He, Adam, in the driver’s seat of the car, Great Aunt Doris beside him with her short PMS 877 hair and practical scarf, Grandma Charlotte in the back with her huge, dyed-mauve bouffant, PMS 2562, wearing a dress and scarf more suitable for a party than for a walk in the country. No speech bubbles today.
They are in the middle of nowhere. Grandma Charlotte lets out a huge rattling wheeze and it reminds him of Elizabeth on her death bed. The grid collapses. His memories, his impulsiveness, they are making it impossible to maintain order in his vision of the world. Ever since Elizabeth died, he’s felt like inside there is a part of him he’s never known, a part that opened its eyes when Elizabeth took her last breath.
Adam glances in the rear-view mirror and Charlotte smiles, a sly smile, her eyes glancing side to side. He always used to think of her as a sweet old lady, simple-minded but harmless, always wearing a dress. She gives him an innocent little wave.
Adam feels guilty for being suspicious of the elderly woman, but he has a bad feeling in his stomach. There is something behind the storyboard he doesn’t want to face. With the grid falling apart and his ability to structure his time and order his thoughts unreliable, he feels vulnerable, like whatever is hiding might leap out and he wouldn’t even see it coming.
“Turn here, Adam dear,” Grandma Charlotte says. “Bethie knew the way. She was such a good girl. She understood we needed to pay our respects, keep our connection to the past.”
Adam feels a rush of rage thinking of how his wife never told him the truth about this annual excursion. Shame pushes the rage down. He always thought Elizabeth was embarrassed by her rough country upbringing, which explained why she didn’t talk about it. Until he met her family, Adam had never heard anyone call her Beth, let alone “Bethie.” She said her friends called her Elizabeth but her family would never surrender her childhood nickname. At least she had a name which allowed for that multiplicity of identities, Elizabeth had joked. She was always joking. Adam is filled with longing for her, how easily she navigated change and uncertainty. At the same time it hits Adam that maybe Elizabeth didn’t talk much about her childhood because she was protecting him from it, not hiding her embarrassment.
Grandma Charlotte taps Adam on the shoulder. “Pull over right here, dear,” she says.
He jumps. He’s been as lost in his thoughts as on the road.
“Stop right now, Adam, I said,” Charlotte yells. “What are you, deaf?”
Adam slams on the brakes. Not seeing a turnoff, he pulls over to the side of the road, Charlotte looking through the rear window as though she is expecting someone to greet them. But there is only impenetrable forest. Adam doesn’t see a driveway, a mailbox, or even a marker — nothing but coloured trees.
He follows the women out of the car, Charlotte continuing to insist this is the right spot. Doris parts the branches and, sure enough, there is a trail, which may once upon a time have been a road. Doris flaps her hand over her shoulder. “It’s hard to believe if you walk just a few miles that way you’ll come to the Bay of Fundy. You’d never even know it was there for all the woods in between.”
The air smells brown-sugar sweet, the pale sun softly illuminating the last of the purple asters. He and Elizabeth had named their youngest daughter for those flowers, Elizabeth’s favourite. Adam tries but fails to summon the Pantone for the blossoms. The paper-thin leaves on the tree branches rustle in the breeze — now just orange, red, and yellow to him. Some have fallen but many still cling to the branches, though it strikes him that it might be the other way around — trees clinging to their cover of leaves, hiding something behind the brilliant colours.
Aunt Doris surveys the path. “You could hardly sling a cat through here. Why did I let you talk me into coming, Charlotte? Just because you’re upset about Herman.”
“Doris, you’re always so hard on him. That’s what he says, how we never understood him. He’s blaming me too, now, because of you.” Charlotte sets off on the trail and Adam and Aunt Doris follow.
“When were you talking to Herman? He’s still in jail, isn’t he? Charlotte, did they let him out early?” Doris’s voice vibrates with anger and apprehension. “At least it wasn’t for murder this time. You think it would have taught him, but no, he’s bad through and through.”
Charlotte turns and shakes her fist at her sister. “I haven’t laid eyes on Herman, Doris.”
