A bird on every tree

by Carol Bruneau

  “Aren’t you going to ask me in?”

  With all her heart she’d wanted to and would have. Wishing not just the once that the house could be empty—abandoned—but for the fire in the kitchen stove, another behind the parlour’s grate. Tidy blue flames. Pa and her older brothers at work. Ma and the smaller ones off at some church social, its basement hall festooned that time of year with paper chains and snowflakes hung beside the belching furnace. But no such luck.

  “Tomorrow, maybe. Or next week. Christmas Day for sure,” she’d hedged. Afraid to say it wasn’t him personally, afraid to say it was.

  So they’d arranged to meet when he got off work. “We’ll go for a bite, see a show?” Shivering in her velvet coat, she pictured them promenading up the wooden sidewalk, slush pushing between the boards. Scrooge in lights on the Strand’s false front—a mockery of Dickens’s Christmas Carol.

  “I’ve got Pa—why pay to see that?” Movies made you fall asleep; why not read the book instead?

  “Right—you can sleep any old time around here.” And he laughed, mentioning a sign in the church foyer: Pray till something happens, it said.

  Then she’d kissed him on the lips and, grabbing her suitcase, leaving him there behind the garage, hustled past her mother’s frozen garden and in through the porch. The smell of finnan haddie and carbolic soap to greet her, and Ma’s shy, desperate hugs.

  “Who was it brought you, Dolly? Not the young fella from the Co’p? He served me once when the girl in dry goods couldn’t. Came right out of the office, he did. Nice fella.”

  And Pa: “Oh it’s you. What, the wind blew you here? Decided to come down to our level, did you. What fella?” Turning away when she might’ve kissed his cheek. When she’d have just as soon kissed his cranky arse.

  Letters, she thinks of, lying here. Ones penned on creamy paper, and the kind typed one by one on a clean page. The doctor comes to speak to her. She’s clear in her head, perfectly lucid. But whatever they’ve given her leaves her restless, worrying the sheet. Better to refuse their medicines, though the oxygen helps. Without it, the heaviness is an animal on her chest.

  “There are no cats in here, are there?” She has always hated cats.

  “No cats.” The doctor pats her hand. “The hospital won’t allow them.”

  Her voice pushes up from the heaviness, muffled perhaps. Words, rhymes? And he hears her; the doctor has no trouble that way.

  “So you like poems?”

  He’s a youngster—his voice tidy like his touch and the way she imagines his gait. He presses a coldness to her bones through her johnny shirt—a jimmy shirt, why couldn’t it be? All she consists of, bones and skin older than the church, the oldest building in town. The raw bones of a bluebird are what she pictures, or Ma’s bony fingers miming a steeple: Open the doors, Dolly, and see all the people.

  There, now: whenever you’re ready, she hears. Her cue. “‘Some quiet April evening, soft and strange,’” she begins.

  Two days before Christmas they were packed into that basement like sardines, half the town there for the recital. He was right beside her—her beau! A bowl of punch on the sweets table, not a bit of kick to it but oh well. People raising a toast glared when he started to cough not a minute into her first verse. He’d coached her, trading off lines over sips of iron brew in a booth at the Five & Ten, the book opened to the page. That night she didn’t need it, not for such a short piece, and left it home out of harm’s way. The paper chains rustled in the draft. A bad flu going around that year, so bad three of her brothers and two sisters had already missed a ton of school. She had to speak over his coughing:

  “And my lonely spirit thrills

  To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.

  There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;

  We must rise and follow her,

  When from every hill of flame

  She calls and calls each vagabond by name.”

  Her young man, not so young at all measured against the other bachelors, by then few and far between, beaming and applauding as she took a bow.

  “You have a tumor, remember. In your throat. When we did the scope, that’s what we found.” The doctor’s voice is needlessly careful. The malignancy could just be coal from the cars shunting past while Jimmy kissed her that day, wet snow soaking their shoes. A misshapen darkness giving promise to light? She wants only sleep, enough of this living longer than anyone has a right to.

