In the First Early Days of My Death

by Catherine Hunter

  In the First Early Days of My Death

  Catherine Hunter

  © 2002, Catherine Hunter

  Print Edition ISBN 978-0921833-87-1

  Ebook Edition, 2012

  ISBN 978-1897109-86-1

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason, by any means, without the permission of the publisher.

  Cover design by Terry Gallagher/Doowah Design.

  Photo of Catherine Hunter by Anne Marie Resta.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council for our publishing program.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hunter, Catherine, 1957–

  In the the first early days of my death / Catherine Hunter.

  PS8565.U578315 2002 C813'.54 C2002-905846-5

  PR9199.3.H825515 2002

  Signature Editions, P.O. Box 206, RPO Corydon

  Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3M 3S7

  www.signature-editions.com

  This book is dedicated to Manuela Dias (1963-2001) and Harry Rintoul (1956-2002)

  Their radiance lives on.

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Although some of the places resemble real locations, all of the characters are figments of the author’s imagination. In no way are they intended to reflect any actual persons, either living or dead.

  I am very grateful for assistance from the Manitoba Arts Council in the first early days of this project. My thanks to the editors of Contemporary Verse Two in which earlier incarnations of this work were excerpted under its working title, “Phantom Pain.” (Vol. 21.1, Summer 1998 and Vol. 23.1, Summer 2000).

  Thanks also to Anne Marie Resta for insightful reading and glimpses into the darkroom, and thanks to Anthony (Ben) Benton for crack research assistance. Any mistakes are my own.

  Contents

  Difficulty at the beginning

  Darkening of the light

  The Wanderer

  The Abysmal

  Before Completion

  Dispersion

  About the Author

  The less one thinks about the theory of the I Ching, the more soundly one sleeps.

  — Carl Jung

  1

  Difficulty at the Beginning

  In the first early days of my death, I could easily rise above the earth, past the massive, crenulated tops of the elm trees, over the scent of honeysuckle, into the summer sky that was thick and soft as a dark bolt of cloth, stars pushing themselves through like bright needles.

  I could see the narrow, muddy Seine trickling north and the wide, muddy Assiniboine flowing east, both of them emptying into the Red River. I could see the whole length of the Red, its gleaming black surface with the wake of the moon upon it like a curved path I could trace to the horizon. I saw every house I’d ever lived in and the orange cross above the hospital where I’d been born and where I now lay. I peered into the windows of buildings and learned to part the glass like curtains so that I could pass right through.

  If I wanted to, I could reach anywhere, feel the whole world at once, full of water and white sand and polar ice, fish in the oceans, red peppers and basil and lilies with their folded petals closed, unbearably lush and delicate and quiet in the darkness. I could hear everything, each exhalation of the humid air breathing through the branches far below, each muted puncture of the sky as another star poked through.

  Some nights, if I let the wind blow through me, I could hear the dead begin to speak.

  It’s true.

  Their voices, low and insistent, rustled past me like the wings of flying birds, and sometimes they sang.

  But I was not interested in them.

  Maybe my life would have ended differently if I’d accepted Mrs. Kowalski’s invitation to join her at that protest rally at City Hall. Mrs. Kowalski was a determined woman, the most persuasive of my mothers, but I’d said no. I had to clean the house that day. I had to prune the oregano before it encroached any further on the lettuce patch. And I definitely had to phone a locksmith. Besides, Mrs. Kowalski was always protesting something. The year I was thirteen, it was pesticides. The year I was fourteen, it was pornography. By the time I was fifteen, I’d gone to live on Langside Street with old Mrs. Lamb, who was far beyond the mothering age and certainly past protesting anything. But Mrs. Kowalski never gave up. That summer, she was against gambling. Or at least gambling downtown.

