The Stone Angel

  Darkness has come, and now I realize that I do not really know where I am going. It is as though I am being led on, and for the moment I am content to follow my feet, certain they are taking me somewhere.

  Emerging out of the shadows just ahead of me is a small summer-house. Now I am gifted with sight like a prowling cat and find the darkness not complete after all. The hut seems to be made of logs, rough-hewn, and roofed jaggedly, perhaps with cedar shakes. Some sort of sanctuary, it appears to be. I can see a bench inside where I may rest. Then, about to enter, I catch a tick of movement from within, a momentary tremor slight as a sigh. I look and see a man sitting there. He has not seen me, for his head is lowered. In his hands he holds a carved stick or a cane, and he is twisting it round and round. His glance is fixed on the little groove his stick is making on the earth floor. Round and round it slowly twirls, always on the same place, making its mark, digging itself in.

  There are men here, in this place, then, as well as women. The man’s shoulders are very wide, and his hair has a kind of shagginess about it. Although his face is hidden, I can see he’s bearded. Oh—

  So familiar he is that I cannot move nor speak nor breathe. How has he come here, by what mystery? Or have I come to the place he went before? This is a strange place, surely, shadowed and luminous, the trees enfolding us like arms in the sheltering dark. If I speak to him, slowly, so as not to startle, will he turn to me with such a look of recognition that I hardly dare hope for it, and speak my name?

  And then he raises his head. I see his face. It is frail as a china teacup, white, the skin stretched thin across the unfamiliar features. His beard looks frayed and molting.

  I’m only in a summer-house in some large garden, I and this man, whoever he is. Stupid. Stupid. Thank God I didn’t speak. A bell sounds, not the mellow iron of the church bells I remember, but a piercing buzz, a shrill statement of command.

  The curfew,” the old man mutters, in a voice slow with rust and disuse. Time to go.”

  As he walks away, I hear Doris calling.

  “Mother—where are you?”

  She sounds alarmed. Idiot—what does she think I’ve done, flown away? A verse the children used to chant to the tune of The Prisoner’s Song—

  If I had the wings of an angel,

  Or even the wings of a crow,

  I would fly to the top of T. Eaton’s

  And spit on the people below.

  “I’m here. I’m here. Don’t shout so.”

  Running, she arrives. “Goodness, what a scare you gave us. We didn’t know—why, what’s the matter? You’re not crying, are you?”

  “Of course not. It’s nothing. I’d like to go home now, if you don’t mind. I’d just like to be taken home.”

  “Well, sure,” she says, as though it were a foregone conclusion. “That’s where we’re going. Come along.”

  She leads me to the car, and we drive back, back along the highway, back to Marvin and Doris’s house.

  Four

  DAYS AND DAYS we’ve spent, it seems, getting these X rays. Each time we have to wait and wait, down in the lower passages of the hospital, the bowels of the building, where there are no windows and the tubed ceiling lights are always on. We sit on hard straight chairs. Sometimes a worried-looking woman in a blue smock comes by with a trolley and thrusts a cup of lukewarm coffee into our hands. Doris peruses magazines, turning the pages rapidly, licking her fingers, flicking another page—lick, flick, lick, flick. She can’t sit still an instant, that woman. She’s like a flea. I am under the impression that I myself am sitting quite composedly on this uncomfortable chair until Doris turns to me with a faintly puckered forehead.

  “Try and sit quietly, Mother. The more you fidget, the longer a time it seems. Should be your turn soon.”

  “Which one is it today, Doris? Which X ray are they doing today?”

  “I told you, stomach. It’s stomach today.”

  “Oh yes.” But it doesn’t really matter. Stomach today, liver yesterday, kidneys the day before. Who would think a person had so many vital organs? It seems an impertinence to me, that these doctors should expose and peer at my giblets.

  “Mrs. Shipley next. Is Mrs. Shipley here, please?”

  We rise and follow the voice and the beckoning arm.

  “You stay here, Doris. Leave me be. I can manage perfectly well alone.”

