by Joan Thomas
It’s hard to predict, he says, but it doesn’t look as though she has the galloping kind. He tips his chair back, as though he’s taking a break from work. This is, what, two years?
The galloping kind?
She’s got the symptoms of MS, he says. Has no one told you?
I ask him what this is. Can you write it down for me? I say, and he sits forward and prints the two words on a sheet of paper, printing upside down so I can read it, as if to demonstrate a boyhood prowess.
What is it? I ask, staring at the words.
No one is quite sure. It might be a hardening around the nerves. A buildup of plaque. That’s one theory.
Have you told her?
I may not have mentioned the term to her. Sometimes it just makes it worse, attaching a long name like that to your troubles. You never know how it’s going to go. There are people who go on for decades with just a little wobble in their gait.
If it does get worse what can we expect?
He stands up and pulls a book from the shelf and flips through the pages, reading silently for two or three minutes, and then he sits down and reads out: weakness, numbness, tremor, incoordination, pain, slurred speech, loss of vision, bowel and bladder dysfunction, paralysis, dementia.
Could I take a look? I ask. At what else it says?
He puts the book back on the shelf. He doesn’t bother to answer this, and I see just how absurd I’ve made myself.
Is there anywhere else I can take her? I ask.
What’s the point? There’s nothing anyone can do. Nothing. That’s all they’ll tell you in Winnipeg. Save yourself the trip. He tucks a cigarette into the corner of his mouth and bends his head over the flaring match. I suppose you could get your people to pray, he says, his eyes mocking me as he shakes the little flame out. He doesn’t mention my dad.
In our spare, clean kitchen I talk about England, no doubt I bring it into every conversation. It’s not that I’m trying to impress them. Without thinking about it, I call the boys lads, and the truck the lorry, and a sandwich a butty. Don’t start the whites until I get my knickers, I say to Betty on laundry day. All of that has to be packed away along with my trunk. Any hint that there’s more out there, a world different to this one.
On a warm day Gracie comes over and we take kitchen chairs outside and sit in the yard. Gracie’s short bangs lie pasted to her forehead, each clump indented by the clasp of the tin curlers she wore to bed. I think of the way she used to skate, in little stiff steps like a cat walking on ice, the socks she wore over her hands because her mittens were too short to cover the long wrists sticking out of her sleeves. And the way she smiled at me, love aching in her eyes, a half-inch of pink gum gleaming at the top of her teeth. She’s wearing a baby blue cotton dress now — it could be the dress she wore when we were fourteen and dreaming about going to the Burnley fair. But she’s changed, as much as I have. Something — disappointment maybe — has displaced her willing spirit. It’s more striking than if her nose had suddenly grown into a different shape.
One fall Madeleine and Jenny and I went to York for the day, I say. We went by train.
Betty and Gracie glance at each other. In England I advertised Canada every time I opened my mouth. Now I discover that I have an English accent.
Was it nice? Betty asks.
Very nice, I say. It has an old wall around it, York. You can walk on it. Silence sets in. They know there’s a world out there, drawing Phillip and the other boys away, but they don’t know what to ask. They’re like I was, on the ship in 1936.
Did you ever see Mr. Churchill in England? Betty asks finally, making an effort.
No. But I did live in Oldham. That’s where he was first elected to parliament.
Phil and I heard his speech on the radio, says Betty. We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in the mountains, we will fight them in the fields, that speech. He has such a funny way of talking.
That wasn’t actually Winston Churchill. It was an actor impersonating him.
How do you know?
George told me.
No mail from England. They must be writing, but for the time being there’s no mail. I take old letters from George out of the biscuit tin and read them in bed at night. I examine the name and address on the envelopes, tracing the uneven, spiky letters with my finger, trying to feel the energy in George’s hand, hear the sound of my name in his mind as he wrote. I don’t write to him, except in my mind. I have all his letters, but the only ones I read are the early ones, from Durham and Char-mouth.
