Sanctuary Line

by Jane Urquhart

  He had become increasingly tense as the two days passed, although, as always, she said, smiling, there had been some moments of authentic connection. Mandy described the church filled with reliquaries they found, some on intricately worked silver pedestals, and some even fashioned in the form of ships, hanging from the ceiling. The finger bones and shards of skulls contained in these works of art intrigued him, and some of the fading, damaged wall frescoes as well, which, according to Mandy, showed vestiges of the last judgment. He became absorbed by the wall paintings apparently and told her he would return alone some day to study them more closely when he could.

  Was it simply carelessness that made him tell Mandy he would go back without her to what she was trying to think of as “their” village – a place far from the celebrated monuments and therefore singular in its own, prosaic way? Or was he as intentionally cruel as I was beginning to believe? Alone, she’d wept on the trains and planes that returned her to Kandahar, carrying with her not the intimate moments of the trip but that one small remark across thousands of miles back to the theatre of war.

  An official military letter addressed to my aunt arrived in the mail the week after Mandy was killed. I feared that because he was a “superior officer,” the man I was increasingly thinking of as Mister Military might have been required to write it, and I despised him more for the idea that he would agree to do so. I hated even more that the military hadn’t taken the trouble to know that her mother was dead, had died, in fact, during Mandy’s tour of duty. I threw the letter into the fire unopened, but when I cleared the ashes from the grate the following morning I saw the bottom quarter of the page was unburned. Only the words “my deepest sympathy” and a signature remained. I remembered then that all through our talks, not only had Mandy refused to reveal the name of her lover, she had never once even described his face.

  But the name was unimportant, really, as was the face, the rank. He would always be Mister Military to me. As far as I was concerned, he was the whole operation, the whole war, the camaraderie and the fear, the abject gratitude for the good days in the face of the arbitrariness of the bad, the seductiveness of all that. The way she had wanted to please him, to demonstrate her courage, self-control, and discretion, broke my heart. She was so accomplished, such a good soldier. In spite of what she believed, she could have achieved all that and more even had he never existed. Instead, she was forced to endure an emotional life where he appeared and disappeared, reappeared and disappeared again, while the improvised explosive device with her name on it was waiting in the shadows to become the eventual resolution. How did he react to the news of her death? Would he have run from that as well? At the time, I couldn’t help but think so because, whenever I pictured him, this man whom I had never met and whose name I firmly believed I would never know, he looked exactly like my uncle.

  There had been only one tale of love among my uncle’s stories. It involved one of the great-greats: a great-great-uncle to us, a son to others, a brother to some, but a husband and father to no one. He had fallen in love with his schoolteacher, a woman my uncle described as tall and thin with a high-necked collar and a head full of ideas surmounting that collar. It was the ideas that he fell in love with, though her long neck and willowy body, admittedly, may have played some role in the attraction he felt. Still there were other long necks and willowy bodies in the neighbourhood, my uncle said, but none with access to the ancient history, classical mythology, and poetry that the schoolteacher brought into this farm boy’s life for the very brief season when he had the time to go to school.

  She was older than he was, of course, but not by as much as you might think because in the rural schools in those days, the teacher herself was often just seventeen or eighteen, having only to graduate from high school to be eligible for the job. Our young ancestor’s farm work was so all-consuming and his school attendance so sporadic that he was sixteen years old when the new teacher arrived. He was determined to finish grade school in spite of his age and the fact that his height made him feel uncomfortable and exaggeratedly out of place. He became even more determined once he had seen the new teacher and heard her recite “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” by John Keats, an affirmation, my uncle told us, of everything that young great-great instantly felt about the woman who was standing at the front of the room.

  That focus: a beautifully formed female monument placed against the dark, horizontal emptiness of the blackboard, the grace of her arm, making sentences like white fences on a landscape of slate, or holding a book out in front of her as she read. “Oh what can ail thee, knight at arms / Alone and palely loitering?” A potent mixture. Young Great-great never would have heard anything like the story that poem tells. Yet something in that narrative would be weirdly familiar to him once he saw the teacher. Like his lighthouse-keeping, bifurcating relatives, an interest in literature would take root in him, an interest that would forever be connected to the teacher, and he would begin to borrow books, first from the two small shelves at the back of the schoolroom and later, when he had finished grade school, from the lady herself. He read all of Keats this way, and a not insignificant amount of Shelley and Byron. And he thought about that poetry and that young woman all the time he was hauling stumps through rough pasture to make a fence or when he was felling timber. He would be all wrapped up in thought on the one hand, and concealment on the other, for she was engaged and about to be married to someone else. And even if she not been, this love he had would have been, according to my uncle, a private possession – something that set him apart from his brothers – and he never would have dared, or perhaps never even have wanted, to confess it.

  This privacy, however, did not prevent him from brooding at great length when she married and also did not prevent him from continuing to borrow books from her once she was someone else’s wife. But it did prevent him from moving forward when she became a childless widow – the perfect moment, my uncle said, for the young man to have approached her as, by then, he had his own a farm, and one that was doing fairly well.

