Sanctuary Line

by Jane Urquhart

  My mother and I spent brief periods of time around Christmas and Thanksgiving at the farm as well, all through my childhood and adolescence. During the long days of summer when I awoke each morning to the sound of the Mexican workers making their way to the orchards and the unfurling of waves over the pebbles on the shore, it was possible to believe that the orchards and the lake were the beginning and the end of the world, my relatives and their workers its only inhabitants. Not so the autumn and winter holiday: then the visit was more like an interruption of city life with its regulated hours of school and after-school lessons. Still, it was at those laden tables decorated with gourds or mistletoe that my uncle shone in the presence of his wife, his sister, his brother, and his brother’s wife. Lengthy, articulate speeches flowed out of him. The ghosts of the great-greats were evoked and toasted, and the old worn book that contained the collected works of the Reverend Patrick Sanderson was pulled from the shelf and read aloud for the amusement of all.

  The reverend had not only written about civic holidays, summer afternoons, and his own dead child but had penned as well tributes to the curling, lawn bowling, and literary clubs of Kingsville. These latter poems were considered to be howlingly funny by the adults, but I couldn’t see much difference between them and the Robert Louis Stevenson poems that had thrilled Mandy so much she had committed many of them to memory as a child.

  When I was young and by the sea

  A wooden spade they gave to me

  To dig the sandy shore.

  My holes were empty like a cup

  In every hole the sea came up

  Til it could come no more.

  Mandy’s interest in lines such as these bewildered me, though I am beginning to understand their wisdom now.

  Consumption of large amounts of alcohol was fully sanctioned for the adults during the winter holidays, while the children were both overindulged and blissfully ignored. I remember my aunt’s cashmere sweaters – she always expected my uncle to provide her with a new one at Christmas. I also remember her competence in the kitchen, and how tastefully she had decorated the house. She insisted on real holly bought from a florist, rather than what she called “dusty plastic,” and boughs of fir cut from the wood lot, the tree with its red and silver bulbs and tiny white lights.

  My mother always felt she had to find the perfect piece of pressed glass to present to her sister-in-law, and was visibly nervous when the time came for the opening of gifts because she was never entirely certain that what she had chosen was not a reproduction. Unlike my aunt, she often could not work out how to tell the difference, and there were plenty of dealers who were happy to prey on that weakness. Not long ago she told me that my aunt would show no signs of disappointment if the goblet or compote turned out to be a fake, but that once or twice during the subsequent summer she would notice that the Christmas present was not evident on the shelves where my aunt kept her collection. A sad, little attempt to please, followed by a small cruelty.

  My uncle encouraged physical activity during the two or three days of festivity. One year he bullied all of us children away from the television – or in Mandy’s case away from her book – and out into the fresh air, where he insisted that we build not just one snowman but a full army of snowmen in the yard. Those ancient terra cotta Chinese warriors had just been unearthed, and he was intrigued and impressed by the discovery. Adults and children alike had more than once been forced to look at the National Geographie’s photos of the horsemen, row upon row of them. And then he had taken it into his mind that we could create something similar, though certainly not as permanent, just steps from the door.

  Even my uncle had to admit that the horses would present a problem, that conventional snowmen would have to do. He would be satisfied, he told us, with just over a dozen. Only three, for each of you, he promised. I’ll do three as well. There wasn’t really enough snow for this project, but he was determined, and sent the boys off into the orchards with wheelbarrows and shovels once it became clear, by evidence of the emerging grass, that we had used up what was available in the yard. The boys went willingly enough for the first few loads, but there was never enough snow and they were sent back again and again, even after the light began to fail at about four in the afternoon. By that time we were all cold but still more or less game.