  The City of Winnipeg had changed a lot of bylaws so that All-Am Development could tear down four square blocks of Winnipeg’s remaining core and erect a luxury casino complex, complete with gourmet restaurants, fountains, skylights, and a glass tower with a green spire that would be the tallest structure ever built in the city. This plan angered a lot of people because of the historic buildings that would be destroyed, including the Walker Theatre, where Nellie McClung had staged the famous mock parliament in 1914 which debated the issue of granting the vote to men. It enraged others simply because the mayor pushed through the bylaws without consulting the public. And it incensed people like Mrs. Kowalski, who didn’t believe in games of chance. She grounded me once for playing poker with the boy next door, although we were only playing for pennies. She was the strictest mother I ever had, and wouldn’t listen to excuses. “Don’t push your luck,” she always said. Maybe she was right, considering the way everything turned out.

  It was because of my husband that I had to phone the locksmith. As a husband, Alika was sweet but less than helpful. The ordinary objects of the world confounded him. He was mystified by road maps, childproof cigarette lighters, income tax forms. Often I watched, enthralled, as he attempted some household project, like the time he lay motionless on his back beneath the kitchen sink for half an hour, the wrench loose in his big hand, water dripping down his fine, brown neck, while he tried to figure out how the pipes worked.

  I have to admit that I took erotic pleasure in the leisurely workings of his mind, longed to be swallowed by the dense, lustrous cloak of obscurity that enveloped him. His brown, hooded eyes, with their shining, opaque pupils, rendered me weak, and when he raised his eyebrows, the young skin on his forehead wrinkling in perplexity, I was completely at his mercy.

  The first time I met Alika, he was standing in the children’s section of the library, holding a dozen yellow slips of paper in his hand. It was story time, and I was reading Sleeping Beauty to the kids, but I saw him. I noticed the high curve of his cheekbones, the shining lock of hair, colour of a crow’s wing, falling across his forehead, the odd, distracted smile, as if he knew me from somewhere but couldn’t quite place me yet. I was aware of his dark eyes watching as I turned the pages, and finally, when Sleeping Beauty lived happily ever after, I looked up and smiled at him.

  As the parents arrived to collect their children, Alika approached me, offering up the bouquet of yellow paper. He said he was looking for a book about perennials because he wanted to grow some in his backyard. He’d been searching through the computer, writing down the titles of books about gardening, and now he wanted to know how to find them. He had not written down the call numbers.

  I guided him back to the computer and tried to explain the Dewey Decimal system. I copied a list of relevant numbers and placed it in his hand.

  “The numbers on the books correspond to the numbers on the shelves,” I told him.

  “Right,” he said, as if he had always known this and had somehow simply forgotten it. This apparent lapse did not disturb him in the least. He sat so passively, with such utter acceptance, that I wondered how he had ever conceived the notion of growing anything. How had he found his way down to the library?

&n
bsp; I pointed him toward the non-fiction, saying, “Good luck with your garden.” And then, on impulse, “Come by and let me know how it goes.”

  He smiled. I saw a sudden flicker, deep within the brown iris of his left eye, a brief flare, like the waver and fizzle of a dying lightbulb. He handed me a business card. Then he was gone. I learned later that his right eye was made of glass. Maybe that was what made him so compelling to me that first day, so attractively off-kilter. I stood in the library, holding the card he had given me, feeling it warm my hands.

  “Wendy,” the head librarian said. “Hey, Wen-dee. Come on back to earth.”

  His mother named him Alika, meaning “defender of humankind,” because that was the name his Hawaiian grandmother suggested just before she died. Rosa and her husband had already chosen the name Michael for a boy, but when Alika was born, Rosa decided to respect her mother-in-law’s wishes.

  Rosa was lonely in Hawaii. She had only intended to stay there for a three-week vacation, but then she fell in love with Alika’s father, and when her friends returned to Canada, she stayed behind. Shortly after they married, she discovered he travelled so much on business that she was often left alone. And so for company, she visited his parents. She grew close to them, caring for her mother-in-law during a long illness, and finally, holding her hand and praying with her as she passed away. Rosa’s husband had been out of town when his mother died. He was busy building a tourist hotel in Waikiki, and so it fell to Rosa to console her devastated father-in-law, to arrange the funeral and cremation.

