Remembering the Bones

  The library in town couldn’t keep me supplied with books. I read novels, history, philosophy, attempts at proofs for the existence of God. How easily I remember those younger years, but with no age attached. It’s strange how I don’t think of myself as old, even staring at my face in the mirror.

  I volunteered as a shelver for years, so that I could be first in line for the new books. That meant finding books for Case, too, when she was a child. “Bring me lots, Momma,” she said. She directed, even then. Once she knew how to read, she went through as many books as I.

  But what was it that Tolstoy understood? What was so simple? Did he know something the rest of us don’t? He slept with serf women, had an illegitimate child—maybe more than one. An unacknowledged son had to drive him around in a carriage on his estate. How fair was that? Tolstoy ran away when he was older than I am, in his eighties. He must have been ready to die. Maybe he’d had it—with his wife and his life.

  Well I’m not ready to die, not yet, nosirree. I’ll be around as long as my bones hold me up.

  Why, then, do I feel as if everything is out of control? If I take my last breath in this ravine, I hope Case won’t choose one of those ready-made verses supplied by the Wilna Creek Times—footprints in the sand, soughing breezes, that sort of thing. She has imagination, she can create something original; she works in the theatre, after all. Her own theatre. The first and only live theatre in Wilna Creek. She bought the old Belle movie house, got rid of the pigeons, tore out the insides and rebuilt. That was before Harry died. Oh, she’s efficient, our Case. But does she ever pause to look around? I don’t ask. She’s too busy getting things done. Still, she has a vision; the theatre is hers, every board and nail.

  Harry and I went to the opening. People came from all over the County, and every ticket was sold. Case had us sit third row centre, best seats in the house, she said. Next to me, on my right, a man whipped out a tape measure from his pocket and measured the distance from his kneecap to the seat-back in the row ahead. He had high, bony knees and I thought patella, patella. He looked at me as if to challenge, but I refused comment. He was a stranger, from away. I did not tell him it was our daughter’s big night, that Harry and I were the parents of the new owner of the Belle. I did not say aloud, as I might have, that bringing a tape measure to a theatre was a picky thing to do.

  The play Case had chosen was Waiting for Godot, a play I still haven’t read. A pair of tramps sat on a chair under a tree most of the evening and scarcely moved. I wondered about her choice for the opening, but the actors did make me laugh. Those two, Gogo and Didi, whatever their names were, waited and waited and then a new day started and nothing had happened since the night before and they’d gone nowhere. When it was over, I had a strange feeling of understanding and not understanding. The self-appointed theatre critic wrote a grand review in the paper the next day.

  But while I was watching, my mind drifted, and I thought about how my Case and Lilibet’s Charles had come so far and had adult lives of their own. Born the same year, their lives as complex as any. I thought, well, Case has studied and tried different things and had one partner and that didn’t work, and she left him, and then she met Rice whom she loves, and now she owns her own theatre and here we are at the opening. And Charles had a marriage that didn’t work and he has a new partner too. A new-old partner. And I thought, Well, Lilibet, maybe everything really does come out in the wash.

  Sometimes I find myself thinking about child-Case right along with adult-Case, and I wonder if Lilibet does the same when she thinks of her four. Here we are, all these years later, standing back and watching our grown children have their lives—through ordinary times, through heartbreak and anguish. But even after horrible events—Diana’s death was one of them—we are sometimes blessed with a moment of unexpected joy. We learn to grasp, to hold tightly to these moments for the short time they exist.

  Seeing Case at the grand opening of her theatre was one of those moments. Her smile could not be erased. Her black hair shone. And after the clapping had ceased and everyone had taken their bows, she had the spotlight come up on Harry and me in the audience, and asked us to stand while she thanked us for our support. When everyone filed out, including the patella man, Harry and I sat back down in our seats, and held hands, and were quiet.