Aunt Doris lets out a sigh of relief, much to the irritation of her sister, who whacks the trail with her cane. “I don’t blame Herman for hating you so much, Doris. You don’t even care that today is his birthday. Even if I don’t see him, I still remember his birthday. All the years are swooping back at me. Time goes so fast. When I was a little girl no one ever told me life would move so fast,” Charlotte says as she rubs her hands together. She quiets her voice and continues in a conversational tone, “Why, my goodness, I should have worn more practical gloves. My gout is flaring up. These gloves are so pretty, though, don’t you think? I knit them out of angora. Adam, you’re so kind to take us old girls on our favourite outing.” She grins, as though the argument they’ve just had never happened.
There hasn’t been any rain in weeks and the dry leaves crackle as Adam and the old ladies walk on the path which, it’s now clear, had been a farm road decades ago. It threads through the woods, which are growing increasingly darker, the silver birches lining the path looming like wraiths. Adam looks at the sun: it’s later than he thought. He should have planned better for this afternoon out, used his GPS. He doesn’t even know where they are, and his phone doesn’t work here in Dog Fuck Nowhere. Adam sits in front of a computer all day long, fiddling with InDesign and answering emails, and then racing to pick up his daughters from daycare. But it’s Sunday afternoon and the girls are at the babysitter’s.
It’s been just over a year since Elizabeth died — this annual outing with her decrepit relatives is part of his inheritance from her. Though what he thought he was inheriting was just a normal country drive — not a pilgrimage into the remains of her family’s dark story.
That story is a piece of family lore that Elizabeth had shared with him before they got married, before he had met her family for the first time. The ancestral home — the ruins of which this path is leading them to — had burned to the ground with the great-great-grandmother trapped inside. Elizabeth had told him the story as though it were a fairy tale, something for scaring children, nothing more. The same casual way she had told him her cousin Herman had gone to jail when he was eighteen, for murdering his father.
Had she imagined this moment, Adam the one following them deep into the woods instead of her? She’s his ghost now, this Bethie taunting him about how carefully he lives, how unpredictable the woods can be, how nature can never truly be controlled.
They’d left Toronto for the tenure-track position Elizabeth was offered. Why do you think I work in cultural sociology and media studies? It’s my destiny. I can’t escape where I was raised. Better to study it than have it eat you alive. I’m interested in basic human experience, the elemental core of who we are. She was euphoric about returning to rural Nova Scotia. She said it brought illumination to everyday life. At least they were in the small, cosmopolitan oasis of the university town, a two-hour drive from the redneck county where she grew up, where her family still lived.
The rustle of the leaves beneath their feet form a tiny chorus of mocking voices. Adam had expected it would be slow going, but it’s especially slow because the old ladies don’t walk very quickly. At least he is able to catch his breath. Charlotte keeps stopping to admire the surroundings and the colour of the leaves. “Oh, the sky reminds me of when I was a young girl. Nothing like a late October sky, is there, Doris?”
Doris isn’t interested in the darkening blue sky, now tinged with a bit of gold and mauve. “Charlotte, don’t dawdle like some sort of foreigner. We don’t have all day.”
Charlotte fuss
es with her angora gloves. “I’m a sentimentalist, I’ll have you know. There’s not enough sentimentality in this world,” she says with an undertone of malice in her voice.
Aunt Doris tries to clear her throat as though something rotten is lodged inside. “There’s nothing practical about sentimentality.” Adam hears the tremble in Doris’s voice. She’s always been so steadfast and resilient. Aunt Doris may have been a clerk who specialized in dealing with idiots, but now Adam sees a frail side emerging. Maybe it was always there and he had never noticed. She had expertly concealed it.
“You can’t scoop up lost time.” Aunt Doris slowly bends over and grabs an armful of paper-thin yellow leaves which immediately spill from her thin arms. She pokes Adam in the ribs with her bony finger and stares at him as though she’s never seen him before. But she says what she always says: “It’s something, having a Chinaman in the family named Adam O’Malley.”