  “No, I think I’d better—”

  Luckily the nurse comes out to speed us, grasps my elbow, steers me like a car, waves Doris politely back. Looking both disappointed and relieved, Doris picks up her magazine once more.

  What sort of dungeon is this, and what is happening? They’ve put me on the table, as before, but now the lights are out and I am falling, falling through darkness as one does only in dreams.

  “What’re you doing? What’s going on?”

  “Just relax, Mrs. Shipley. We’re only going to tilt you forward, you see, until you’re almost in a standing position.”

  “No, I don’t see. I don’t see at all. Why not ask me to stand up, then, if that’s what you want?”

  A subdued titter from the creamy-voiced nurse, and now my annoyance almost obliterates my apprehension. Isn’t she the saucy piece? She should try being tipped like a tea tray and see how she’d feel about it. You’d hear no snicker then. She’d likely shriek the place down, that’s the type she is.

  The mechanism stops. I haven’t fallen after all. The nurse puts something in my hand—a glass with a bent straw.

  “Drink as much as you feel you comfortably can.” A male voice, intent on reassurance.

  “What is it? What’s this stuff?”

  “Barium,” the unseen doctor says, a trace abruptly. “Drink up, Mrs. Shipley—we must get on with these.”

  Barium—someone has said something about it to me, I’m certain, but what? I sip. It’s thick and glutinous, like chalk and oil. I gag on it, and then I recall what the other doctor said. I force the stuff back down my throat. If only there were someone to speak with. Are they human, those around me, hidden in the dark?

  “My doctor—Doctor Tappen—no, no, I mean the other man, the one I go to now—he said this stuff would taste just like a milk shake.”

  I intend it only as a pleasantry, hoping they may speak, explain, say something. But I’ve bungled it. My voice, shakily complaining, falters and fades.

  “Is that so?” says the X-ray presence in a bored and abstract voice. Then, an impatient tapping out of words, “Drink a little more, please.”

  It goes through my head now that the pit of hell might be similar to this. It’s not the darkness of night, for eyes can become used to that. Another sort of darkness flourishes here—a darkness absolute, not the color black, which can be seen, but a total absence of light. That’s hell all right, and Rome is perfectly correct in that if nothing else.

  Red and green flecks appear and disappear, but even they are somehow not so much lights as illustrations in darkness. Momentarily they dazzle my eyes but illuminate nothing. There are voices, though, and these should mean that people are beside me, but I have the feeling that only the voices exist, only the vocal cords, the un-bodied mouths babbling and plotting somewhere in the middle of this vault’s dark air. The air is cool and stagnant, and I feel I have been kept in storage here too long, Perhaps when let I’m out, launched into wind and sun, I may disintegrate entirely, like the flowers found on ancient young Tutankhamen’s tomb, which crumbled when time flooded in through the broken door.

  I sip again and force myself to swallow. Again and again, until I start to retch.

  “I can’t—I can’t—”

  “Stop, then. Perhaps that’ll do for now.”

  “I’m going to be sick. Oh—”

  “Try to keep it down,” the X ray says, calm as Lucifer. “If you don’t you’ll have it all to take again. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

  My eyes stop watering and my constricted throat is eased by my fury.

  “Would
you?” I snap.

  “No. No, I wouldn’t.”

  “Well, why ask me if I would, then, for pity’s sake?”

  From the infinite gloom comes, unexpectedly, a sigh.

  “We’re only doing our best, Mrs. Shipley,” the doctor says.

  And then I see it’s true, and he’s a human, and overworked no doubt, and I’m difficult, and who’s to blame for any of it?

  “I only wish my stomach or whatever it is could be left alone,” I say, more to myself than to him. “I can’t see that it matters much what’s wrong with it. It’s been digesting for getting on a century. Maybe it’s tired—who’d wonder at it?”

  “I know,” he says. “Sometimes one feels that way.”

  So sudden is his gentleness that it accomplishes the opposite of what he intended and now I’m robbed even of endurance and can only lean here mutely, waiting for whatever they’ll perform upon me.