  Men, our uncle told us, are not good at expressing their feelings. And the stronger the feelings, he assured us, the worse they are at expressing them. Hardly an original observation but interesting in that my uncle expressed it. Instead, as the years went by, when certain strong thoughts about the woman haunted Young Great-great, he would ask to borrow a particular book from her, one that he hoped might echo those thoughts. Maybe this was a peculiar language between them, though more than likely the lady, now in her thirties, would have assumed that he wanted only the books. The important thing, however, was that he wanted the books given to him by her, even though by now there was a perfectly good library in the town where they lived. He could have just as easily pulled Coleridge or Robert Browning from the library’s shelves, but it seemed that unless the teacher had herself turned the pages of a volume, he did not feel compelled to read it.

  After her husband died, the woman – her name was Alice Simmonds – had not gone back to teaching in the little schoolhouse. Instead she developed a curious talent, that of writing poetry for greeting cards. This was ironic in and of itself, my uncle said, because often she was required to write verses about relationships she (beyond her short marriage) had no real connection to. Her speciality was the sort of cards exchanged by courting couples. To My Sweetheart on Her Birthday, or A Valentine’s Greeting to the One I Love, and a number of poems meant to be from a secret admirer.

  To him your hand is like a dove

  Your face is like a star

  He will not tell you of his love

  But worships from afar.

  And things of that nature.

  Young Great-great did not know about the greeting cards for several years until one day, purchasing a card for his mother at Christmas, he was startled by the storekeeper musing aloud as to whether the verses contained therein had been written by Alice. Alice Simmonds? he asked. Yes, the storekeeper said, and let on that this was how she made a living now, w
riting up these cards for a company in Toronto.

  Always, after that, our ancestor spent a good deal of time browsing in the small greeting-card section of the store, paying close attention to any new secret admirer cards that appeared on the shelves. The sentiments expressed in those cards, though admittedly not as complicated or fraught as those brought to light by Byron or Shelley, were very familiar to Young Great-great, and though he couldn’t be sure which ones had been written by Alice, he began to believe that, all along, she had been able to read his thoughts and that this, in fact, was her way of communicating with him. He bought one or two of the more discrete versions. He dared not mail a card to Alice, however, for fear that the verses had not been written by her and that she might take offence at receiving a card with a poem composed by someone else, even though he had absolutely no intention of identifying himself.

  Now, while he was behind the two workhorses ploughing a field, or feeding his animals, or pruning the orchard, he tried to puzzle out a method of discovering just which cards had been written by Alice. He thought of writing the Toronto card company, but likely there was more than one, and anyway he believed that taking such drastic action would be too intrusive. And then an opportunity presented itself.

  In the post office one day when he was collecting several packets of seed he had ordered from a catalogue, the postmistress handed him a parcel addressed to Alice. Oh, she had said, realizing her mistake, that one’s meant for Alice, some of her cards. She pointed across the street in the direction of Alice’s house and said, She works on them in the morning. I can see her there at her table near the window, working away.

  Young Great-great knew what he had to do. He was to begin harrowing the north field that week, a job that began at dawn and ended at dusk, but he would put it off for a day or two. Instead he would go in the mornings to borrow a book. He would go every day until he could catch a glimpse of a poem she was writing at that table.

  He brought home an edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets that way and a collection of Wordsworth’s verse, but it wasn’t until the third morning visit that he managed to get close enough to the table to be able to gather two lines:

  My love’s a secret no one knows

  Except my lonely heart

  And those two lines shook him to such an extent he forgot what it was he had come to borrow, so he stood in her kitchen, hat in hand, with nothing at all to ask for. Alice pulled a collection by Robert Burns from the shelf, though he had already borrowed the book several times in the past. He was able then to put his hat on and say goodbye, which he did, my uncle said, with the knowledge that he had missed a significant moment, one when he might have spoken to her. “‘Wee cowering, timorous beastie,’” he muttered to himself angrily all the way back to the farm.

  Still he had those lines she’d written, and they seemed like a gift to him. He haunted the stationery section of the general store so often after that, reading every card, including those wishing a Happy Christmas, that the storekeeper finally asked if there was a particular kind of card that he wanted to order. Finally, in spring, he found what he was after: one with a cream-coloured background, and violets making a border around To My Secret Love. And inside, at last, the words he was seeking. Purchasing it, however, was a different matter. It’s meant as a joke, he eventually said, for my sister. We’ve had a quarrel.

  He mailed the card, unsigned, the following day.

  Perhaps, my uncle said, the sending of the card was all that Young Great-great wanted at the time, or perhaps he had hoped Alice would guess that it was he who had sent it and would send some kind of signal of her own, and when she didn’t, he felt foolish and humiliated. Either way, he stopped borrowing books after that and applied himself fully to the timbering he had begun in his woods, making a good deal of money in the process, and nothing further happened until one year later when he heard that Alice was gravely ill. It was then, and only then, that he resolved to marry her.

