The Wife Tree (9 page)

A dry wind has been blowing for days and the fallen leaves, which for weeks have lain splendid, moist and plastic beneath the trees, nearly alive, are now curled up in drifts and crunch like seashells beneath my feet. The sky presses down and sometimes there are black clouds boiling out of the West, but so far we’ve had no snow. Tonight, when I mounted the hill from the hospital, my heart, conditioned now to the slope, beat less frantically, my blood flowed less thickly than a month ago, the soles of my shoes taking the rise with ease. Arriving home, I found Harry Lang toiling outdoors, screening his Japanese maples and his rhododendrons within loose cages of rough burlap and wood stakes.

“Your yard looks like a refugee encampment, Harry,” I said.

Conte stopped me on the driveway.

“Lovely warm day, Morgan,” he said cheerfully. “Probably one of our last. Temperature’s supposed to drop fast tonight. You can feel it already. How are things at the hospital?”

“William is improving bit by bit,” I said. “We’ll get through this, Conte.”

“That’s the spirit, Morgan,” he said approvingly, and I marched bravely, mechanically up the driveway, rather like one of those stiff, robotic soldiers in William’s war documentaries, with their arms and penises on the rise.

I set the evening paper as usual beside William’s chair. A month’s issues now await him and I’m afraid that by the time he comes home, such a faulty tower of news will greet him that he’ll have another stroke just thinking about all the world’s weighty matters he must sort out.

Harry Lang knocked on my door before supper.

“I just wanted you to know, Morgan,” he said, standing with me in the narrow front hall, “I wanted to alert you to the frost warning for tonight. If there’s anything fragile in William’s garden, you may want to cover it up with a section of newspaper. You seem to have no shortage of it here,” he said, observing the stacks of newspapers with a mixture of curiosity and alarm.

“That’s good advice, Harry,” I answered, “but I don’t dare disturb William’s papers. They’re sacred to him. He’ll want to read every article, every word. He’ll be very upset when he comes home if he finds he’s missed any news.”

“How is he, Morgan?”

“They’ve moved him out of intensive care.”

“He’ll be coming home, then?”

“Very soon, I should think,” I lied.

“Conte and I have been talking about paying him a little visit.”

“I’ll let you know when he’s ready. Soon he’ll be like the old William you knew.”

Harry smiled. “That’s wonderful news, Morgan. We’ll have to have a homecoming for him, won’t we? In the meantime, are there any problems I can help with? Furnace okay? No taps leaking? Storm windows that need to go up before the snow flies?”

When I departed for the hospital this morning, I’d noticed Harry up on a ladder, washing his own windows, with Heather assisting from below, passing him cloths and a bottle of Windex. Seeing them together, I’d wondered: What would it be like never to have borne a child, so that you could still believe the love between a man and a woman is the greatest joy on this earth?

“Anything cumbersome needs to be carried out to the curb on garbage day?” Harry asked me.

“You shouldn’t be lifting heavy things, Harry.”

“I’m strong as an ox, Morgan,” he said, rapping his chest firmly with a fist, making a sound like a deep drum. “Retirement has recharged my batteries. I’ve never felt more alive. I’m getting my second wind.”

For a full month now, I’ve been living amid William’s populace of flower bulbs, knowing I daren’t touch them for fear of mixing up the various tribes. Tonight I stole a bit of free space on the table to set down my knife and fork. I began to pick up the little yellow labels William had brought home with the bulbs, each giving the recommended depth of planting, the height of growth, the moment of blooming, the names of the various cultivars. I read:
Queen of the Night. Miranda. Elegant Lady. Clara Brett. Princess Charmante. Madame Lefebvre. Stella. Jacqueline. Temple of Beauty. Naked Lady
. Had William, sorting his bulbs the day of the stroke, fingering their fleshy masses, their smooth white curves, imagined the women who inspired these names, pictured their pale thighs, their firm bellies?

I thought, then, of William’s anger in the hospital and before I could stop myself, I reached out my arm and swept all the naked ladies off the table. They bounced and rolled across the linoleum floor and into the far corners of the kitchen. Dear God! I thought. Now what have I done? William will murder me for this. Because all his ivory women were dashed together now, the bulbs no larger than my thumbnail tossed in among those as big as a hen’s egg, and I felt my heart thumping very hard. Then I remembered what Harry Lang had said about the frost and I knew I must bury the bulbs at once, before the earth froze and William came home and saw my handiwork.

I went out into the backyard, which is enclosed by hedges,
grown now the height of a man. Passing the Man and Wife Trees, the sackful of bulbs thrown over my shoulder, I smelled the sweet perfume of the Man Tree’s fallen apples as they softened in the long grass. William would be angry if he saw this, I thought, because the decaying apples are a blight on his healthy lawn. Since his retirement, William’s been as devoted to the yard and gardens as a man smitten by a new lover. Solemnly he sows his seed, his gestures tender, ardent, shaking with wonder.

I crossed the lawn beneath the branches of many trees randomly planted over the years by William. Because he grew up on the prairie — where the earth is flat or sometimes gently rolling, but everywhere bald and cruel, spare as bone, shelterless — William has all his life had a deep hunger for trees. But so many trees on such a small property have heaved the ground so that tonight I feared turning my old ankles in the lumpy grass or tripping on exposed roots twisting like snakes across the lawn.

“Too many trees, William,” I’ve warned him over the years. “Haven’t you noticed how their roots have ruptured the basement walls? The foundations of the house are crumbling.”

Tonight, I looked up and saw the Man Tree reaching into the sky. At the tips, his branches looked fragile, thin as wires. How would they survive the icy winds of winter? The fruitless Wife Tree, late to turn colour, had stood for many days at the absolute zenith of her glory, with nary a leaf lost, but the week’s winds had now stripped her branches. I looked down at her fallen leaves, layers and layers of them, like all the days of a life, cast there, one upon the other, without shape now or rhyme or reason.

I set the heavy sack of bulbs down and knelt in the cold grass. On my hands and knees before William’s flower beds, I stabbed at the soil with a trowel. Excavating two broad, shallow holes, I
threw the bulbs in willy-nilly, all the sizes and shapes tumbling together, and pushed the loose earth over top, the rich soil oily in my hands, its cold funky smell filling my nostrils. My old knees were shouting with pain by the time I concluded the burial and I thought for a moment that I wouldn’t be able to straighten them and get up. Moments later, just as I was turning toward the house, I heard weeping coming through the hedge, from a corner of the McTavish place.

“Vivien!” I called out. “Vivien, is that you?” But then I thought: What a fool you are, Morgan! If it’s Vivien, she can’t hear you. Then I wondered: How is it that Vivien has the voice to weep but not to speak? I turned my back on the grief and crept along to my own house, not wanting in my heart of hearts to know of anyone’s tears.

Half an hour later, sitting down with my baked potato and my shakers of salt and pepper, I paused suddenly with a forkful of hot white flesh halfway to my mouth, for outside I saw large, startling snowflakes falling through the sky. I went then to the calendar and saw that, in all my parade of Xs across the days, I’d forgotten about the change of seasons. Snow in November isn’t unheard of in these parts, but it’s also not common. What was the meaning of this early winter? With the soundless falling of the snow, the house was eerily silent, silent as William in his hospital bed, as though his aphasia had spread its tonguelessness, reaching across the city blocks to stifle these rooms.

I don’t care. No no no no no. I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care
.