After River

by Donna Milner

  ‘You know,’ she added wistfully, ‘he took his monthly bath the night before.’

  That did it. I lost control. The repressed giggle burst through my fist. On either side of me I felt Morgan and Carl’s bodies shake. Suddenly the car filled with choking laughter. Even Boyer and Mom’s shoulders started to shake.

  Boyer stopped the car on the side of the highway before we reached town so we could compose ourselves. It took more than a few moments for the fits of hysterical laughter to quiet down, the tears to be wiped away, and noses to be blown. As the car started again I shrunk back in the seat and avoided Morgan and Carl’s eyes in fear that the inappropriate giggles, or sobs would start up again. I pressed my tissue to my nose. My muffled sneezes were echoed in the front seat by my mother.

  We parked in front of St Anthony’s. Yellow light spilled from the windows of the stone building next to the church. Suddenly I didn’t want to leave the car. I had no desire to go inside to meet the old strangers and new friends gathered there. And I did not want to see my father lying in a casket. Reluctantly I climbed out after Morgan. I stood outside the church with my brothers and my mother and mentally put myself on autopilot. I would follow their lead. I steeled myself to get through this, unemotional and detached.

  Boyer took Mom’s arm. She was only forty-six, but for the first time I had a glimpse of what she would look like as an old woman. Shrunken, smaller, worn down by time, yet still strong.

  I followed behind with Morgan and Carl. Inside the chapel solemn faces turned to greet us. Some I recognized and some I knew I should. Ma Cooper hugged Mom and murmured something to her as Widow Beckett and Jake, red-eyed and grim-faced, stood waiting to offer comfort. Boyer too waited at Mom’s side as she accepted hushed condolences. Then they continued making their way toward the wooden casket at the front of the room. The small crowd parted and let them pass.

  Morgan and Carl followed. I held back. The coffin, surrounded by flowers, seemed surreal. The heavy fragrance from the blossoms repulsed me. No wonder Mom never liked cut flowers in the house.

  Somehow my legs carried me forward, my feet floating as if on their own, towards the polished mahogany casket. The open casket. I stood behind Mom. She whispered something to Boyer. Then she leaned down to kiss my father.

  But the waxy face enfolded in cream satin resembled no one I knew, least of all my father. There had been a mistake. This was not my father! This was not even a person. Just a hard wax dummy. Why was my mother kissing this apparition? Now touching it, as she murmured soft words that only she could hear? Tears slid down her cheeks and dripped from her chin as she caressed the sunken face. Then she patted the folded hands, just as she patted my father’s hands every time she poured his coffee at the kitchen table. But she was patting the wrong hands. Couldn’t she see that?

  She reached over and put her arm around my shoulders, urging me closer. ‘Kiss your father goodbye, Natalie,’ she said, as if I was a little girl who needed to be coerced into kissing someone who was leaving for a short while.

  I recoiled, almost fell, as I tried to step back. She took my hand and placed it on the chest of the impostor. I felt the scratchy wool of my father’s Sunday suit. But underneath was a hollow hard nothingness. This is not my father! This is not my father!

  ‘It’s okay, Nat.’ Morgan took my arm. Had I said it out loud?

  Behind me I heard the rising whispers. ‘What’s Natalie Ward doing now?’

  Even here, even now, they would talk. Talk about me. Talk about Boyer, our family. I bristled. I would not make a spectacle of myself, my family. I leaned over and kissed the cold, grey cheek of the stranger, who at one time must have been my father.

  That evening, the next day, the funeral, all passed in a blur. I was there in body, but like a swimmer caught too far out I was treading water, watching my breathing, trying not to panic. I slept so deeply in my childhood bed that Carl or Morgan had to come in the morning to wake me.

  I dreamt of my father. He flashed a smile at me as he climbed into the cab of his truck. I reached over and placed my hand on his face. It felt warm and soft. Then suddenly it was Boyer’s face. It melted like wax and ran down onto my father’s Sunday suit.

  The morning after the funeral, Carl shook me awake.

