And yet the pieces of furniture that surround me now, the mirrors that reflected our family’s dramas — even those we should never have been witness to — remain firmly in place, unmoved, unchanged. The mystery of Mandy: her march toward order and regimen, passion and death remains in place as well, unsolved. I cannot explain the perfect symmetry of a boy’s eyebrows or the exact design of a butterfly’s wing. And then there is the mystery of that Mexican boy himself, and what did and did not pass between us.
Once, late in the season of that distant summer, when the days were getting shorter and the nights cooler, when the last of the tomatoes were harvested and the apples were beginning to be picked, I observed my uncle watching my aunt. She was wearing dark pants and a fuchsia cardigan over a white blouse. Her blonde hair was pulled back from her sculpted face, on which there was just a trace of makeup: eye shadow and lipstick, blue and red. The delicate gold band of a small watch surrounded her left wrist and moved slightly when she lifted her arm. Each gesture, as she bent to clear plates or turned to speak to her sons or her daughter, was a study in grace. Her poise, her demeanour, was perfect.
I had given little consideration at that time to how one mature person might respond, in an unspoken, inner way, to another. The whole adult personality was to my sixteen-year-old mind so fixed, so certain – even my uncle’s volatility had its own predictable patterns – that the idea of one citizen of that community causing a hidden reaction in another, especially within my own family, was unthinkable. I had my own secret moods by then, and believed that the journey I had found myself taking into privacy and preoccupation was something uniquely mine, perhaps because I was not old enough to shake it. For the previous month while I had talked and laughed with my cousins, or played soccer after supper in the yard, or swam, or dried the dishes, there was something beyond my control growing in my mind: a variety of longing, though I wouldn’t have called it that at the time.
My uncle looked at his wife, and for the first time I was able to read his thoughts, dark fish swimming behind the solemnity of his blue eyes. He needs her, I thought, and he admires her, but he is not at ease with either his need or his admiration. Her beauty and her strength diminished him somehow. At least that is what I remember thinking, though admittedly these may have been observations nurtured in hindsight being, I now see, far too complicated for the girl I was then. Still, regardless of how I might have interpreted that look, I noted it and was startled and vaguely frightened by what it might hold, by all that remained unexpressed between that couple and would remain, I knew, unavailable to me.
What can I do now with all that ambiguity and doubt? There is no information I can bring to it, no light I can shine on it to make it any clearer. Despite the evidence of subsequent events, each theory I have developed lies discarded somewhere in the shadows. I have even attempted to examine the opposite of what I intuited and later observed, believing that if I could at least disprove that, I might strengthen one hypotheses or another. But it is impossible to follow this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion. There is no scientific method by which to establish that the look I apprehended was not one of uncomplicated adoration without even the rumour of approaching contempt to interfere with its clarity. She was beautiful and talented and intelligent in ways that he admired, and he loved her. End of story.
But it is not the end of the story. The story ended in the sorriest of ways out on Sanctuary Line, the road I drive each day to the research station at the Point. Or perhaps it ended before that while we romped through the summer days and clung to the furniture of the past. Yes, perhaps, even then it had ended. The minute that boy put his hand in my hair and his face next to mine, for example, I could feel something change and close up behind me, I could feel something ending. But perhaps that was only the beginning of the end; perhaps the true finish was the military pomp, the ceremony that marched poor, exquisite Mandy from a country whose name we barely knew as children to the old graveyard where her mostly forgotten ancestors awaited her arrival.
After two full decades of life experience it still astonishes me to admit that I brought no more insight to what happened to Mandy while she was over there than I brought to the night everything fell apart all those years ago. In spite of the lengthy phone calls placed in the early hours of the Afghan morning, phone calls during which Mandy, a brilliant officer and ambitious military strategist, barely mentioned the war, her passion and obsession having eclipsed even that ongoing catastrophe. In spite of the times when she was home on leave and making every effort to pay attention to each of her old friends while her mind was thinking, thinking, thinking about one man. In spite of the way she returned to this house and collapsed into an orgy of confession with me as her unlikely priest, I couldn’t really hear what she was saying. Except, when one is set apart by passion and goes into the world of that secret, there seems no reason to take heed of anything beyond those gestures that protect the secret. If I believed in destiny, I would be compelled to call it destiny. There seemed to be no tools with which to examine it, you see, and no weapons with which to blow it up. I could only assume that hidden, unknowable forces were at work. But I am a scientist. I am supposed to believe that what appears to be unknowable is merely that which has not yet been thoroughly examined.
The thing about scientific system taxonomy — Life, Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus — is that while it pretends to inject predictability and comfort into our world, it can’t really cause either of these states to come into being. I’ve been taught that we can define every life form in this manner, by simply moving in a deliberate way, down the list. Everything, that is, except for extinction, which carries out its own scientific duties in an opposite manner. Working its way slowly up through the divisions, it is creation in reverse. First a species disappears, then a genus, then a family, an order, a class. Extinction is relentless, and it is flourishing. I believe it will win in the end.