  “Have you forgotten me?” she asks the blueness. “Are you on vacation, or what?” A translucence winks back, blueness through the windowpanes: “Pray till something happens.”

  “A gold nugget inside a black lump.” This she says aloud to make the doctor feel better. A coldness echoes down the shafts of old flights of adventure, past escapes. What, Dolly, is your secret? The secret of making it to this tremendous age; some still ask. No husband to fuss about. How she laughed telling people this, relishing their reactions: envy, sober second thought, a grim delight.

  Coal seams under the ocean are emptied out, tunnels quietly collapsing.

  It’s important that she tells somebody—in the interests of science?

  “I didn’t have to stay single. Once, you know, I had fellas beating down the door.” Only a partial lie—there was a man who boxed, a couple of others during the war, and even a minister, who allowed his cat on the furniture. Too Presbyterian for her liking; and she never could abide felines, certainly not in the house.

  “Be sure to tell the nurse,”—this man, the doctor, bends close, too close, his breath in her ear—“if you’re having pain.”

  Yes, she could have, should have married Jimmy.

  Where there’s tea there’s hope, says the plaque someone gave her one or another Christmas or birthday.

  With any luck he’ll have some waiting, a full pot and a plate of Ma’s fat archies to go with it. His desk cleared and the safe locked for the night, a fire in the office’s potbelly stove.

  No grass grows under your feet. Never mind grass’ll soon grow over them. The rest of that flu-ridden winter she’d stayed put, and that spring too, figuring out what to do with her life while helping Ma. The littlest not even four years old, hardly old enough to tend whatever baby or babies might come next. Working at the Co’p she made enough to keep her youngest siblings in candy. Six pairs of blue eyes staring up from across the counter, these didn’t include her two older brothers’.

  ‘How many of there are yuz?’ Jimmy liked to tease. What made the job bearable was glimpsing him through the office door, busy at his figuring. Garters on his sleeves, a visor on his head, he looked more banker than clerk. And this didn’t touch the Jimmy who sat beside her at the Five & Ten, reading Bliss out loud.

  “Will you come out to the country some Sunday?” he invited her early in June. Two ways to get there: by train or having one of her brothers drive them. But if they gave themselves all day they could walk and be home by dark.

  Ma packed ginger beer and molasses cookies to sustain them. Oh she’d brought him home by then, one Saturday while Pa was safely off on a toot, at one of his ‘meetings’ behind the machine shop. Between scrubbing the floor and rushing to get the Sunday pies in the oven, Ma made an extra place at the table, yelling to the boys to stoke the fire but not enough to burn supper.

  “Pleased to meet you, pleased indeed,” she said, picking dough from her sleeves, fighting her surprise at the bunch of lilacs Jimmy handed her. “Not for me?” The only men who brought flowers weren’t men at all but boys, four and five year olds clutching fistfuls of dandelions.

  “I believe he’d like your hand, wouldn’t he?” Ma’s voice was cagey, almost sly, when that Monday morning she was helping with the beds—so many sheets. Bundling them up, bringing them downstairs to be boiled on the stove for whitening.

  “Why else, girl-dear, would he be so sweet?”
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br />   For two solid years before any of this he’d written to her faithfully. Words crawling over the British Canadian Co-operative Society letterhead on which he also copied out poems. Sent them weekly while she’d worked in Quebec designing neon signs—that bold new brightness you’d never dream of in a coal-mining town—and up in Toronto designing tombstones. In memory of. Here lies. No winged heads like the angels on Lazytown’s scabby stones but stylized urns, wreaths, and crosses, plenty of crosses. What else could she do with her diploma? Scholarships had got her through school; her way of seeing was what some, most of all Ma, appreciated.

  Not that Ma ever said so, she didn’t have to: A gal’s dead a long time, Dolly. Use your brains. Better yet, be a bird and fly out of here.

  Answering Jimmy’s letters—enclosing the odd verse from The Toronto Star—had seemed safe enough, from that distance. Romantic, even. But then the work dried up and that Christmas she’d come home.

