Sanctuary Line

by Jane Urquhart

  All the other images had been put away, including the framed aerial shots of the farm in its heyday when the Mexicans still came each summer. I was not unhappy with this: memory was not my friend, even though I was so young. I now believe that memory is rarely a friend to anyone. Always attended by transience and loss, often by anguish, the very notion that the elderly spend their days wrapped in the comfort of pleasant mental journeys into the past is simply absurd, in spite of what my mother wants to pretend when I visit her. Perhaps, after all, it was better to be my aunt, who was officially divorced from memory before her death, than it is to be my mother staring out the window at a parking lot trying to puzzle out the riddle of all that was lost.

  And yet, while my mother and my aunt still lived here, and in spite of my reticence, there was something mildly consoling to me about returning to an intimately known place situated on a lake so large that the shore of the lake itself, and therefore the place where you stood, was visible on a map of the world in a way a city street could never be. Comforting as well were the rituals my mother and my aunt still participated in, attending to all the Butler graves in anticipation of Decoration Day at the town cemetery, for instance, both of them being blood Butlers by birth, and myself as well, I suppose.

  That graveyard! There they all were, the antecedents who were heroes of my uncle’s legends, the old farmers, and the old lighthouse-keepers, all the great-greats and the ones who were once or twice removed and therefore vaguer to me, though, remembering the stories, no less interesting. The ones who went to the Klondike, the ones who went to the wars. The ones who died in childbirth, though they were surprisingly few, leading my mother to announce that the women in this family were strong and healthy, a statement that would seem ironic when it was recalled a couple of years later at my aunt’s funeral. The ones who died in farming accidents, and logging accidents, or as the result of an incident with a horse. The small curved stones of the many Butler children who died in the early years following the migration from the south after the American War of Independence. Flowers were planted and placed at all these graves. My uncle wasn’t there, of course, so we brought with us no flowers for him. And once, only once, during that period did my mother bring this sad fact to our attention, though without using his name. “He can’t be buried anywhere else,” she said. “Everyone was always brought home.”

  “You mean you think he is still alive?” He had been dead to me for years. Completely gone.

  “Yes, of course. He would be brought here, if he were dead.”

  “And how exactly would that happen? No one knows where he is. And,” I added, “no one wants to know.”

  I could see that my mother was close to tears, but nothing in me was willing to relent. “He is my brother,” she said. “I want to know.”

  My mother was silent then.

  “Do you have any idea what bringing him back would do? What are you thinking?”

  “He is my blood and …” She stopped speaking, sensing the approach of my aunt.

  I walked angrily away from them both. As far as I was concerned at the time, my uncle had lost his citizenship in the ancestral geography. He had given up the luxury of being able to claim an easily identifiable place for himself on a map of the world, and I wanted even the memory of him erased. Dead or alive, there would never be any flowers for him, not if I could help it. Nor any legends either. I wanted nothing to do with the kind of custody the past enforces on those who continue to remember. And yet, here I am, all these years later, talking to you, detailing history, solidifying legends. Day after day, I allow myself to be taken into custody, my life an anachronism lived in the vicinity of that chair, this table, the polished walnut of Old Great-great’s important-looking desk.

  My mother sometimes talks about this dining table where we are sitting; its superiority to the functional tables at which she is forced to eat at The Golden Field. “It was brought by water from Ohio,” she tells me, “to the wharf, along with all the other furniture. Interestingly, the good dishes in the house had to be ordered twice because a November storm sank the ship carrying the original set.”

  I remember the china shards that we as children so often found along the shore. Their numbers have diminished in recent years. I think of all the tableware and glassware that, during the previous century, must have sunk down to the bottom of the lake only to be broken apart by seasonal storms, then tumbled, softened by the company of stones.

  Sometimes around four o’clock on a late-fall afternoon, the grey, leafless trees beyond the window become black silhouettes against the backdrop of lake and sky, and there is a bruise, purple and strange, on the horizon, a lake-effect snowstorm, I expect, though the day will only now and then show evidence of the famous and deadly squalls of November. Each time I look out this window, the season surprises me. I have overwintered for two years at this place, which as a child I believed was where only summer lived, and still I cannot fully accept the slow, darkening onset of winter.

  I recently read a diary I kept when I was nine years old during one of my city winters: a litany of piano lessons and ballet recitals, sessions of skating in city parks with children whose faces I have completely forgotten, and tests administered by teachers whose names I barely recognized now. How could so much of my life have meant so little to me? The only vivid memories cling to the summer territory of this farm and the past that built it.

  I have one very clear memory concerning a school lesson, but even that connects with my summer life. We were studying the Aztecs and then the Spanish invasions in social studies, reading from an illustrated book entitled The Explorers. The heroic explorers, looking like circus performers in their brightly coloured tights, striped bloomers, and silver armour, often met a sad end at the hands of “the natives,” who were, it seemed, consistently ungrateful for the word of God and the European flags the explorers had taken great trouble to bring to their shores. There were maps in the book, and among them was a map of Mexico, twisting like a funnel cloud at the end of British North America. I knew that this country was where Teo lived when it wasn’t summer, but I never once associated him with the ungrateful natives.

