After River

by Donna Milner

  The only person I ever knew who died was my grandmother. I was twelve years old when Grandma Locke passed away. She visited us only a few times, but I never forgot the way she looked at my brothers and me, as if we were to blame for her daughter’s lot in life. As if, by merely existing, we held our mother, who was meant for much finer things, captive against her will. And I remember the only words of advice my grandmother ever shared with me. ‘Never marry a farmer, Natalie,’ she told me. ‘Remember it’s just as easy to love a rich man as a poor one.’ It didn’t seem to occur to her, or to bother her if it did, that it was my father who paid her bus fare whenever she came to visit.

  I followed Mom out of the garden. ‘Why didn’t Grandma Locke like Dad?’ I asked her, but my eyes were watching River climb out of the truck. His ponytail bounced against his back as he started unloading the empty crates from the truck.

  Mom closed the latch on the gate behind us. ‘Oh, it wasn’t so much him she didn’t like,’ she said, ‘as what he did for a living. And when he called me Nettie. Well, both my parents thought that was barbaric!’

  ‘Ah, yes, the late, great Leslie and Christine Locke,’ Dad’s voice called from inside the back of the milk truck. ‘The king and queen of Victoria.’

  ‘Oh, Gus,’ Mom answered. I’d heard her use this expression so many times that, when I was little, I thought it was one word.

  ‘I don’t think your folks ever forgave you for marrying a milkman,’ Dad replied, passing an empty crate to River. ‘And according to them an ill-bred one at that.’ Then he added, ‘Maybe that was the attraction.’

  I hurried to the back of the truck and reached up to take the next milk crate, then followed River into the dairy. He stacked his crate, then smiled at me as he reached to take mine.

  ‘Got a little sunburn there, Natalie,’ he said and tapped me on the end of my nose.

  I wondered just how much was sunburn and how much was from being around him. No one else had the power to make me blush except River. Although he had been there for a month I was still finding myself tongue-tied around him.

  Outside, he gave me a conspiratorial glance as my parents continued to banter back and forth. After the last of the empty milk bottles were stored in the dairy, we followed Mom and Dad up to the house for lunch.

  Dad threw his arm around Mom. ‘So, Nettie,’ he said, ‘I hear congratulations are in order.’

  ‘Congratulations?’

  ‘On finding your long-lost relatives,’ Dad said slyly. ‘We ran into Gerald Ryan this morning.’

  Mom stopped so abruptly I almost bumped into her. She turned and looked at River, who was fighting to keep a straight face, then back to Dad. ‘Oh, I—’ she stammered, a flush rising in her cheeks. ‘I didn’t—I thought—’

  ‘Yes, thanks for vouching for me, Cousin Nettie,’ River drawled.

  ‘I always knew you wanted a large family,’ my father said. ‘I just didn’t realize what lengths you’d go to get it.’ He laughed and hugged Mom closer.

  I let go of the breath I had unconsciously been holding.

  ‘And that’s the only reason I married you,’ Mom sniffed and shrugged off his arm in feigned anger. But I could tell she was relieved too.

  River rushed up to the gate and, with a mock bow and a wave of his arm ushered her, and then me, past.

  ‘Don’t ya believe it,’ Dad said to me as he walked by River as if he wasn’t there. ‘It was love at first sight when your mother saw me.’

  ‘Ha! For you, maybe.’ Mom’s back was straight and her chin held high as she made her way up the porch steps.

  Dad hurried after her and pulled open the screen door. He held it as Mom and I went into the kitchen. Then he followed, letting the door close behind him. River caught it just before it slammed. Inside, Mom and I stood together at the kitchen sink, rinsing the garden dirt from our hands.

  ‘If you could have seen the goofy look on your father’s face when he saw me, instead of Aunt Elsie, at her door on my first morning in town,’ she said ignoring my father. ‘He stood there with a milk bottle in each hand, looking like he had just discovered them, and had no idea what they were for.’

  River chuckled. As he pulled the kitchen table away from the window, he asked, ‘So what brought a city girl to Atwood in the first place, Nettie?’

  Mom thought for a moment then said. ‘Well, my father joined the Navy in 1939, as soon as war broke out.’