  He appeared at her door on an autumn evening, dressed in his only suit, with a bouquet of the last roses of the season in his hand and a diamond ring he had purchased in Toronto in his jacket pocket. A woman opened the door, looked at him questioningly, then introduced herself as Alice’s sister-in-law. She led him through the kitchen where all that poetry had been written and into the parlour where Alice sat with a rug over her lap and a shawl around her shoulders.

  Neither spoke until she roused herself enough to ask if he had come to borrow a book. He handed her the roses then and looked at her drawn face, where traces of her beauty and of her intelligence remained visible in her expression. By the time he gathered the courage to produce the ring he saw that she had fallen asleep. So he left the small box on her lap and crept from the house. When he returned the following day, the sister-in-law told him that Alice was too weak to leave her bed but had left an envelope for him, an envelope that contained a card. Alone in his own kitchen, he opened the envelope and looked at this card, on the front of which, embossed in gold, were the heart-stopping words To My Fiancé. He could hardly bear to read the verse inside – Our courting days are over now, We’ve found our joy at last – or bring himself to look at her name written in a faltering script at the bottom of the page. But on his next visit he brought the card with him, showed it to the sister-in-law, and was permitted to enter Alice’s bedchamber.

  It was instantly clear to him that she was dying, my uncle told us, and that if he were going to marry her, he would have to work fast. A wedding gown, were the only words that she was able to say to him. Perhaps it was the beginning of a verse she was making in her head, but Young Great-great knew that he would be expected to produce this article of clothing.

  Her sister-in-law gathered together the ladies of the church, who spent the next day and night working on the gown and who also provided the veil, which, in his haste, he had forgotten all about. The ladies of the church also put the minister on high alert, and his mother withdrew her own gold band from her finger so that it could be used in the upcoming ceremony. Three days later, my uncle always said at this point in the story, a middle-aged great-great finally married the middle-aged love of his life, and she died, six hours later, of tuberculosis.

  In the end she had been too weak to put on the gown; this was the part of the story that Mandy and I liked the best. She had been too weak so the veil was put on the pillow behind her head and the gorgeous satin gown was laid over the blanket that covered her body.

  Drifting in and out of consciousness, she was just able to nod her consent when asked the pertinent questions by the minister. Young Great-great slipped the gold band on her finger and held her hand, the only time they had touched. It was said that her youthful beauty returned once she was dead and the women were able to fully dress her in the wedding gown she wore in her open coffin. He went on to build sawmills all over the county and became tremendously rich. He wore a black armband, however, for the rest of his life, and never again read poetry after he found one of her cards with what he considered to be the perfect verse for her tombstone.

  She lies beneath her native earth

  And in the land that gave her birth

  A multitude of flowers wave

  In sadness o’re her early grave.

  The only time I remember Mandy speaking about her disappeared father was in reference to this story. She said she couldn’t believe that he had put all the romantic nonsense into our heads when … But she didn’t finish the sentence, adding instead, Well, it wasn’t like that for him, was it? I think my mother may have ruled him after all, or tried to. And his job, as it turns out, was to find ways to escape her custody. It was almost a decade ago in early spring when she said this. She was making one of her rare visits from Petawawa, and I had come down from the city to see her. Outside the house, melted snow had created a water meadow in the orchard. Through the window I could see that the few remaining trees were reflecting exact doubles of themselves in sheets of silver liquid.

  Nothing romantic
about an escape from perceived imprisonment, Mandy said.

  I agreed, trying to keep the bitter edge out of my voice, nothing romantic about any person trying to control another by any means. I was thinking about the command-and-control theory Mandy told me she studied during her officer training program.

  For Mandy herself, of course, romance would have had nothing to do with command-and-control theory. Instead it would have been the mystifying poetry she sometimes read to me pushed up against discipline, uniforms, physical training, and military strategy while she was still at college and talking about the honour of serving her country. Her college days were followed by postings to less than glamorous Canadian locations, and then eventually a journey into the chaos of a desert war so debatable in its intentions that even Mandy, who, like her colleagues, was fully committed to duty, once said if you look at history, it could be said that one man’s terrorist is often another man’s freedom fighter.

  And then those hotel rooms. How much poetry could she have possibly brought with her into such spaces? How much of this farm, the lake, her father’s stories, and the terrible way her father tore himself out of all that? She was – I was certain of this – both imprisoned and displaced. Where was the fight for freedom in all that?

  Just last month, when we decided it was time to choose what to engrave on the stone we chose for Mandy, her brothers and I immediately thought of poor Alice, of Alice and of our own Young Great-great, who, because of her, had come to love the sophisticated poetry she loaned to him and the banal commercial poetry she wrote. We wanted there to be two headstones with that unsophisticated verse concerning emplacement incised on their surfaces in the little country graveyard. But in the end we changed our minds when we discovered the military had already prepared the standard headstone for Mandy’s grave. A maple leaf surrounded by a circle, her name and birth and death dates.