  I don’t for a minute believe that Case understands the way I see her present against her past. I once tried to explain, but maybe I didn’t explain very well. For me, it’s impossible to think of one without the other. Child. Adult. Adult-child, a contradiction in terms. But Case moves too quickly to get into discussions of this nature. She solves problems, chooses plays, directs. She doesn’t want to humour a mother who can look inside her past—the last thing that interests her right now. But it will, it will. For now, she is part of the theatre. I love the language she uses; I love the way she takes for granted the sense of belonging in her own arts world. It’s a little family unto itself.

  Maybe she’ll choose haunting flute music to drift over my coffin. Or a stirring elegy. Or jazz with a beat trickily played. Like Django, who plunks and vibrates “I’ll Never Smile Again” with his scarred and charred fingers until you think one elongated note will break your heart. Except that it doesn’t. At the end, you feel mellow and uplifted. Or after hearing him strum “New York City,” you want to stop what you’re doing and run all the way to New York as fast as you can, on the tips of your toes.

  Case and Rice are childless. When they first met, perhaps they made a decision to stay that way. It wasn’t discussed with me, but it’s a decision I silently mourned. Maybe they mourned, too. There are things Case doesn’t share with me, nor I with her. It’s understood that there will be no one to follow. She will impart what she knows through her theatre, her art.

  She told me one night that she had fallen in love with Rice’s mind. I love him too, but that’s because he loves my daughter, and because of his music. Case finds ways of putting him and his jazz guitar on stage, or has him play for receptions, or during intermission between acts. He’s easygoing, does his own gigs around the County, especially during summer and fall.

  It was Rice who told me about Lully—another awful death—though I should stop contemplating death while lying on my back beside a half-dead tree. Lully was a composer in the French court of Louis the something, hundreds of years ago. He used a sharp-ended wooden pointer to conduct and banged it in rhythm against the floorboards. But he became excited and struck his own toe, and ended up dying of gangrene. Lully could have been saved, Rice said, but he was obstinate, he refused to have his toe amputated. Rice sipped his tea. We were in my kitchen, talking about death the way people do. Rice calmly raised and lowered his fist as if he were banging Lully’s stick and conducting Lully’s musicians. It made me think of my old teacher, Miss Grinfeld, banging her wooden pointer, but I didn’t interrupt. They’d heard my Grinfeld stories—or Case had—countless times. And Miss Grinfeld had never hit her own foot or contemplated gangrene.

  Rice told me about Webern that night, too. Webern stepped outside onto an Austrian balcony to smoke a cigar in the dark and was shot three times by an American soldier. I thought of Uncle Fred, from Austria; I thought of my father, who died the same year as Webern, 1945, before Case and Rice were born. But the composer’s was a quick death, a sudden one, and my father’s was not.

  If only I could laugh. Stop thinking about death. Keep my thoughts from multiplying. I can’t seem to hold back this endless supply. Thinking of Diana’s crash didn’t help.

  I want to drag myself again, but I’ll be in danger if I move. Somehow, I know this. Disequilibrium. I felt it when I suffered from vertigo for an entire week last summer. On the third day, Case drove up the hill to see me, her take-charge self exasperated at my self-diagnosis. I was sure the cause was an inner-ear infection, but she disagreed. “Come on, Mother,” she said. “I’m taking you to the doctor—and please don’t argue.” She drove me to my doctor’s office and, when we arrived, I cra
wled on my hands and knees from the reception desk all the way down the hall to the examining room. Case looked away; she hadn’t anticipated this. “If you can’t walk, crawl,” I told her. “If you can’t crawl, slide on your bum.”

  The doctor said I had an inner-ear disturbance caused by a virus; there was nothing to do but wait it out. Case drove me home again and I had the grace not to say I told you so. She helped me into the house and said, “Please, please, do what the doctor told you.”

  The next day, I stood in the shower and tried to shampoo my hair. I’d been told not to shower because of the danger of falling. I tipped my head back to rinse, and my arms flailed out to save me. I shouted into the air and went down as if I’d been thrown. I stayed on the wet tiles until I was rinsed, crawled out on my hands and knees, yanked at a towel and dried myself while I was still down. I stayed there another half hour, and did not tell Case about the fall. When I stood, I wrapped a towel around my hair and turned my turbaned self to the mirror. I grabbed the edge of the sink, only to see that my shoulders had humped when I wasn’t looking.