  She retrieved the kettle from the stove, took it over to the sink and filled it as she spoke. ‘He left my mother and me in Victoria on Vancouver Island and shipped out. After Pearl Harbor, when the Americans joined the war, Mother suddenly realized that Japan was “just across the water”. A week later she sent me to live with her Aunt Elsie here in Atwood.’

  ‘And then she saw me and was a goner,’ Dad said. He winked at me before he headed into the bathroom.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Mom said over her shoulder. She turned off the tap and lifted the kettle out of the sink.

  River hurried over and took the heavy kettle from her hands and carried it to the stove. Mom watched him for a moment, then turned back to the cupboard.

  ‘Tell River about the dance,’ I prompted. I had heard the story of how my parents met many times. I thought it was so romantic that I wanted River to hear it too.

  She pulled out the cutlery drawer and continued. ‘Your father couldn’t even stammer a hello that first morning. I’d completely forgotten him by the time he showed up at the Christmas social at the Miners’ Hall the next weekend.’

  ‘To the surprise and delight of a number of excited young women there, I might add,’ Dad called out over the sound of running water.

  ‘That’s true,’ Mom whispered.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ my father said. He emerged from the bathroom drying his face with a towel. ‘I saw all those ladies look up hopefully with their dance cards ready when I came into the hall. But I headed straight across the dance floor to where your mother stood and said, “I believe this is my dance.” She glanced down at her dance card, back up at me, put the card in her pocket and said, “Yes, I believe it is.”‘

  As River slid into his seat behind the table, he mouthed silently, ‘dance card?’ and we exchanged a secret smile.

  ‘I was never one to make a scene,’ Mom sniffed. She was slicing bread at the sideboard. ‘It wasn’t as if I had many partners to choose from. There was a war on after all. There was a shortage of eligible men and I was new to town. The only names on my dance card were friends of my aunt’s. When the song was over—’

  ‘And what was the name of the song?’ my father crowed.

  ‘“It Had To Be You”.’ Mom rolled her eyes at me as we set the table. ‘Anyway, when the dance ended I thanked your father cordially, but firmly. Then I returned to Allen Mumford. He was the town’s new doctor then. It was his name that was really on my card. As Allen led me out onto the floor, I saw your father leave.’

  ‘I was never one to overplay my hand,’ Dad retorted.

  They were into it now and needed no further prodding from me. I glanced at River and caught the amused expression on his face as I passed him a platter of cold cuts from the fridge. ‘The next morning, when I delivered the milk to Aunt Elsie’s,’ Dad went on, ‘her front door opened and out comes your mom. She bounces down the stairs, opens the passenger door of the milk truck, jumps in, slams the door and says, “I believe this is my seat,” without even cracking a smile.’

  Just who swept whom off their feet depends on which one tells the story. In the wedding picture taken eight months later my father looks a little shell-shocked. He says it was because he still couldn’t believe he was standing there beside this ‘beautiful stranger’, his bride, ten years younger than he was. He had proposed to her on their second date – after more than a few gulps of whiskey from a brown-bagged bottle. When she surprised him by answering ‘yes’, he walked into the alley behind the Roxy movie theatre and threw up.

  Mom says they would have marr
ied even sooner except that it took a while to convince her parents, who had to sign for her because she was only seventeen. After she threatened to run off to the States and marry without their consent – a very real threat since the border was only minutes away – her mother and father gave in. If they had realized she would give herself over to the Catholic Church, my grandfather said, he ‘would have come here himself and kidnapped her, dragged her home and tied her to her bed until she got over this foolishness.’

  ‘As it was, he found out too late,’ Mom said. ‘Dad was at sea when Father Mackenzie performed our vows in St Anthony’s. Your grandmother realized it was a Catholic church only minutes before the ceremony.’

  My grandmother was also not one to make a scene, but anyone in the church that day could have seen that the gulping sobs and tears she shed were not the normal mother-of-the bride tears of joy.

  Contrary to my grandmother’s belief – a belief she held until her dying day according to Dad – my mother insisted she never regretted becoming a farmer’s wife. From the moment she stepped out of the milk truck at the Ward Dairy for the first time, she said her heart was captured.