  ‘Natalie, come and look at this,’ he said. He hurried across the room and threw open the window.

  I climbed out of bed, wrapped myself in my quilt and joined him. I followed his gaze down to the rose garden. It took me a moment to recognize the hulking figure there. It was Mom. She had on our father’s canvas jacket and woollen pants. My mother was wearing pants! The shock of seeing her in them was almost as startling as the state of the garden. All around her lay pieces of thorny branches and chunks of rose bushes. The last of the autumn blossoms lay scattered and crushed in a profusion of colour. Mom stood swinging an axe over a half-felled yellow rose bush. Chips of barbed branches, thorns and petals flew in the air with each swing. I glanced at Carl, then open-mouthed, we both watched as Boyer and Morgan approached the garden. They moved towards Mom cautiously, as if afraid they might be the next to be attacked. ‘Mom?’ Boyer called tentatively.

  It looked as if she had not heard him. She gave no reply. She dropped the axe, then leaned over, picked up a handsaw, and began working at the gnarled branches at the base of the bush. The scene was so bizarre I wondered for a moment if I were still asleep.

  ‘Mom?’ Boyer called again, as if her name was a question that needed to be answered.

  ‘What?’ She kept on sawing.

  ‘What—What are you doing?’

  ‘What does it look like I am doing?’ she answered with a quick glance up. ‘I’m getting rid of these old bushes.’

  Boyer surveyed the destruction that lay at their feet. ‘But, your rose garden—’

  ‘It was never my rose garden,’ Mom said punctuating each word with a saw stroke. Then she dropped the saw and kicked at the severed plant with her rubber boots. ‘This garden was always your father’s.’ She grabbed a shovel and jammed it into the roots. ‘He doesn’t need it any more.’

  Boyer and Morgan remained motionless, unsure what to do next.

  ‘Don’t just stand there gawking.’ She stood on the shovel blade and wiggled it into the earth. ‘Either grab a shovel and help,’ she puffed. ‘Or go away.’

  I felt, rather than saw, Carl step away from the window and leave the room. I remained there, riveted, unable to pull myself away.

  For the rest of the day, wrapped in my quilt, I sat on the window seat and watched the four of them dig up the garden. They took wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow load and dumped them beside the compost heap. The twisted and snarled roots, tangled branches, sharp hooked barbs and thorns, all lay in an angry-looking pile in the fading afternoon sun. After Mom raked up the last remnants of pastel and blood red petals, she took Dad’s silver Zippo lighter from his jacket pocket and held it to the dried branches. The air filled with the smell of pungent smoke, mingled with the aroma of freshly turned earth, and the sweetness of crushed petals.

  Mom stood and leaned against her rake watching the smouldering fire. ‘Peonies, now there’s a nice soft plant,’ I heard her say. ‘In the spring we’ll plant peonies. They don’t bite back.’

  I smiled at her words. I knew she was not speaking to anyone standing there.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Nettie

  GUS’S FACE FLOATS before her. She lifts a weighted arm and reaches out to touch him. Her eyes open. She tries to focus, to search the room for him. But the room is bare. Hospital bare. ‘I’m coming, Gus,’ she whispers.

  But death is taking its merry time. She fights the dark spectre, not willing to surrender at the first assault. She coughs, then clutches the sheet. It is near now, close enough to whisper promises. She agrees to take its hand, welcomes it as a trusted friend. But first-first, there is something she needs to do. What is it?

  Natalie’s name comes to her lips. Where is she? There is something
she must tell her. It’s more than goodbye. But what?

  She hears the hum of machines; the nurses’ hushed voices in the hallway, and the laboured breath of someone in the room. No, it’s not someone else’s breathing she hears; it’s her own. The morphine is wearing off.

  The afternoon light is fading. Night is coming. It’s not the pain she wants to avoid; it’s the night. The night is not her friend; it never was.

  The pain begins to seep in. She feels it creep relentlessly through her wasted body. She does not resist it; with the pain comes a lifting of the fog. She holds back the moan she feels rising in her throat. She doesn’t want the nurse to come in and check her intravenous feed of oblivion. She opens and shuts her hands, the only part of her body she can move now without the pain. She wants to clear her mind, to be able to think, to find her way back to memories.

