The Wife Tree (5 page)

Softening the face cloth under the cold-water tap, I brought it to William. He pressed it to his eye.

“Is it helping?” I asked, but he only moaned and shuddered. Looking down at his ears, grown large as oak leaves, at his nose, transformed by drink so that it now resembles the blunt and homely root vegetables we once stored in the farm cold cellar, I thought: How ugly we become in our old age.

The pain must have subsided after that, because William stopped his complaining and at nine o’clock went back to his television profile of Adolf Hitler, sepia footage of German soldiers jerking like windup dolls across the screen. Why is William so obsessed with war documentaries? Do they make him long for the time when he was free of me, an ocean between us? Or do these programs simply feed his appetite for destruction?

I said good night and went up to my room, put on my flannel
nightgown and crawled into bed. I closed my eyes. Soon the fragrant autumn air sweeping in through the open window had me dreaming of a nocturnal flock of Canada geese soaring over the house, heading south with the cry, “Mor-gan! Mor-gan!” It was William, of course, calling from the foot of the stairs, waking me finally. “Morgan! Come down here!”

The radio clock read eleven. I got up quickly and just as, many years ago, I used to hurry upstairs when one of the children cried in the night for a glass of water or for the comfort of my cool hand on a feverish brow, so now, pulling on my housecoat, I hastened in the opposite direction to minister to William’s desires. And as I sleepily felt with the toe of my slipper for each step, I wondered at what moment William’s documentary had stirred his loins: was it the action of all those ejaculating and recoiling war canons? Or the sight of so many German soldiers performing their
Heil Hitler!
salutes, their stiff and rising arms inspiring William’s penis to ascend in sympathy?

What was to follow, I knew by heart. With his wounded hand, which is missing three fingers sheared off one day when he was cutting back the Wife Tree with a chainsaw that slipped, William would lift the hem of my nightie. I’d feel his desire against me, hard as a tree branch, then the thrusts of his thin pelvis against my buttocks. I’d hear his jagged breathing fill the room, feel his poor weak heart pounding tiredly against his ribs as our frail bodies moved together in an old luckless rhythm.

But it wasn’t to bed that William was calling me tonight. I saw a lamp still glowing in the living room and found him standing there in his striped flannel pyjamas.

“What is it, William?” I asked, tying the belt of my dressing gown.

“I want to knock a hole in this west wall.”

“A hole?”

“Put in a sliding door. What’s the use of having flower gardens, Morgan, if you can’t sit in your favourite chair and turn your head whenever you want, to see them blooming? A west exposure would give us the setting sun and every time I looked out, I’d know that I was facing Saskatchewan.”

It was the wall with the sofa along it and, above that, a great framed picture of Christ in purple robes, sitting on a boulder in the Garden of Gethsemane.

“But with that wall gone, William, where will we put this picture? And what about the furniture? There won’t be room for everything. My tables. I can’t get rid of my tables.”

He opened the cellar door.

“William, it’s eleven o’clock. Can’t we talk about this tomorrow?”

“I feel something, Morgan. I sense an urgency.”

He disappeared and a moment later returned, carrying lightly, in his hand, an axe, its blade glinting, its handle polished and dark as a tanned limb. At the sight of it, I turned pale, thinking he’d take pleasure in chopping off my head if I stood in his way. In his agitation, he seemed a young man again, and I saw from the free way he bore the axe and the excitement on his face that, for him, on the other side of the wall lay not our tidy wedge of grass, but full-blown prairie, yellow grains gracefully bending, a high peacock skybowl, eternal horizons. I was afraid that if I let him knock down that wall, there’d be no stopping him; he’d eventually bring them all down. He may have seen the opposition in my face, because he raised the axe above his shoulder, swung it like a young lumberjack and struck the wall just below the figure of Christ barefoot in the garden, trembling with thoughts of crucifixion.
The wall shivered. The picture fell from its hook and crashed to the floor, the glass shattering.

William looked surprised when he saw the hole he’d made. I thought at first it was because suddenly he felt the dry Saskatchewan wind sweeping into the room. Or because at last he’d succeeded in sundering the wall of our home. But it was neither of these.

“Jesus Christ!” he cried, and I thought he was speaking to the fallen Christ, slipped down now behind the sofa. But then he dropped the axe and I watched him sink to the floor.

“William!” I said, going down painfully on my old knees. “William!” But his eyes remained closed and I saw a side of his face drooping as though with a great and sudden disappointment in Life. I said to myself: You must do something.
Think
, Morgan.
Think
. Then I recalled William often saying, “You are no good, Morgan. You are no good in a crisis.”

I made the ascent today to Muriel Pelter’s neighbourhood, a development of long bungalows in grey stone, with curving walkways and rock gardens and sculptured shrubs laid out with a balance of shapes and colours to make the eye flow. The higher I climbed, the more clearly I could see the blue mirror of the reservoir, white clouds floating on its surface like dollops of whipped cream, and beyond it, rolling fields, barns and silos, grazing herds. They make
me laugh, these people who want a view of open countryside, imagining rural existence to be full of peace and harmony. What do they know of farm life? Give me the city any day!

“Did the doctors say the stroke was caused by a clot or by a hemorrhage?” asked Goodie Hodnet. She’d gone to the library to research strokes. “Did they say William had a thrombosis, or an embolism? It’s important to know these things, because it determines the treatment. Have they talked about doing a carotid endarterectomy? What exactly are they doing for him? You have to push to get him every treatment he deserves. If I were his wife, I’d be more aggressive.”

