Returning to the beach, she collected some large pieces of bark and arranged them over the skeleton like blankets.

For a week she told no one. She had trouble sleeping. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the skeleton. She dreamed one night that it called to her, saying it wanted its liver back, just like the story her brothers told in the dark. But there had been no insides when she found it, she knew that; just the perfect arch of its rib cage and the helpless hands hanging from the arms. She visited it in its hidden place, lifting aside some of the bark so she could make sure it was still there. In a moment of bravery, she reached down and touched the fingers. They were smooth and cool. She liked the feel of them in her own fingers. She touched the ribs. Once they had cradled a heart, two lungs, all the business of digesting. A child who had died before it had even gone to school—she was convinced of this because when she scrambled down into the hollow where it was and lay next to it in the sand, she was taller than it would have been when alive.

“Dad, I found a skeleton on the beach. I'm kind of worried about what to do about it. I think it might be one of the bodies that washed out to sea.”

Tessa's father looked up, startled, from the magazine he was reading in a lawn chair in the backyard. A bottle of cold beer stood on an overturned bucket beside him. “A skeleton, Tessa? Are you sure? And what do you mean, the bodies that washed out to sea?”

“Don't you remember telling me about a storm? Your dad told you about it? When the creeks flooded out part of the cemetery and some of the graves washed out to Ross Bay?”

She was anxiously wringing her hands. Her father saw dark hollows under his daughter's eyes and wondered why he hadn't noticed them before. He rose from his chair and found his sandals from where he'd let them drop from his feet in a moment of uncharacteristic summer abandon.

“Yes, but that was a long time ago, Tessa. 1909, I believe. You'd better show me this skeleton.”

They walked in silence down to the beach at Ross Bay just below the cemetery. Tessa removed the little cairn of bark she had placed over the skeleton. Her father looked at it briefly and then hugged her.

“Have you been worried about this for long, sweetie?”

She confessed that she'd found the skeleton a week earlier and hadn't known what to do about it. She told him she'd looked for a caretaker but worried she might be accused of digging up a body.

“You did the right thing to tell me, but you needn't have worried about this being something from the cemetery. Because, well, it's a seal.”

“A seal, Dad? A
seal
?”

“I can see why you might have thought it was a human body. It's a very good skeleton—all the parts are intact. See the long bones here that end in what look like hands? Those are the flippers, but there are even fingers, aren't there? Think of the shape of the mammal sort of hidden in the outer trappings of a fish. And look how beautiful the rib cage is, like a boat. It's a neat thing to have found, Tessa, and I'm quite relieved it's not a human skeleton. I had visions of us calling the police and there being an investigation and . . . well, let's just say I'm relieved.”

“I think we should bury it, Dad. I don't want it to break up in the tide and that's what would happen, wouldn't it?”

“Probably. The sea takes care of all that very well, I think. Other animals feed on a dead one and the water and salt scour the bones. But yeah, we can bury it. The sand is a good final resting place for it, I suppose. You wait here and I'll go home for a shovel.”

Tessa sat in the sunshine, beside the seal, waiting for her father to return. Now that she knew it was not a body from the cemetery, she felt free to touch it and to examine the way the joints were held together, to wiggle a tooth in the skull, to hold the strange hand in her own. When her father came down the stairs from the breakwater with the garden shovel, she had picked out a place as far from the low-tide mark as possible. She had laced two pieces of driftwood together with seaweed to make a cross, ready to plant when they had dug the hole, laid the skeleton in carefully, then covered it with fine dry sand.

“We should say something, Dad. What do they say at funerals? Are there proper words?”

Tessa's father looked at her tenderly. “You have a good heart, Tess. Yes, there are proper words. I remember some of them from my father's funeral. Let me think for a moment. Well, it's probably not right to use something like this for a seal, but it does seem fitting:

Therefore will we not fear, though the earth be moved,

and though the hills be carried into the midst of the sea;

Though the waters thereof rage and swell,

and though the mountains shake at the tempest of the same.

And there, we can say goodbye and go home for something cold to drink, as is usual after a funeral, Tessa.”

And so they did. Her father promised her he would say nothing about the skeleton to her brothers. She knew they would make fun of her, laughing about her conviction that she had found the remains of a child on the beach, and they would tell all the neighbourhood kids. She wanted it to be private, something between her father and herself.

PART THREE

Hecuba

TWENTY-FOUR

1962

Using a plant book of her father's, Tessa drew the Atlas cedar onto her map, then the pines, with a little gathering of crows in the high branches. A cork elm in the southwestern corner. The stones themselves were more difficult. But she resolved this to some degree by taking a little notepad to the cemetery and sketching the stones from life (if it could be put that way). Then she carefully cut out around the drawings and pasted the images into their approximate locations on the map. Some of them were difficult to draw. The angel at Charles Edward Pooley's grave, for instance. It was so elegant that she worked for a long time to get it as right as she could—which was not good enough. Several with doves were easier. And the Rithet mausoleum was fun. Mick, a good artist, taught her to use perspective; two lines coming to a point could show a road heading towards the horizon and angled lines could make a building appear less flat. So she drew the mausoleum's arch and stonework, shading and erasing until it was as real as she could manage. She wished she could have indicated every grave, but there wouldn't have been enough room on her paper so she selected the ones she felt closest to. Baby Campbell's chair and booties. Mr. Spencer's tall grey obelisk where she could hear the water and which also gave her the opportunity to sketch in part of the West Creek flowing underground, something she did by drawing wavy blue lines that, her legend explained, represented hidden water.

