by Joan Boswell
“Thompson?” The ground seemed to tremble slightly under her white pumps. He had the dark seal-like hair, the black eyebrows, the face that made the girls glance sideways at him when they should have been studying the notes for Twelfth Night. But shouldn’t he be older? Thompson McBride, the terror and bane of her first teaching season, had to be in his forties. Disconcerted, she pressed the coins into the boy’s hand.
“Thanks.” He grinned and said, “He’s my uncle.”
“Pardon me?”
“Thompson’s my uncle.”
“Ah. Well. Thank you then.”
Really, she scolded herself as she pulled out onto the road and turned toward home. The boy’ll think you’re doddering, mistaking him for an uncle he probably considers as ancient as you. Then a smile played across her face. Did that boy have the joker-is-wild personality to match the looks? Her first class of Grade Nines, and the Superintendent had showed up for her first inspection, and there was Thompson’s group standing on top of the desks performing a scene from The Chrysalids. Thompson McBride and a “streaker costume” at the Halloween dance. The appendix he’d added to his Shakespeare essay, recommending various improvements to her wardrobe.
Where in life would a boy like Thompson end up?
Two mornings later, Margaret walked downtown for her newspaper, succumbed to temptation and the Muffin Man, and read that Dr. Thompson McBride had died in a fiery four car pile-up on the Burlington Skyway. On his way to work the night shift at the hospital emergency. Instead, an ambulance had brought his body in. Cause of the accident unclear. Police still investigating. Call for witnesses.
It’s enough to make you stop reading the news, she thought, splashing coffee as she looked away from the wretched newspaper. And she’d been thinking of him just a day or two ago.
Only this time, she took no comfort from it. What was the point of thought and remembering if they only brought you pain? Perhaps he thought of me, and therefore I thought of him, and I do hope his thoughts were kind, but I’ll pass on such connections in the future, she told the cosmos. Maybe there’s no pass, the carping voice whispered in her ear, No free ride on the cosmic railroad...
She shivered, in spite of the warm coffee and the cheerful clatter of cups in the Muffin Man.
“Stop it!” she told herself firmly. She was acting just like that silly cousin of Desmond’s. Rose-Ann, that was her name. Believed in all kinds of nonsense, meditation, crystals; set up shop as a heath food expert with a sideline divining water. The world has room for all sorts, and she supposed the world could take a herbalist or two lest humanity get so sensible it start to bore God himself. But let a woman think her own thoughts, thank you very much. And she went home to water the garden.
Yet even there, among the lilies and the hollyhocks, from which she attempted to drive a creeping rust of ragged leaves, she felt anxious and restless. It took two days of heavy digging and path building to reclaim her peace. Only a week until Paris, she thought, as she surveyed her work with satisfaction.
Des had stuck the wrought iron bench in the middle of the lawn, and it had always looked lost and lonely, usually just a resting place for the mugs of coffee he expected her to bring him through the day. Now it waited to receive visitors under the birch tree, the destination of an inviting meandering path.
When the phone rang, a portable model she’d propped in the Y of the maple, she was tempted not to answer. Then she remembered she’d asked the travel agent to find out how many of those Euros it would cost to take a taxi from the Paris airport to her hotel.
But it wasn’t the travel agent, it was Desmond’s elderly Aunt Marie, family conduit of news.
“Has Krista had her baby then?” asked Margaret, trying to sound interested.
“Not yet, dear. I’m afraid it isn’t good news.”
“Oh, dear.” For Aunt Marie that could mean someone’s cataract surgery postponed, or heavy repairs needed on the aging Honda, or even a divorce in the clan.
“Do you have a pen and paper handy, dear?”
“I’m out in the garden, Auntie. But I’m sure I can remember.”
“I’m sure I couldn’t,” quavered the thin old voice, “but then you’re chicken compared to me.”
“You’re only eighty-four and younger than most.”