His ancestors came to build the railways across the country in the 1880s. His grandmother married an Irish immigrant, which is why he has dark eyes and auburn hair, why his mother knew how to play Mahjong, which she learned from her neighbours who had moved to Vancouver before Hong Kong was handed back to the Communists.
“How’re your comic books coming along, Adam?”
“Graphic novels, Charlotte.”
He should move back to Vancouver, he knows this. But the children are settled. He promised Elizabeth he would let them grow up here.
“That’s what they call comic books now? Everything a child needs to know is in Donald Duck,” Aunt Doris declares. She sounds more like her old strident self.
Adam thinks how the old ladies wanted you endlessly explaining so the truth would always be in motion.
“Sweet Herman loved reading mysteries. He could have been a writer,” Charlotte says, as though Herman is dead and she’s remembering him as a young child.
Elizabeth had always said her strange older cousin was an author of sorts, writing on people with his fists instead of a pen. Adam thinks that for all they know, Herman could be dead, but he knows better than to say this out loud and risk Charlotte collapsing in hysterics.
When Elizabeth was bald from the chemo, they took the girls for a visit to Charlotte’s place in Nolen, Elizabeth’s childhood village. There were family pictures throughout the house. It was built in the early 1970s but Charlotte always referred to it as my lovely modern home. There was a photo on the telephone table of a smiling young teenage Herman holding Elizabeth when she was about five. They had the same dark eyes. Elizabeth adored Herman. His father was Charlotte’s eldest child.
Herman had always wanted to inherit the abandoned old family property up on the mountain, Elizabeth had said. The old ladies wouldn’t give it to him, not until he turned his life around or theirs ended. If he couldn’t get himself on the straight and narrow, as they called it, Herman would just have to wait like a good boy until they died.
The old women continue talking about Herman as they walk, how on the one hand he meant well and on the other hand he was such a misfit. It wasn’t his fault he was born this way; his tramp of a mother drank so much when she was pregnant.
Maybe Aunt Doris was right to be suspicious. And maybe Herman’s not in jail, he thinks. Adam can’t keep track of his incarcerations. “Herman isn’t grateful, that’s the problem,” Aunt Doris says. “If he appreciated even a bit of what people have tried to do for him, if he could just take responsibility, he wouldn’t end up in such trouble. Nowadays young people don’t want to take responsibility for who they are. Or do penance for their failings.”
Another ripple of guilt moves through Adam for doubting Charlotte. He feels like he and Doris are ganging up on a helpless old lady. As the sisters argue, Adam notices how his black leather shoes toss up yellow leaves as he shuffles along.
Charlotte shakes her cane. “No one paid enough attention to poor little Herman,” she barks. “And you never had children, so what do you know?”
“Herman’s bad in his bones, I’ve come to believe. Our family has a bad streak,” Doris says, with the new warble in her voice. “It’s a good thing he’s locked up. We’re too old to try and help him. And your time has passed for making amends, Charlotte. You should have tried to help him when he was a child. It’s too late for regret. You can’t fix everything by remembering someone’s birthday. You can’t unravel the past like you do with your knitting if you miss a stitch.”
Charlotte had knit a pink toque for Elizabeth to cover her bald head. Charlotte’s own funeral instructions include burying her with her knitting bag. Adam imagines you will hear the clickity-clackity of her knitting needles in her pine casket below ground going for as long as her rotting fingers can hold them.
On the way home from that visit, Elizabeth wore the pink toque. The little girls slept in the back of the car.
“How can you stand them?” he asked Elizabeth.
“I think of my life as a Werner Herzog documentary. Herzog says facing the camera is like facing death. That’s how I do it. Face life like a camera. Live like I’m in a Herzog film.” She was looking straight ahead through the windshield, as if through the night the headlights beamed into a secret she could see but Adam could not, no matter how hard he tried. He remembers gripping the steering wheel in frustration but not saying anything, not wanting to yell at a dying woman or to wake the children.