  Then my uncle revealed what seemed to us, at first, to be a wonderful plan. Up in the attic were a number of clothes worn by the great-greats. Mandy and I knew all about these costumes, of course, having thoroughly explored their possibilities as soon as we were able to do so, and even the boys were familiar with some of the more masculine apparel, which they had worn at least once at Halloween. We all thought that maybe a cape or a top hat would be just the thing for our snowmen, who were now nearing completion. But my uncle’s ideas, like his harvests, were nothing if not bountiful, and he made trip after trip to the attic, returning with his arms filled with dark cloth and his face as rapt as if he were the subject of a magnificent conversion. And then I knew that, under the spell of some ridiculous combination of humour and ancestor worship, he was going to try to resurrect the great-greats, right out there on the dismal December lawn. He draped the clothes over the picket fence that surrounded the yard, then took off his soggy gloves and pulled the old beaten flask out of his pocket, as we had seen him do several times before in the course of the afternoon. The silver glinted in the light that was being thrown from the house. “What do you think?” he said.

  “I’m cold,” Mandy offered, a bit sullenly. “What I think is, I’m cold.”

  He ignored her. “What do you think, should we have some girl warriors as well as boy warriors?”

  “No.” Shane was stamping his feet on the ground, trying to keep warm. “There’s no such thing.”

  “And anyway,” Mandy said, “they wouldn’t wear dresses, even if there were.”

  “Let me tell you.” My uncle was screwing the lid back on his flask, not looking at us. “Let me tell you, the women warriors in my life wear dresses.”

  He actually used four-inch spikes in order to get those garments to stay on the snowmen. By the time he had gone to fetch the mallet, we had been called into the house and he was angry. Angry with his wife, I imagine, for once again interrupting one of his projects, angry with us for succumbing to the pressure of women and abandoning him, and angry with himself for not having figured out in advance that a snowman could not be manipulated into either a velvet jacket or a silk dress. Inside, watching him through the window, I remembered the schoolteacher poet our ancestor had loved, how, like the snowmen, she could not fully wear the costume the moment demanded of her. My uncle, meanwhile, had marched out of the house and within minutes had our car, his car, and a truck all idling along the fence so that he could use the headlights to illuminate the task he was about to undertake.

  My aunt pushed open the door. “Stanley, for God’s sake, stop,” she yelled. “Get in here. Don’t be a fool.”

  An orchardist in winter can be a desperate animal, even if that orchardist has lofty, progressive notions and a cultured wife. In order to produce, the peach, apple, and cherry trees must enter a lengthy dormant period. For this to happen, they must be cold and quiet, so that the developmental process can move at the slowest possible pace. If the temperature is too high or too variable, leaf bulbs will not receive the signals they need to make them grow, and the tree may not produce at all during that particular year. It would be like expecting a caterpillar to become a butterfly without the encasement and calm of the cocoon. I’ve now come to think that, like the fruit trees he nurtured, it was essential for my uncle himself to enter a dormant stage so that he would be prepared for the chaotic work that would make up his spring and summer. The trouble was that he could never accept the notion that rest would enable him to cope with any kind of season ahead. His whole being was focused on engagement of some kind or another. It was simply impossible for his mind or his body to remain still. There was no middle ground with him. He
believed that the opposite of vitality was death, and from a scientific point of view, of course, he was right. Vital statistics, vital signs. But his own vitality was extreme, exhausting. I never saw him sleeping, and still can’t imagine him asleep.

  He worked on those white ghosts in the yard for an hour, spiking aprons and frock coats into their flesh. Child’s play, really, but the kind of child’s play that even the children could no longer bear to participate in. We sensed something sombre and funereal about those clothes, and we withdrew from the process altogether, settling instead into the safety of board games and an easily understood set of instructions while my uncle laboured with snow and rags in the evening chill. The thing about my uncle was that he made all the rules, clarified them in our midst, then in that extreme way of his changed them or broke them. It is both heartbreaking and enraging to think of him out there in the dark and cold, stubborn and alone. It was as if he had been trying to make us witnesses to his awkwardness, his discomfort, the fact that there was never going to be any respite for him.