  She closes her eyes searching for visions of summer fields, yellow with drying hay. Of winter days, brilliant with the sounds of her children’s laughter and sleigh bells jangling on the harnesses. She wants to bring forth images of the autumn brushed onto the treed hillsides above her home. She concentrates until she sees once again the colours so bright she had to remind herself to breathe when she first looked up and saw them on a crisp fall morning after a hard frost ran wild through the forest.

  And the spring. She longs for visions of springtime. Of days when the farm was alive with the sounds of new life. She pictures fluffy yellow chicks chirping madly as they ran willy-nilly under a heat lamp, wobbly-legged calves bawling as their mothers licked off the afterbirth, a new foal under the belly of a mare, sucking greedily from swollen teats. She smiles at the memory of her children’s faces, faces still young enough to be as awe-struck as she was at these miracles.

  She allows the memories to flow, free from the blur of morphine, memories awash in the light of time, the daytime.

  Her eyes open to see the darkening sky through the window. And she suddenly remembers long ago nights and shudders.

  It was only during the night times that she had lost her way. Only as she lay in the dark beside a snoring Gus, that she wondered. She would try to drown her thoughts in lists of chores, meal plans, and prayers. Yet too often, like the nauseating perfume of the roses, the voices bullied themselves back in. Until she reached for the book always waiting on her night table, and left her bed.

  Sometimes she believed her reading was a curse. Sometimes she thought it would be a blessing to be like Gus, to never have read a novel in her life, to be unaware of what she was missing, to be ignorant of the possibilities. She was certain that all of Gus’s carnal knowledge came from observing the farm animals. His lovemaking was as business-like, and over as quickly, as any barnyard mating.

  Only once did she shed her shyness and try to put into words what she was feeling. But she quickly learned that for all his public displays of affection, her husband could not, would not, discuss the intimacies of their bedroom. So she pushed back the unnamed and unspoken yearnings on those nights when the only relief was the weight of her husband’s body falling away from hers. And then, in the mornings, as her family surrounded her at the breakfast table, the family she had longed for all the years of her only-child youth, she wondered how she could question her life. In the light of day, she felt foolish for her night-veiled thoughts. And so in the dark of their room she stifled the sneezes into her pillow and was grateful for the fullness of her life in the daylight. Until River.

  River? Now she remembers what she needs to tell Natalie.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  SOMEWHERE IN THE back of the bus a child cries, probably from the pressure of changing altitudes. I swallow to pop my ears.

  We’re getting closer, almost there. I see nothing except my blurred reflection as I try to peer out the side window. But I don’t need to see to know we are nearing the turnoff to Atwood.

  The bus driver glances at me in the rear-view mirror. ‘Going home?’ he asks as he catches my eye.

  ‘Yes,’ I answer automatically, and then wonder why. Atwood has not been my home for over thirty-four years.

  Home. Such a simple word. What does it really mean? Where is it exactly? I think of the line from the Robert Frost poem, ‘The Death of the Hired Hand’, once one of Boyer’s favourites:

  Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

  And they would take me in. No one sent me away or shut me out. My exile was self-imposed.

  But there’s really no ‘they’ left there any more. Only Boyer. Now that Mom is in St Helena’s, Boyer is the only member of our family who still lives out at the old farmstead.

  Even the farm is not the same any more. The year after I moved away, shortly before my father died, the barn was automated and the milk sold in bulk to the large pasteurizing dairies. And not long after that Morgan and Carl moved to the Queen Charlotte Islands.

  The bus begins to slow. As the air brakes release their long-held breath, a flurry of conflicting emotions grips me. For a moment I feel nauseated. I push the anxiety back down and begin to gather my belongings.