Werner Herzog is an asshole, he remembers thinking. There was a difference between courage and rashness, between living well and being oblivious to danger. The heater was blasting and he strained to hear Elizabeth as she spoke. Adam remembers how soft her voice was, as though she were praying. Then she was silent for a few minutes before laughing, more like cackling really, and then quiet once more filled the car and all Adam could hear was the low sound of the engine and the heater, the heavy breathing of their small sleeping daughters in their car seats in the back.
When the cancer metastasized to her bones and her brain, Elizabeth wasn’t afraid, only angry at the brevity of her lifespan, at the idea of leaving her little girls. She was in a hospice at that stage. Adam remembers there was a photographer who came in to take portraits of the dying. It was for an art show, photographing the dying for the living, a fundraiser for the hospice. Elizabeth loved the concept. The next best thing to Herzog himself, she said. The photographer brought her little boy because she didn’t have a babysitter and he played with their girls. But Elizabeth died before the exhibition and Adam didn’t go to the opening despite the nice invitations extended. A few months later the photographer had mailed him a sympathy card and a photograph of Elizabeth. She was skeletal and bald but the photographer had captured Elizabeth with a tiny smile as though she had a secret or had finally understood an age-old mystery.
He could still hear Elizabeth’s hoarse chemo voice. I’ve already faced death. I know what’s coming.
Before she got sick, Elizabeth never expected Adam to come along when she took the old ladies out. She did it only because her mother had made her promise to keep up the family tradition. She was dead too, his mother-in-law, of the same sort of hereditary breast cancer which Elizabeth said she’d been on the watch for.
“We’re almost there,” Charlotte shouts, waving her cane at a clearing in the trees illuminated by thin, end-of-day sunlight, a dull spotlight on the stage of their memories. There is a massive old apple tree, the wizened apples glowing red, the branches tumbling down like arthritic grey limbs. They walk toward the clearing, the only sound the wind whispering in the leaves.
Elizabeth constantly told him life should be lived in pursuit of what Herzog called the ecstatic truth. A truth Adam should hunt for after she was gone if he wanted any real peace of mind. She was very ill by then, but he was still shocked when she died. He hadn’t expected the wrath lurching up in his body, an irrational and shameful fury at how Elizabeth had abandoned him with two small, helpless children, as thoug
h she had done it on purpose.
Adam knows now it was a terrible fear and sorrow hiding behind the rage. Grief would be tender and quiet, Adam had assumed. But instead he found himself running laps around the pond in the back of the house every night while the children lay asleep in bed, and he hoped they wouldn’t wake up alone while he screamed in the woods, fleeing from the stupid ecstatic truth chasing behind him under the dark, sinister sky. Even then the grids and panels in his mind were slipping.
His wife’s funeral was packed with friends and colleagues and extended family. Cousin Herman standing at the back of the sanctuary, staring at the coffin. The little girls skipping up and down the aisle between the pews, Aster tripping on the thick red carpet. She hit her chin on the wooden pew and Herman helped her up. She held his big rough hand until she stopped crying. Then the girls ran up the aisle and sat by the altar, the young priest smiling at them.
Later, at the reception, Aster and Julia asking when Mommy was going to be coming home. Tears leaking from Adam’s eyes as Herman put squares and cookies in a plastic bag. No use good food going to waste, Herman said. He hadn’t shaved or combed his long stringy hair and he was wearing a plaid hunting jacket and work boots. Herman lived in a mobile home near the gravel pit, right by Johnny’s Burger.
A few months after the funeral Herman was arrested for punching the mail delivery person.
Adam was stuck with the old women, but at least not with Herman and his stringy hair and his hatred for the mailman who never brought the mail anymore. Herman was like Elizabeth. He did as he pleased, whenever he was so moved, with no hesitation, no regret. Courage or insanity, Adam wasn’t sure. They were like backwoods crusaders in an obscure comic. Adam is simultaneously drawn to and repelled by their way of living outside the grid. Nothing ever storyboarded, spontaneity the order of the day, never a glimpse of cowardice or regret.
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