The Seary Line

by Nicole Lundrigan

  Even though Stella knew her aggravation was unwar-ranted, petty even, sometimes she resented Nettie. Resented the fact that Nettie offered nothing in return, no clues on where to go, on what to say. But there was always an expectation hanging in the air, though Stella was unable to define that expectation. She generally tried to keep the chatter easy and humorous, to offer up stories that might float in through Nettie’s ears, and make some hidden part of her smile. But how was Stella to know if this was what Nettie wanted? And when Stella sat in silence, Nettie would stare at her, blinking. Stella thought that if Nettie’s eyes could make a sound, that sound would be shrill.

  Perhaps Nettie preferred that Stella talk about the greater meaning of everything. She had tried that, but it always sounded too personal, especially when Mrs. Jenkins or the nurses were listening. No. That was a lie. It always sounded too final. Reflection did not involve moving forward, only looking back. Stella did not want to look back. And think. There was too much that didn’t make sense. By surveying, she was likely to discover too many strands in her life that were unfair. Growing old was one thing. Old and bitter, something entirely different.

  Stella stood, unfolded the quilt draped over Nettie’s footboard, and laid it across Nettie’s folded knees. As she did every time, Stella touched Nettie’s face, pressed slightly at the corners of each eye, daubed both sides of Nettie’s mouth. Paper-thin skin, sunken and nearly mummified, Stella’s gentle touch adjusted her best friend’s expression. It’s a harmless thing to do, Stella told herself. Who would ever know? At the end of every visit, Stella kissed Nettie’s forehead, and Nettie stared back with a fixed, but pleasant smile.

  On her way down the hallway, Stella stopped at the door with the brass cowbell decoration. Her visits with this hapless elderly woman began as a favour, but had turned into a habit. And now she was unable to leave Pine Ridge without at least saying “Hello” to Miss Miriam Seary.

  Some months ago, a nurse had approached Stella about another resident of the home who had spent a short time in Bended Knee.

  “Well, travel’s a lot easier these days,” Stella had replied.

  “No, no. I believe ’twas when she was much younger. A young woman. She doesn’t talk much, but when she does, she always goes on about Bended Knee.” The nurse leaned closer to Stella. “I minds she says she fell in love there.”

  Stella was curious now. “P’raps I knows her?”

  “You could, my dear, though she’s quite a bit older. Miss Seary’s her name. Miriam. Oldest woman on the floor. Lived here for ages. Before I came on to work, even, and I won’t tell you how long I’ve been here.” The nurse reached out, touched Stella’s elbow. “Don’t suppose you got the time to spend a few minutes with her?”

  “Ah. . .” Stella stepped back slightly, glanced up and down the hallway. Close by, she noticed a woman with a liver-spotted scalp in a reclining wheelchair, staring at a framed print on the wall. Why do they hang such dull artwork? Stella wondered. Why would someone whose sense is lost want to stare at a bird flying into a forest?

  “I knows, ’tis a lot to ask. But Miss Seary’s a lovely woman, and as far as we knows, she don’t belong to no one. Never had a single visitor since she came to us. Not a one. Not even a card or a call. We all says she come out of nowhere. Got no line. No line to speak of.” The nurse hesitated. “Plus, Mrs. Smith used to enjoy spending a bit of time with her. Before, well, she took to her bed and all.”

  “Well, I suppose.”

  “You never knows, you might end up related.” The nurse had nodded. “There’s always some connection, isn’t there?”

  Stella found that notion highly doubtful. She had never heard of anyone in Bended Knee with the last name of Seary. This woman was likely someone who’d spent a summer there, or maybe worked for a year or two as a mother’s helper.

  Placing her hand on the door, she stopped for a moment, wondered what type of person she was going to find behind it. A person who belonged to absolutely no one. What might that be like? No parents or aunts or uncles rooting her with stories and tradition, no children or grandchildren, making her light with their silly antics, unwavering love. How empty must that feel? To have no line. No line to speak of.

  As the nurse looked on intently, Stella shuddered slightly, pushed open the Seary woman’s door, secured it in place with the rubber doorstopper and stepped inside. She had intended to visit that one time, but was surprised to discover she found Miriam Seary’s childlike company comforting. Familiar. There was something filling about it. Reminded her of warm bread, ready to eat, thick layer of butter melted down through.

