Where I Live Now

by Sharon Butala

  But behind Peter’s hardiness was a weakness. Since he was a young man, Peter had had stomach pains that were not accounted for. As our years together passed slowly, what turned out to be his acid reflux condition grew worse and worse. It was discovered that he had a hiatus hernia, and swallowing began to be more difficult. Eventually, during most of one year, he began to throw up his meals, and he took various medications and began to undergo various medical tests.

  On the fourth of June, 2006 (we had returned from a long trip to Australia and New Zealand in late January), our family doctor told him that he had esophageal cancer. I had understood this a few days earlier, but when I tried to explain that this was what the nurse at the Medicine Hat imaging clinic was telling him in her roundabout gentle way, he wouldn’t believe me, or perhaps he simply couldn’t bear to hear me, and I felt it better not to insist. But the following Monday, when we saw his family physician, he could no longer deny it. Thus began, as all readers will know, a terrible time for him that would end in his death, and also a very difficult time for me as I tried to support him, nurse him, drive him, comfort him, and help him eat, always trying to find something that he could actually swallow as his condition worsened. Then the time came when he could swallow nothing, not even water, and the trips to the hospitals began.

  It was summer by then, and many of the staff members of our neighbouring hospitals, including doctors and specialists, were away on holiday, making it necessary for our local physician to spend time on the telephone trying to find a hospital a reasonable distance away with a staff gastroenterologist or cardiologist to see him. After each foray to Regina or Saskatoon, we would return to our home and Peter would have to be, in an emergency situation, driven by me to the hospital in a nearby town to be given intravenous fluids or whatever the physician decreed. Sometimes he did not know where he was and would whisper this to me, and I would tell him. I was not always sure that what I said helped, although mainly it did. If it seems now to me that in some ways this went on forever, an eternity of our driving down empty highways in the high summer heat to large, unwelcoming, and very noisy city hospitals, it seems in other ways to have been only days from the diagnosis to his death two months later. I had cancelled my few summer’s engagements at festivals and conferences, and I gave myself over to his needs. Not that I was much use to him, except as someone who was always there at his side through the rest of this journey.

  Almost immediately following his diagnosis surgery was planned for him, an operation described by one surgeon to me as “one of the biggest we do,” a really frightening prospect. Peter was booked for this procedure in three weeks, but when the time came, he failed his pre-surgery evaluation. The cancer had moved too fast and it was too late.

  Three or four times in the next couple of days, someone, each a different expert in his field, came and stood at the foot of his bed and carefully confirmed the verdict: Too late for surgery, no other procedure suitable. In the end, as far as I can tell, little could be done to prevent his dying or even to slow it. There were attempts to make him comfortable and, at least twice, a ghastly procedure to open his throat so that he could swallow a little, for a while. Then, without further ceremony, he was sent home to die. “Home,” in this case, was, at Peter’s own choice, the twenty-some-bed hospital in the town twenty-five miles from our home.

  In those last days, once Peter was settled in the palliative care room, I would spend the night at home, rising early to arrive back there by about seven and staying at the hospital until visiting hours came in the evening. By this time, I had been through the death of loved ones three other times, and the process was familiar to me. I actually believed, because this had been my experience with my father, then my mother and then with a sister, that this stage would go on for several months and that I needed to ration my strength for that long road. Even though we had been told Peter would not survive his cancer (looking back, I know that Peter had with great reluctance accepted that this was true), nobody had ever said directly to me, “Your husband is dying. He won’t survive more than a few weeks.” So I went on pretending to myself for days that it wasn’t true. For three nights I drove home through the gold of the early August evenings, arriving in time to feed the barn and house cats, talk to the horses, walk outside in the evening stillness for a few minutes, then spend a couple of hours phoning family and friends to report on Peter’s condition.

  The house, those nights, felt magical. It felt as if it were someone else’s house, the shadows in the corners rounded and soft, as the day melted into night, the pools of light golden, the edges alive where light softened and mingled with dark, and outside, glowing silver-blue and resonant. My last phone call made, I would fall into bed and sleep soundly without a single dream and wake too early at five or so, still exhausted, frantic to get back to the hospital.

