A Witness to Life (Ashland, 2) (5 page)

I have always thought the fur felt hat, with its Russian calf-leather sweatband, to be a fine piece of manhood. In fact, I purchased it at this very place, almost ten years ago, with my first pay.

But now I am not so sure. The realization surfaces that being surrounded by females of all kinds is no guarantee of understanding them, and I am taken aback.

It lies on the counter between us, more than a hat, and remarkably less. Her eyes drop down to study it, then rise once more to meet mine. She is wearing a white, high- collared blouse with a pin at the throat, which falls in ruffles at her bosom. Her hands, I now see, have small veins on their backs. The nails are short, well kept.

I know her from somewhere, but cannot place where.

"I see," she says. Then a finger touches the brim. "It is an old hat. Looks like it has been worn well."

I have never thought of it as an old hat, or worn, well or otherwise. Through her eyes, it transforms.

"I bought it here," I say.

"An older style. We have new stock. A great deal. What did you have in mind?"

"I don't know," I answer honestly. Things have shifted. I realize that in some minute way, I am not the same man who wore the hat into the store. He is gone. I have replaced him. Who is she?

"Silk hat? Opera hart"

I lean forward on the counter and study the signs hanging behind her head, but in so doing, unthinkingly, I come too close to her. I do not understand this until I see her face contort slightly, realize from her expression that she has smelled the ale on my breath, and has judiciously backed away.

"I'm sorry," I say.

She says nothing.

I am mortified in a way that is new to me. "I've just come from—"

I stop.

"I'm sorry." I pick up my hat, nod. I turn and leave. I feel her eyes on my back as I stride down the aisle toward the door. I am careful not to betray myself further, not to embarrass myself with a stumble, a false step.

Sitting on the streetcar, traveling home, I am in a daze. I see nothing but the mouth turned down at the corners, the hair rolling across the forehead, the pin at the throat. I see the hat between us on the glass counter.

The next day, Saturday, I return, stand at a distance from her counter, beside a table that announces: BRACELET, 35¢; BEAD PURSE, 59¢; SHAWL, 50¢. I have no plan. I only know that things were not right, and now, in the clear light of day, I have to fix them. The floor is bustling with energy, with people who need to be in a place like this after managing the routines of their lives for another week, and it occurs to me that I am one of these people.

But she is not here. Another woman is displaying wares to a customer on the glass counter that stood between us last evening.

I swivel my gaze throughout the room, fixing on faces, scanning. Then I look back at her counter. The woman here now is younger. In a way that I do not understand, she is less than the woman I saw yesterday.

Above her head, I read the sign ostrich aigrettes for 75¢, good assortment of colors.

I approach, stand with fingers touching the dark wooden edge of the glass counter. When she notices me, I try to think of something to say. I ask to see the men's fur cap encased beneath my hands. The woman, younger than me, than her, very pretty, soft features, complies, passes it to me, smiles without showing her teeth. I touch it, turn it over in my hands.

"This one's astrakhan. We have them in half Persian lamb, nutria, beaver, German otter. . . They're only three dollars and fifty cents. Good value." The voice is pleasant, friendly.

"It's very nice." And it is. I let my fingers probe its exotic mystery, its suppleness. Its softness. "Thank you," I say. "Thank you for showing me." I hand it back.

She continues to smile.

I cannot buy it from her. She does not tell me that my own hat is an old one. Her mouth does not curve down at the corners.

That night, Saturday night, I meet Jock downtown and we make the rounds. We drink ale, eat sausages and eggs and pigs' feet in beverage rooms with sawdust on the floors, spend an hour with two women named Diane and Caroline, whom we meet at the Nipissing, neither of whom I can picture clearly in my mind the next day.

But it is not the same for me as it has been in the past. It is not the same. My mind is elsewhere.

Her face. I know her.

When I stumble in the door past midnight, I know that something is amiss. All the lights are on. I hear voices from an upper bedroom.

I pause at the foot of the stairs, clear my head, listen.

The priest is standing at the foot of the bed. He has just conferred the last rites on Gramma. She lies there, tiny, covered with a checkered quilt to her waist. Her feet are small hillocks beneath its weight. Someone has wrapped rosary beads about her hands. A clean blue nightgown is tied tightly at her neck.

There is blood in her stool, Ma tells me. Ma does not know what this means. They have called the priest instead of a doctor, which, somehow, does not surprise me.

On the bedside table is the bottle of Lourdes water, more than twenty years old, that I have been told Father Owen gave to Ma when Sarah died. The only other time I have seen it is when I was six years old, when Rose was sick, that winter, when Ma, her eyes fierce with fear, rubbed it on her chest, praying for her cough to disappear.

Extreme Unction. Father Owen. Miss Lecour.

The memory of St. Mary's School—of catechism lessons—back in Elora floods back, like the Grand River, wide and powerful. I stand in its midst, an obstacle to be eroded, the Tooth of Time.

Gramma's eye sockets, lips, ears, hands glisten with the holy oil, with forgiveness of sins she has never committed, could never commit.

Her eyes roll toward me, watery, fasten tightly. Her mouth opens in a small
o.

No sound.

But she is alive. She is alive. Still.

Da did not receive the last rites. I saw him myself, that day, before he was washed.