  When Stella entered the room after visiting Nettie, Miriam Seary was seated in the worn chair next to her bed. Her head was angled towards the window, likely tilted to watch the blustery wind hurtling hard flecks of snow against the glass. Light arriving through the snow was clear and bluish, and the room was cast in soothing tones. Stella slipped into the second chair, its burlap textured fabric weathered, and though she was tempted, she resisted picking away at loose strands, bits of exposed yellowed foam.

  Settled beside Miriam, Stella felt incredibly slight. Miriam was a woman of grand proportions, her girth was made worse by the clothing she wore – large print polyester dresses, usually a combination of brown, dull green, a smattering of white. In her current dress, her trunk was a human landscape, rolling field, earth turned, dead vegetation turned inwards, first snowfall hiding in dips and folds. Her cheeks appeared greasy, and her shiny cleft chin, resting on the loose skin of her chest, was nearly lost among the layers of soft fat. Though Miriam was certainly clean, Stella found that she still smelled very much like a baby who had not been bathed, as though drops of creamy milk, trapped behind her fleshy ears, were fermenting. Stella did not find this offensive at all, her appearance, her odour. Instead, she felt a tenderness towards this aged infant, pity, too, certain that in Miriam’s lifetime, many people had let her down, never nurtured her as promised.

  Speaking in her characteristic short bursts, repetitive phrases, Miriam once again began to tell of her time in Bended Knee. And Stella always listened politely, though she had given up trying to discover any common ground. Miriam only spoke of minor things, such as kittens in a loft, setting out plates on a tablecloth embroidered with fruit, making soup from fish heads with an old woman. Stella thought perhaps Miriam worked in a kitchen, or perhaps she never lived there at all. There was nothing in her descriptions that would lead Stella to believe her one way or another. She had mentioned a man, but he could have been a man from anywhere or anytime. And Miriam had just placed him in Bended Knee because that was a memorable place for her.

  “Ellie.” Trying to straighten the sharp bend in her back, Miriam looked up at Stella with wide set eyes. “You knows him?”

  “Ellie? No, Miss Seary,” Stella replied gently, as she did each time Miriam asked this same question. “No, I don’t mind that I do.” She guessed that Miriam had been born simple, that her childlike manner was not due to senility. “Do you recall his Christian name?”

  “He plays the music. Music.”

  “What sort?” Stella reached up to touch the slight cleft in her own chin, stared at the cleft in Miriam’s.

  “Lots of keys. Keys opens nothing.” She guffawed at her own joke, wide mouth revealing a set of perfectly even greyish-white false teeth.

  “Keys?”

  “Keys, keys.”

  “Piano, you means? I never heard you talk about a piano before.”

  “Oh, yes. Nice music. Good boy.”

  “Did you play?”

  Miriam giggled, slapped her thighs with both hands. “No, no. He gave me nice.”

  “Music, Miss Seary?”

  “Good boy. Nice boy.”

  “Yes, Miss Seary.”

  “Dancing. You dance?”

  “Not lately, no. But I did. Back in the day.”

  “Oh, I dance, dance. Missus don’t like it.”

  “Missus?”

 
“Good girls don’t dance. By theyselves.” Miriam began to open and close her legs, hoseless thighs slapping slightly.

  “To a bit of piano music? I don’t see no harm in it. ’Tis harmless.”

  “Dancing for the devil. Devil dancing.”

  “That’s old nonsense now, Miss Seary.” Reaching over, Stella patted Miriam’s shoulder. Somehow, Stella had expected her fingers to sink into Miriam’s flesh, but instead, she encountered a reassuring firmness. “Whoever filled your head with that don’t mean it, I’s sure.”

  As they chatted, Stella’s thoughts skipped backwards, flicking through old memories, and at once, she sat upright. With this talk of a piano, a small door cracked open in Stella’s mind. Only one person in Bended Knee owned a piano and that was an old widow named Berta May. She had died years ago, but Stella remembered the man who lived with her, helped to take care of the land, few animals, and the house. He was an odd individual, used to wander up and down the laneways in all kinds of weather, would stare at Stella and frighten Elise. But he played beautiful music. The melody often wound its way out through a cracked window, lingered in the air like a foggy charm.

