Believing Cedric

 

For my sister, Gina

Reaching up to the frosted copper handle

and opening the door to air

so warm it stings the cheeks

Supper steaming at the window

with the sweet breath of fried onions

Mittens drying on the furnace duct

beside a lunchbox lined with breadcrumbs

Being lifted impossibly high

above the portrait frames and lamps

the sandpaper scraping

of my father's stubble

clenching my body tight

with laughter

I imagine there are questions

and answers about school

but these have all faded

unlike the tactile

The plump fingers of my

mother's hand on my head

The wet of the dog's delicate lips

as he pulled the gristle

from my fingers

under the table

This is what I would have told you

if you'd asked

what I remember first

But you never did

Melissa was seated neatly on her sofa, reading, her cat asleep on the cushion beside her, just out of reach, when a sleek car drove into view and turned with certainty into her driveway. She looked up from her book, sure that this car, which she'd never seen before, would reverse out and drive away in the opposite direction, something that happened quite often on the road where she lived, an almost dead-end lane in the small town of Haliburton, Ontario. But whoever it was had turned off his vehicle and was getting out, though with much less conviction than he'd had while pulling in. It was her father, Cedric, now slouching in her driveway, slamming the door while squinting through the front window, a hand held over his brow to function as a visor.

Melissa's lips hinged open. The last time she'd seen him was four years ago. He had gained weight since then, and had taken, she noted, to wearing a tacky gold watch. She closed her book, hesitated.

Outside in the boreal distance, a chainsaw puttered out. A crow complained in the quiet left behind. In the sky behind Cedric, a myriad of individual clouds—the kind that are only seen here in autumn, small and shaped like blotchy snails with grey-bottomed bodies and white-furrowed shells—glided through the sky, all of them moving in the same direction, from one nameless place to another.

Cedric made his way to the landing, where he gave two feeble knocks on her door. He waited for her to answer, glanced over his shoulder, looked at the clouds.

That morning—the morning it happened—Agnes O'Donnell was sitting in the window of her resource room, as she did every day before class, staring down into the schoolyard, thinking. This was her ritual. And though it differed very little from the rituals of other teachers at the school, it was something her colleagues consistently commented on. She would come in forty minutes early, pour herself a cup of tea, select one of the old
Lethbridge Herald
newspapers lying on the staff-room table, tuck it under her arm, and retreat into the tiny room attached to the front of her class. There she would sip from her cup and stare at the wide field, never reading, or even opening, the paper she'd brought along with her.

It was a Tuesday, and a thin layer of snow covered everything but the places the children had trampled on Monday, snaking footprints exposing the brown grass and lumps of earth beneath. Beyond these erratic patterns, there wasn't much distinction between where the school grounds ended and the closest farmer's field began, except for the rows of yellow stubble scarcely sticking out of the white, raking lines into the horizon where they eventually swirled with the clouds. As usual, Agnes surveyed as far as she could.

She began this routine soon after her husband died, after the initial wave of sympathy cards had subsided and were thrown away. Most of them she had barely read, folding them in half with a careless crease and dropping them into the garbage, knowing that her husband was the type of man who was neither loved, nor respected, nor likely to be missed by anyone at all. He had been a proud man: proud of his job, proud of the authority he held at the bank, and proud of the immaculate order of his tool shed, which he seldom used. They had met at a dance in the basement of a community hall only a month after she'd signed on at the school.

She was drawn to his posture, how he held his neck with an almost comical erectness, craning to look down at the room around him, and she'd made a point to stand nearby, scratching at her nape, her hair draped over her hand. They danced twice, and on the second waltz, with the base of his wrist pressing into the small of her back, it crossed her mind that this would be the man she would marry. And, as it turned out, he had a promising future, along with being the only bachelor to have ever taken an open interest in her.

When they'd made love he was swift and fervid, and she spent most of her energy, pinned below his rigid weight, attempting to calm him, to placate his mounting frenzy that bordered, in her mind, on dangerous, his expression fierce, eyes widening. He would finish by squeezing her shoulders tight with a sudden rush that seemed to drain him completely, flopping onto the sheets beside her afterwards, catching his breath in the dark. He was a man that never whispered, and slept deeply.