I spend my time now moving back and forth between the field and the lab, between the quick and the dead. Everything is at risk, not just the orange and black Danaus p. plexippus of the Lepidoptera family, but everything. The old barns – those that have not burned or been taken down – sag and collapse. The small white churches are almost empty on Sundays, if they haven’t already been sold and turned into cafés or antiques stores. All of my ancestors and their houses sleep in closed and unexamined albums. Neither my much-loved cousin nor my enigmatic, haunted uncle is ever coming back.
My uncle was a dynamic man, an experimenter, a risk-taker, always pulling the new into a traditional world, wanting to be the first to grow an exotic crop, use innovative equipment, employ the science of chemical farming, build new structures. Perhaps having been born, as I now believe he was, into the full flowering of previous men’s pioneer labour, he knew that to cling to tradition — no matter how much one loved that tradition — was only to encourage eventual loss. He who came of age in this county when the second growth of trees was entering its lush maturity, and the pastures, fields, flocks, and herds were fed and cared for, and the children educated and inoculated, might have spent his days watching everything he admired grow old and irrelevant around him had his vibrancy not caused him to lean toward change. He was the first farmer in this part of Ontario to cause a strawberry crop to ripen twice in one season, and one of the first to employ foreign workers. He invented a method of staggering the development of plants, and the growth of trees, so that he was able to use his workers to the maximum, with five or six significant harvests a summer. He had the bunkhouses built and the Mexicans flown to the cargo terminal at the Toronto airport and the governments of both countries convinced before anyone could question his purpose. And, in spite of the low wages he paid, he was kind without being patronizing to his employees. Or so we were told, perhaps by him. And it seemed, at the time, to be so. The same men came willingly back year after year, the same men and a couple of women returned and worked steadily from dawn until dusk; all this
happening on one of the oldest farms in Essex County, in the fields and orchards that surround this marvellous fieldstone house. It was built long ago, as I’ve told you, by the second Canadian Butler in the middle of the nineteenth century, and built, I would imagine, without a thought given to Mexican labourers or chemically encouraged farming. Built at a time when the success of each tree in the orchard and the fattening of each animal in the barn seemed to be a gift provided by the relatively moderate climate near the great lake, the hardwood lumber, and the wonderful rich soil of what in those days was called “the front.” Various fruit trees on the farm were named at that time for the men of the family who planted them, so that there was Eber’s tree or Oran’s tree or once, inexplicably, even Matilda’s tree, though no one ever told us who Matilda was. Varieties of apples were identified by the Old World locations they’d come from or, now and then, the New World spots where they were first grown: St. Lawrence, Northern Spy, Hubbardston Nonesuch, King of Tompkins County, or the famous Butler Light, named for the lighthouse-keeping side of our own family. Or so our uncle, Stan Butler, told us. There was not a single exotic apple tree on the farm by the time my cousins and I were born — only the reliable McIntosh remained — so we had neither seen the blossoms nor tasted the fruit of those legendary, vanished trees.
What can I say about my Uncle Stanley? That he was the father I never really had, the man who would guide my way into adulthood? No, he was the father I never could have had, the performing father, full of jokes and hijinks and important-sounding, often conflicting — but always oddly believable, at least to us — pronouncements concerning politics, history, animal husbandry, grafting, and pruning. There were the spontaneous summer adventures: trips in pickup trucks to ghostly old mills and abandoned cheese factories situated in parts of the back townships that only he seemed to know about. “I’m going exploring!” he would announce, springing up from a chair on a Sunday afternoon. As children, even as young teenagers, we would call after him, running to keep up, begging to be included, and he would relent with an air of feigned resignation, as if he hadn’t intended us to join him all along. All that celebration and enthusiasm! And then there were the dark moods, also significant and admirable simply because they were his.
We all adored him, of course, and madly courted his favour, which was not always visibly present, no matter how we tried to please. Seldom unkind, he was nonetheless seized by bouts of vague withdrawal, sometimes by downright absenteeism in our midst, as if a grey veil had been woven between him and us. I now see that as we tried harder, he withdrew further. Then abruptly, some small thing that not one of us had thought of would bring him back, and almost always this would be an external phenomenon, something that really had nothing directly to do with him.
Once it was my cousin Shane, who at the age of about eleven had begun to whittle farm animals from pieces of driftwood he had found at the edge of the lake. My uncle would be interested, you see, not so much in the carvings themselves but in Shane’s absorption in the carving – a window, perhaps, that he hadn’t noticed before into his son’s character. Then, without warning, he would lunge into the whole idea of carving animals, scouring libraries for books on the subject, finding just the right piece of driftwood on the shore, insisting we all become involved until Shane himself would be completely overwhelmed by his father’s enthusiasm. In this way, I now understand, my uncle was a variety of appropriator, a hijacker or robber, having to make everything his, having to own the lion’s share of any experience. Were he here now, he would undoubtedly follow me to the lab, keep records of the fall and spring migrations, and in no time know more about the monarchs than I do, I who have been studying for so long.