  When Rosa went into labour a month later, her husband was back in Waikiki. She drove herself to the hospital, delivered and nursed and named the baby without him. The name Alika never really suited her son, not even when he was a baby, Rosa admitted, but it was bad luck to disobey the dead.

  Rosa was inordinately superstitious. She believed in destiny, in omens and premonitions. But most of all she believed in bad luck. Anything could trigger it. The usual things, of course — black cats, stepladders, umbrellas that sprang open unexpectedly, by accident, inside the house. But she also knew other rules I’d never heard of, exotic rules, involving all manner of innocent tasks — the peeling of apples, the sweeping of floors. It was perilous, I learned from my mother-in-law, to pick up the telephone in the middle of a ring. Where, I wondered, did that one come from? I’d always considered superstitions to be ancient, like religions, but for Rosa, even the modern world was a labyrinth of chance, a game of snakes and ladders that required constant vigilance.

  But Rosa never learned what had caused the worst luck of all. Although she wracked her conscience for evidence of a forgotten rite, some criminal recklessness involving salt or mirrors, she could never find a reason for the car accident that had nearly killed her children.

  Alika and his sister, Noni, were small at the time, nine and ten years old. As usual, their father was away on a job. He was supervising a construction site in Honolulu, and would miss his father’s birthday. So Rosa had dutifully driven the children across Maui to visit their widowed grandfather at his nursing home in Wailuku. At twilight, when visibility was at its worst, a weary long-distance truck driver, hauling a load of pineapples, wobbled and veered toward the white line in the middle of the highway. Rosa swerved toward the shoulder, and her car spun wildly. The truck hit Rosa’s rear door, sending Noni’s tender body sailing through the air. Noni lost her leg because of that crash. Alika lost his eye and part of his right ear. I sometimes wondered if he hadn’t lost something else, too, something less tangible, a way of operating in the practical world.

  Loving Alika was irresistible. But I sometimes worried that marrying him so quickly had been improvident. At first I considered his bewilderment to be a sort of courtship ritual, an act of seduction. I expected it to dissipate eventually. After all, he had a good job. He was a photographer at Gino’s Portrait Studio, where he was apparently quite competent, even exemplary. So I supposed that a latent intelligence huddled somewhere within, that it would someday emerge into our life together. But after nearly a year of marriage, there was no sign of it.

  The problem wasn’t Alika’s clumsiness with household objects, which I found endearing, even sexy. It wasn’t his failure to read directions properly, navigate the library, put gas in the car, remember the grocery list or where he put his keys. All of this I could forgive, did forgive, every night, the moment he cuddled up beside me in bed. No, the worst of it was his stupidity when it came to people, especially women. Especially Evelyn James.

  Where Evelyn was concerned, Alika was blind, deaf, and brain-dead. It was Evelyn, not incidentally, who was responsible for the perennials. She had suggested the idea to him when they were first dating. She wanted something permanent to commemorate their relationship.

  According to Alika, there was never any hope of permanence with Evelyn. She was no more than a fling, a one-month stand. He’d met her at the corner convenience store, where she worked the evening shift, and asked her out — just on a whim. But it didn’t last. She became possessive, made him claustrophobic. He began to slip away from her as soon as he met me, he said. As soon as he saw me at the library, he wanted me to be his wife. All romantics lie like that, though they don’t even know they’re doing it.

  “What if I’d quit my job?” I asked him once. “What if you’d gone back to the library and I wasn’t there?”

  “I’d have found you,” he said.

  “You would have forgotten all about me.”

  “I’d have found you,” he repeated, no more insistent than before, calmly convinced he was telling the truth.

  “What if I’d moved away? Out of town?”