Charmouth, 16 July 1938
Dear Lily,
Six o’clock, still waiting for our tea. Mrs. Slater is starving us on purpose. This morning when Ellen came in to serve breakfast she looked like a cross between Cleopatra and a frightened rabbit. Turns out she has conjunctivitis in one eye and the nurse at the clinic told her to lay off the face-paint, so she gobbed up only the good eye. Mrs. Slater would have let her stay but we made a big stink about the contagion. So now Slater’s on her own and she’s paying us back! Me stomach thinks me throat’s been cut, to quote our mutual granddad.
I’m sending you a drawing of the Oxford belemnite. As you can see, the creature apparently had two parts. The thunderbolt fossil, like the one I gave you, was just its tail (which it used as a buoyancy chamber). A stony cone sometimes found in the same areas was actually the room where the creature lived. So they’ve identified two fossils in one stroke. A clever solution. But inelegant, wouldn’t you say? We almost never find the phragmocone part. Apparently they’re more fragile. I do have one I bought in a curiosity shop. It’s in perfect condition. Interestingly, there are growth rings in it, like a tree trunk.
Lily, could you keep watching Bardsley’s for a couple of books for me? I really need them but I can’t afford to order them new. I’m sending you a pound. If you need more, ask Mother to lend the rest. Some of them are pretty old, so Bardsley might pick them up at an estate sale. In fact, you could leave my list with him so he can keep an eye out.
Pax,
George
And then there was a separate sheet with a list of the books, only one of which I was able to find.
Dad’s clothes are too small for Phillip, and Mother wants me to clean them up and send them to the aid depot at Burnley. All that’s left are his three shirts and his work pants. He was buried in his suit. And then of course there’re his heavy and light jackets, his Sunday shoes, his rubber boots. His combination underwear. His workboots. I wash the shirts and press them. I tell Mother I’d like to keep his light jacket. Tears well up in her eyes. She’s been reading the Burnley Herald, showing me the ads for war bonds. I want it all to go to the depot, she says. It’s all we have to give. I decide to slip the jacket out anyway and hide it. But she knows me. She follows me out to the kitchen when I carry the box and sits guarding it like a commissionaire until Phillip comes in to take it to town.
I go outside, trembling with fury. What she doesn’t know is that I’ve found a pair of Dad’s shoes, his house shoes, under the Toronto couch on the porch where he left them the last time he lay down for a nap. The shoes look different to me, cheap and shabby, not like his wedding shoes at all. I handled a hundred pairs like them in the WVS depot in Oldham. But the inside is finely polished from years of his feet sliding in. Each toe has made a distinct bed. When I slide my hand inside I feel the shock of intruding on his privacy. I wipe the dust from them with my sleeve and slip them back under the couch.
Three times a day we gather around the worn yellow oilcloth of the kitchen table. We begin each meal with grace, Betty full of conversation, my mother drooping like a wilted flower over her dinner, will and cunning and frustration chasing across her white face as frankly as they do across the face of a child. Some days she pulls her plate down to her lap and lifts her fork slowly to her mouth. We might be able to force her to eat, but she’ll be damned if she’ll enjoy it! Some days she gets up and shuffles into the bedroom in the middle of the mea
l, and we never know why. We just keep eating. I always thought it was just me that was wrong with my mother, but now I hold to the fact that there is something else. Sometimes I think about the particles of stone collecting like crystals on the endings of her nerves, and I think, I should be kinder, but I’m exhausted at the concept.
Alone I encounter my father, I come across him as I walk to the pasture. His fundamental kindness hangs over the path, it glistens on the bare branches of a poplar bluff. Tell me, I say to him. This life — was it real to you? Did you see yourself here? Maybe Mother and Phillip meet him too, maybe they hang their heads and let out their tears the way I do, when no one else is near.