She worked for some time to make faint shadowy figures, those whose graves had washed away in the storm of 1909. Some of them she lightly sketched under the sea, as though swimming. And she paid attention to another grave Miss Oakden visited, with a woman's name on it, and a long inscription:

I lay myself on these wounds

As though upon a true rock;

They shall be my resting place.

Upon them will I soar in faith

And therefore contented and happily sing
.

She wrote the passage into her notebook, and wondered at it. It sounded like music, maybe a hymn that would be sung in church. Tessa hated church. Mostly her family didn't go, but sometimes they had to and it was hard not to laugh when the old people sang in their shaky voices. This inscription was on a tall stone of the deep red granite, polished like glass, with little flecks of silver in it. Bluebells grew around it, the same colour as the sky. She supposed if you lived long enough, as many people you'd known all your life would be buried as not. And she knew what good company the dead could be. She sat and made a daisy wreath for her hair, right by the grave of Baby Green. But instead of putting it onto her head, she left it draped over the small footplate commemorating that baby who had no first name.

The cemetery was a cool place to while away summer afternoons when she was not needed by Miss Oakden or her mother was unable to walk with the children over to Gonzales beach. The grass, kept clipped and raked, was lovely to stretch out on, under a favourite tree—maybe the cork-bark elm down near where Memorial Crescent met Dallas Road. She could hear the sea just a few yards away. The crows were busy in the canopy, squabbling and muttering. Smaller birds nested in the hedging, and she watched them dart in and out with worms or insects to unseen young. She had taken to carrying a little notebook everywhere in order to record details that might be needed on her map. The nest sites, for example. The location of the perfect snakeskin she found shed on some rocks near the Helmcken mausoleum, its eye sockets intact. She had not wanted to touch it but sketched it so she could remember it exactly as it lay draped over the rocks like an empty ghost. And she sketched the seal skeleton too, from memory—its hands open to the sky.

On the evenings when there wasn't Little League, most of the neighbourhood children gathered at Bushby Park for a game of scrub. Teams were chosen by the two captains, usually Mick and David Grey, a boy from Joseph Street; positions were assigned—Tessa was almost always a fielder. It was exciting at first to hover in the outfield with her glove, one Teddy had outgrown, and wait for someone to hit a ball in her direction. Once she surprised herself and everyone else by catching a fly. Mostly she chased balls like the other fielders, to the end of the park, across Bushby Street, into yards, fishing among flowers and shrubs while the runner loped around the bases and her own team groaned at her slowness. The one time she played shortstop, someone hit a line drive directly into her face. Her lip immediately swelled up to about four times its size; her mother was called and came running with ice. There was quite a lot of blood from both her nose and her mouth where her inner lip had been cut by her teeth, but luckily that was the extent of the damage. The swelling took five days to go down, and she kept to herself during that period, working on her map and resisting the call of the children in the park in the evening, their voices dreamlike in the falling light.

She drew in the monumental works, on stilts at the back, with stones leaning on one another in the yard. She had been looking at other maps, several she'd brought home from the library, and liked how some of the mapmakers worked in the details of cities and buildings. The librarian spread out a map showing a bird's-eye view of Victoria, seen from the water. There were boats and lots of open areas that she knew had been covered with houses by now (the map was created in 1889). She loved how it made the city seem so real; it inspired her to make the important buildings on her map as close to real as she could. After working hard to get a house just right, she would put a face in a window, a door slightly open with a bloom leaning against it. And after thinking about it for a day or two, she drew Miss Oakden kneeling before the stone with the Latin word for horse, a basket of rosebuds beside her.

One day Miss Oakden asked her to help weed a border. At first the woman stayed close to show her which were weeds and which were garden plants, either mature ones or seedlings self-sown from the robust perennials. Tessa caught on quickly and soon worked on her own. It was satisfying to clear out the buttercup runners and dandelions and see the clumps of columbine, asters, and delphiniums with the clear dark soil between them. The earth was full of worms, which Miss Oakden told her were necessary for soil health. Their tunnels aerated the soil and their castings (a nice word for poo) fertilized it. Tessa was fascinated to think of all this activity right underfoot where you couldn't tell it was going on. It reminded her of the streams passing under May Street and under the cemetery, anxious for the sea, no one knowing they were even there. Except for her. And a handful of others, she conceded.

•  •  •

That day, after weeding, when she was drinking her lemonade, she mentioned a ball game and something Tommy Gurack had said. Miss Oakden looked interested.

“I knew his great-grandfather,” the woman commented. “He was a very nice man who helped me a lot in the job I had during the war. The Great War, Tessa, not the one that came after.”

“What kind of job, Miss Oakden?”

“I designed tiles, the kind you see around fireplaces in old houses, or even in bathrooms—if you go into mine, you will see a panel that is my work. And Tommy Gurack's great-grandfather was a master at glazes. He knew how to make such rich beautiful colours. And he was a brave man, Tessa. He came to Canada alone, sending money back to Hungary for his family. He went back to Hungary for a time but then returned, with his wife. His daughter—she is Tommy's grandmother—came later, after losing her husband in the 1956 uprising, to live with her married daughter, already in Canada.”

“She was at his birthday party, the one who lost her husband. She told us to eat the candles, and I didn't know it was a joke so I did. The boys all thought it was hilarious; my brothers still tease me. But the Guracks have no father. Did he die too?”

“I believe he simply left, Tessa. And as for the candles—these misunderstandings happen. She never would have intended to embarrass you. She made wonderful pastries, I remember, with poppy seeds and sweet butter. Mr. Nagy—that was his name—died, possibly from accumulating poisons from the glazes, though no one knew of the dangers then. It's a household that has seen its share of hardship. Mr. Nagy was an artist, though. He made beautiful pottery himself as well as working in a commercial enterprise.”