He died at work, after eating the tomato sandwich that Ma always made for his lunch, beside a road excavation bed that he had just carefully lined with crushed gravel. They say that he caught his foot on the pedal of the steamroller, fell and struck his head on the metal side, hung twisted from one leg. They could not find Ma, but the men told me they knew my name and where I worked from listening to Da brag about me, so a man in a faded checkered shirt and suspenders, sad eyes, and a floppy moustache curving over a thin mouth, his broad-brimmed hat gripped in soiled hands, came to my work and told me and took me there to see him. He was lying on a grass boulevard beside the sidewalk, covered with a tarpaulin. Work had come to a halt, and the twenty-one men on his crew stood about silently, leaning on shovels, rakes, brooms. One sat astride the giant steamroller, his face a blank. I said nothing as I looked down at him. The death certificate would list the cause of death as a fractured skull, and make up his age, because he had always shaved years off to keep jobs. I remember the mud and cement caked on his shoes, the gray dust of his labor on his hands.

And watching Gramma, I know, suddenly, that like Da, when my own time comes, I will not receive the last rites either. And because Da did not receive them, I know, too, that I do not want them.

I wonder if this is one of the things it means to be a man. I wonder about the possibility of redemption.

Gramma does not die that night. Before dawn comes, the priest has left, but we are still with her, exhausted, not knowing what we want.

When I fall asleep, finally, in the early morning, I dream the dreams of the drunk, of the dazed, of the ones who have seen, however briefly, their own abyss. I dream of Sarah, my sister, buried when I was a child, see her dying, her white dress bloodied, her eyes frantic.

I dream of a lone hawk, soaring high above me, high above us all.

"Gramma," I say.

She looks at me, says nothing. We are alone.

It is the next day. Sunday. Ma has gone to late mass with Mary, Michael, and Francis.

"I'm glad you're feeling better."

I remember the night I touched her, lifted her. Now, I put my hand over hers, cover it, hold it, feel the thinness of its liver-spotted surface.

She looks down at our hands in wonder. Then she looks up at me, makes the
o
with her mouth, studies my face intently, tilts her head, and I feel her fingers tighten on mine.

"Would you like a cup of tea?"

Her face begins to shake.

I set the two cups of tea on the bedside table, beside the Lourdes water. Propping the pillow, I slide her into a sitting position. Touching her again, I think.

"I put sugar and milk in yours too." I lift it to her lips, hold it steady. She drinks, a few drops spilling on her chin. When I place the cup back on the bedside table, she blinks at me and her lips part, but no sound comes out. She studies my face carefully.

"I met a woman," I say, hearing my thoughts come to life.

She listens to the words, watches my mouth.

"I went to see her again, but she wasn't there." I sip my tea, sit back, relax. "I think you'd like her." I smile.

Her silence is profound for me. I think of all the women's voices that have surrounded me my whole life, contrast them with Gramma's quiet calm.

I hold the cup to her lips once more, watch her fists clench and unclench.

When Ma returns, I ask her. "What's Gramma's name?"

Ma looks at me. "What do you mean?"

"Her real name, her full name." I have never asked before. I do not know why I have never asked.

She is preparing a stew for our dinner. The carrots have been chopped, lie scattered on the wooden board. Turning from her work at the kitchen counter, she faces me. "Margaret," she says. "Her maiden name was Loy." She frowns. "She married Martin Whalen. My father. You're named after him."

"Where was she born?"

"Ireland."

"Where in Ireland, though?"

"The Whalens, the Loys, the Radeys," she sighs. "Your father was born in county Kerry. I was born in King's County. Kerry's the wild county, green and rolling, near the sea. The southwest. King's County is more in the center, farther east. It's farming land. Southwest of Dublin. Northeast of Cork." She wipes her hands on her apron, lifts her chin, stares at me, silent, in thought.

"How old do you think she is?"

Her eyes shift to the wall behind me as she answers. "I've wondered myself, many a time." A pause. "I'm sixty-two. So I'm told," she adds. "Born in eighteen forty-five. How old does that make her?"

I don't know. I don't know what I am supposed to know. "Was she old or young when you were a child?"

"What do you mean?" Her eyes move back to me.

"You know. You were fifteen when Sarah was born, thirty-five when I was born." Thirty-five sounds so old to me as I say it. Maybe, I think suddenly, I should not have mentioned Sarah.

But she smiles.

I wait.

"There were just the two of us. Me and my brother. His name was Mártain, too." She pronounces the name with its Irish lilt, and I hear the old language, hear it sing. "So you see, there's a Martin in each generation."

Then she pauses, seems to be remembering. "She was young," she says. Then: "Did you know that her name, Loy, is the Irish for shovel^"

I shake my head, say nothing, just listen.

Her lips move, as if to say something, as if to complete the thought. But she says nothing else aloud.

"Father died in Ireland, shortly after I was born. Mártain was three. Eighteen forty-five. At the beginning of the famine."

Ma sits at the kitchen table as she speaks; I stand by the window.

"That's why there are only the two of us." A pause. "He choked to death on a piece of meat. We were all there, even me, wrapped in a blanket in a box. It was dinnertime." Another pause. "Mártain used to tell me how mother screamed and screamed. He was too little to do anything. He used to say that he remembered it vividly. He just cried. He was scared."

I have never heard this before, have never asked. I am stunned.

Ma is quiet for a minute. Then: "That was the beginning of the end for Mother. They say she was never the same after that. By the time we left Ireland, the next year, her mind was going. We had been evicted. We had nothing. Everybody had nothing. There was no food. Nothing. I try to imagine it." Ma stops, hesitates, then: "She wasn't as bad as she has been since you've known her. But she wasn't able to make the decision to emigrate. Uncle Liam made that decision, and put her and Mártain and me on the ship. He was Mother's brother. He did most of the looking out for us the year after Father died." A pause. "Liam's dead."

The story hypnotizes me. "What happened to Mártain?" I have never met him, have barely heard his name over the years.