  Sometime later that night, the temperature rose above freezing and it began to rain. It rained all the next day and the day after that. No one, including my uncle, mentioned the snowmen, who began first to sag, then to diminish by degrees. I tried unsuccessfully to forget about the disappearances that were occurring in the yard, and more than once I caught Mandy anxiously looking out one window and then another, as if she believed the snowmen could be resurrected simply by changing one’s point of view. On the second night, the freezing rain set in, and my mother and I were forced to stay for an extra twenty-four hours. By the morning of our departure, the clothing lay in dark puddles all over the lawn, as if the great-greats themselves had lost substance in the last three days and their shadows had been fixed in place forever by a half-inch of ice.

  The last summer my uncle operated the farm, he appeared to be filled to capacity with energy and physical warmth, and because he was always up before dawn, his laughter would awaken Mandy and me each morning from the depths of adolescent sleep. He was bursting with jokes, often at someone, anyone else’s expense. His delivery was so slapstick and essentially so affectionate, his arm flung around his victim, a bantering tone in his voice, one couldn’t help but be warmed by the attention. We grinned and blushed when he teased us about imaginary boyfriends, or when he tried to sing the songs of our favourite rock groups. Even Sadie could be caught secretly smiling, her back turned in feigned disapproval when he reminded her, in our presence, of their courting days, of a certain night in a tent by the Ohio River, or that time in the canoe. We teenagers loved this. “What tent?” we would cry. “What canoe?” But our questions were never answered. His attention span was so short that summer, he would be wrapped up in something or someone else before we could press him any further and, of course, we knew better than to ask our aunt for the details of those occasions.

  But right in the midst of this good humour, once we had entered the last two weeks of summer, the twilight games we always played began to change, becoming, for want of a better word, more vigorous. My uncle had discovered the English game of rugby and would gather as many of us as he could out in the yard to divide us into teams. No more touch football: these innings involved full physical contact, sometimes edging toward violence. Teo and I arranged to be on opposite sides, or perhaps it just happened that way and this is something I have since invented. But it was often Teo who tackled me when I had the ball, and I remember his arms around my hips or the hardness of his thighs against my own, and then a delirious tumble in the grass. This was to be the only time in my life when I would fight competitively for a ball. Although I never could have admitted this, it was really Teo I was fighting for, his proximity, his arms.

  My uncle could sometimes be quite brutal with his boys during the game, enthusiastically crashing into them, dragging them across the grass, and once or twice I thought I saw real anger in his expression. Don’s wrist was sprained in one of these skirmishes, and then there was the trip to the hospital: all three parents were involved; my mother, no doubt, trying to both comfort Don and placate Aunt Sadie, who would have been furious at her husband. The neighbouring kids who had joined in the game trailed home, and the rest of us were left alone in the fading light. Mandy and Shane went indoors to watch television, and Teo and I walked out to the beach, where we sat throwing stones into the water and very occasionally and surreptitiously allowing our hands to touch.

  I have no memory of what we talked about, perhaps we merely discussed the stones and the water, but I do remember how the shyness slowly evaporated between us. Our speech became less halting and awkward as the days passed, and the sense of dislocation I’d been feeling began to be gradually replaced by a new emotional landscape. Without making any formal promises, we met at that spot, in full view of the house, the next evening and the evening after that. We were easing ourselves into this intimate companionship – neither of us spoke about the afternoon in the car – as if we were learning a vocation, the skills of which we had not yet fully acquired: a glance, the touch of a hand, the sound of a voice. But each of us knew, I think, that those skills would become comfortable and familiar to us as the days went by, and that eventually we would own them as if they had always been ours.

  Her husband gone, her sister-in-law still in the city, her grown children moving deeper and deeper into the preoccupations of their own separate lives, my aunt lived alone in this house for a number of winters. I can imagine her standing at various windows watching the leaves fall from the old maples or the buildup of ice along the shoreline while her elegant face began, almost imperceptibly, to lose its particular definition, softening with age. During this period she seemed to have become engaged in an odd and disturbing activity, one I would know nothing about until I moved here a few years later.