But during those summers it would be the sailboat that Don was trying to build or Mandy’s fossil collection that might seize his attention. The fossils were a hobby she had been working on for years, one that her father had never, to our knowledge, even noticed, until he did notice and became a connoisseur. Soon he had found a quantity of fossils among the pebbles of the beach, each one rarer, more unlikely than the one before. A week later he was using words such as trilobite or protozoa in many of his sentences and reciting long lists of Latin names for prehistoric life forms at dinner. Then, while Mandy reddened and looked at her plate, he would make ridiculous demands, insisting that she tell him the life story of a brachiopod or suggesting that the two of them leave the table immediately to see who would be the first to find a graptolite on the pebbled beach. I don’t believe there was malice or even competitiveness in these actions; perhaps he was only teasing. He sensed, I think, a calmness, a steadiness around the tasks that other people loved, a reliable contentment, and in his own unhappiness — if he was unhappy — wished to enter the zone where that contentment came into being. He may simply have been seeking some sort of refuge.
It was essential that some of the members of my family or, more accurately, my mother’s family live near water – the men in particular. Exhausted by making both nourishing pastureland and decent crops flourish in wilderness landscape, they seemed to need to sleep somewhere in the vicinity of an unruly element they could see but knew they were not expected to control. If we were to believe my uncle, it had always been that way; every single Butler farmer had ploughed a field or driven his animals through a pasture that had a shoreline for a shoulder.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the family had bifurcated, one half continuing to pursue – fruitlessly, no doubt, judging from the southwest part of Ireland where they pursued it – the agricultural life, the other half entering a profession, that of lighthouse-keepers.
The keepers would have been eventually taken into the world of the elegantly named Commissioners of Irish Lights and would have been considered fortunate indeed by their brothers in that they would have been given a recognizable job, a house, monogrammed silverware, and solid ironstone crockery with the motto In Salutem Omnium etched on its surface. They would have been given lamps to light, storms to contend with, lives to save, and an elevated vantage point. Their brothers, on the other hand, while they were still in Ireland, dealt with drenched, unmanageable land, large, cold houses, sickly livestock, depressed wives, and poverty-stricken and eventually starving tenants. The North Americans of my uncle’s generation healed the bifurcation by coming solidly back to the land. By the time I was born, there hadn’t been a keeper among us for half a century, though the lighthouse my great-great-uncle had manned was still visible to us and shone, and still shines, completely mechanized now, from the end of nearby Sanctuary Point.
Today is the kind of day that would have been a lighthouse-keeper’s dream: bright sun and a steady breeze strong enough to make cumbersome sailing vessels dart like insects around nautical hazards, but not so strong that those vessels would be smashed to pieces on the shore. Everything is either shining or sparkling: the waves are picturesquely topped by white foam, but the swell is not large enough to cause danger. The onshore wind moves the branches of trees, making an interesting play of light and shade on the grass, but it is not stiff enough to ground the butterflies, many of whom are undoubtedly making use of its updrafts to travel easily from blossom to blossom.
Occasionally, I can hear the drone of one of the old aircraft they use for training purposes across the lake at the Ohio air base solemnly circling above the water. Just before Mandy enrolled in the Royal Military College, during her Great Lakes search-and-rescue phase, she trained for a while in a Canadian military plane, sailing right over Lake Erie, her old farm, her old life. Eyes fixed on the instrument panel and the sky, and then the few scattered patches of forested terrain, she never once looked down at the remains of the orchards. Or so she claimed later, when I asked her.
Year after year in my childhood, my mother and I left the city of Toronto in June and drove west for three hours to this farm, our summer clothes in the back seat of the Buick, the windows open for air. We lived for most of the year in the brick house my father bought before
he died, long enough ago that I barely remembered him or living anywhere else, long enough ago that my mother, and I, had fallen easily back into her family, its generations of agriculturalists, its Irish origins, its identification with the Ontario land it had adopted and has now abandoned. The city house was a convenience; it sheltered us when I went to school and my mother went to work as a secretary in the same school. But it had none of the allure, the glamour of the farm on the lake, the place where she had been born and her father and her father’s father before that. There, each summer to greet us, were the trees planted in the yard and the fences built in the fields by dim ancestors whose stories were reinvented for us by my uncle. And there, also, was the man I always thought of as my other uncle – my mother’s other brother – who lived in the town of Kingsville with his wife and children, whom I thought of as my other cousins. There were views of the lake and sessions of play with Mandy, Don, and Shane and the other cousins, who did not sleep at the farm but who burst out of their parents’ cars on weekends and ran with us, as if by instinct, toward the lake.
Mandy was almost two years younger than me, but it had never really seemed that way. This may have been because, when she wasn’t cavorting around the farm with the rest of us, she was reading, increasing her knowledge of experiences outside of the world of this place and its ancestral narratives. She consumed all of Dickens, I remember, and could speak about orphanages and evil step-parents with authority. By the time she was twelve, Walter Scott had grabbed her imagination and with him came wars and love affairs. This addiction to books was something she came by honestly, an inheritance from several of the great-greats, but I’ll tell you more about this later. Robert Louis Stevenson was her introduction to poetry, which had happened at a very early age. I have begun to read Mandy’s books now, and the other night I let A Child’s Garden of Verses fall open in my hands. How could I not think of those summers when I read the following stanza:
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