“Well, then. Visitation will be from two to four on Friday. That’s at Patterson’s. And seven to eight thirty in the evening, and the service will be at St. Mark’s on Saturday. Of course, you make up your own mind, dear. I just thought you’d like to know. And she and Des were famous friends in the old days, always into mischief, those two.”
“I appreciate you letting me know, Aunt Marie, but you didn’t say who. Whose funeral is it?”
“I didn’t say? I’m sorry, dear. It’s Rose-Ann. Had a massive stroke last night.”
Margaret’s hand froze on the receiver, but even through the blood pounding in her ears, she could hear the tinge of vindication in the old woman’s voice. “Only sixty-seven. Shows where your health food will get you. Just eat healthy and in good variety, that’s what I always say.”
“Yes. Thank you. I’ll be there. Bye, then.”
The garden was anything but silent. Birds, of course, not just whistling and chirping, but the hum of their wings and the whirr of the mourning dove as it landed. Insects too, the cicadas just beginning to rehearse for high summer and the dreaming whine of the mosquito hiding in the shade. Skin thick and throbbing with heat. Wind in her ears whispering harsh and rasping: Mind like a gerbil’s cage. Rat’s nest. Where thought goes to die.
It was too bizarre to contemplate. Too true to deny. Three times her mind had lit by chance on the memory of some old half-remembered acquaintance. Three times death had followed remembering like a shadow.
“Don’t be foolish,” she said to the garden. It’s just coincidence. People think their thoughts, people die, both happen all the time. But she turned and stumbled to the house, feeling older than she had on any day since she had found Desmond dead under the birch tree.
“Foolishness.” she muttered. “Claptrap and nonsense. Alzheimer’s setting in.”
Of course, that triggered a panic of its own. It took a long hot shower to wash away the first layer of fear, restore enough calm so she could think through the problem rationally and with at least a veneer of composure. Nothing like a cozy bathrobe and a cup of hot tea to restore perspective, she thought, as she settled for the evening with her latest borrowings from the library.
She’d think about the other business later, just settle her mind first with a bit of reading. She picked up a historical mystery, set in Paris, brought home to help her get ready for the trip. Thinking about another century would be just the thing to shake morbid ideas from her mind and silence that whisper, that carping voice.
It was a wonderful gift, this trip the boys had given her. Of course, the greatest gift any mother wants is her children’s love, but it’s nice to have a concrete sign of it from time to time, and it doesn’t have to be Paris. Upstairs in the cupboard sat the just as precious box full of handmade cards and bookmarks, pencil holders, pens with silk flowers carefully taped on, Mike’s tearful letter of apology when he had lost John in the aisles of Canadian Tire, so mesmerized he’d been by the feathered fishing lures, he never noticed his little brother’s departure for the bikes. What a frantic fifteen minutes before they found him interviewing the mechanic in the service bays. Which he could only have reached by going outdoors and around the store where anyone might have snatched him.
The one who’d needed the most consolation hadn’t been the oblivious John, but Mike, who looked for the rest of the day like he hadn’t seen the sun for a year. She’d had to tell him again and again that life had it’s risks, and you couldn’t be perfect all the time and...
A hand clapped over her mouth, as if silence could quell thought. Tea splashed in the saucer as she set it down. She’d been thinking of Mike. John too. She’d been thinking of her boys. Rememb
ering.
She wouldn’t think of it. It couldn’t mean a thing. It was nonsense.
Not nonsense, said the whisper, the nasty murmur, the invitation.
“Nonsense!” she said firmly, but still, she went to the telephone and called all three of the only numbers she knew by heart. None of her boys were at home, but she listened to the strong male answering machine voices rumble confidently with life, then hung up without leaving messages for Peter, Mike or John.
What could she say? “This is your mother, and I’ve got this crazy idea that when I reminisce about people, the next thing that happens is that I hear they’ve died. And I hear your father whispering that it’s all my fault.”