She had imagined her life unfolding in the same conventional way as other teachers she knew, first Normal School and her certificate, then marriage, children, perhaps a stint as a housewife, and retirement. But two years after the wedding she still hadn't fallen pregnant and had begun to be a little concerned. It wasn't serious enough to warrant seeing a doctor; no; besides, she wouldn't want her husband finding out she'd gone to see anyone, as they'd managed to carefully avoid the subject of pregnancy altogether, only having talked about it once, in the first week of their marriage. She was cleaning the plates off the table at the time, reaching in front of him to arrange the fork and knife so they wouldn't slip off. “I'd like to have a couple boys,” he'd said. “One day.” He picked up a carafe and poured some water into his glass, drank it down, and clunked the container back onto the table without looking up. She put the plates in the sink and started to fill the washbasin, saying nothing. That suited her just fine.

Two years later she was finding it hard to fall asleep after he had rolled off of her, feeling the sweat of his sides cool and become clammy against her forearms, wondering if she was doing something wrong, or not doing something right, missing out on some important step. She wished she had a woman in her life close enough that she could ask these things. Her sister, who was single anyway, and happened to be a horrible correspondent—capable of answering even the longest of letters with an aloof postcard—had moved to Saskatoon, and her mother was gone, and had been since she was eight.

Agnes told herself she would wait another year before going to the doctor, which amounted to 1932 in its entirety. The months seemed to dawdle out in front of her, to slow down, and even, on certain Sunday evenings, to stop. The local news inched along on its sluggish orbit. There were strikes and the threat of communism; the Ku Klux Klan set a cross on fire in a neighbouring town, while in another, rabbit roping was introduced to their rodeo, and still there were no cells amassing in her belly. She buckled before the year was through and made an appointment, arriving at the clinic an hour early. When the test results came back a few weeks later, she went to a different physician, who came to the very same conclusion. He was sorry. He really was. But there was nothing anyone could do.

She told her husband at breakfast, the radio crackling in the background with a local show that neither of them really liked but still tuned into every morning. She spoke suddenly. “I can't.” He was chewing his toast at the time and his jaw slowed to do the processing, trying to piece together what she might be talking about. Then, as suddenly as she'd said it, he understood. She went to the kitchen window to stare out of it while he readied himself to leave for the day. She heard him use his copper shoehorn, hang it back on the hook where it belonged, straighten his tie in the mirror, and walk out the door. She stood there for a long while, the announcer listing the city's events and advertisements from the Philco in the corner. There was a sale on car batteries.

The following months found her spending the odd night on the chesterfield in the living room, the lamps turned out, watching the slats of light from the street standards tint the carpet, gradually brightening, then fading again as the dawn blanched the sky. And through these nights Agnes began to feel, physically, that her body had changed in some way, that it was missing something, something she would have described as being the size of a stack of nickels, and as heavy, in the space above her stomach, just before the bones of her rib cage began. And what had filled that space was a kind of hunger, which, she had found, it helped to sleep with her hand over, to have the warmth of her fingers on the skin just above. She would eventually grow used to it, and used to the way that it sometimes clinched tighter, becoming a sudden knot below her sternum that would have her standing still until it passed—in line at the grocery store, erasing the chalkboard at the end of the day, arranging flowerpots in the backyard—a hand pressed tight below her breasts, waiting.

Through the years her husband dutifully sidestepped the topic of children, even avoiding the mention of her students, but Agnes felt that it was always there, between them, a kind of onus that weighed on her side of the scale and lightened his. And adoption seemed to be out of the question for both of them, for him because the idea of raising a stranger's offspring (that no one else seemed to want) was somehow perverse, while for Agnes it was an unspoken fear that held her back, the fear of not being able to devotedly bond with a child that hadn't come from her own body, the fear that she would feel the same way toward him or her that she felt toward her students, which is to say very little. So then, a childless marriage was just something they would have to learn to live with, or through, around. Accordingly, their home became a place of hushed civility. They adopted habits that circumvented each other, moving to different parts of the house whenever the other person entered the room. And Agnes increasingly felt that they did this not because they wanted to avoid conversation, but because they simply had nothing left to say. They had reduced their lives to the efficiency of gestures and motions, to the common understanding of wants and needs.

Until one sunny spring day in 1953, when she came home from school to find him in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet lid, staring at the towels in front of him, waiting for her to ask what was wrong. His answer was multiple myeloma, a bone marrow cancer whose prognosis was “bleak at best.” By the following week he had stopped work at the bank and was receiving treatment, which, as far as Agnes was concerned, did nothing but speed up the process of his death. He deteriorated rapidly and within a few months was bedridden, and she had to take a leave from work to look after him.