  ‘It was really the farm I fell in love with first,’ she said wistfully, the tea kettle whistling on the stove.

  I’ve tried to imagine what it was she found so compelling when she first climbed out from her shanghaied-seat that winter morning. By December the countryside is usually hidden under snow so deep it’s hard to believe there’s anything beneath the endless white, or that the fields and gardens will ever be green again. All winter the entire farm and surrounding hills are completely obscured by a heavy white carpet. The cows mill around close to the barn in a brown slush-filled mud and manure pasture. Still, to hear Mom describe the scene it’s easy to understand how she romanticized her first vision of the farm.

  ‘It was like a Christmas card,’ she said. ‘The snow hung heavy on the branches of trees, it rolled off the barn roof like thick icing. Fat, silent flakes fell, dusting the backs of the cows and horses. A stream of smoke curled up from the brick chimney of the farmhouse. It was beautiful she mused. ‘In the dairy, the smell of cream, wet cement and bleach was as familiar to me then as it is now.’

  ‘You sure it wasn’t the kiss I stole as soon as the door closed behind us?’ my father teased.

  Mom ignored him as she poured boiling water into the teapot. She knew with certainty, she went on, that as she followed Dad through the maze of shoulder-high snow banks to the farmhouse that it was her future in-laws she was about to meet.

  As she placed the teapot on the table, Dad came up behind Mom and wrapped his arms around her waist. ‘And that was our lucky day,’ he said as he spun her around. ‘Underneath those snow clouds, the sun was shining right side up. Eh, Nettie?’

  I caught a brief flash of something akin to sorrow fill Mom’s eyes as Dad took her into his arms. It was there, then disappeared so quickly, I thought I imagined it. I couldn’t tell if River had noticed because when I glanced over at him he was studying his fingernails.

  While Dad sang an off-key version of ‘It Had To Be You’, Mom frowned in mock exasperation.

  ‘Oh, Gus,’ she sighed, letting him lead her around the kitchen in an exaggerated swaying slow dance, ‘of course it was.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Nettie

  SHE STANDS AT the gate. A dust-covered truck lumbers up the dirt road and passes beneath the Ward Dairy sign. The flatbed with its hulking cargo pulls into the farmyard. Carved birds-eye maple legs and foot pedals protrude from beneath the quilted packing blankets. Nettie recognizes the piano, a wedding gift from her parents. It’s the same piano she grew up with, took lessons on, and played each day, in her childhood home in Victoria.

  ‘Probably could have bought a new one for what it cost to bring it up,’ Gus’s voice whispers in her ear. Nettie smiles.

  Gus places his hands over her eyes and leads her to the side of the farmhouse. His first surprise on this her wedding day. He pulls his hands away to reveal the rose garden. It is not her new husband’s wedding gift itself so much as the thought that pleases her. The fact that this pragmatic man secretly worked so hard to produce a romantic tribute to her middle name brings tears to her eyes.

  Wedding guests gather behind her.

  ‘Well, he’s no gardener by any stretch of the imagination,’ Ma Cooper’s voice says. ‘When Gus started tilling a small strip of soil between the house and the dairy, Manny and I wondered what he was up to. We watched him mix wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow full of manure from the pile behind the barn, with soil. I was beginning to think he had flipped his lid. Finally he came in and asked us what roses to plant.’

  ‘Frivolous,’ Nettie’s new mother-in-law, Manny, snorts. ‘I said it then, and I’m saying it now. Frivolous. I wasn’t letting him have any of my vegetable garden to waste on flowers.’

  ‘I told him to go with yellow tea roses,’ Ma Cooper’s voice continues. ‘He planted the bushes along the fence. Once they were in we watched Gus stand back and contemplate the effect. It wasn’t good enough. Oh, no. He decided it wasn’t quite right and dug a larger strip, tilled, manured and planted the red American Beauties. Then he tilled, manured, and planted again, and again, until what started out as a simple border of tea roses turned into this.’

  Nettie stands before Gus’s labour of love, a profusion of colours, sizes and varieties of roses in an enormous fenced garden, complete with a cedar trellis and an arbour over the gate.

  ‘Well, I’ve had about as much gardening as a man needs in his lifetime,’ Gus’s laughing voice recedes into the dark.

