The Wife Tree (10 page)
Authors: Dorothy Speak
Tags: #Fiction, #Rural, #Sociology, #Social Science, #General
Merilee called this morning.
“Did you tell Morris I was getting divorced again?” she asked.
“I might have mentioned it,” I said cautiously.
“That was supposed to be a secret, Mother.”
“But, Merilee, you have so many secrets, I can’t keep track of them.”
“Well, he sent me a bible, Mother.”
“Oh, dear.”
“A huge edition. The cost of shipping alone —”
“He’ll get points in heaven for that. It was worth the postage. Which version is it?”
“I don’t know,” Merilee answered, exasperated. “What difference does it make? The point is, Mother —”
“How is Alan?” I interrupted.
“Alan?”
“The boy who answered the phone the last time I called.”
“Why do you call him a boy? He’s in his thirties.”
“It’s just that you seem to go for the younger men.”
“Is there anything wrong with that?”
“But, how is he?”
“I don’t know. He’s not living here any more. He started to get on my nerves. I asked him to move out.”
“Poor Alan…” I said.
Dear girls,
…My mother had a garden and sometimes asked me to help her with it. One hot summer day when I was on my hands and knees pulling up weeds between rows of beans, I heard her and Uncle Harper talking beyond a screen of delphinia. I saw Harper step close to my mother, nuzzle her ear. She pushed him away.
What’s the matter with you, Olympia? Harper asked, angry and frustrated.
I don’t feel like it today, she told him.
You
never
feel like it any more, he said. He’d come straight from the cemetery, shovel in hand, his fingers still black with graveyard soil.
I’m too weary, she told him.
Little wonder. Waiting hand and foot on that boy. You overdo it.
He’s helpless now.
You’re in love with him, aren’t you?
I love him, yes. He’s my son.
I said
in
love.
Don’t be stupid.
You play with him when you take him upstairs, don’t you? You diddle him.
My mother reached up and slapped Harper so hard across the face that he staggered backwards. Regaining his balance, he touched his cheek in disbelief. The afternoon turned suddenly so quiet it chilled me. Even the cicadas seemed to stop droning in the trees…
Dear girls,
…Did I tell you that, after I’d borne five children, I went to the parish priest, Father O’Casey, and asked his permission to obtain some kind of birth control from my doctor?
Birth control! he chided me. You know the pope has forbidden it. You should be ashamed of yourself, Morgan. God will decide how many children you’re to have and every one of them is a gift.
Three months later, learning of a new pregnancy, I stood at the kitchen window and cried because I could see no end to the number of babies I’d carry. Beside me on the floor stood a bucket of soapy water. In the living room you children had taken the chairs I’d moved out of the kitchen and you’d lined them up one behind the other to play “train.” My tears came flooding out like an unstoppable river and I couldn’t move to pick up the wash bucket. At
the end of the day, the kitchen floor was still encrusted with spilled milk and you hadn’t tired of playing conductor and engineer and when your father came home he couldn’t cross the living room because it was blocked by your locomotive. I cried for days, astonished and frightened by the bottomless well of despair within me, making no attempt to hide it.
You followed me around the house asking, What’s wrong? Why are you crying? Are you sick? Are you going to die?
I developed pneumonia near the end of term. The labour came early. The baby was born with fluid in his lungs. Three days later, Father O’Casey was reciting Psalm 50 over the infant’s body in the cemetery. Returning from the burial, your father said bitterly, Do you know what Father O’Casey said to me at the cemetery, Morgan? He said, Today you have a little saint in heaven. A little saint, Morgan! Hell of a lot of good that does us!
We didn’t look at each other. We rarely met each other’s eyes any more. We were like two blind sculptures, our sight worn down by the winds and rains of time. For days, I lay in the hospital, inert with grief.
I don’t understand what you want, Morgan, said your father, staring out the hospital window. I thought you’d be relieved that the baby died. Nine months ago you were crying because you didn’t want this child. And it was a boy, Morgan. A boy!
All through the pregnancy, he’d kept telling Morris, This one’s going to be a little brother for you, Morris.
Why are you telling him that, William? I’d asked. You’ve no way of knowing.
