Sanctuary Line

by Jane Urquhart

  All the time Mandy was talking I envisioned her in a long line of volunteers, walking through the fields of her farm, beating back thick grass, searching for and eventually rescuing her father. Then I imagined her making peace between her father and mother, though exactly how she would achieve the latter, or the former for that matter, never came fully into focus. But then her future role in the military never came into focus either, at least for me. Beyond the echo of my uncle’s own short-lived experience at Maritime Command in Halifax, there was nothing solidly military anywhere near me – or near her.

  What about the poetry? I asked her. She had always kept secret notebooks in which, she had once confessed, she tried to write poetry. And then there were all those books. A volume by a man called William Carlos Williams was on the night table on her side of the bed. I remember thinking it was odd that the name Carlos, which felt Mexican to me, would be bracketed by those two Williams.

  Search-and-rescue is perfect for poetry, she said with what I now see as a surprising amount of insight. Think of it as a metaphor.

  I mean, at the military college I thought you wanted to do an English degree. I simply could not imagine her fully absorbed by what I believed to be the banal world of army manoeuvres. But you could do anything, everything there, she told me. The college granted arts degrees, just like any other kind of university. She would be able to study the poets while she sought-and-rescued and kept the peace.

  I was sitting on the chair in front of my desk with my back to my homework. I was about to enter dangerous territory.

  “Do you really think you’re going to find your father?” It was a brutal thing to ask, but I had been carrying brutality with me for the last six months and I needed to ask it.

  She was silent for some time, her face closed and her eyes averted. “No,” she eventually said. “A lost person must in some way or another choose rescue.” This phrase, potent under the circumstances, was one she was no doubt quoting from some course or another, but it sounded to me like my own limited idea of poetry. “He doesn’t want us to find him,” she said bitterly. “I just know it. He doesn’t even want us to look for him.” She was on the very edge of tears, but I knew she wouldn’t allow herself that comfort. She straightened her spine instead, lifted her head, and looked out my window at the grey city street. “I never want to see him again,” she said.

  She was my cousin, practically my sister. She was the only person whom I had ever shared a room with. I knew her sleeping patterns, how she held a book in her hands, the order in which she put on her clothes: her socks, then underwear, a T-shirt, jeans. I had been there for her first period, her first bra. And I had been there earlier when we were both losing our baby teeth. I knew how she wriggled into a swimsuit. I had been in and out of the lake a thousand times with her, and I knew what she looked like when she had been in the lake too long, her lips blue and her shoulders quivering. I knew her moods, her romantic and poetic side, and something else in her that was a combination of pride and stubbornness, a recipe that would later evolve into what I saw as ambition.

  “Mom hates him,” she added and then after a pause, “I do too.”

  I got up from the chair and walked toward the door, having neither the nerve nor the heart to carry the conversation any further. I knew her very, very well. And I knew that she was lying. But at the time, when I told her I hated him too, I still honestly believed that I was telling myself the truth.

  About a month ago, driving over to the sanctuary, I saw two farmers standing like phantoms in a lane beside a pickup truck that was parked near a large, badly maintained barn. With their heads bent, their caps pulled down over their foreheads, they seemed to be absorbed in a matter of great importance to them. Perhaps they were cementing an agreement regarding an animal or a delivery of hay. Or maybe they were discussing the barn itself, arranging for its demolition, because I suddenly saw the structure for what it was: a colossal sagging monument from another era, as ancient and shaggy as an extinct beast. It was so out of place in the midst of what was developing around it – a gravel pit on one side of the road, the beginnings of a subdivision on the other – it could have been a Roman granary, a stage set based on a medieval drawing, or some kind of huge wooden freighter from earlier times that had found itself inexplicably moored near the twenty-first-century asphalt of a secondary highway.

  Our family had had problems with barns long before my uncle set fire to the one whose foundations would contain the remnants of my aunt’s rose garden. As my uncle would have it, that barn, which he never admitted to burning, was merely a replacement for a more splendid, more capacious, and more beautiful barn destroyed in the nineteenth century as a result, he said, of covetousness. The first Canadian Butler had built a log barn for his animals, quite early in the game, after migrating from the American side of the lake, even before he constructed the log house. What else could he do? my uncle used to say. The place was rotten with wilderness, trees and vines, and undergrowth. Mostly swamp, he said, animals up to their fetlocks in muskeg. Had to get something up fast or nobody, animal or human, would have survived the winter. Loyalty to the Crown so far had brought him nothing but heartache and labour and dead children. He didn’t want to lose the animals as well.

  Time passed, a reasonably spacious log house had been built, and the barn made of logs began to seem too small. By then my great-great-grandfather had four strong sons to help him clear trees and plant essential crops. He also had a wagon and a horse so that he could take his grain to be ground at the nearest grist mill some ten miles away. A terrible journey, my uncle claimed, the tracks nothing but mud and boulders. A sledge on the frozen roads of winter would have made the voyage much easier, but in winter, of course, there was no grain to be ground, so the mud and boulders of the warmer seasons had to be conquered. Many things were shipped by water on the great lake so close to my ancestor’s door, but the grist mill was deep inland, situated, as it had to be, on a fast-flowing stream. There was a lot of grain because of the hard work completed by him and his sons, and there was a vast quantity of straw, and it wasn’t long before the old man began to long for a real barn in which to store it all, a barn made of hewn beams and sawed lumber. Had he been able to afford the lumber, this would have involved another series of difficult journeys to a saw mill, also located inland on another fast-flowing stream.

