“Why didn’t you put it on?” Jonah said. He let go of her hand and clenched both of his into fists, the colour of his knuckles draining to white.
Hazel came between Katie and Jonah. “Maybe we should just turn around and go home. We had a nice drive together. I think it’s enough.”
Jonah knew she was being reasonable. Yet something flared. Like an explosion seen in slow motion, he could feel it expand but was helpless to stop it.
“We’re not going to let her mistake ruin this for everyone,” he said. He put up a finger to silence Hazel and walked back to the car, unlocked the trunk and began to rummage around until he found a pair of his old garage pants, blotched with machine oil. When he wrapped them around Katie’s shoulders she slumped under the stiff weight.
“I’m not really that cold,” she said, but it came out chopped up.
“I-m n-ot re-all-y th-a-t c-old.”
Hazel took off her own jacket, bundled it around Katie and picked her up. “It’s not her mistake. If you’d told me where we were going, I would have known what to bring. For that matter, you knew — why didn’t you grab her coat?”
“She’s old enough to think for herself once in a while. And if she can’t, it’s your job to make sure she has what she needs.”
Hazel put Katie down but continued to hold on to her as she spoke. “Something’s wrong. Something’s been wrong for a while now. I’ve been waiting for you to tell me, but you need to do it now. What is it?”
“It’s nothing. Nothing’s wrong. Does something have to be wrong to expect a little gratitude?” Jonah got into the car and drove away without looking back at Hazel and Katie, whom he’d left at the edge of the lake. When he returned for them an hour later, they were huddled together on a large rock, throwing stones into the water. Nobody said anything until they were home.
“How about I make us some varenyky for supper? I think there’s still some in the freezer,” Hazel said to Katie as they climbed the few wooden steps into the porch and took off their shoes.
Katie nodded and looked back at Jonah, her cheeks brightening a little. Jonah smiled thinly, deliberately, before he went past them and into the bathroom where he closed the door. In the mirror he saw that the contented creases at the corners of his eyes had begun to fade, replaced by the beginnings of channels that appeared across his forehead and between his brows. He covered his ear with his hand and looked away.
Later that night, Jonah woke up and found Hazel on her knees, praying in front of the picture window in their bedroom. He knew without listening to his wife’s whispers that she was busy thanking God for something. Worse though, he knew she was praying for him. He turned away, waiting to be pulled back down into sleep.
A few weeks after the drive to Cypress, Katie peeked in on Jonah as he sat in a chair in front of his bedroom window, staring at the last narrow band of sunset.
“Daddy?”
“When’s the last time you had an ear infection?” he asked. She took a step towards him, but when he didn’t turn to look at her, or hold out his hand for her to come, she stayed near the door.
“I don’t know. A long time?” Katie said, though Jonah knew she’d had more than her share of them.
Jonah let his head fall forward, as though a string at the back of his neck had been cut. He waved towards the door for Katie to leave. She didn’t though, and Jonah saw her crouch into the shadow of the bed. He’d already decided that the only thing that could be wrong with his ear was a tumour. He had convinced himself of it, feeding the idea until it grew and invaded every other thought. He had cancer. The tumour was growing and pressing against his eardrum. Soon, if it hadn’t already, it would spread to his brain and bones and that would be it.
“Cancer,” he said to himself, loud enough for Katie to hear. “Do you know what surgery is? They’ll put me on a table and cut into my head. Remove as much as they can, but it won’t be enough.” Jonah nearly laughed when he thought how the disease that had taken his Uncle Elias had skipped over his father — probably his insides were too vinegary for the disease to survive in — and settled for him.
“It’s probably nothing serious,” Hazel said the next morning when Jonah told her what he suspected. “You haven’t even seen the doctor.”
Jonah sat on a paper-covered examination table in the doctor’s office, holding his breath as the doctor peered into his ear. He closed his eyes and thought about how his uncle was prepared to accept God’s will. But Jonah wasn’t. He was furious with God, and had told Him so.