  The first morning when I was rushing through the kitchen into the sun porch to speed to the hospital, I saw that two of the window screens had been pushed into the porch and that there was now nothing to keep out birds and animals. Before I’d gone to bed I had opened all the windows to capture the night’s coolness, and the interior screens were held in place only by those little plastic arms in strategic spots around their perimeters, each at the most a half inch long. Now the screens lay awkwardly half on and half off the furniture. This was peculiar: there’d been no wind overnight, only that steady bath of heat, and even in my frozen state, absent even from my own terror, I was sure I couldn’t possibly have done it myself. Fortunately, though, defeating my purpose in keeping the windows open, I had closed and locked the door between the porch and the kitchen before I went to bed.

  The second morning the screens were down again, only this time they didn’t lie where they had fallen, but were scattered about the room. What was going on? But in a rush, my mind in a turmoil, I simply put the screens back up and hurried on to the hospital. The third morning one screen was again down. Now this had become a mystery, and as I rushed over the country roads, tires crackling and spitting gravel, I thought and thought about it, and finally it came to me: Raccoons! Of course, it had been raccoons all along: the clever little beasts with their unnervingly strong fingers could easily have done it. Thankfully, I hadn’t told anyone, and I felt foolish over what I began to see was my full-blown paranoia.

  I was no longer myself, was not fully present to anything. I felt as if I were holding my breath, had been doing so for days and then, as time passed, for weeks. I ran back and forth each night, reporting faithfully on Peter’s condition, holding back my emotions because a part of me knew that if allowed out they would knock me to my knees, would render me useless. I was in time and yet outside it. I can’t remember now if Peter asked me to stay all night at the hospital, his last two nights on earth. When the moment of his death finally came in the late afternoon, not at night, I was there, holding him for those long moments — they seemed forever — until he departed.

  I might still have been holding his head as I had done for the last half hour or so of his struggle — such a current of heat there was flowing between the back of his neck and my fingers during that time! — I can’t remember. I know I kissed him and I stood looking into the face of the man to whom I had been married for so many years, waiting for the facial contortion of the struggle and suffering of his death to subside; I would not leave him until I had seen one last time the face that I had known as his. I thought only that if I waited another moment his real face would return, and then I would be able to leave him.

  But instead, as I watched, his face began to change, and to change again, and to change again, and again, and again. Aghast, unable to look away, I saw his jaw thin and narrow, his teeth get smaller and more even, his cheekbones get higher and more prominent, his skin begin to stretch tightly over the newly shaped bones of his face, until what I saw in the end was the face of . . . I couldn’t say exactly, but it seemed to me that it was the face of a Mongolian warlord, or no — it was an Asian face, maybe the fa
ce of a high priest — perhaps a Buddhist monk was a better description. Either way, what I saw now was the composed death mask of a stranger, not of the work-ruined rural peasant attaining peace in death, or the contemporary temple scholar, pale and other-worldly, but of someone of power and wisdom.

  Deeply shaken and yet also in pain because it seemed to me the greatest cruelty not to see him as I knew him one last time, I backed away from his bedside. At the end of the bed I looked again, my final look, and saw that it was still that same unrecognizable face, not Peter at all, not the man I had known. I stumbled out of the room. There was a Catholic church next door to the hospital; I went straight there, on the way passing the priest who stood in the stillness and heat of the late afternoon washing his car. “Is the church locked?” I asked him, not pausing, as if I had been passing by and thought to drop in. “No,” he said. “Go right in.” He began to swab his car with a sponge or a bunched-up cloth while at his feet the hose trickled tepid water across the sun-heated gravel. I hated the moment, the way the orange sun spread itself across the dusty grass and the rough driveway; I hated the bleached sky, what I could see of it behind the high cross on the church roof; I hated the very feel of the parched air.