  “Was his last name Wood?” She could no longer conjure his first name, though didn’t fret over the lapse. That man hadn’t crossed her mind in a decade or more, and Stella’s memory was about as crisp as a damp rag.

  “Got me in trouble. Trouble. It did.”

  “Oh, come now, Miss Seary.”

  “Oh my, oh my, oh my. All sorts. Ask missus.”

  “What sort?” While in the company of Miriam, Stella often had the desire to dig through her purse, find a peppermint knob, offer it up.

  “Missus don’t like it.”

  “Probably you misunderstood.”

  “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up!” Miriam’s voice, suddenly shrill, angry.

  “Pardon me?” Stella flinched in her seat, put her hands to the knot in her scarf. Miriam had never before spoken in a harsh tone. “Oh, I do apologize, Miss Seary. I didn’t mean. . .” Stella began to stand, slightly nervous now.

  “She says shut up. Hurt awful bad. Owww.” Miriam slumped forward, praying hands pinched between her knees. “Owww.”

  On the edge of her seat now, Stella said, “Miss Seary, is you all right?”

  “’Twas hot. Hot belly fire.”

  “Do you want me to get the nurse? A drink of water?”

  “Fire down. Down there.”

  “The washroom? You need the washroom, Miss Seary?”

  Miriam opened her eyes, stared at Stella, her gaze reminding Stella of an innocent goat. Open, trusting, a hint of fear.

  “I left it. Left it there.”

  “What did you leave?”

  “Left it. Uh-huh. Had to.”

  “You couldn’t go back for it? Whatever it was?”

  “No, ma’am. Uh-huh. ’Twas dead. Missus said so.”

  “I don’t understand you, Miss Seary. I don’t want you to be upset.”

  “Dead. Took it away.” Miriam sucked in air. “Right quick. Gone.”

  “Oh my. I’ll get the–”

  “Before I even seed.”

  Stella clutched her black vinyl purse, stood up. She placed her hand lightly on Miriam’s shoulder, said in a hushed tone, “I’ll go and fetch the nurse. I’s awful sorry, Miss Seary. I gone and upset you with my questions.”

  Stella walked out into the fluorescent lights of the hallway, tottering slightly. She leaned her shoulder blades against the wall. At first she hadn’t understood, but after a moment, her mind snapped to attention. Miriam Seary had had a baby in Bended Knee. Born still. Or so someone had told her.

  With her knuckle, Stella daubed the moistness that had formed in her eyes. She stood as straight as her spine would allow, and took a deep breath. The old woman had surprised her. In her head, Stella had conjured up a magical life for Miriam Seary. A full lifetime as a child, brimming with wonder, absent of misery or sorrow. But now she recognized how foolish that was. Every person experienced loss. Every person, no matter their wits or station, was occasionally enveloped in it, forced to absorb it.

  Directly across from where Stella stood hung the portrait of the black bird. Flying straight into a forest of dark green brushstrokes. It angered her suddenly, this image. Of innocence about to be devoured. And she stared at that bird, clenched her fists, willed it to arc upwards, towards the heavens, and avoid the tangle of certain night that lay ahead.

  That was the last time Stella saw Miriam Seary. Nettie died within hours of their final visit, and because Stella perceived, at best, a tenuous, and now slightly awkward, connection to Miss Seary, she never went back again.

  On a warm day in June, Miss Miriam Seary died while resting peacefully at Pine Ridge Retirement Centre. There was a small farewell with a handful of attendants, nursing staff mostly, a doctor. Though all were fond of Miriam, welcomed the ever-present smile on her sharply tilted head, they recognized that she would not be missed. No husband, no children, no loved ones worth mentioning. They felt a tinge of sadness when they acknowledged that kind Miriam Seary, who everyone joked might live forever, had died completely alone. “It’s impossible,” one said, “given the constraints we’re under, to spend any amount of time seated with one woman.”

  But they were wrong. Miriam was not alone. Her mind was full, occupied with the good company found inside her recurring dream. Her hands moving over the warm pink udders of the old girls, heavy with milk. Churning sweet butter with all her might. Lying down with a man who was gentle with her. The smell of spring grass, every blade bent and broken beneath her.

