Dear Hearts

by Barbara Miller Biles

  She has Jamie in her arms as she twirls and struts around the living room to James Brown. “I feel good,” she sings along a little breathlessly, and plays the goof that a two-year-old appreciates.

  “I got you Grammie.”

  “Yes, you have now,” she sings

  “I fee goot,” he sings in his two-year-old way, and Leona, for the first time in many years, thinks about Larry Milton and her mother’s charity, as well as the boy in the hospital with no name. The boy will be pushing sixty now if he has made it this far, and Larry Milton is probably dead like her father. Jamie’s hairline is, so far, like those receding on middle-aged men, and his hair is still thin, like the boy with no name—the one thing she remembers about the boy.

  Jamie’s mother, Leona’s daughter, Leanne, has a full head of hair now, beautiful strawberry blonde, but at fifteen, when the marriage was falling apart, her hair fell out—first the odd strand, then handfuls. Leona’s son Jon, on the other hand, has always kept his hair growing wild and strong, perfumed with tobacco and pot. He plays his guitar and claims a mellow sensibility, but Leona suspects anger is burning at the core. He and his band mates have discovered James Brown and try to claim him as their own. For her the music is nostalgia or, at times, a reminder of the long-ago use of sex to manage mourning.

  Leona twirls Jamie faster, harder. “I feel nice,” she sings and she really does feel nice. She wonders if James Brown felt nice when he sang it. Was he free of self-reproach or, like her, did a sense of guilt often travel with him?

  The Guardian

  SHE IS MY LITTLE GIRL. She sits with a pensive mouth and unequivocal eyes. “I’ll have my breakfast now,” she commands.

  I am at her beck and call. I am dispensing a mother’s cure.

  I realize she has a beautifully shaped head. It has just a few gentle wisps of hair remaining, but, if she were given permission, she would be beautiful bald.

  There is a picture of her, as a young girl, standing in front of the poplar in our yard, its slender green limbs reaching up with hopeful energy. She has long braids, her hair pulled close to her head, her head cocked wistfully downward, her eyes screening the light.

  The poplar must have taken root innocently enough, producing miniature leaves that would jitterbug in the breeze. But in my earliest memory the poplar was already grown and reaching over to my bedroom window.

  It had smooth, grey skin with comfortable black botches that I would trace and read with my fingers. Black ants would lead a procession to the patches of sticky sap, and I would summon them forth and urge them on in low funereal tones, like a director whispering orders over a loudspeaker.

  I would sit in its shade and strip caragana pods, putting the moist, green seeds into miniature porcelain cups. I would offer her a sip if she happened by, and she would thank me and pretend to enjoy my concoction.

  This morning I stir the oatmeal as if I am in a trance, vaguely aware of the bubbles erupting into miniature volcanoes. I stir and stir, stir and stir.

  I lift her from the couch, placing my arm and shoulder under hers. I think, as always, that I will be too weak to support her, since she is my older sister, but I am strong, very strong. I am strong and powerful, and she is my little girl. I feel her ribs and the soft sides of what remains of her breasts.

  “I’ll have a little more milk, please. And could you put the sugar right in the middle? Thank you.”

  The porridge is good for her. She has more colour in her cheeks.

  “I’ll help you with your bath now,” I say cheerfully. “Then we’ll leave for the hospital.”

  I remember a time, in the dry summer heat, after shifting restlessly through the night, when my poplar branch began rubbing the window screen and dust began seeping in with the breeze. I looked out to find that the large heart-shaped leaves had developed a greyish appearance. They soon had a yellow mottling, and, as time passed, they turned a muddy brown and began to drop to the ground. People said that the tree was an eyesore. A band of Cygon was painted on the trunk, just below the lower branches, to kill off the gall-forming mites. I was told to stay away from my tree.

  There had already been complaints about its greedy roots, how they sopped up so much moisture, leaving the grass roots high and dry and patchy. Sometimes the roots had surfaced above the ground, revealing the fact that they were creeping toward the foundation of our house. They had begun infiltrating our mother’s prize flower beds and extending into the neighbour’s yard. They showed no signs of self-restraint.