  When I arrived at the Sanctuary Research Station, it was the time of the late-summer migration, so my work with the butterflies kept me there for most of the daylight hours. Eventually, however, the monarchs departed and I was left with some empty mornings in this room, with its shelves still filled with my aunt’s collection of antique pressed glass goblets, tumblers, spooners, compotes. The late-September sun, I remember, plunged through the windows, having lowered since full summer, and made the dust on all forty of these highly collectible vessels visible, even to me. Recalling the meticulous care that was lavished on each glass item by my aunt, I decided to wash them. As soon as I placed a dozen or so goblets in hot, soapy water, piece after piece, pattern after pattern – Bull’s Eye, Grapevine, Daisy, and Button – fell apart in my hands. I was mystified by this and believed that perhaps the temperature of the water was responsible for the breakage. I removed the shards, filled the sink with cooler water, then added several more pieces. I was astonished that again the glass separated into fragments. I pulled a compote from the shelf and held it up to the light. I noticed a couple of seams and the odd tiny bulb of dried china glue emerging from them. I examined the rest of the collection, and then I knew. She had broken all of it and then glued it, object by object, back together again. I had to assume my fastidious aunt had for some reason destroyed one piece at a time because the jigsaw puzzle created by a sudden, full demolition of the inventory would have been impossible to solve, and clearly she had made the effort to repair the damage. For a while anyway, she had been able to keep up appearances.

  It wasn’t the destruction that confused me but rather the painstaking reassemblage. Thinking of this aging woman, alone in her house at night with a broken treasured item and a tube of china glue, caused me to feel an uneasy compassion for my aunt. This was particularly true as, aware of the irony, I watched the interlocking circles of her favourite pattern, Key and Wedding Ring, fall to pieces again now in this oddly gentle manner.

  She didn’t replace the rose bushes, however, the ones that had been torn up and thrown into the lake. And as for me, I never was much of a gardener. I planted nothing at all during my first month in the house
. Instead, I spent my time wandering from room to room arguing with ghosts. In the end, I filled two clear, plastic recycling bags with that antique glass. Then I dragged those clinking bags out to the road, where they awaited the arrival of the garbage truck. If Mandy or the boys noticed the collection was gone, they never spoke about it.

  Mandy used to talk about the bond that developed over there among the soldiers. I knew that in the vicinity of Canadian Forces Base in Kandahar there were literally dozens of men, boys really – young, bright soldiers, some of them just as dead as she is now – who would have been more than content to spend one hour speaking quietly with her across a table, consoled by the vitality of her conversation or simply by watching the changing expressions on her lovely, intelligent face. She knew this too, and responded to the attention in the same way that she blossomed in the midst of her schoolmates all those summers ago at the pavilion. In the beginning, many of these young soldiers became her friends. She could talk to them, and they to her. She told me that just being there made it seem as if everyone, men and women, had known each other since childhood. Brothers and sisters, she said. And then she added the word cousins, acknowledging me.

  Tall and strong, her wealth of blonde hair pulled back from her face, she looked good in anything. But her undeniable attractiveness was so natural, so unstudied, it would facilitate rather than interfere with any kind of interchange, and I am certain she could talk to a homesick boy from Hamilton, or a lovesick boy from Nanaimo, or a young married man from Quebec, frantic with worry about a sick child with full empathy. And, I imagine, all of the soldiers would respect her military judgment as well, her perceptiveness, the way she could cut through the complicated intricacies of military language right to the core of a particular manoeuvre, the choreography of any planned diplomacy or violence, if it came to that. They would talk to her about the chaotic events of the day before and ask her to tell them her thoughts about what she felt might unfold next. She would be a comfort to these men, many of whom were frightened or angry about things they barely understood. She brought a focused energy with her into any room and a sense that each man’s troubles were as important to her as they were to them. It was a gift she had, this power of shared talk. At least in the early days.