It’s a gut feeling, Morgan. I’m sure it’s a boy this time.
What is so special about sons, William? I asked in the hospital.
They don’t cry, Morgan, he said.
When I was discharged from the hospital, I noticed that Morris was often late getting home. Where is Morris? I asked you girls one evening.
Sometimes he goes to the cemetery after he’s finished the paper route, you told me. He visits the baby’s grave.
I put on my spring coat and walked across town. You remember there’s a small cemetery in the old district, at the northwest corner of Simplicity. A stone wall encloses it on three sides. Inside the wall, the ground climbs gently to form a knoll, with a groomed cedar on top, tall and slender as an obelisk. At the front of the cemetery stand impressive headstones bearing the names of the town’s founders. But it was toward the back, where the humbler graves lie and where there’s no stone wall and the cemetery just peters out and runs downhill into the railroad tracks and the yards of the town’s dark turn-of-the-century factories, that I found Morris seated on the damp ground.
Morris, what are you doing here? I asked him. He didn’t answer or look up. He would have been eight or so at the time. It was a fine breezy April day. Aren’t all the heartbreaking days always the most beautiful ones? I reached out, intending to touch him, then quickly withdrew my hand, fearing that my small store of energy would flow out of me and through Morris and down into the bones of the dead child. Morris, you mustn’t come here like this, I said. It’s not good for you. It will only
make you sadder. You have to forget about this baby boy. You’ve got to stay away from this place, do you hear me? I looked down at his bare neck and understood how imperfectly I’d loved him…
We’ve had a great slanting snowfall overnight and now the trees are dressed in heavy white robes, their branches, fattened with snow, etched against the peacock sky. This morning while I was getting dressed, I heard the sound of scraping and I looked out the kitchen window to see Harry Lang throwing snow, his new light aluminum shovel striking a soprano note on the drive in contrast to the bass tones of the old steel ones of days gone by. Still in my nightgown, I opened the front door and called out, “Take it slowly, Harry, your face is red as a tomato!”
He waved at me happily. “Just test the air, Morgan! It makes the lungs crackle!”
I thought of William looking out his hospital window and I wondered if the word
snow
was forming over and over in his head, with no way to get out, so that soon it would be banked, cold and deep, against his brain.
Up from the cellar, I brought my own thick-soled boots. Stepping into them, I pulled at the heavy zippers and shrugged into my Persian lamb coat. Over the years, its skins have become brittle and torn and hang now in strips inside the lining, like the hide of an old ravaged ewe. I went out into the cold, beautifully disguised streets. For days now, the city has seemed very dark without its coloured leaves and though I know that winter is the season
of death, I appreciated how much brighter the world had now become, with its cloak of snow. It cheered me to travel soundlessly along the deep sidewalks and to turn and see behind me a trail of solitary footprints, without William’s size ten shoe beside mine, as though I was now a lone explorer in an undiscovered land.
The blanket of snow reminded me of William’s body beneath his wintry sheet, which in recent weeks has shown fewer and fewer hills and valleys. He’s sleeping a great deal now and must surely be dreaming of the prairies, because his form has grown flat as Saskatchewan. When he tries to swallow, the food often streams out his nostrils and I wouldn’t be surprised someday to see it come gushing out his ears.
“Haven’t you noticed,” I’ve asked the nurses on Second East, “that William’s tray is practically untouched when you take it away? How many pounds has he lost?”
“We can’t tell you that today. We weigh the patients only once a week.”
“Which day will that be, then?”
“Next week, Mrs. Hazzard,” they keep promising. “We’ll weigh him next week.”
Today, with the snow sticky underfoot and clinging to my boots, only the sound of my desiccated lambskins crackling like Harry’s winter-filled lungs accompanied me on my way through the deep streets. Already I sensed the white lawns sinking like a fallen cake and I knew that soon the air would warm and last night’s snowfall would begin to drop in great slabs from the ballgowned trees and the streets would turn to slush and rivers of cold clear water would run in the gutters. It will go like this, week after week. A fickle winter. Snowfalls — light or heavy — followed by quick thaws because the climate in this part of the world has changed. We no longer have the blistering summers or the bitter winters of my memory. From now until
March, I’ll be able on any given day to walk across the exposed grass in our yard and look at the two mounds covering William’s flower bulbs, which lie beneath the soil, dangerously exposed to the cooling earth, shedding their friable skins.