  We pull to a stop at the side of the wide junction. Parked beneath the highway sign is the old Ford Edsel. Boyer? Boyer has come to pick me up? My body goes rigid with sudden panic. Oh, God, alone with Boyer for the forty-minute drive into Atwood? I have not spent one minute alone with him in thirty-five years. What will we find to talk about? Why would he come? Where’s Jenny? Then I feel the heat rise to my face. Mom? Maybe I’m too late.

  But it’s not Boyer who climbs out of the car’s driver’s seat as I stand waiting for the bus door to open. An involuntary sigh of relief escapes from my throat as I step off the bus and into my daughter’s arms.

  Through our tearful hug, Jenny assures me that Mom is all right. ‘She was sleeping a bit fitfully when I saw her earlier tonight,’ she says, ‘but she has some fight in her yet.’

  The sharp mountain air bites my face as we load my suitcase into the trunk. The bus tail lights recede. Darkness enfolds us. I’d forgotten how suddenly blackness snaps on in these mountains.

  ‘I was surprised to see you with Boyer’s old car,’ I tell her once we are settled inside.

  ‘My car,’ she says, a note of pride creeping into her voice. ‘Uncle Boyer gave it to me. I’m just taking it out for the last spin before the snow flies.’ The dashboard lights cast green shadows on her face as she pulls onto the highway.

  We drive in silence for a few miles, then without taking her eyes off the road Jenny says quietly, ‘Tell me about River.’

  I am momentarily stunned at hearing his name. A name from another lifetime. A name I haven’t given voice to for years. My mind races trying to give meaning to the simple question.

  ‘Mom?’ Jenny glances at me then back to the road. ‘Who was he? Tell me what happened to him – what happened between you and Uncle Boyer.’

  So there it is. This is what she wanted to talk to me about. I’ve always known this day would come.

  I have always known that when I told my version of our family’s story to Jenny, I would have to begin before that summer of my sixteenth year. I need to tell her about who and what our family was before it all happened. I need to tell her about the ‘before River’, and the ‘after’. I want her to understand just how much had been lost-left behind.

  Still, I am startled at her request, not ready to speak it all out loud. I always thought the telling would be in writing. It would be so much easier to put it down on paper than to hear the truth falter in my voice. But now? I’m not ready now. Not while my mother is dying. I cannot deal with both these traumas at the same time, and I tell Jenny so.

  ‘But now is the time,’ she says, her voice firm, but kind. ‘Now, while Grammie is still with us.’

  ‘How do you know about River?’ I finally ask. There, I’ve said his name. I’ve let it out into the small universe we inhabit within the interior of this car, where his presence still remains in the wooden peace sign hanging from
the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Gram,’ she says. ‘She’s said some pretty strange things in her delirium. And I’ve talked with Uncle Boyer. He said if I wanted to know more, I had to ask you.’

  I concentrate on the highway before me, on the darkness unbroken by oncoming headlights. If I could see out the passenger window, if it were daylight, I know I would be looking over a vista of treed mountain tops rising like islands out of a sea of clouds. I shiver, but not from the cold.

  I recall how, on other trips home, my imagination ran away with thoughts of the bus losing control and careening off one of the sharp corners, plunging into the steep chasm below. The vision, the idea, of the fiery end on the tangled forest floor, was not without its morbid appeal then. Everything would be beyond my control – not my fault that I couldn’t make it back to Atwood. I would not have to deal with the reality of my past. But not tonight. Not with my daughter in the car.

  Jenny’s questions create mixed emotions. Would it be a relief to finally unburden those secrets? Can I tell them all to this person whom I love more than I fear the past? The only other person I have ever felt that temptation to tell is Vern.

  From the start, Vern and I resisted the urge to play the ‘tell-me-something-you-have-never-told-anyone’ game all new lovers seem to play. I realize with a start that the real reason I don’t share my past with him, why I avoid bringing him to my childhood home, is I do not want him to see how much devastation I am capable of.

  I wonder now how much of the truth a daughter should hear about her mother? How much does Jenny already know? What have Mom and Boyer told her? Have they told her about that long ago summer night? The night it all started to go wrong?

  They couldn’t have. They weren’t there.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  NO ONE WAS home that night except me. And in the room above the dairy, River.