  Like Phil’s shoulders.

  Can these belong to me? I asked.

  My thighs were already bruised, and looked like hams.

  Can this body be mine? This face? My expression was Phil’s in an earlier decade. And yet, I felt thirty-five inside, maybe forty. I could not see the face of someone in her eighth decade.

  Maybe Case will start looking like me someday. Maybe we all turn into our mothers if we live long enough.

  I’m trying to be positive. Think of native women, pioneer women who slept out in the open, close to where I’m lying now. In cold and sleet, with or without shelter. Bitten by insects, frightened of howling wolves.

  But they didn’t have broken bones.

  They might have. You don’t know that.

  The shoulder. Scapula! What a splendid boost is memory.

  During all the years I studied the makeup of the human skeleton, I told myself that if Grandfather Danforth had returned from the war, he’d have been pleased to know that his youngest granddaughter had memorized the bones. That she missed his presence and would have loved him fiercely, if only he’d been around to meet her. She might even have learned to be a doctor, like himself.

  But he did not come home. And because my father, Mr. Holmes, died after I finished high school, at a time when the dry goods store was floundering, there was no extra money and no possibility of attending university to study anything.

  And now, scapula is the last bone I can dredge up.

  BACKBONE

  FIFTEEN

  My life unknits as I lie here. How many days? How many nights? My stories are my mother’s stories, my grandmother’s, my daughter’s. I did not plan any of them; they became what they became; they are what they are. I look to my left and see the last thin bit of light ‘wobbling through the branches of a high ‘white pine. The tip of the tree is so remote from where I lie, it might belong to a parallel realm, one in which I play no part ‘whatever.

  I am not used to perpetually staring up. The side of the ravine is more layered than I imagined it to be. Dusk has sharpened its outlines. Each heavy rock fits the ones above, beside and below, as if laid by the hands of a stonemason.

  I see now that I might die of thirst, not of clots or broken bones. My tongue could split in two. The way it has swelled inside my mouth, it might halt the flow of air. I must think of other things if I’m to survive, if I’m to see Case and Rice again. But I have to get water. I’ve sucked the buttons. What more can I do but lie here like a useless person—the most humbling part of all.

  I hear a noise. It makes my ears perk, my heart jump. Rabbit? Raccoon? I’m not fond of things that crawl; they have their place and I have mine. I don’t bother them unless they enter my house and, then, I sweep them out.

  Still, the noise might have been human. Hope leapt; hope plunged to the slough of despond.

  Memory spills its lines. The night refuses to be silent. I have to tighten my sweater, gather my coat. If the moon would show itself, I’d feel less alone. How this old root that keeps me company must have groaned when, having once been decently buried and alive, it was pried unwillingly up through earth.

  Slowly, silently, now the moon

  Walks the night in her silver shoon

  I doubt that Monsieur de la Mare ever spent a spring night in Canada on the ground, nowhere to look except at sky. I needn’t mention thirst and broken bones. It’s terrifying to think that I might die from the cold. Thank heavens for this unusual weather. It was almost balmy when I left for the airport. But cold from the ground seeps into my legs, my bottom, my back. Still, it could be worse.

  There. I’ve looked on the bright side.

  I would like to see the moon. Cold company, but company nonetheless.

  There was something in the poem about silver paws. Or silver claws. I didn’t understand the word shoon when I memorized the lines for class. I was puzzled, embarrassed to ask, afraid to be humiliated. Was it sheen, shoe, a pair of shoes? Miss Grinfeld assigned the poem to the fifth grade every year, but most of us had already learned it after hearing the older students’ recitations four years before, and three years, and two and one.

