The Wife Tree (13 page)

But I hadn’t anticipated the crippling force of labour. When it came in the middle of the night, I cried out in surprise and dismay, because, doubled over with the contractions, I knew that I couldn’t possibly escape. My wails brought the nuns running. My door flew open and in the pale lamplight there was a swish of dark skirts. Hands came forward, received the baby. I saw a brief glimmer of slippery skin, that was all. The child was carried off into the dark corridors of the convent, passed impersonally by hands disciplined never to love anything physical, never to touch their own body, face, breasts, thighs with anything like pleasure or joy or acceptance. Then came the delivery of the afterbirth, one of the nursing sisters sponging and mopping. “You’ve made quite a ruckus, haven’t you?” she said. “Everyone’s awake now, in the middle of the night. I hope you’re satisfied. And you might have given us some warning. Look at the mess you’ve made.”

My father was summoned to fetch me. He said not a word
when I climbed into the buggy, but only tucked the wool blanket around my ankles, snapped the reins, clicked his tongue to get the horses moving. The wagon gave a jerk and we set off for home.

I’d never in my life felt worthy. I’d once heard my mother say, “Every new baby is just another mouth to feed.” Even when I sang, I understood that my voice — the only thing that lifted me up out of the ordinary — was a gift from God in which I’d no right to take pride, that it was not my property but the instrument of my mother and of the nuns at school and others who sent me, egoless, up onto soapboxes or church hall stages or into choir lofts to entertain strangers. On the journey home, my body, without its familiar weight of child, seemed worthless, such a poor and utterly hollow object that I prayed this feeling of emptiness would somehow kill me before we reached the farm. I kept thinking: before the next crossroad, before the next letter box, before another silo comes into view, surely I’ll be crushed to death by this burden of sorrow.

Billy Bond had gone away. Far from keeping the whole affair a secret, Lance had run him out of the county. I heard that Billy was living now on the east coast, working on an uncle’s fishing boat. I pictured him sitting on glassy waters, waiting patiently for the fishnets to fill up with the sea’s bounty, like a pregnant woman’s swelling belly, with plenty of time on his hands to think and to calculate the months and the timing of the baby’s birth and to understand that the child born in the convent was not his own.

Billy’s mother was struck blind the day Lance drove him off. The doctors said it was the trauma of losing her son that blinded her and that eventually her sight might return, but it never did.

Last night I had a dream in which I was running down a dark country road, pursued by a man. Though the farms sweeping away on either side of me were dormant, their fields blanketed with
winter snow, I could tell that this was the poor miserable broken countryside of my childhood with its rocky fruitless soil. On and on I ran, looking for our farmhouse, while the male figure behind me drew closer, the sweet smell of liquor on his breath. Clad in only a cotton dress and pinafore, I felt very cold. It was a great long time of running and searching before I recognized our own modest barn and silo and, with relief, turned up the lane. But the passage was unploughed and I began to trip and fall in the deep snow, getting up each time and struggling further, spurred on by the distant sight of my mother standing in a bright window. I was rapidly wearying because, though young, I had only my old senior’s heart to keep me going.

As I drew closer, I heard music coming from the house and realized it was my own voice singing “Girl of the Golden West.” In the window, my mother was youthful again in her sea blue party dress with the hem cut to look like the waves of the ocean. I fell once more. Only then did I realize that there was a great weight in my pocket pulling me down, and I thought: I must rid myself of these heavy potatoes so that I can get up and run on. But then I noticed that the pocket of my pinafore was soaked with blood. I reached in and drew out a hand amputated at the wrist. Then I knew, of course, that my pursuer was Lance. Struggling to my feet, I shouted,
There it is! Take it! I never wanted it anyway! I never wanted to even touch it!
and threw the hand as far as I could across the snowy field. But it wasn’t the hand that Lance wanted. He grabbed me by my long hair and pulled me to the ground. My mother, seeing him bear down on me, reached up and drew the curtains closed.

“Do you remember,” I said to William, because his silence has made me think that his mind is a blank slate on which I’m free to document the past, “do you remember when I came out west on a holiday to visit my sister Alfreda during the war?”