  We were in and out of the house and in and out of the lake all day long in the summer, always running, often together and joined by a gaggle of my cousins’ friends, the screen door banging behind us and driving the mothers mad. Fly swatters were handed out to us before dinner each evening — a red one for me, blue for Mandy, dirty white for Don, and yellow for Shane – because, as the adults reasoned, we were the ones who let the flies in and should therefore assume the responsibility of getting rid of them. All these sounds I recall from the end of the day: the bang of a door, the slap of a fly swatter, the churning noise of the great lake negotiating with the shore, the footsteps of the Mexican workers on the gravel path leading to the bunkhouses, adult voices, the clink of ice filling a tumbler.

  One summer afternoon, Mandy and I – about ten and twelve at the time – burst noisily into the silent house, looking for our swimsuits. This was during a time when the mothers were visiting Aunt Sadie’s family on what I, having been there once or twice myself, thought of as our twin farm in the State of Ohio, and we and Mandy’s brothers were left, therefore, in the somewhat abstract care of my uncle. We hardly noticed him as we hurried through the living room, he was sitting so quietly at the varnished walnut desk that had belonged to his father, and his father’s father before that. But as we were running past him on the return trip, he intercepted us, holding up an old brown school scribbler in his hand.

  “Stop right there,” he shouted, though we were only a few feet away. “Stop!” he commanded. “Look!” he said, holding the notebook aloft. “Listen!” We knew we could not object, though the day was hot and we had found and put on our suits and longed to be in the lake. This may not have been the first time I’d seen him like this, but I do not remember previous episodes, only the conviction, strongly felt, that I did not wish to provoke him by stating our cas
e.

  “Mandy,” he said, “you like poetry.” He waved the book back and forth in a faintly menacing way, as if he were going to toss it over his left shoulder. “This is your goddamned great-grandfather’s poetry I have here,” he said, a belligerent tone in his voice, “and I’m going to read you his goddamned poems.”

  I doubted the existence of such poems but was instinctively fearful of this side of my uncle. I wanted out but dared not move. Mandy stood beside me, tense with apprehension and interruption, as if quivering on the edge of flight, a towel hanging from her arm.

  He pushed his chair back and began to read aloud in a slow, deliberate voice. “‘Milkers and milking,’” he began after a meaningful pause.

  Milkers should be kind

  Neat and clean, milk rapidly

  Systematically, regularly

  He looked at us to make certain we were paying attention. Then he continued.

  The udder is filled with veins

  Arteries, fat and flesh

  The periods for feeding cows

  May be divided in two

  Winter. Summer.

  He looked at us again, distrustfully, over the top of his reading glasses. I could feel myself wanting to giggle at the word udder and sensed Mandy would share the impulse. I determined not to make eye contact with her and looked instead at my uncle, resentment rising in me for reasons I barely understood. And yet, and yet, cutting right through the resentment and the fear of his bewildering anger toward us was a slender, taut thread of love that was tied to him and whatever his anger was trying to express. There were tears in his eyes. I hoped, and I knew that Mandy hoped, he would put down the book and come back to us, but, even though we were just children, we were aware this wouldn’t happen. Not yet.

  He began again, in a subdued fashion, and less declaratively, as if he had forgotten his audience, though we knew better. “‘Dairy stables should be light-filled, well ventilated, have tight floors, comfortable stalls, and should be handy to work in. There should be two rows of cows facing each other for company.’” He looked toward the ceiling. “Christ!” he said, “for company!” He looked down again at the book. “‘The stable should be wide, with a place overhead for hay and straw, meal bins within reach, a silo and a root cellar nearby. The tether, if needed, should be as comfortable as possible, and mangers should be cleaned out daily.’” He was reflected in the glass of the nearby door that led to the porch as well as in the mirror on the opposite wall, as if there were three uncles in the room. Why do I remember this, these ghost images of him?

  “Christ!” he said again. “Who uses the word ‘manger’ now?”

  “Baby Jesus,” Mandy offered.

  He ignored her. “Or the word ‘tether,’” he continued. “Who talks of stables?” He brought his fist down on the desk, causing both Mandy and me to jump nervously. “One cow!” he shouted. “One cow could produce three hundred pounds of butter!” His voice softened. “‘Guernsey, Jersey,’” he recited solemnly, then, “How many pounds, Amanda?”

  “Three hundred,” she said uncertainly. Her answer was barely audible.

  My uncle pushed his chair back, his hands on the arm rests as if he were going to spring into action. “Speak up!” he commanded. “Annunciate!”

  “Three hundred.” Mandy could not control the quaver in her voice.