“I’ve never been very good at pushing.”

“Well, now’s the time to learn. Survival. Survival of the fittest. If I never learned anything else on the farm, I learned that. There’s no point in pretending your life won’t have to change, Morgan. You’re going to have to take charge of things now. Assume responsibility. The banking and the bill paying, for instance. Didn’t William do those? Who’s taking care of them now? Then there’s the property maintenance. What have you done about that? Who’s going to cut the grass? Who’s going to trim the hedges? You can’t prevail upon the neighbours to do it. You can’t expect people to tend to your needs. People haven’t got time to babysit you. You’re not at the top of their list of concerns. Have you had extra locks put on the doors? Remember: you’re defenceless now that you’re alone, Morgan.”

Goodie Hodnet’s husband died of heart failure. Muriel Pelter’s of lung failure. Anna Six’s of liver failure. Goodie, Muriel and Anna, happily stunned by their new freedom, say that losing a partner is like shedding a burdensome winter coat. That they’re content to be released from cooking three square meals a day, from the smell of a man on their bedsheets, from
Hockey Night in
Canada
, all the while enjoying their husbands’ pensions. But if this is so, why are they so bloated in widowhood? They eat and eat, expanding to fill the void created by the death of their spouses. They outgrow their waistbands, travel to a nearby city, pension cheques in hand, looking for suits in larger and larger sizes. An initiate, I linger these days at the fringe of their exclusive group. Until William dies, I won’t truly enter their ranks. But I wonder if I’ll ever have enough substance to join this society of powdered and lipsticked, church-attending, money-spending, dessert-baking two-hundred-pound women. Could my brittle, osteoarthritic bones support such a cargo of flesh?

Of the three women, I’m most intimidated by Goodie. I fear her fearlessness. A big, solid woman, she dresses always in browns, greens, russets, golds — the colours of the farm, of the earth — as though she hasn’t yet relinquished her ties with the soil. Weekly, she visits the town library, signing out volumes on history, politics, economics, the thicker and heavier the better.

“On the farm, I never had a minute to read,” she’s told us, and I suspect she must have been very glad the day she went out to the barn looking for her husband Noah and found him dead on his milking stool, slumped against the rough boards of a stall while a cow waited patiently for him to grab her soft dugs and pull. I’ve seen her marching to the library with her pounds of books, leaning into the wind with the same joyless, intrepid stride with which she must once have crossed the barnyard, weighed down in either hand with pails of chicken feed. A beast of burden, her legs grown thick to support the encumbrance of her broad hips and her steep farmwife’s bosom, her jaw thrust forward to meet adversity.

“That Goodie,” William used to say to me. “Now there’s a real woman. She would have made a great partner on a farm.”

“Women were never partners on farms, William,” I answered. “They were chattel.”

Goodie has just returned from attending
Hamlet
at the Stratford Festival. She drives down to Toronto to visit her daughter, with whom she’s attended plays, Broadway musicals, Handel’s
Messiah
. After she went to Mexico, she came over to describe it to William, because at bridge we’d cried, “Stop! Stop!” when she tried to tell us about the Mexican rain god, the Yucatán, Chichén Itzá.

Today, Goodie and I were partnered at bridge. Picking up the deck to deal a hand, I felt, as always, more alive than at any other time, enjoying the glazed finish of the cards, smooth as seashells in the hand, the
slap slap slap
as I shot them across the table, the dizzying spin of the powerful symbols: hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades. The royal family in heavy embroidered robes — the troubled king, the stoic queen, the self-absorbed prince with his golden rolled wig — seemed more mysterious than ever. I’m lucky at cards, luckier than in life. But I’m also clever at them. “It’s like you get a brain transplant when you pick up cards, Morgan,” William has conceded with grudging admiration. I know that cards are the currency of the elderly and that I’ll need this capital after William dies. A widow is only as valuable as the bridge hand she’s been dealt.

“Are you sure you don’t want to give up the bridge for a while?” Goodie asked me today. “It would be a rest for your eyes.”

“My eyes are fine. As long as I have good light, I can see the cards perfectly well.”

“There’s something else slowing you down, then. You seem to take forever to play a card.”

“I was the first of us to learn bridge,” I reminded her, wounded. “I taught all of you the game. I was once a champion player.”

“When was that?” asked Goodie. “Ten years ago? Ten years is a long time.”

The three of them glanced at each other. I saw face powder sifting like sand into the deep folds of their necks, lipstick bleeding in jagged red rivers from their lips. They stared at me, like smug fortune tellers, their fanned cards rising to hide their mouths. The afternoon was darkening. Around the room, table lamps suddenly clicked on, activated by a timer. Muriel’s flowery perfume filled the air.

Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. I got up abruptly, accidentally tipping the table as I rose. The cards slid sideways. Goodie’s eyes grew wide with alarm. Anna grabbed, too late, for a bowl of nuts, which tumbled to the floor. Hurrying down a back hall, I entered the bathroom, locked the door. A moment later, Muriel was tapping at it with her long lacquered fingernails, making a sound like brittle rain.

“Come out,” the three of them commanded together. I imagined them grouped on the other side of the door, their soft bodies pressed together in the narrow corridor.

“I couldn’t live without William,” I said through the door. “If William dies, I’ll die.”

“You won’t be permitted to die,” they told me. “You’ll have to go on living. There’s nothing special about you. You’ll have to get through it, just as we have. When William dies, you’ll become one of us.”