Dear girls,
…At night when I roll over in my dreams, I hear my collection of epistles rustling in their folder like dry autumn leaves in the wind. Then I’m tricked into believing that snow hasn’t yet fallen and that autumn is still with us. But once, my tossing and turning so disturbed my store of letters that, awakened by their sighing, I was frightened into thinking it was the sound of my soul escaping. I do promise to fold up the letters soon and slip them into envelopes. I’ll affix rows of stamps bearing the cold profile of the young Queen Elizabeth and shoot them off across the oceans. I
will
send them, girls, as soon as I’ve collected the courage…
Dear girls,
…I was looking tonight at the picture of the Sacred Heart on my church calendar. There’s a tiny wooden cross engulfed in its flames and a thorn piercing the heart, which is red and fleshy as a piece of prairie beef. This Christ looks so much like the young effeminate men I see now in television comedies: their slenderness, their hairless
chests, their benign smiles. I recall the pictures of St. John with his head in Christ’s lap at the Last Supper and it makes me think: Despite all the Catholic Church’s rants against gay men, would it not be ironic if Christ — if he and those twelve apostles, if the whole pack of them — turned out to be homosexuals?…
Tonight when I arrived home I heard a chopping noise coming from behind the house. Going round to investigate, I saw a figure toiling in the far corner of the yard. The snow back there is now a foot deep. I made my way slowly across the lawn. My feet broke through a granular crust to the powdery accumulation beneath, which was soft and dry as soap flakes and insulated from the winter by the brittle surface skin. It wasn’t until I got closer that I recognized who it was.
“Conte!” I called. “Conte!” But he couldn’t hear me because the sharp blade of his axe was slicing into the belly of the Wife Tree. I felt a pain in my own gut as the metal struck the live wood. Just then, the tree began slowly to tilt. As it went over, it gathered momentum and came down with a crash, sending out a gentle wind and clouds of snow.
“Conte!” I repeated when the tree had stopped quivering from shock and come to rest. Against the snow, its black branches looked charred. I smelled the fruity perfume of the injured wood.
Conte, his arthritic joints all bundled up in brown wool, leapt with surprise at my voice and wheeled around to face me.
“Conte, what on earth are you doing?” Dismayed, I looked around at the meaty wood chips scattered like flesh across the snow.
“Morgan!” he said, catching his breath. “Morgan, William and I were supposed to cut down this tree together. Don’t you remember? Didn’t he tell you? It was to be this autumn. But he hasn’t
come home from the hospital, has he? So, finally, I decided to go ahead on my own. I wanted to do this for him. It’s one thing less he’ll have on his mind.”
Should I have told him that possibly William didn’t remember his neighbour any more or even know what an apple tree was?
“William wanted her down,” Conte said. “She wasn’t giving any more apples.”
“But she showed herself spectacularly this fall, Conte. Her leaves were brilliant as fireworks. She was still enjoying life. She was still strong.”
“No, Morgan.” He picked up a branch and showed me the termites, the powdery wood. “Look at the rot. She was hollow and crumbling inside.” He looked down at our feet, buried in snow, his expression full of regret. “I’ve left this job too long. You kept telling us, Morgan, that William was coming home. I pictured us cutting the tree down together.”
“I do think he’s coming home, Conte.”
“Vivien and I live in such terrible silence,” he confessed, shuddering with sorrow. “You’ve no idea how lonely that can be. It was such a relief and a pleasure for me to be able to come out here and talk to William.”
I thought about all these men in their old age, thirsting for the speech of other men, when at one time their wet dreams were full of the voices of women.
“William knew a little bit about everything,” said Conte. “He read so broadly. He could talk on just about any subject. I admired his mental sharpness. I don’t suppose he misses me at all.”
“Of course he does.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Morgan. Vivien’s a wonderful woman. But once you’ve lived with a deaf-mute, you come to realize that
the human voice is the most beautiful sound in the world.” He picked up the axe again, his face glistening with exertion.