I reminded William that I’d travelled west on the train in a private compartment with four suitcases and three striped hat boxes at my feet. I read
The Lamp Is Heavy
, smoked one cigarette after another, drank lukewarm tea made with water straight from the tap. For a while, these comforts helped me to stave off feelings of gloom. But once the dense bottle-green forest of northern Ontario had slipped behind us, the sight of the prairie began to weigh down on me like a stone. Nothing Alfreda had said had prepared me for a landscape so unforgiving, so bereft of the rises and hollows we surely associate with the haven of our mothers’ bodies, the depressions and swells of breasts, belly, hips, collarbones, shoulders, small of the back.

The days passed and the train rocked and swayed and I thought that by now surely we’d crossed the earth. Finally, the sight of the flat, soulless country brought me to a realization: I was thirty years old and unmarried and destined to be a spinster. And understanding this, my breathing became so suppressed and my lungs so deprived of oxygen that I grew light-headed. My economical cabinet and everything in it — the efficient corner wash basin, the fold-down bed, the neat metal fittings, the rattling steel door — began to tip and whirl. I brought out my rosary, but even the brave sound of my own voice firing off a string of Hail Marys couldn’t dispel the panic I felt when I turned and saw the endless shimmering fields, the devastating horizon, the vacuous prairie sky.

At last we arrived. I put on my hat, big as a wagon wheel. Climbing down from the train in a velvet suit and green suede shoes, I was certain that my city look would cause a stir. But, glancing around in search of the station building, I saw that I stood on a wooden platform set alone in an empty wheat field.

An old farmer in overalls and a battered felt hat approached me. “You Morgan?” he asked gruffly. “Alfreda sent me to fetch you.” He threw my bags roughly onto a crude flatbed wagon and we jolted off across the prairie.

“Do you remember Alfreda’s children, William?” I asked. “All of them pigeon-toed and timid as sheep?”

Frances and Myrna, two daughters in boys’ trousers with faces broad and coarse as heifers. They covered their mouths with their dirty hands and giggled stupidly at everything I said. A son, Alfred, thin, solemn and blond, wouldn’t look at me when I arrived, but ran upstairs and hid under his bed covers. Finding the house in a state of filth and chaos, I set to work washing walls and curtains, fumigating the tick-filled mattresses, bathing the children, brushing the burrs out of their hair, mending their clothes, darning the holes in their socks, while Alfreda sat on the back stoop in a sliver of shade and read Yeats.

I found her intelligence daunting. But I was indebted to her. It was she who, by dipping into her meagre teacher’s savings, had sent money back east to cover my nursing tuition. Her generosity had enabled me to flee home when I was eighteen, in the early years of the Great Depression. Why such a gift? I didn’t know. Perhaps the day my grandmother hurtled to her death, the day Alfreda had thrust the rubber nipple into my mouth, she’d somehow intuited that I would need help to escape.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if the girls had dresses to put on?” I
interrupted her one day. She answered by reading to me from “Sailing to Byzantium,” while the children, who’d been listlessly drawing with twigs in the powdery earth at her feet, scattered in three directions, their hands clapped over their ears.

Alfreda’s husband, Seamus, was in boot camp in Regina, waiting to be posted overseas. She showed me a picture of him on her bureau, a tall, double-chinned, big-chested man leaning on an umbrella, wearing a bowler hat and a big self-mocking grin. I suspected she’d married him because she’d been in love with Yeats all her life, and, like Yeats, Seamus was a Dubliner. His picture told me he liked to act the buffoon and couldn’t take life seriously and I remembered that Alfreda had never been one for laughter.

“Do you remember the day I walked a mile along the dusty road to the store?” I asked William in the hospital. I described how, on the journey, to the left and the right of me the flat fields swept away to the brutal horizon. Not a house or a barn or a stick of forest in sight, and the land eerily silent except for the hissing of the dry brittle yellow grasses in the wind. The ground, for all it could produce, might as well, I thought, have been made of stone.

At last, terrorized by the deserted road and by the thumping of
my own heart, I came to the store. It was a crude eyesore of a building clad in tarpaper, with two wooden boxes in front overflowing with empty whisky bottles, shamelessly displayed for passersby to see. The store rose in ridiculous isolation, a preposterous risk, out of nowhere.

“You nearly fell over yourself getting round the counter to greet me, William,” I reminded him.

I put William’s zeal down to the fact that, in that godforsaken stretch of country, customers were thin on the ground.