  His neighbour was the son of an original Upper Canadian settler; the family had been in the vicinity for two generations. Their crops were healthier, their house was bigger, and they had what my uncle called a “real beaut” of a barn built on a foundation made up of a quantity of fieldstones that had been removed from the acreage over the past thirty years. Great-great used to look across the two fields that separated them, at the neighbour’s barn, and wonder if he would live long enough to have one of his own, concluding, sadly, that this wasn’t likely going to be the case. On certain days, when he was able to take a small vacation from the endless work that filled his waking hours, he would walk across the two fields to talk to his neighbour about the building of barns and the acquiring of sawn lumber, and during one of those visits the neighbour announced that he was selling out and opening a harness shop in the village that was beginning to grow, albeit in a ragged fashion, two miles to the north.

  Great-great bought the barn, my uncle told us, by trading the two fine workhorses he had raised from colts, angering his sons because they knew they would now have to manage with only the two elder parents of these young beasts. And there was another problem: my ancestor had not bought the land the building stood on, intending, as he announced, to move the barn to a foundation he would build with the fieldstones so prevalent on his own property.

  More laborious effort ensued. A sledgelike vehicle, something called a stone boat, was used, I think. And when the foundation was ready, the wooden structure of the barn had to be moved across the fields on log rollers by the animals with the aid of something called a capstan. A kind of architectural drunkenness
took place as the structure swayed precariously in the dips and hollows of the meadow or stood, obstinately refusing to be moved, when it rolled into a rut. Things could have been worse: the project had been undertaken in late August so the ground was as dry as it was ever going to be, and eventually the barn reached its destination. Then, of course, winches had to be devised and used to lift the structure onto its new foundation, and mortar had to be mixed and applied to cement it into place, all this going on while the women of the house hauled tables and chairs and buckets of food outside to feed the men once the job was completed. My uncle was a little vague on the details of the winching, but he gave a precise picture of the menu of the feast: roast turkeys and chickens and ducks, turnips and potatoes and cabbages, twenty-four loaves of fresh-baked bread, thirty apple pies, and thirty jugs of cider – one for each man – made from the farm’s first apples. Much chanting of Protestant prayers, and much singing of Protestant hymns, and general good fellowship occurred at this banquet. The barn, firmly situated and looming over the celebrants, looked as if it had always been there, “as if it had grown there,” my uncle was fond of saying.

  The next day, Old Great-great and his sons filled the barn with grain and straw and led the two aged horses into the stalls. “When your barn is well filled, all safe and secure. Be thankful to God and remember the poor,” my uncle always recited at this point with a knowing irony in his voice. The men hung harnesses on wall hooks and carved their initials on the rafters. The younger sons leapt from various heights into the straw of the hay mow, and cats from the house were coaxed into taking up residence in the barn to discourage mice. The few iron implements they owned, a couple of spades and a plough, which until that moment had been rusting either out of doors or in the damp of the log barn, were brought into shelter. In spite of extreme Protestantism, a barn dance was planned by the older sons and sanctioned by their father, who was anxious for these sons to court and marry and, most important, to mate in order to produce more young males.

  Now weather enters the story, as it always seems to do whenever a story involves the great-greats. There followed two days of excruciating heat and “crippling” humidity and a lot of talk about how fortunate it was that this heat and humidity had not been part of the barn’s relocation. And on the evening of the fourth day, just before sundown, a magenta cloud – unlike anything anyone had ever seen – crawled over the eastern horizon, trailing a powerful windstorm in its wake. Old Great-great enjoyed only a few moments of gratitude for the barn’s shelter before the building exploded and then vanished as if it had never been there. No one in the vicinity knew much about tornados, but almost everyone had heard rumours concerning the wrath of God. They went through the list of sins in their minds and eventually concluded that it was the sin of covetousness that had brought this wrath down upon the family. To the end of his days, however, the old man himself believed that it was the sanctioning of the barn dance that had brought about the building’s destruction, and, consequently, none of the subsequent Butlers were permitted to attend even the most innocent of dances. Not until my mother and uncle’s generation was the ban lifted. Old Great-great never again allowed the word dance to be spoken in his presence. And, just to be safe, he never again coveted anything, as far as anyone could tell.