  Chemotherapy room number four has chartreuse walls with pale magenta baseboards. At its centre is a green vinyl lounge chair, much like a dentist’s chair without the usual paraphernalia. A woman with a long dark wig sits in reluctant repose and engages in an intense, animated conversation with her bearded companion. He leans over her, engrossed in her every word, as though they are sharing a cappuccino at some trendy coffee house. They seem oblivious to the intravenous tubing attached to her arm.

  Across the hall, I see my girl laying obediently prostrate, looking small and solitary, with a catheter emptying down to a plastic bag of pink liquid. I stand outside her door and study the framed pallet of spring colours on the wall. Pure blues, pinks, peaches, and greens wash gently across the canvas. Two young girls in their long, blooming dresses and wide-brimmed hats—one a tall, willowy redhead, the other a cherubic, golden blonde—are looking wistfully downward and vaguely toward one another, but their eyes do not meet. In the background, a white picket fence progresses along in gentle rhythm, bordered by fresh green trees and bushes. On the frame is a gold plate inscribed: In appreciation of the fine care given.

  In spite of the Cygon, the poplar’s leaves continued to drop. I would wake up to a gentle scratching on my window and look out to see the skeletal finger of my naked tree pointing, accusingly, through the glass. Below, flagrantly coloured begonias bobbed for my attention. I would pull the covers over my head and listen to the birds announce, in muted tone, their pleasures and their fears, and I would believe that all was well and normal outside my window.

  One morning a buzzing sound drew me out of bed and to the window, where I saw a slender, pale-faced man aiming a drill straight toward the heart of my tree. He began drilling a hole just a couple of inches toward the centre. He then withdrew and moved around the base of the trunk, drilling a ring of holes all around it.

  I stood motionless, transfixed.

  Setting the drill down, he lifted a can and poured liquid into each hole.

  “I don’t want any visitors today. Tell people I have plans.”

  “Okay,” I say, smiling gently down as I pack the pillows in around her brittle, bony frame.

  We sit in careful contemplation, then begin to share selected stories from our past. Our eyes meet momentarily, then stare into imaginary distances, holding tight to our deepest disappointments, our greatest fears, and our secret joys.

  “I’ll have some tea and chocolate cookies. Don’t bring me vanilla. I’m in the mood for chocolate.”

  We engage in gentle smiles and gentle revelations. We gingerly sip our tea, careful not to burn our tongues.

  We’ve been polite and gentle sisters. Good girls. Solemn good girls. Not likely to say, “I want this, I don’t want that.”

  Now she makes it clear. “I’ve talked enough now. And no more phone calls.”

  I shift from dreams to semi-consciousness. Something is at my window. At first I think it is my tree, but then I detect a gentle whooshing sound, a tickling on the pane, and I acknowledge that my tree is long gone and she is there instead.

  There is no time to lose so I send out my message over and over, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” I listen to my voice wending out in streams, sprinkling soothing, massaging notes through the air, and I hear it echoed back. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

  I carefully lift the grass with a straight-
edged shovel and dig at the fibrous earth. I gently pour the ashes from the earthenware pot in amongst the large decaying roots, and I place the grass back on top as best I can, to make it appear undisturbed.

  I have returned to sit in the spring sun and sip a cup of tea, but my tea sits untouched on the folding wooden table. A shaft of light catches my eye as it reflects on the outside of my window pane and, without looking down, I remove my sandals. I let my toes wander aimlessly through the grass until they catch on a thick stem. I look to see a poplar shoot growing out of the mended patch of grass. I reach over with my cup of lukewarm tea and gently pour out the potion. It trickles to the earth and seeps downward toward invisible young roots. I do want a guardian to wake me from the night.