  I’ve waited like this, for things to get better or worse, many and many a time. I should be used to it. So many years I waited at the Shipley place—I’ve almost lost count of them. I didn’t even know what I was waiting for, except I felt something else must happen—this couldn’t be all. Work filled the time. I worked like a dray horse, thinking: At least nobody will ever be able to say I didn’t keep a clean house. I used to black the stove until it glowed like new-polished boots, and wipe the kitchen floor clean no matter how many times a day the mud or slush or dust, according to season, was tracked in upon it. There was never a smoked-up lamp chimney in my house, nor a saucepan left unscoured, nor a ring of grease on my skillet, nor a high-water mark on my boys’ arms. When Marvin was old enough to fill the woodbox in the kitchen, I trained him to pick up on his way out the chips and bits of bark that had dropped from his armload on the way in. He was a serious and plodding little boy, and seemed to take to chores naturally. But when he’d finished them, he’d hang around the kitchen, and everywhere I’d turn, there he’d be, getting under my feet, until it got on my nerves.

  “I’ve finished my chores,” he’d say. He was never much of a conversationalist, even as a child.

  “I can see you’ve finished. I’ve got eyes. Get along out now, Marvin, for heaven’s sake, before I trip over you. Go and see if your father needs any help.”

  “Did I fill the woodbox too full?”

  “No, no—it’ll do. It’s fine. Get moving, Marvin—how many times do I have to tell you?”

  “You never looked to see,” he’d say. “I brought them long pieces from the new woodpile.”

  “All right, I’m looking—there, will that do? Now, please, Marvin—I’ve got the dinner to get. And for pity’s sake say those pieces, not them.”

  As he got older, he was less underfoot, for he spent more time outside with Bram, and after he went to school I seemed to see very little of him except at summer and the hour he spent doing homework at the kitchen table while I sewed, and Bram, to improve his mind, read Eaton’s catalogue. But Marvin still at nightfall would often say, “I’ve finished my chores,” and stand there on the kitchen threshold until I’d have to tell him to come in and close the door against the wind in winter or the flies in summer.

  Most of the farmers in the district worked their fingers to the bones. Not Bram. Oh, he could work all right, and when he did, he worked like fury and would come in at supper time smelling of sweat and sun. But then the moment would come when he would recall the brown Wachakwa, the easeful grass on the sloping banks, and he’d be off, like Simple Simon, to fish for whales, maybe, in six inches of creek water.

  He managed usually to keep himself in line during harvest, when the threshing gang was there. They’d be half-breeds from the mountain, mostly, or drifters, and why he should have cared what they thought of him, I can’t imagine, but he did. In ten years he had changed, put away the laughter he once wore and replaced it with a shabbier garment. When the threshing gang was there, he used to boast about his place and what he planned to do with it. To hear him then, you’d think the great red barns would be rising, miraculous as Jesus from the tomb, before another year had passed. Toolsheds would blossom like field buttercups. Fences would shake their old shoulders and straighten of their own accord. Silos by the score would sprout like toadstools. The hawk-faced men, listening, would laugh their low laughter, grin their slow grins, and say, “Sure, sure.” Then they’d glance sideways out the window to the gray-bleached barn that settled a little more each year into the dung-soft loam, the henhouse surrounded by chicken wire that sagged bunchily like bloomers without elastic, the tip-tilted outhouse looking like a child’s parody of the leaning tower. That damned outhouse bothered me most of all. It always looked so foolish.

  The kitchen was huge, and the old woodstove was the size of a furnace. The table was covered with oilcloth that had once been blue-and-white checked, but Clara and then myself had scrubbed the pattern off. Nearby, the washbasin stood—they’d all wash in the same water, and never think of emptying it, and when I saw its gray soapy scum as I served the food, it took my appetite away. I’d pass the plates to them, serve them all before I ate myself, watch them wolf down fried potatoes and apple pie for breakfast, never letting on how I felt about it, Hagar Currie serving a bunch of breeds and ne’er-do-wells and Galicians. But when I’d listen to Bram spinning his cobwebs, then it would turn my stomach most of all, not what he said but that he made himself a laughingstock.