The Sunday Phillip leaves we all squeeze into the Ford and go out to the cemetery. It’s on a little knoll marked from a distance by a clump of spruce trees. Some of the graves have painted white crosses, some large stones collected down by the river. Others have proper granite headstones. My father’s grave is a blank garden plot. It’s flat to the prairie turf around it, not mounded. There’s a piece of shingle stuck into the ground at the top end with PIPER written on it in ink. The colour’s drained from the grasses around it, they’re all just shades of brown and grey. My mother clings to Phillip’s arm.
Going to be sunk in by spring, says Phillip. What was Norbert thinking?
Lily will have to arrange for a headstone, says my mother.
Above us clouds move in two directions — low, fat white clouds skim west, and high above, against the white sky, wispier clouds drift slowly east. Wind murmurs in the tops of the spruce trees. It’s a bleak day; It’s October, what other sort of day could it be?
2
Soon it’s too cold to be outside with no purpose, and when she’s not working she lies on her bed. The fossil George gave her sits on the ledge above her. The ancients were wrong about it, of course, it has no protective powers. She leaves her curtains open night and day. All she can see through her window is black branches of scrub oak against the sky, haphazard lines of ink on a white paper. When there’s a wind the oak branches scratch at the window. Someone should go out and prune them, she thinks, it’s what Dad would have done. Instead she does what George would have done, she looks untoward up in the dictionary. Whatever happened that night may have been improper or it may just have been unfortunate. Or it could have been both.
She had to hear the news from her mother — Aunt Lucy addressed the letter to both of them. Betty brought the mail from town, and Lily climbed the ladder from the cellar with the enamel basin full of potatoes to find that her mother had opened the blue airmail envelope and had the letter unfolded in her hand. She climbed up through the hole in the kitchen floor to hear her mother saying to Betty, She seems to be the kind of person who makes a fuss about things. You’d think he was her real son, the way she carries on.
Lily scrambled out of the cellar opening and snatched the letter out of her mother’s hand. The first impulse of her eyes was to scan it, trying to snatch reassuring words out of the even blue lines. But Aunt Lucy’s round script resisted her and she had to calm herself to start at the beginning. Aunt Lucy is sorry it took her so long to write and they hope Lily had a safe passage. They are all well, but feeling very anxious because of a telegram that came after she left, on October 20. It told them that George was missing. Then a letter arrived with the same information, that George was missing. Not missing in action. He was simply missing, he’d gone missing at sea, and his captain could not divulge the location or mission of the vessel at the time. There had been what he called an untoward incident during the night, not involving the enemy, and George, who’d been present for roll call in the evening, was not present in the morning. Lily read that they intend to conduct an inquiry. She read that Aunt Lucy wonders at times if he could have gone AWOL, but she knows he would never do such a thing and she can’t really hope for it. He was like all the other brave lads, ready to do what had to be done, and there must have been some terrible accident. We are trying to be brave too, Aunt Lucy wrote, but it’s very hard not to know what happened. Lois and Madeleine are heartbroken but are trying to keep their hopes up. We know how much Lily cared for George, and are sorry to have to write to you with such bad news, dear, but send you all our love.
Well, if he did drown, it’s better than being shot in the trenches, Lily’s mother was saying to Betty. The way my brother Franklin was in the last war. He got a shell in the stomach, and he had to lay in the mud for two days before they could get him out.
Lily stood looking out the window at the chickens pecking around the henhouse, and then Betty noticed her and brought her a handkerchief, handing it to her with a tender little moan. It’s a miracle he didn’t bleed to death, Mother said, and Lily went outside, lifting her coat off the nail in the porch and shoving her arms into the sleeves. She had known it all along, she’d carried this truth home with her the way you might carry a stone in your mouth: that she had let him down and that he was gone. She’d known it all along, but now that the letter had come she found she could hold it away from her, she could trudge in the usual way with her shoulders hunched against the wind, along the edge of a stubble field with broken stalks of wheat bristling the clods of earth. After she reached the corner and turned her back on the wind, she found she could even switch briefly to the other side: to where he was alive, where he had slipped through their fingers like one of the Romanovs, or Bonnie Prince Charlie, or the dauphin. He was making his way incognito over the cobbled streets of a village — not an English village, he never managed to blend in very well in English villages, but one with a rounded bell tower like an inverted bowl, and villagers with wooden clogs and their faces shadowed by cloth hoods. She saw a woman standing in a doorway with a little girl leaning against her skirt. The woman handed George a round loaf of dark bread. They exchanged some words in her language, and she smiled, and then he waved and walked off down the lane. He was wearing a felt hat Lily had never seen on him before, but he had his old walking stick and he walked the way he had always walked, in that same loose-jointed way.