“Why don’t you take that pickled old shit down the hill?” Jonah had shouted up to the sky before driving to town. Then he hung his head and wept. “I’ve become a better man than him. I’m a good husband. A good father. I don’t deserve this.”
Jonah was quiet when he talked to the doctor, describing what had happened with as few words as possible.
“Aha, well, there we have it,” the doctor said after he’d shone a light into Jonah’s ear. He selected a pair of slender metal tweezers from a drawer and slid them inside Jonah’s ear canal. “This little bugger must’ve been looking for a safe place. Wait, wait. Hold still, then, or you’ll have part of him left in there, and my tweezers lodged in your eardrum.” He probed gently and Jonah felt something inside shift and be withdrawn. He didn’t have a chance to ask what it was before sound rushed back into his ear like a cool breath. He waited quietly for the doctor to flush warm water into his ear and drain it into a crescent-shaped bowl.
“All done,” the doctor said, peering into the basin, sloshing the liquid back and forth until he seemed satisfied. “All anatomy present and accounted for.”
Jonah looked inside the bowl the doctor held out. Among other parts, an anther and a slender black insect leg floated together with globs of wax. On the table, a large luna moth had been set aside with the tweezers, its stained-glass wings crumpled against its body.
Jonah stared at the moth for a long while, as though it would reveal something. Finally, he slid off the examination table, nodded towards the insect and said, “I want to keep it. Can you put it in a jar?”
At home, Jonah put the moth in a drawer of his night table. He sat on the edge of the bed, rested his face in his hands. Even though it turned out to be nothing, he still felt as though he’d narrowly missed sharing his uncle’s fate. And nearly lost something else, as well.
Jonah didn’t tell Hazel about the moth that night. He woke early the next morning, before Hazel or Katie, and thought he could hear the moth fluttering in his ear. The sound was like whispers. The words, if there were any, were empty.
As the room began to take shape in the grey light before dawn, Jonah opened the drawer beside his bed and took out the moth, still in the specimen jar from the doctor.
Jonah slid his feet to the floor, quietly left the room and walked through the house until he was outside, standing on his front porch. From where he stood, he could see his father down the hill, walking away from their old barn, his back bent, a heavy pail of milk in each hand. Jonah looked at the moth again. Suddenly he couldn’t remember why he had wanted to keep it.
ASHES
LIBBY WOULD RATHER BE IN THE garden. It’s almost warm enough this April. As teasings of green push up through the soil to suggest early spring, she feels a winter’s worth of longing to plant the garden, walk with bare feet through warm mud, take root alongside the seeds she harvested from last year’s best squash and melons. She intends to grow tomatoes this year as well, although she has sometimes been accused of giving them too much space that could otherwise be seeded with more sensible vegetables. The kind that grow in straight rows with modest coverings of husks and pods and rinds. Or potatoes, ugly but underground.
Tomatoes make Anke nervous. The way they become vulnerable to frost at the first hint of ripening. Their shameless red and soft flesh that yields to the slightest pressure, their gel-enveloped seeds. There was a time when she picked and ate them in the afternoon, warm from the vine. Now she presses them into steriliz
ed jars, tempers their sweetness with a boiling salt-and-vinegar brine.
Besides tomato red there are other colours Anke finds disturbing. Blue, like the scattered shards of cobalt pottery scattered through the far garden. And yellow. Tuscany yellow. The name of a paint she’d once chosen for one of the bedrooms.
Unlike Libby, Anke is a sure voice for practicality. But, since Matthew went and married Libby anyway, Anke won’t say a word to him about it now. Tell him that girls like Libby inevitably come to grief. That their careless, barefoot-in-the-spring ways, their enthusiasm, undoes them. And Anke’s not willing to explain how she knows this.
“It’s been so warm. Almost like home on the coast,” Libby says to Anke, even though she knows that referring so often to her life before Saskatchewan irritates her mother-in-law. “I saw Meryl next door putting out trellises for her sweet peas.”
“Meryl?” Anke says, as though she has never heard the name.