  That kitchen never had an indoor pump, although they weren’t so difficult to fix from the rain barrel. Never a sink, either. You’d think he could have managed one or the other, but no. After the harvest, I wouldn’t see hide nor hair of him for weeks. He’d be off duck-shooting on the marsh, or drinking red biddy with Charlie Bean in some shack on the wrong side of the tracks. They’d roar back together, the pair of them, singing, in the middle of the night.

  “Oh my darling Nelly Gray, they have taken you away—”

  They’d head for the barn, knowing they’d not get a welcome from me. I used to wonder who’d seen him in town and what he’d done. He couldn’t possibly have done all I imagined in lingering detail. Sometimes I heard and sometimes it was as bad as I’d fancied.

  “The Mountie gave Dad a warning,” Marvin told me once.

  “What for? What on earth for?”

  And Marvin, eight or nine then, with a nervous laugh imparted the news slowly, bit by bit.

  “He said he’d put Dad in the clink if ever he did it again.”

  “Did what, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Relieved hisself—that’s what the Mountie called it—against the steps of Currie’s Store.”

  How I lashed out at Bram that night, calling him everything under the sun.

  “Goddamn it,” he complained defensively. “It was late at night, Hagar, and no one was about.”

  “The steps of my father’s store—that was no accident. Who saw?”

  “How in hell should I know who saw? I never done it for an audience. Shut up about it, Hagar, can’t you? It’s over and done with. I’m sorry. There, is that enough?”

  “You think it fixes everything, to say you’re sorry. Well, it doesn’t.”

  “Judas priest, woman, what do you want me to do? Get down on my bended knees?”

  “I only want you to behave a little differently.”

  “Well, maybe I’d like you different, too.”

  “I don’t disgrace myself.”

  “No, by Christ, you’re respectable—I’ll give you that.”

  Twenty-four years, in all, were scoured away like sandbanks under the spate of our wrangle and bicker.

  Yet when he turned his hairy belly and his black-haired thighs toward me in the night, I would lie silent but waiting, and he could slither and swim like an eel in a pool of darkness. Sometimes, if there had been no argument between us in the day, he would say he was sorry, sorry to bother me, as though it were an affliction with him, something that set him apart, as his speech did, from educated people.

  Bram, lis
ten—

  I hear a click, and all at once I’m standing in a glare of light. I feel I must be naked, exposed to the core of my head. What is it? Where?

  “We’ve finished the X rays,” the doctor informs me. “You can go now.”

  And now I remember. I’m getting my stomach scrutinized, not my heart or soul. This doctor is a mild-looking man, not what I’d pictured at all. Doris is at the door, nodding earnestly as the nurse gives instructions.

  “Give her a laxative tonight. Barium’s apt to be constipating.”

  “When will we know about the—?”

  “We’ll send the results of the plates to Doctor Corby. He’ll let you know.”

  “Oh, thank you,” Doris says in a heartfelt voice, praying, no doubt, that the pictures of my interior will be riddled with evidence of some incurable disease, preferably contagious, and Doctor Corby will say—The nursing home, by all means, without delay.

  But when the doctor’s report comes, they are both so secretive about it, sneaky almost, looking at me with their eyelids lowered. Even Marvin, usually so down-to-earth, seems vague as vapor when he speaks.

  “He says you need professional care, Mother. He thinks the nursing home would be the best place for now.”

  “For now? What about later? Did he say I could come home later?”

  “No, he didn’t say that, exactly—”

  “What exactly did he say, Marvin? What’s wrong with me? What is it? What are you keeping from me?”

  He fetches himself a beer from the fridge and makes a long performance of pouring it. He’s such a slow thinker, Marvin. He never could make up an excuse on the spur of the moment, as John could. Finally he’s got it, and obviously believes it’s brilliant.

  “Well, there’s nothing exactly wrong, organically,” he says, pleased with this impressive word. “Doctor Corby just thinks you’d be better off with proper care and all.”