  Inside the church the air was more alive and somehow fresher. I sat in a pew near the middle, off to one side. I don’t know, now, why I didn’t go to kneel at the altar. I suppose because I haven’t been religious for many years. I sat alone only a few minutes when the priest came in and began to putter around at the back; I suppose he was making himself unobtrusively available to me, but instead of turning to him, I remember wishing he hadn’t come in. I sat for a few more minutes, during which I felt only emptiness, a suspension of thought and feeling. I became very aware of the church’s interior and the depth at the altar. Then I walked back to the hospital to begin, with his family, the business of Peter’s death.

  That late afternoon when Peter died, my older sister and her husband were already on their way from their home in British Columbia, landing at Medicine Hat in the early evening and renting a car to drive the 220 kilometres to our place. They would not arrive in Eastend until about 10 p.m., and as they didn’t know the way, I was to meet them in town and lead them down the unmarked roads and through the rural darkness to the hay farm. I had at least three hours until then. While I waited, having no other idea of what to do to pass the time, trying to outrun the wall of emotion I feared would overcome me if I gave it room, I got down on my knees and washed the kitchen floor, all the while saying to myself, “My husband is dead; my husband is dead,” as if by rehearsing this I might be able finally to believe it. I brought my family back to a spotless kitchen floor.

  Over the months that followed Peter’s death, we sold all his machinery and equipment and other items we had shared in our many years together. I said good-bye to the old broken snowmobile — recalling the night in a lull in the middle of a five-day blizzard we rode over eight-foot drifts to a neighbour’s for coffee, and the time he rescued an old rancher post-storm on it — good-bye to the bicycles we’d ridden slowly down the lane on a summer evening, the horses, the various old trucks. It was good-bye to old furniture stored in this shed or that, things that were there when we married in 1976, all the possessions he had cleared out from the ranch when it was no longer ours, things that had belonged to his family going back to the early part of the twentieth century. I grew sadder, but I shed no tears. I seemed to be frozen.

  After the funeral and the departure of my three sisters and their husbands and many friends as well as a few strangers, the months slowly passed. Finally, with the disposal of so many years’ accumulation of things both useless and useful having been accomplished, including the machinery and equipment, and with the date of my leaving set, I was left alone on the place where I’d spent half my life. Each square of grass where trucks and implements had sat was deserted now, as were the sheds and shops; even the gates of the corrals gaped open, empty of animals. The entire place seemed to me to have a forsaken air, Quonset doors wide open on emptiness, feeders upended in the corrals, my footsteps echoing hollowly when I walked through the vacant outbuildings. My shoes would scrape pebbles or scuff up dust as I walked, the sound unnaturally loud and yet minuscule in the sudden wideness and emptiness of what had been the coziness of home. I had only to pack a few personal items and to make my final farewell.

  It seemed to me, in those days, that the landscape faded, that the sky had retreated even farther away than usual and lost colour, and that the fields and hills had grown monochromatic, a uniform faded buff, as if the rocks and shrubs, the stone flakes and circles that lay scattered beside the Aboriginal cairns and graves, all of which I had known so well, had filled themselves in. It was as if the land had sealed itself away again, was no longer one where I might find history rising up to meet me. It had grown distant and silent, as it had been when, many years earlier, I arrived as a bride.

  Every time I looked out the windows to the north and nothing out there spoke to me, the light no longer caught a boulder and gleamed unexpectedly, shadows no longer moved and paused for me, a lump would come into my throat and my chest would ache. In the days after all the work was done and the yard and fields were empty, slowly, I saw nature saying good-bye to me. It knew as well as I did, and my neighbours and my friends, that I was leaving the countryside and my life as a country woman for good. That I would not be back, that it — that life that had been mine — was over.