“Mrs. Larsen’s daughter-in-law. Remember? There were such lovely peonies at Jake and Meryl’s wedding last summer. All different pinks. I’m thinking of trying to hybridize a new variety to name after her.” Libby knows Anke wishes she would attach herself to the daughters of Anke’s friends rather than their son’s wives.
“What I know is that you sure-as-sin don’t want anyone to think of you in the same breath as that senseless girl,” Anke says. “I went to pay her a visit after she moved in over there, you know, and found her popping pansies into her mouth like she was eating lettuce. And acting as though there was nothing at all strange about it. Why would you want to name a flower . . . ” Her voice trails off as she sees Libby heaping fruit into a pie shell.
“Libby. You’ll be using up the last of my good peaches on just one pie if you keep that up. I want at least six to put in the freezer. And besides, it just doesn’t seem right to pile fruit all up on top of itself like that, does it?”
Anke bites her tongue to keep from wasting a short sermon on “immoral fruit.” Libby doesn’t appreciate good sense.
Deflated, Libby spoons most of the fruit from the pie shell back into the bowl and spreads the thin layer of remaining peaches over the bottom before fitting on the top crust. She crimps the edges and wonders when Anke learned to be so tight. Even sleep seems a necessity Anke resents when there is work that could be done. Libby though, as she sits by the kitchen window and works on the peaches, is in a good mood, wanting peace on such a lovely day when everything outside seems filled with possibilities. She smoothes a hand over the small new curve under her apron and looks outside.
“There’s no need for showing that off,” Anke says, noticing Libby’s fingers moving under the pleated, curtain-like fabric tied at her waist. She lately presented Libby with a set of seven such aprons, one for each day and a special one for Sunday. In case they should be surprised in the kitchen by neighbours, she explained, or the nosey farm boy hired to help in the fields this year. “I myself stayed out of sight when young and expecting,” she says. “Although I suppose things were different then — probably even in cities — ”
Anke doesn’t approve of city girls moving to farms. Not even Libby, who has a college degree in plants but no sense of how fickle they can be, especially on the prairies. Libby, who Anke believes vexed Matthew’s father into his grave last summer with all her organic and hybrid ideas. He might have lived another year, she suspects, if not pressed to change his ways. But Anke never brings that up. Or how, as a widow, she had no choice but to sell her house to her son and let Libby behave as though it was her own to do with as she pleases — while Anke lives like an unwelcome guest in the upstairs bedroom, pretending tiredness at seven-thirty in the evening so she isn’t in their way. Do they appreciate her sacrifice? It doesn’t matter, she tells herself; generosity should be performed without thought of rewards in heaven.
And soon, God willing, there will be an infant and what a chore that will be, to undo all the permissive upbringing and unchecked affection she’s sure the child will receive. So, although she has lately begun to feel pain in her chest when it is cold and in her head when it is hot, she is determined to live long enough to see that her grandchild isn’t raised without some good German sense.
“I’ve been thinking about a name for the child,” Anke says. “Abraham. After his grandfather. It only seems right.”
“I don’t think we want to name a baby after someone who’s dead,” Libby says too quickly. “And besides, we think it’s a girl.”
“There’s never been a girl born first in my family.”
It’s not entirely true. Not true at all, in fact. There was her Ruth, but too few people remember her. And now Libby’s quick refusal to consider Abraham has injured Anke, and she imagines how her son must have been manipulated into agreeing to forget his father. The same way he was seduced into marrying this girl who, with all her untried ideas about farming, is practically a foreigner. She knows she should have insisted harder that he go to school in Saskatchewan. Only nonsense comes from wanting to live by the ocean. And Libby is all nonsense, unlike the girls he would have met closer to home. Steady girls, with parents who know where they’ve come from.
Libby considers herself “Canadian,” as if saying so means anything. A Swedish-Dutch mother and a mostly Swiss father. Who can even keep track of such genetic clutter?
“How about Abel?” Libby says.