  Now she sits on the iron bed in the old miner’s cabin by the lake. Gus has fixed up the old one room shack for their honeymoon. Another surprise. She watches Gus blow out the kerosene lamp. He reaches for her in the dark. Nettie’s final surprise, in this day of surprises, rings hollow and disappointing.

  Nettie wakes, still she hangs on to the images. She wills her life’s scenes to play out. She can almost hear the hum of the walk-in cooler in the dairy below as Gus snores beside her. Boyer is born while they live in the room above the dairy. On the day after Gus’s father dies of a heart attack, they take their one-year-old son and move in with Gus’s widowed mother. Gus adds a downstairs bedroom and a sunroom to the farmhouse. Nettie’s dream of her own home disappears.

  No matter how she tries, Nettie never grows close to her mother-in-law. Still, they are cordial. Enough so that, as Nettie’s family grows, Manny teaches her how to can, to preserve, and bake along with many other skills so foreign to Nettie, but necessary as the wife of a farmer. Nettie even feels some grief when, at the age of sixty-one – after gutting twenty-seven chickens at the kitchen table-Gus’s mother lays down for a nap one afternoon and never gets up. Pregnant with her fourth child when she finds her mother-in-law’s lifeless body, Nettie fights back the joy she feels at the thought of an extra bedroom. Even now a wave of guilt rises as she allows the scene to replay one last time.

  They’re all gone now: Ma Cooper, Manny and Gus. Morgan and Carl have moved so far away. And Natalie. Natalie was the first to leave. Nothing is the same any more. Even the rose garden no longer exists. But Boyer is still out at the farm. Boyer and the piano.

  Home. She wants to go home, to give herself over to the soothing, healing sounds of music once again.

  She sits in the parlour. She will play Natalie’s favourite song; maybe the notes will hurry her daughter home. Then she can tell her.

  She pushes back the wooden lid and places her hands on the ivory keys. Her fingers deftly find the chords. But no matter how hard she presses no sound comes.

  Chapter Nineteen

  THE BUS LEAVES me at Cache Creek. I eat my lunch outside the motel restaurant that serves as a bus depot while I wait for my connection to Kelowna. Two hours to kill.

  I feel a nagging regret kindling over my stubbornness in not allowing Vern to drive me to Atwood. I try to ignore the meaning behind his words thi
s morning. His unfinished sentence about not having a chance to meet my mother. But he’s right. Her dying is more a reality than a probability. A spark of fear ignites in the pit of my stomach. The fear that I might be too late.

  I push aside the last of my salad. My notebooks and laptop are spread out on the table top, open, ready, waiting for words to flow from thin air to keyboard, to hard drive. Nothing comes. I am working on a series of articles about northern women for the Prince George Chronicle. Inspiration wanes as I travel south.

  Before me a swimmer does laps in the motel pool. I watch indifferently as an arm arches up. Water cascades over tanned skin, a strawberry blond head lifts and turns from side to side. Something familiar wakes me to the moment. I am sure the swimmer is Ken.

  Kenneth Jones, my second husband. I’m afraid to look too closely. How would I feel if he stood up, removed his goggles, and walked toward me? What would we say to each other? But no, no it can’t be.

  Still, each time the swimmer’s head comes up for air I’m less certain. The features, the shape of the back, the long arms, are all my ex-husband’s. But the way this swimmer carries himself is not the way the man I was married to for nine years did. The constantly nervous Ken that I knew would never have glided through the water with such self-control. He would have stopped many times to see who was watching, to flash a timorous smile, as if apologizing for being there, for taking up space. And yet, as I watch him, almost mesmerized by oblique possibility, I am not sure. It occurs to me that perhaps the anxiety, the lack of confidence, was only there when I was. Maybe this is who he is now that I am not in his life, not threatening to leave.

  As if I have willed him to, the swimmer stands in the middle of a lap. He pulls off his goggles and wipes a hand over his face and shakes the excess water away. He looks at me, then through me. I am of no more importance in this stranger’s life than he is in mine. I don’t even see now what it was about him that brought Ken – who I haven’t seen for over fifteen years – to mind. The men in your life never really go away; they only disappear. Or you do.