  Our father liked the poem and asked me to read it for him one evening. I stood beside his chair and recited without looking at the page. He closed his right eye, his left eye hidden by the patch. His brows flattened in the middle and made a single, shadowy line. Mr. Holmes liked tranquility at home, probably because he was not a natural socializer and was forced to greet the public at the store all day. It did not help that when he smiled, his chin tightened in a way that made his smile look like a grimace.

  In the evenings, he asked Ally and me about our homework and sometimes demanded to see our scribblers, requiring proof that we were learning. He peered over our shoulders, but never parted with a word of praise. Ally and I did what we could to please him, but he was distant, he withheld. After her homework was finished, Ally turned to her drawings. Across the kitchen table, her hand furiously pencilled and shaded. Mr. Holmes looked at the drawings, picked them up one by one and laid them down. He nodded, but did not speak. I was certain a smile would break out. I tried to will him to smile, for Ally’s sake. But he didn’t. Later, Ally declared that she didn’t care whether he praised her art or not. If he wasn’t interested, she wouldn’t invite him south when she left our bitter winters behind. She still hated the cold, but neither of us could have predicted then that she would spend half a century plotting her escape.

  “We’ll find someone else to do security,” she said, trying to pretend that I was included in the planning. “Uncle Fred can take that on as an extra duty, and do inspections, too.”

  I knew that the two of us would have given an entire villa for a word of praise from our father. But praise was not forthcoming and we were learning to pull away from that yearning part of ourselves.

  South was no more than a word at that time; it did not have a place name attached. But within a few years we were referring to Ally’s villa as “Boca.” During several recesses, she had stayed inside to examine the school atlas. She chose Florida, that long lever of land that dipped into the ocean like a notched handle that could be tightly grasped in order to tilt the entire continent on its Alaskan nose. She ran her finger down the Atlantic edge and chose Boca Raton, near the bottom. When Miss Grinfeld had us fill in blank maps of North America, Ally covered the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf with seagull-wing waves to show water on either side of the long handle she had chosen for her villa.

  By then, we were no longer calling her drawings “art.” These had become her “work.” Decades after our father died, long after she really did move to Florida, Ally told me on the phone one night that she was certain Mr. Holmes had been emotionally dyslexic when we were children. “We just didn’t know how to describe it at the time, Georgie,” she said.

  I wasn’t entirely convinced about emotional dyslexia, but I did know
that our father had spread gloom throughout the house when he was in it. And now, all these years later, I have only a feeling of sadness, a feeling that something was wasted, something that might have been.

  At night, our father shouted in his sleep, and in every room he could be heard. “Keep away from the ribbons! Bolt the door! Get away from the till!” On and on it went. Someone was after him. Someone was robbing the store. When his shouts woke us, we rolled onto our backs and stared at the ceiling. Sometimes we whispered to each other, wondering if the night train had passed through town and out the other side, heading towards us. There was no clock in our room, but if the shouting occurred close to midnight, we would soon know the exact time. At three minutes past twelve, the long thin wail of the whistle drew close. The sound widened the air through which it tunnelled, sailed across Mott’s darkened field and into our room. It provided comfort from the blackness of night, relief from the tirade coming from the next room. It gave us permission to go back to sleep. I pulled the covers over my head.

  During the day, as if to counteract the spreading gloom of Mr. Holmes, Phil was cheerful around Ally and me. But we sensed the necessity for split allegiances. There was a clear dividing line between Mother and Father that Ally and I did not cross. “Why did they marry?” we asked each other. “How did they meet?” But we had no answers and were afraid to ask. There was already enough to worry about without adding to existing problems.

  Phil did not make a fuss about the night shouting except to say, one Sunday morning at breakfast, that she was glad our father didn’t sleepwalk, too. Mr. Holmes flatly denied talking or shouting in his sleep. Grand Dan remained neutral.

  The noise again. A rabbit would be easy prey down here. I know there are foxes; Harry and I once saw an undulating brush slip into tall grass and disappear in the dusk. We also came across the bones of a snowshoe hare. And there are grouse, wild turkey; they won’t hurt. Bears don’t come this close to the edge of town. Thankfully for me, there are no wolves any more—not in this ravine.