Suddenly they begin to get mail from England. She goes to town on her own when she can and one day there are three letters from Madeleine. She takes them out to the truck and drives to the edge of town, pulling over onto the shoulder beside someone’s spent garden, where broken carrots and dry cornstalks wait for snow. She checks the postmarks and opens them in order. The first one was mailed just three days after she left Oldham. Somehow Aunt Lucy’s letter got ahead of it.
You’ve only just left and I miss you already. It was like having a real sister (don’t tell Lois I said that). My legs are hurting like the dickens because — guess what, I have a job! Working for the Transport Authority! The day after you left it was in the paper that they needed conductors because they’ve doubled the tram schedule (not enough petrol to run the coaches). Mrs. Tupper said they were taking girls, so I went down to the office yesterday and I was hired. They gave me a uniform and put me to work that very morning. It’s not bad, except for the lads who think a girl who will work on a tram is a certain kind of girl! Those lads need to realize that things are different now and we all have to help out!
Lily has never known Madeleine to pray, but she says that they are praying for George. They believe they know where he was sent, although she can’t say in a letter. He had that queer idea about not writing last year, she writes, but now that the action has really started, I hope the silly apeth will at least let us know how he is. Lily can hear her, the anxiety in her breathless voice, she can picture Madeleine’s small hand pressed like a starfish on her breastbone while she talks. She lingers over this letter. It’s hard to open the next, as if she will make this thing happen, as if it will happen in the little moment between her reading the letters, while she sits with sunlight milkily pouring through the dusty windshield.
Finally she leans her head against the window of the truck and opens it. Madeleine’s handwriting is large and round and childish:
By now you wi
ll have Mother’s letter telling you about the telegram. I wish we could have you here with us, Lily. Mother is wretched and hasn’t slept since it came, but she is still going to the depot every day. It’s easier to keep busy and feel you are doing some good. Archie’s stationed in Bournemouth now and Lois went down to visit him. It’s very hard to know what to do, we can’t even have a service. We feel as though our hearts are breaking and I know you will feel the same.
This must be the way women all over Europe have learned to say it, Lily thinks, folding the letter up with trembling fingers, that they feel as though their hearts are breaking.
The last letter is in a brown honour pledge envelope, the sort you can buy to ease the workload of the military censors. Madeleine has signed a pledge in a little box on the front: I certify on my honour that the contents of this envelope refer to nothing but private and family affairs. Inside she makes no effort to disguise names and places. She says that Wilf was home on leave and came to see her. He told her that the 71st Searchlight had been sent by frigate to the Orkney Islands to defend Scapa Flow, and that the night of October 16 they’d had engine problems and had to moor alongside the high cliffs at Duncansby Head. The officers were drinking in the stateroom and no one bothered to take roll call. The enlisted men were up on deck in the dark. George said there was a lunar eclipse — that was their pretext for being up on deck, the moon under blackout orders. There was a dreadful sea, and they were drinking on deck, and around midnight they got into some sort of scuffle. A private from Liverpool went over. They had grappling hooks and they pulled him out half drowned, but they couldn’t put searchlights on the water to see if there was anyone else. But then when they went below, George’s bunk was empty. When Lily reads this she can see the tilting, slippery deck, the dark, confused shapes of the men, the waves lifting themselves to the obscured moon, smeared with its orange light, and her image of George walking at dawn through the cobblestone streets of an ancient village melts the way a dream melts at morning.