  One of the horses in the barn had been killed outright. The other, however, was found the next morning calmly grazing in a neighbour’s pasture, five fields away, with no gates open between him and the place where he was last known to be. And the only fragment of the barn that remained in Old Great-great’s custody was the one board that had crashed through his kitchen window and that had his own initials freshly carved into its surface. The board was kept in the family attic; Great-great’s descendants must have been superstitious about discarding it. My uncle hauled it down from there one evening after telling the story, hauled it down and nailed it up above the fireplace. He did this in spite of my aunt’s protestations – even she did not have the power to stop him once an idea of this nature had firmly lodged itself in his mind. He wanted, I now think, to change the status of the old board to that of a holy relic. But you could feel the will draining out of him as he searched for nails and for the struts in the wall in which to pound them. In the end the whole act became faintly ridiculous, embarrassing those of us who had been ordered to stay in place until the ceremony was over. It took too long and was too fraught with ordinary difficulty to qualify as a mythic gesture. The ancestral initials were all but invisible to the naked eye, and my aunt’s disapproval was palpable in the air. When he had finished, my uncle looked at his audience as if he were going to say something we would all be required to remember. Then he turned back to the fireplace and removed the flakes of plaster his hammering had scattered all over the mantel, pushing them, quite carefully, with one hand into the cup of the other. “I’ve made a mess,” he said, maybe to himself, maybe to my aunt. Then he closed his fist around the fragments and left the room.

  “He wanted to be called an orchardist,” my mother once said. “As the years passed, your uncle was never entirely comfortable with the term ‘farmer,’ at least in relation to himself.”

  The view from her windows at The Golden Field, as I’ve said, was one of strip malls and row housing, neither fields nor orchards in sight in either direction. On this winter day, however, it was difficult to determine the shape of the landscape at all because the wind had come up and the atmosphere was thick with blowing snow.

  “Sadie, you see, was always trying to get him to understand that what he was doing had more to do with science than with ordinary labour.”

  Yes, I thought, he had consistently described his activities in a botanical, chemical, or sometimes even an aesthetic manner: soil chemistry, blossom-to-fruit ratio, the transfer of cells after grafting, the sinuous line of branch growth after pruning. It was up to my aunt to take care of the practical, and the financial details, tasks she undertook with enthusiasm and ultimate success. She was herself ambitious: also not fond of the word farmer and all that it implied. But neither of them was able to come up with a substitute for the word farm and used it, unconsciously, all the time, unless one or the other was fed up with something or engaged in an argument, at which point the farm became “this place” or sometimes “this godforsaken place.” Years later Mandy would hear this phrase in a country thousands of miles away. What kind of inner echo would that have caused in her, on that hot, dusty military base? Would she connect her parents, this farm, to the man who spoke the words?

  The farm, of course, ground to a halt and faster than you might think as soon as my uncle was gone. The decade immediately following his disappearance was perhaps the oddest of the past twenty years, though none of those years seemed to have any kind of structure regardless of the way life insisted that regular maintenance take place, that new clothes and cosmetics and toothbrushes be purchased, and that various repairs be made to windows, faucets, roofs, cars. As I’ve said, sections of the waterfront property were sold off as estate lots. Large, ungainly houses were built by people neither my aunt nor my mother – nor I for that matter – ever came to know. I can see none of these houses from my windows as the farmhouse is situated midpoint on the shoreline of a small bay and the homes in question are located on the other side of what we, as children, called the Old Wharf. Sometimes this pleases me, as I like the isolation of the spot, that sense – entirely an illusion now – that I am alone on the shores of the great lake. At other moments, though, when I feel myself being absorbed into the past, I wish I had the ability to become part of a neighbourhood, as my mother hoped I would; had the knowledge of how one leans over a back fence to discuss the goings-on in a village or township, or even to participate with some interest and enthusiasm in the art of gossip.

  Sometimes I feel the past will eat me alive, will devour me in the same way that the now abundantly overgrown cedar bush is devouring the pioneer rail fences on which, as children, we used to stand in order to watch the Mexicans work
. I fear I will become one of those women you sometimes see buying groceries in town, unkempt, vaguely mad, barely present, and talking quietly to herself as she pushes the cart in a bewildered fashion toward the vegetable section, a woman not unlike the woman my aunt was in her last years.

  “I wonder why he insisted on the term ‘orchardist,’” my mother continued, still thinking about my uncle. “He wasn’t really a snob, you understand. Everyone he knew was a farmer. Everyone had a farm of some kind or another.” She glanced at the clock on the wall. It was nearing lunchtime. “Either that or they did something on the lake. The trout was wonderful, you know, when we could still eat it. And then there was the shipping.”

  If you look at our small bay, you will see that its eastern arm is made up of boulders and mature willow trees. One of the old great-greats had a sizeable wharf built there so that he might ship his own apples across the lake to the markets in Cleveland, or Akron. But I doubt that any of my unseen neighbours, looking at it from the opposite side, think of it as anything other than a natural phenomenon, like the western arm, a series of limestone slabs pushing out into the lake, which we called Little Point.

  When we were children, Teo and I constructed our paper boats on Little Point and set them afloat in the shallow water. I can recall the feel of the cool water on my ankles and the smooth stone beneath my feet, Teo’s laughter, him teaching me the words barco – boat – and naufragio.

  “Do you remember Teo and me playing with boats at Little Point?” I asked my mother now. “He used the word naufragio whenever one of our paper boats capsized.”