  “All right,” he sighed as he sank back into the chair. Turning from us, he began to fumble in the pigeonholes of that old dark desk. We could see the flask, but he was having trouble finding it, and we wouldn’t have considered giving him directions of any nature. “Ah well,” he said, his hand finally coming to rest on the beaten silver container that also likely belonged to his grandfather or his great-grandfather. “And what do we keep in that godforsaken woodlot out back?” He gestured vaguely to the north with the hand that held the flask.

  “Holsteins,” said Mandy. “Three of them.”

  “Who milks them? Who writes poetry about them?”

  Mandy and I were silent. I suspected there was no right answer to this question.

  “Who the hell milks them?”

  “Nobody,” whispered Mandy.

  “Exactly.” He waved us away. “Write your own poetry then, swim in your own lake!”

  The argument in him had mercifully collapsed, and we knew we could get out of the house if we did so quietly. We did not look at each other as we moved toward the door in which he was reflected, as if both of us were ashamed of something we had done or were about to do. “Swim in your own lake!” we heard him call from the house as we silently crossed the grass toward the beach, towels hanging limply in our hands.

  By dinnertime he was jovial, playful, inclusive, cooking wieners and beans over a fire on the beach, insistent afterward on somersaults and cartwheels in the yard, games of tag, badminton, baseball in the twilight with Teo ferreted out of the bunkhouse to participate, and Teo’s mother encouraged to observe the goings-on. A few other Mexicans, whose names we never troubled to learn, would stand on the fringes at times like this, their bodies as muscular and sturdy as alert engines, primed for labour and waiting to be put into gear.

  Teo’s mother, Dolores, was taller than most of the men she worked with but only slightly, and like them she was made of smooth firm flesh; no part of her body moved independently when she walked, as I had noticed my own mother’s did. And when she stepped up behind her son and draped her arms over his shoulders and across his chest, those arms looked to me like polished wood or some other solid matter, completely unlike the soft freckled flesh on the arms of my mother and my aunt. I believed then that everything about her was other, though she spoke our language well and operated as a kind of messenger between the bunkhouses and the farmhouse, the fields and the gardens. Teo, at least, had the fact of being a child in common with my cousins and me and therefore inhabited a space I could partially understand. But she, his mother, walked alone. I don’t recall her ever laughing, for instance, though now and then, looking at her son a slow smile transformed her face, and that, combined with the angle at which she held her head at such times, made her almost beautiful. Once, standing in the kitchen preparing a picnic of peanut butter and jam sandwiches to take to our fort, I asked Mandy where Teo’s father was. “He doesn’t have a father,” she told me while pouring water into a plastic pitcher containing the pink powder that would magically transform into raspberry Kool-Aid. She glanced at me to gauge my reaction, her expression, for a fleeting moment, not unlike her mother’s. “Just like you,” she added. Though I was somewhat stung by what she said, we were soon too busy in our playhouse to think about parents at all.

  But those twilight games! My uncle was an enthusiastic participant, a joyous collaborator. Somewhere in this house I have the photos: all of the cousins and sometimes the boys from the neighbouring farms, my Uncle Stan, Teo, and occasionally my other uncle frozen in gestures of anticipation or avoidance, bracing for a blow, it would seem, or an attack, or stretching and opening up to receive an airborne object into their arms. Everyone’s concentration in these pictures is so fierce, it is impossible to believe that whatever was coming toward us was not life-changing, profound, or at the very least much more meaningful than a simple ball thrown in play. The yard was as huge and significant as a battlefield – it would never look that large again – the lake surprisingly less important than the earth until, near dark, we crashed into the water for the evening swim, which was followed by flannelette on cool skin and a sleep so deep we would be unaware of the presence or the absence of adults in the many rooms of this house.

  A week ago last Sunday I passed by the pine desk where my uncle had intercepted Mandy and me all those years ago. It was a clear day. The low winter sun plunged through the windows facing the lake and crossed each object in the room at such an oblique angle details normally invisible insisted on being noticed; dust, for example, and the places here and there where my sleeve had, unknown to me, brushed dust aside. And there, on the wooden surface of that des
k, pressed into the soft wood, were hundreds of incised words, the residue of sentences written on what must have been thin, single sheets of paper. I found the magnifying glass my aunt had sometimes used for identifying the manufacturer’s marks on a certain piece of pressed glass, and later used for reading fine print, and began a tour of the wide polished board that was the flat top of the desk, hoping to find ancient family history until I realized that only a ballpoint pen would require the kind of pressure that would leave such a mark. The sentences overlapped and latticed one another in ways that made the words impossible to decipher, except for two fragments, written in my uncle’s awkward backhand script. “What I mean to say …” one truncated sentence began, and then another, the phrase “farther than everything,” followed by a jumble of superimposed loops and swirls in an unfamiliar hand, and then his hand again, and one word: “winter.” How like him, I thought, unfairly, I suppose, how like my summer uncle to leave behind only a partial record of a cold season. He was farther than everything. He was completely beyond my understanding.