  Burnt Sienna

  RANDALL ELLIOT, RANDY TO HIS FRIENDS, sits in his swivel rocker and stares, with beseeching eyes, at the painting on his wall, as he has done many times before. It is in the style of Cézanne, but the place is not Marseilles Bay; it is a part of Buffalo Lake. Fingers of ultramarine, each created by a single brush stroke, line up to Pelican Point, while raw sienna sand stretches in horizontal lines along the beach. He presumes there are boats tied to the titanium white posts that dot the shore.

  Randall closes his eyes and imagines the gentle breeze caressing his sandy hair. He is eight years old and lying flat on his belly on the bow of his father’s racing scow. He uses a willow switch, like an artificial limb, to extend his reach and create his own trail in the water. The water slaps a lullaby against the sides of the boat and rocks them both, Randy and Papa, in its lap. They zigzag toward Tony’s Island. He can feel the boat moving back and forth as Papa steers with the rudder and swings the boom from side to side.

  “Papa, are there animals on Tony’s Island?”

  “Sometimes the farmer’s cattle cross in the winter and get stuck over there.”

  “No, I mean wild animals.”

  “Maybe some coyotes and rabbits. Probably deer and porcupine. And skunks! We got plenty of skunks.”

  “No cats?”

  “Well, we have been known to have a bobcat around the odd time, and there’s always the feral cats that people have abandoned.”

  “Bobcats! Can we go hunting for bobcats on Tony’s Island?”

  “We’ll see how the weather goes,” says Papa as he searches the whole sky for signs of inclement weather.

  In the background of the painting, further out in the water, a swirl of indigo and white and cerulean blue work together to reveal turbulence from an unknown source. There is a spot of burnt sienna, like a drop of dried blood, on the water—really a life buoy bobbing near the swirling part of the lake. It is there to save lives.

  In the foreground a small boy bends over and digs in the sand with a shovel tinged with titanium white. It is a sunny day. You see his soft cheeks and slanted nose and shaded eyes, all focusing on that jot of sand. A bare-shouldered woman, his mother, sits to the left, facing the water with her back to the artist. Her striped swimsuit curves down into the sand, and you must imagine that her legs are bent in front of her, that her hands are comfortable and relaxed.

  Papa, the artist, intends to create a perfect scene. Randy and his mother sit at this particular spot at his father’s request.

  Randy plans, in his optimistic mind, a castle to rival all sandcastles. It will have towers and turrets and a great moat which he will fill with pails of water from the lake. He will plant a red flag, with a tiger insignia, at the gate. He loves tigers. They will protect his fortress.

  His mother seems to spirit herself across the lake. He smells coconut on her oiled skin and sees her mystic smile, but he knows that her eyes, even under dark glasses, take her somewhere across the lake, beyond Tony’s Island, somewhere that he has never been.

  “Does Tony live on the island?” Randy moves to sit near Papa and shades his eyes with his hand, the one without the willow switch; he has transferred it to his left hand and sometimes holds onto the edge of the boat with his right now that the wind has picked up. Earlier he toyed with sacrificing his switch to the rising waves as a motorboat passed by, but he maintained his grip. After all, he spent a good part of the morning shaving off the bark and nodes with his switchblade.

  “Tony used to live in a shack in the middle of the island. But he’s dead now.”

  “Why?”

  “He just died, that’s all. Lived there alone like a hermit. They say he died in the winter but wasn’t discovered until a group of high school boys swam over in the summer and decided to search him out. He built his shack in the middle of the island, screened by poplars and a thicket of wolf willows, so he would be out of sight.”

  “Can we go see it?”

  “Maybe some time.” Papa searches the sky again. “There’s a storm coming across from Rochon Sands. We’d better head back.”

  “Ah.”

  “Another time.”

  In the evening, when the poplars hiss and the sky rumbles, Randy leans against his mother’s side while she reads Rudyard Kipling:

  “In the days when everybody started fair, Best Beloved, the Leopard lived in a place called the High Veldt. ‘Member it wasn’t the Low Veldt, or the Bush Veldt, or the Sour Veldt, but the ‘sclusively bare, hot, shiny High Veldt, where there was sand and sandy-coloured rock and ‘sclusively tufts of sandy-yellowish grass.”