“So, you won’t use the name of my dead husband. But you’ll curse a child with the name of the first person murdered on this earth.”
“I just thought — ”
“What? That it’s almost like Abraham? I’m sure in your mind it is.”
Libby considers suggesting Jezebel for a girl, but decides it won’t make either of them feel better.
“And don’t go thinking up any of those new-age names you west-coast girls are so infatuated with. I won’t have a grandchild named Sunshine or Sand Dollar or God knows what else. A solid European name is best in Saskatchewan. German, since that’s what he’ll be.”
Anke wants to say the name Ruth, but it sticks in her throat like a thistle, and she swallows hard to force it back down.
The kitchen is too hot, the oven breathing out heat for the baking of Anke’s half-inch-thick pies. Although Libby knows what thoughts it will prompt in her mother-in-law’s mind, she slips outside through the kitchen’s back door, where she inhales slow draughts of spring air, testing it for substance like a vintner pondering young wine for a sense of its emerging notes of oak and florals. This will be her third summer here, so far away from the mountains and mild coastal weather. Where farming takes place in occasional valleys, not all over the province, on expansive fields flat as an unspooled carpet. Like here, where her wedding to Matthew, like everything else, had waited until after the harvest.
And then came the shock of her first real winter, when the temperature on the thermometer meant nothing if there was wind. And there was always wind.
It happened on a January walk, when she went out into what began as a soft, insulating snowfall but changed suddenly into a blizzard that whipped snow sideways and froze the moisture in her lungs, that Libby found an abandoned outbuilding at the far corner of the farm.
With a small wood-burning stove and stack of dry wood and matches, Libby was able to make a fire and keep warm until the storm passed. And later, in the spring, she claimed and restored the place into a haven for herself and her plants. She imagines children playing there — two girls and a boy — planting seeds for red and yellow carrots and candy cane beets. Chasing one another on the freshly cut grass, stopping to sing “Ring Around the Rosie”. Tumbling down, laughing, after ashes, ashes.
We all fall down, Libby sings, thinking of Anke and wondering why she’d had only one child. A daughter might have softened her.
Anke only said so once, but she disapproved of Libby’s plans for the shed. Strangely possessive of a place she never visited, Libby thought. But because Anke kept her disdain to a few scornful looks, Libby went out
to swish up cobwebs and push dust out the door in what felt like her first true act of housekeeping. Now the walls are hung with new shelves of old wood displaying her collection of glass cloches — from tiny domes that warm delicate young sprouts to giant mute bells that help capture sunlight to grow her tomatoes. Libby thinks of the cloches as keepers of garden memory; she believes in their ability to remember plants. The same way a woman’s body remembers its children.
Libby has walked farther than she meant to, her feet finding the path to the shed. It always seems to happen like this when she lets her mind wander. The shed comes into view unexpectedly, rewarding her with the sight of its weathered frame and gentle windward lean.
I wonder what these walls remember? Libby thinks as she steps up into their shade. She touches the lintel as if to remind the shed who she is.
When she first found it that winter it contained nothing but a packet of unviable poppy seeds and a few clay pots, now filled with fragments of blue pottery she found everywhere in the adjoining square of garden. The shards told her that this place hadn’t always been a secret, though it was impossible to know when it had last been used. What was certain, was if the shards were left in the garden, their sharp edges would threaten the roots of tomatoes and pansies and, even if the plants survived, they’d be unable to bloom.
From inside the shed, the old sunken glass windows, etched and altered by decades of dust storms, will never be clear. When Libby looks through them, the world appears as if under water.
For all its suggestions of former use, Libby senses the garden shed has begun to accept her, a transplant, struggling to thrive among sturdier stalks. Still, it seems determined to keep its secrets.
In the kitchen, Anke — though she prefers being left alone to do things the right way the first time — is working herself into satisfied indignation over Libby’s absence. Where is that girl, anyway? She should want to be here and help. To learn how women in this family do things. And that includes learning how to take care of my son the way he’s been used to.
Mennonites Don't Dance Page 4