  One morning a coyote came through the yard. This was a healthy animal, not mangy, or young and on its own for the first time, or wounded as wild animals coming into a farmyard in full daylight tend to be. This was a large, mature animal of the kind you saw only in the distance in fields as it was out hunting and you had ridden inadvertently into its range while checking cattle. It nosed its way under the pole fence that separated the yard from the narrow dirt road that ran more or less parallel to it, that before the sale had contained haying implements but that was now only a bare patch of trampled grass. Its thick fur was a glossy mix of dull gold and grey as it came trotting on a diagonal across the stiff ochre grass, past the leafless caraganas and the rough grey poplars and on down the gravel road that ran between the feed yard and house toward the barn and corrals at the bottom of the yard, and behind and below them where I could not see it, to the river crossing, where the water burbled softly over smooth-worn brown and grey stones, whispering its swift but delicate way through the broken, drowned grass. I watched from first one kitchen window and then another as the coyote moved by, oblivious to me. As I watched, I had a sense that the wild knew that I was the last living person here and that I would soon be gone. Otherwise, the coyote would not have come by so casually but so purposefully. It was as if I had already left.

  Then, a day or so later, I heard the crunching of gravel and, thinking a truck was driving slowly into the yard, looked to see who it was. Trotting unhurriedly through the open gate was a massive male mule deer, his rack huge, the muscled flesh of his chest and haunches moving as he perambulated, sure of his own safety, proud as an emperor, his hooves striking the thinly spread gravel with an authoritative ring and clink. I watched him, not breathing as he moved on past the window at the end of the kitchen, as he went on down to the bottom of the yard and then, barely hesitating, veered to his left through the open gate into the second-to-last corral. Here he changed course again, to his right this time, and with the same stately, deliberate gait disappeared on his way down to the river. Such an extraordinary thing, I had never seen this before, an animal trotting down the yard as if the place were already gone back to the wild.

  I had only a few days left now. There began to be a strange noise in the trees across the yard. I went out to stand on the deck, trying to see which tree it was coming from and what was making it. I deciphered the dark silhouette of a large creature sitting on a high branch in the tree on the far side of the lane that led through the yard down to the barn and corrals. It was framed by foliage and it
was so big that for a moment I thought it was a cougar. But then it shifted slightly, changing its silhouette, and I saw that it was an enormous owl. As I watched, the bird lowered its head into its shoulders, then pushed it forward and emitted a sound like the single harsh bark of a dog. It did this again and again, the lowering of the head, the bark, and then again. Then I saw a second, equally large owl in a tree across the lane from the first and closer to where I stood watching from the deck. I had never before heard an owl make that noise, although I have read that there is one that does, but its range is far south of us in the United States. One spring an owl had built its nest in the same trees and gave birth to and raised its owlets there, but never had it or its partner, coming and going with food, or the babes, made such a sound. I went slowly, filled with wonder, even a little frightened, back into the house.

  After that, the owls were in those two trees, one on each side of the lane, every single day. There was no comforting familiar hooting: only that menacing movement and that bark, over and over and over again. I was counting down the days left to me: five, four, three, two. I think part of the reason I had been so wary of this pair, aside from the steady, strange bark of one of them, was that years before I had had a dream in which, as I walked across a field toward our home to the right, far ahead and deep in the valley, a giant black dog was bounding toward me across the fields ahead of me and on my left. It was one of those dreams that so terrify you there really is no way of conveying the intensity of the fear — fear that, surprisingly, didn’t wake me as such dreams usually do at the last possible second when death is certain: the drowning, the fall off the cliff, the rapist, the man with the gun. This great black dog, murderous, implacable, was about to tear open my throat, to toss me and kill me. I was weaponless and alone, frozen in fear, in an instant would be torn apart. But just as the dog leaped upon me, in a flash that was a physical jerk to my eyes, at the last possible second, the dog vanished, having turned precisely into three dark-grey owls sitting side by side on the ground on my right and ahead of me. But the owls were also terrifying and, by the way they kept jumping up and by the vicious snapping of their beaks, as rapacious. How to get by them? As it happened, I was carrying a package of meat from the deep freeze, still wrapped in frost-covered, shiny tinfoil. I threw the package to the three owls; they dived upon it and began tearing it apart, forgetting me. I walked tentatively on past them toward the hay farm to the right and ahead of me, down in the cleft of the valley. Then I woke.