  “What,” said Pa, “people aren’t dying anymore?”

  The Sunday they walked to the country started off drizzly and dull. Mist sprouted from the fields, hay as shy as fiddleheads unfurling along swamps. The coltsfoot by the ditches was gone to fluff but in the woods, starflowers and lady’s slippers bloomed everywhere. She carried Ma’s refreshments in a bag tied with string. When they reached the Point, well past noon, they found a good flat rock for everything.

  A finer fat archie he had yet to taste, Jimmy said.

  Wet beaded the spruce needles, clouds thick as work socks hanging over the flat-topped mountains on the far shore. The lakes as far as you could see were one big mirror shimmering grey to blue when the sky tried to clear. Still the dampness clung to their clothes and the air had a nip. He kept shivering and she regretted bringing ginger beer, wishing there’d been tea instead—not that he minded. “It’s only cold staying still, Dolly.” So they walked some more, past a spot he pointed out where they’d look for chanterelles come late August, to one where a hawthorn bloomed, a fragrant billowy white. Coughing into his sleeve, he said before she could that he’d never seen a bush so loaded or smelled air so alive with its scent.

  It had gotten that way, one stealing the other’s thoughts.

  He put his hand over his mouth to cough; he’d had this stupid cold all winter, couldn’t shake it. “It’s not a cold,” he said, “just a tickle.” And he seemed fine, healthy enough, kissing her—all over her face, it felt like. Enough to make her blush, though she kissed him back of course—though if it had been summer and there’d been people around she’d have told him to stop, she’d have had to.

  As it was, it was cold, beyond chilly and damp as they lay together on the picnic rock, the pair of them. The balky sun and his pale, pale chest when he undid his shirt. Even then she heard the rattling inside. But that wasn’t what stopped her. It was the thought of Ma’s hands, those chapped fingers. The swell of Ma’s stomach, the promise and the threat of another child, and the pies, the sheets, the roasts and gutted codfish, the tears, the spats, the mending—always something needing mending—these were the things that said, Don’t be stupid.

  Of course he took it another way.

  “I’d be the happiest guy in the Dominion of Canada if you’d do me the honour of being my wife. Will you, Dolly? Till death do us part.

  “I do love you,” he repeated, when he needn’t have. He needn’t have at all.

  The book’s best section, in her opinion, is “Songs of Vagabondia.” No need to consult the pages once the doctor’s gone, reciting lines to herself and to the ceiling, which must be there. Bliss’s purple asters in their autumn haze: she can see them. Tiny mauve stars, the signs of summer’s end and fall’s hastening, the last of the flowers to go. They bloomed by the cliff and in the hollow above the stony beach at the Point, where the fields and the spruce woods gave way to the lakes’ shimmer.

  Late that summer, at the tail end of August, she and Jimmy had rooted around on hands and knees, like pigs she later saw in Italy sniffing out truffles. A pair of golden chanterelles rewarded their trouble, almost too beautiful to take home and fry. He was awfully thin by then, and even after being outdoors his face looked waxy, pale as the candles Ma stocked up on for winter storms that brought down the wires.

  But on that drippy day in June, offering no more than a shrug, she had picked up the flattest stone at her feet, shale pointed and fine as an arrowhead, and sent it skipping out over the lake the way her oldest brother had taught her.

  “Who knows, Jimmy, what my plans will be? Where I’ll be or what I’ll be doing.”

  Her answer had more to do, finally, with Bliss’s poems than it did with Ma. It had all to do with roaming—her feet, if not necessarily her heart. So it was Bliss who buttoned her lip against saying ‘yes.’

  Soon after finding the mushrooms he started coughing blood—and she was offered a spot in Normal school, quite unexpectedly. Her plans took shape almost too quickly by Labour Day.

  “Abyssinia,” she told him: her way of conscripting geography to make a point.

  I’ll be seeing ya.

  “They called it the poet’s disease,” she wants to tell the nurse and whatever shapes, whatever sprites rise and dance from between the book’s pages. Shelley, Keats, the Brontës, Elizabeth Browning.