  “You didn’t,” he said. He was puzzled. What was the point of this conversation?

  Even I wasn’t sure what the point was. I’d never been like that before, insecure, asking dumb, unanswerable questions, demanding proof of a love that was plainly audible in his voice. It was Evelyn who made me like that. It was Evelyn’s fault that I felt uneasy, watchful. That I began to lose faith.

  The last morning of my life began normally enough. I was on holidays, so I came downstairs in my pyjamas and made blueberry pancakes and coffee. Then I called Alika into the kitchen for breakfast. I handed him his coffee and he raised the cup to his lips.

  “Sugar,” I warned him.

  “Thanks,” he said. He put the cup back on the table and added sugar.

  “I’m going to get dressed,” I said. “I want to start on the garden early, before it gets too hot.”

  Upstairs, I showered and changed into shorts and a T-shirt. I started to make the bed, but when I picked up the pillows, I discovered, on Alika’s side, a single nylon stocking, hidden underneath. I picked it up and drew it slowly between my fingers. I smelled it. I knew whose it was.

  When we were first married, I rarely thought about Evelyn. She never crossed my mind, except for those odd moments when I’d encounter one or another of her belongings in Alika’s house. He had told me that she used to spend every weekend at his place, and it was no wonder, I thought, that she’d misplaced a few things, given the state of his housekeeping. Alika’s house had appalled me, the first time he invited me over. I found myself washing dishes, wiping the counter, mopping the floor. Alika didn’t understand the importance of these details. He grew impatient, wanting me to sit down, drink a glass of wine, listen to music, talk to him. But I couldn’t relax when the kitchen floor was so dirty that the beer cartons were glued to the linoleum.

  “Come on, Wendy,” he’d say. “Forget about the linoleum. There are more important things in life.”

  “This is life,” I’d tell him.

  In the fall, shortly after our wedding, I found a pair of Evelyn’s earrings, a compact, and a silk scarf that still carried traces of her trademark scent — lavender, a strangely old-fashioned choice. It seemed as though Evelyn had slowly come unravelled, leaving a meandering trail of detritus in her wake. I pictured her as a slovenly, absent-minded girl, the kind w
ith nubby sweaters, chewed fingernails, band-aids on her knee. I cleaned and tidied, claiming the house as my own. I removed every loose trace of Evelyn and forgot about her all winter.

  But early in the spring, tucked behind a couch cushion, I found a signed photograph of my husband’s former girlfriend. She looked about twenty-two, a few years younger than me. She was wearing a pink sundress and matching sandals. She didn’t look like a convenience store clerk, at least not like any I’d ever seen. It wasn’t that she was beautiful. She wasn’t even very attractive, though her brushed hair emitted a faintly golden glow, reminiscent of honey, of peaches and butter. But she was focussed so intensely on the photographer that her image was rivetting. I studied her hopeful eyes, her hungry smile, and something tugged at me, deep within my belly. I didn’t mention the photo to Alika. I kept it in a drawer for a couple of days before I threw it away. But that photograph was only the beginning. It seemed that the flotsam and jetsam of Evelyn had resurfaced. All summer long, I found more of her belongings scattered throughout the house — a jewelled comb, a little monogrammed notebook, blank inside — yes, I looked, I rifled the pages. By that point, I was worried. And then I found the stocking under Alika’s pillow.

  I sat on the bed for a while with the stocking in my hand, alarmed by its sheerness, its silky texture and unmistakable lavender scent. I considered the possibility that it had lain unnoticed in our laundry hamper for twelve months, found its way accidentally into a recent load of wash and, in the dryer, become stuck by static electricity to this pillow case. It didn’t seem likely. Not in this humidity. When Alika finished his pancakes and came upstairs, I presented him with the stocking.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “What do you think it is? It’s a woman’s stocking. Evelyn’s stocking. Do you want to tell me how it got under your pillow?”