Cause and effect...you think of them, then they die.
She forced her eyes to travel slowly around the room, focussing on the small, the ordinary things. The clock ticking on the mantel. Petals of delphinium fallen to the polished mahogany table top. Steam rising from her cup. It was all so everyday, so much as it had always been and was meant to be for years, and yet she stood here thinking such absurdities about remembrance and death, death and remembrance.
She sat down, took up her book, stirred milk vigorously into the tea. You’ll just read your book, Margaret, she told herself. Just keep your mind on the book and the present. It’s just a strange set of coincidences, she told herself, and not the voice. She refused to acknowledge the hearing of any voice. The boys are fine and will be fine and this will all look so stupid in a day or two. But for now, just to ease your mind, there’ll be no thinking about the past. Just keep your mind on the here and now for a change. It’ll be good discipline, goodness knows. Just drink your tea and read your book and it will all look so different in the morning.
But staying in the present tense turned out to be hard to achieve. Within another paragraph, her mind drifted willy-nilly from the lover’s quarrel on the page to a scene in the high school hallway not two years ago. Had those two scrappers, (what were their names?) gone to the altar after all...
Name them! Name them! said the whisper, Name them and they’re next.
Cutting off that line of thought, she tried television, chose a program she’d never watched, a game show that promised huge amounts of money for answering the most inane questions. The second contestant reminded her instantly of Mike’s grade school soccer coach.
“He’s dead already,” she told the darkness. Had an asthma attack in the prime of life, right there in front of the kids at the side of the playing field. But she snapped the television off, thinking that things were in a pretty state if she had to be glad that someone was already dead.
You were glad I was dead.
“Yes, I was.”
In the long hours of the night, she tried knitting, a tiresome pattern that required strict attention and endless counting of stitches; telephone conversations with people she’d known only for the briefest time; and finally, sleep. No matter what she did, the more she tried to govern her thoughts, the more her mind crept and crawled beyond control. Again and again she lurched out of a half remembered scene, yanking herself back from the brink of recollection like a woman balanced on the edge of a crumbling cliff.
She didn’t sleep at all. By the time morning came, Margaret realized there was only one way to test the proposition. The voice. Herself.
Feeling gritty and rubbed all the wrong ways by a night of twisting between the sheets, she climbed out of bed and made that first pot of coffee. Optimistically, she brewed the usual three strong cups, poured in her milk and carried a mug out to the back porch step. Sat there and watched dawn arrive in the garden.
It’ll be easier here, she thought.
She sipped the strong warm coffee, picturing Des on the same porch step, sipping the first of many she’d hand him through the day, not that he’d ever thanked her. Her coffee was always too weak for him, until she’d brewed him that last excellent mugful of exactly what he deserved.
How sweet it had been to shake her head in sorrow that dear Desmond, usually so precise, had miscounted the doses of heart pills he’d taken that day.
Think you’re smart, do you?
I do, she replied. It was nice to have you dead. Even nicer to make you look a fool in the process.
Then she ignored him and concentrated her thoughts instead on choosing a test subject. She couldn’t let herself dwell on anyone for long, but she’d always thought there were some people that the world would do better without. Maybe that woman at the bank, said to be driving the doctor to drink. Maybe that fellow who’d just been arrested again for driving drunk. If he died, it might even save a life or two.
Aunt Marie? Be nice to live without those gossiping phone calls. But she was so old, it would prove nothing, might still be just another coincidence. No, it had to be someone fit and strong, who had years of life left to live.
And anyway, she was only playing a game, avoiding the inevitable. Really, she’d known all along that there was only one way to satisfy the whisper.
Dew glistened on unfurling lilies that would bloom only today for a single bout of glory. What had she to complain about, who’d had so many days, and her boys, and their love?