  Randy closes his eyes and sees the high Veldt along the northern beach of Tony’s Island, and a jungle rises up around Tony’s shack. He wants a story about how the tiger got his stripes in the jungle, and his mother tells him he will have to make it up himself.

  “Why are they called Just So stories?”

  “Well, some things just are what they are and there’s nothing we can do about it. They are just so. There’s no other explanation.” She gazes across the room the way she sometimes stares across to the far shore of Buffalo Lake. “Besides, Kipling wanted the stories read exactly as he wrote them, just so. You see? Then you sleep so soundly because the words have been said.” And she guides him to his bed. She reads more Kipling until he’s asleep:

  “Let’s—oh, anything, Daddy, so long as it’s you and me,

  And going truly exploring, and not being in till tea!”

  Randall still loves tigers and has a collection of tiger prints and drawings in his study, as well as his father’s painting. Throughout his adult life Randall has worked for the World Wildlife Fund and has travelled to the ranges and reserves of the Indian and White Indian tigers, the Bengal, Siberian, Sumatran, and even the Caspian and Balinese, though these two are already extinct.

  He remains in awe of the tiger. Powerful cats, yet supple and graceful with their killer instinct, they are armed with sharp claws and surgical teeth that can bite through the spinal cord of sizable prey. They gorge on a captured animal while warm blood still courses though its veins, and later, as they guard their lair, they relish the leftovers of putrefied flesh. Still, some are endangered.

  Above his desk hangs a framed calligraphic copy of William Blake’s The Tyger, done especially for him by his mother.

  Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  Randall closes his eyes again. This time he sees blood dripped onto the white shirt sleeve, first above and then below the burgundy arm band, and dried like burnt sienna. He reviews this scene over and over in his mind. He sees only the back of the shirt. The man sits at his desk with his head turned sideways, his cheek resting on the oak desk top. There is the smell of gunpowder in the air. The man’s spectacles are off-kilter with one of the arms sticking up at an odd angle. The clock is tick-tick-ticking and something is drip-dip-dripping. The inkwell is open and a fountain pen has leaked onto vellum, invading the loops and points of script in the letter, although some words seem to remain clear
. He does not, cannot, go too near. Cannot breathe, cannot swallow, cannot speak. Cannot read Papa’s story.

  Now, with eyes wide open, Randall wants to read his father’s letter, but it is too late. Sixty years too late. His mother threw it into the fire where it curled up into carbon confetti and ribbons of smoke, then rose up the chimney into frosty air, like letters to Santa, claiming good behaviour and a wish list of rewards. A lump of coal the colour of red sienna burns in Randall’s heart and tightens his chest and stings his eyes so that tears well up. He tries to read the painting because it is all that he has left.

  Unrevealed secrets, like hidden putrefied meat, leave a telltale rotten smell, but nothing he can digest. The painting is part of a legacy to his own son, Brian, and sooner or later, probably sooner, it will hang on Brian’s wall. Then how will the story go? Just so?

  Tattoos

  IT CAME IN A DREAM. Arlene would roll her eyes if anyone else said this to her, but there it is. It came in a dream and she responded, bolted out of bed and reacted straight away, impulsive and optimistic. Not her usual self. She stepped into her jeans, pulled on a sweater, and ran her fingers through her hair as she went out the door.

  Jenna, who has been gone for over a week, reached out in the night through some sort of mother-daughter ESP and begged her to come. As things are now Arlene has no way to reach the golden-haired Jenna and tell her she is on her way. Mommy is on her way.

  “Why,” she asks herself, “is the road so vacant today, of all days?” even though she knows the answer. It is too early, just past five in the morning.

  Cyclists train along the shoulder lanes as soon as the roads dry up. The locals, in their pickup trucks, take more risks passing the influx of fair-weather drivers. Bikers come out in droves on their Hondas or Harleys to commune in the parking lot at Bragg Creek, some for ice cream, some for dope. But not this morning.