  On that same day, a woman named Anita Hilliard paid her neighbour, young Henry Tuck, fifteen dollars to repair the squeaky floor of the attic bedroom in the home she had purchased in Bended Knee. With the small inheritance she received when a beloved great uncle died, she had decided to transform the abandoned farmhouse into a lively bed and breakfast. She recognized that those sorts of things were coming into vogue, and she wanted to be seated at the front of the investment bus. Plus, it was a good way for a single mature woman to earn an income while maintaining a respectable home.

  The home had once belonged to a married couple named Willard and Berta May. They never had any children, only a few distant, distracted relatives who had no interest in a rundown farmhouse. Anita snapped up the long abandoned home at a steal, and when she toured the rooms, she could practically feel the old-fashioned character oozing out of the walls. Vandals had left behind plenty of smashed beer bottles, some pissy corners, but most of the contents remained intact. Being a thrifty lady, Anita decided to keep much of it. Taking it room by room, she re-papered walls, re-painted doors, re-sugared wilted doilies, vacuumed chairs, bought fresh pillows and sheets. Her handy neighbour, Henry Tuck, assisted with most of the hammer work. While she didn’t mind the cosmetic fix-up, she was not one to play with tools.

  Though it could have gone under the heading for charm, the squeaking in the attic irritated her. Whenever she would enter the room, she’d shift her weight back and forth over those floorboards, aggravated by the song that rose upwards. As if the floor was trying to tell her something. But Anita, being a poor listener, wanted to shut it up. Stifle the whine. She moved the chatty floorboards to the top of Henry’s list, felt a sense of finality as she heard his steady hammering.

  If she had gotten down on all fours, which she rarely did, and felt along the floorboards of the attic room, she might have discovered the cause for the irritable squeaking. Several boards were loose, could be lifted easily with a set of eager, prying fingers. But instead, Henry Tuck securely nailed each end of the planks. Nail after nail after nail. Forever locking away a wooden box that was laid on the thick support beams beneath. Inside was a photo, covered lightly in oily loops and arches and whorls. And though no one would ever read them, the box also contained several letters written in scratchy, but legible handwriting. Impeccable spelling. Remarkable, considering the man who penned them. Each one carefully
and lovingly addressed to My darling Mirry.

  My name is Eldred James Wood. I lived in Bended Knee with Mr. and Mrs. Willard May from the age of seventeen years until my death. I wrote those letters, hid them under the floorboards. No one will ever find them and read them, share them. In twenty-three years, a simple swallow of time, the old May farmhouse will burn down because of faulty wiring. My words will be turned to dull ash, then scattered by the very gusts that fed the flames.

  Where am I now? Of course, I am long gone. Moved on, as some delicately call it. The narrow pine box, my final resting place, has long since degraded, collapsed under the weight of several feet of damp dirt, a flourishing bed of orange marigolds. There is nothing left of my woollen suit, my watery flesh, the paste that was my bones. With the help of life within the earth, I have travelled outwards, blended in with the soil, disintegrated.

  Those in Bended Knee who remember me might think my life was insignificant. Likely they consider me nothing more than the dull-witted farmhand who turned soil on cloudy days. Or the peculiar man who wandered up and down the laneways in thick drizzle. Or perhaps they remember me as the piano player who could never read a note of music. However I exist within their minds, undoubtedly they view me as a lost soul without a purpose. Someone who had simply slipped in and out of existence without leaving as much as a wrinkle.

  But they would all be wrong. Though I left a very quiet footprint on this earth, even I have a story to tell. We are all like that. Our lives, when they begin, may fit neatly on the head of a pin, but as we move through the years we are given, our lives expand until we have touched every star in the universe.

  So, listen now. Those of you who think I don’t belong here. I admit, it is a curious place for me to be, when my story so clearly should have ended near the beginning. But I will tell you what I must, to unravel the sadness, and set it free.

  My mother, you see, was an angry woman. And much of that anger was directed towards me. Don’t judge her though, as she had every right to be. I let her down, down so deeply, she was never able to recover. In the long light of a warm September afternoon, I destroyed my mother. Only her obligation to me forced her to live like that for years, all the way dead inside. Through and through.