So, within a single boundary, Margaret let her mind run free. She named her self. She remembered the doll who had become as real as any person, and the black checked pants it had worn, and the house she’d made for her under the cherry tree. Remembered the blue church dress with the big bow at the back she’d loved. Games of hide and seek in the dusk from which no one had ever wanted to come in, the grown-ups calling from the porch, “It’s time to come in, Margaret!” while the fireflies flickered in the gathering dark. The swing in the backyard from which Margaret had fallen and broken her arm, the feeling as vivid as ever of whumping hard onto the ground and the numb oddity of a bone going the wrong way.
And while she sat on the step, remembering and remembering, the silver branches on the birch tree danced.
Cecelia Kennedy lives and writes in Brampton, Ontario. Her Tony Aardehuis stories have appeared in The Grist Mill and in Storyteller, where she won the Great Canadian Story contest for both 2001 and 2002. Her collection of Tony Aardehuis stories, The Robbie Burns Revival, was recently published by Broken Jaw Press.
The Black and White Blues
He either loved me or he didn’t,
There were no shades of grey,
Not like that Philco TV set
I used to watch all day.
It was black and white, with no remote.
You had to get up to change it.
And there he sat with our remote
As if he bodily owned it.
So...
He either loved me or he didn’t,
There were no shades of grey,
Not like that plasma TV set
He sat and watched all day.
“It’s black or white. Give me that remote.
You do not blinking own it!”
And he just sat and ignored me
Not knowing that he’d blown it.
So you see officer...
He either loved me or he didn’t,
There were no shades of grey,
Not like the Philco TV set
I used to watch all day.
Now he’s black and blue and so remote.
I had to try to change it.
There he sits with that thing down his throat
And he truly bodily owns it.
Joy Hewitt Mann
The Red Pagoda
Days Lee
The responsibilities of the eldest son are clear: marry, provide an heir to carry on the family name, and assume responsibility for the family and the family business if necessary. That was my mother’s firm belief, a belief rooted in Chinese custom and tradition.
So, when my father passed away over a year ago, my mother insisted that I assume his position of managing the Red Pagoda, the restaurant my parents owned for over forty years, while she continued as head cook. Two years earlier, with a ye
arning to run my own business, I’d left the banking industry to join Peter, my younger brother, in his publishing venture. With my parents’ consent, we’d converted their basement into office space. The magazine had seen black ink for the first time when, one evening, before we left for the funeral parlour, my mother stood between stacks of the next month’s issue and informed me that I had an obligation. At forty-seven, I was still single and, to my mother’s consternation, dating Caucasian women. I had not been living up to expectations. My mother was certain this was because I was cursed with her brother’s good looks and affable character, a combination that, if history was being repeated, meant I was adverse to responsibility. Thankfully, Peter had ensured the family lineage by having a son a year after marrying his mail-order bride from Hong Kong. However, family friends would expect me to do what was right: take care of my mother and assume my position as head of the family.
I agreed. My parents had made a number of sacrifices in the name of family responsibility. Owning a restaurant was synonymous with living in one. I don’t have a family memory that doesn’t take place in the Red Pagoda. The cooks, waiters and waitresses became extended family. The restaurant had provided me with a couple of trips to Hong Kong and a Masters degree. The time had come for me to make a sacrifice for the family. Peter would now be able to hire a part-time assistant for the magazine while I ran the restaurant.
The Red Pagoda is a fixture on The Main, a few blocks north of Chinatown. Not much had changed since it first opened its doors in 1961. Vinyl green and yellow booths and Formica tables formed aisles over a faded linoleum floor. I used to joke that it was the Chinese version of “Happy Days”, but the aging furnishings didn’t look so funny any more. It was time to update the restaurant.
My mother was appalled that I planned to destroy my father’s legacy only a month after his death. We had many arguments. In private, she was resolute and enforced a punishing silence. But in the restaurant, she gave a performance that rivaled any Peking Opera star. To anybody who didn’t understand Chinese but was literate in gestures, it was the story of a son who was the reason for his mother’s tragic heartbreak.