  They were going to read Mann’s Magic Mountain too, she and Jimmy, but found its prose long and meandering, lacking in rhyme.

  ‘Tomato juice is good for it, I hear,’ Ma wrote in a letter, rather pointlessly, because by November he was in the san up in Kentville, and she up to her eyeballs in exams.

  But in the shifting shapes—is it the light at the window? Leaves or cats or birds flocking past?—she thinks of Keats, his chilly room by the Spanish Steps, the light gone out of the Roman sky, and his narrow bed, his death mask. It was all there the time she travelled to see it. Poor Keats, and Bliss too—also dying alone, impoverished, cold. And Jimmy, gone by the time she came home, briefly, for one last Christmas there. Too late to change her mind and tell him yes.

  Before the start of the holidays the tuberculosis took him.

  The dead never fall out of love.

  And now she sees him. The snow sifts down, replacing the leaves; yet their feet aren’t cold. It melts into his coat, its soft heavy flakes, and he’s holding something out. Not a promise, not an offer, but a present. The snow dissolves the paper and underneath it the gold-lettered cover warms her hands, its cloth a rich, fine-woven rust, not at all faded but new. Beware rust and moths, the minister always said, the one in the pulpit high above the furnace, not the one with the cat.

  “Nice to see you, Dolly,” he says, smiling. “Dolly-girl, this is for you.”

  Polio Beach

  We’re older now, my cousins and I—the cousins who would occupy my mind. A couple of us have children grown up and far-flung, who themselves have little reason to come here. My own reasons for coming dwindle steadily; by the end of this day they’ll have dwindled to none? But this bears no thinking of, just now. Taking a beach break—a respite in the sad business of burying an old aunt, the last of our mothers’ family, and divvying up the ‘spoils,’ her worldly goods—we walk in solitude, my husband and I. On this windy crescent locked between cliffs, the furthest merging with the town of my mother’s birth and its slag heap’s glacial outline, we walk to put in time this dark July afternoon.

  It could easily be mistaken for early spring, the sea a roiling dark blue: whitecaps, breakers, bits of plastic bobbing on them. Spray stings the air—with a foulness, we realize, as the dog noses the tidemark and a tilting sign anchored in concrete comes in view: Warning. Outfall. A sludgy current froths, waves flinging murk onto the sand—ribbons of toilet paper, not kelp—this once-pristine beach where we swam as kids and my mother and her sisters before us. Abandoned, it’s a floating landfill. The dog roots at the pink plastic of what could be a prosthesis—a doll’s leg—then darts ar
ound a diaper, the detritus of people too busy stumbling through the days to cover their tracks. It’s as if the sun-splashed shore in my memory never existed: scalding sand under untroubled feet and blankets weighted with stones, oranges, towels, shivering bodies. The only evidence of what was is a charred stretch of boardwalk passing a boggy oasis of alders, burnt wood littering the battered dune. Vandalism or some party’s bonfire gone wild? This can’t be the place we swam, can it? I call to my husband—but he’s out of hearing, hastily leashing the dog, sidestepping something no doubt gross. It can’t be the place. Yet it is, its ruin a large, fairly final nail in the lid of a chest of memories soon to be set adrift. Having come from Halifax, I’m missing home.

  To everything there is a season. Still, feeling relief that, having quit coming here years ago, Aunt Flo was spared seeing her old shore “go to pot,” I linger, longing to find something unchanged—evidence of finer days. And there it is: the brackish pond behind the fouled dunes, its stream emptying into the sea, the suck of its current so strong it still cuts the beach in two. Unbreachable now as then, it offers proof that the filthiest spot is indeed where we spent hot afternoons—hours of hen-rooster-chicken-duck—rewarded afterwards with Orange Crush from the crossroads’ store, its dripping cooler. Wasn’t life sweet, in the days when Ma cut oranges into dories—Rory’s in the dory, and he can’t get out—and sprinkled on the white death?