Fit Month for Dying (7 page)

Later that night, when I was back home and cuddled into Grandmother's big feather bed, I composed a love poem to Dennis. “For Dennis,” I wrote, “whose love for me is as infinite as my love for him.” Other lines followed this inscription, but my mind has since erased them, taped over them, perhaps with a lullaby for Brendan. Or maybe with a prayer for the repose of Dennis's soul.

The morning following our walk on the beach — election day morning — I had jumped out of bed the minute I woke up, not wanting to miss one exquisite moment of this incomparable day. There was much work still to be done before the polls opened. Greg, who was then my campaign manager, and Frank Clarke had drafted a victory speech for me, but I still had to add my own thoughts.

I ran to the window and grabbed the tail of the cream-coloured vinyl blind intending to raise it as far as it would go to let in every bit of daylight. In my haste, however, I forgot to keep a grip on it. With a crack and a thump it scrambled up the window like a cat up a tree, and it didn't stop scrambling until it had flipped several times around the spring-held roller at the top of the casing. In my rush to get going, I left it as it was, hanging unevenly, cavalierly ignoring echoes of Grandmother's admonishment that any woman whose blinds list like a Lunenburg schooner heading into harbour is a sorry excuse for a homemaker. With equal conceit I tossed aside her oft-repeated omen that blinds that go up in a hurry come down in a hurry — this referring to the custom in the Cove of lowering every blind in every house for every funeral that processed through the village.

I began working on my victory speech even before I had finished breakfast, adding and deleting words and phrases between bites of homemade bread that Rose Clarke, Frank's wife, had brought to me. Because all signs pointed to an easy victory for me, I concentrated on my victory speech. However, in case of a surprise at the polls, on the off-chance that my opponent, Dennis's brother-in-law, Dolph, would win, I half-heartedly put some effort into a speech conceding defeat.

When I had honed both speeches to my satisfaction, I poured myself a second cup of tea and sat at the kitchen table and looked out through the window at the reddish sun inching its way into the Cove. I pulled my pink chenille bathrobe closer around me to keep out the early morning chill and wallowed in my good fortune, reminding myself out loud in the empty kitchen that by the end of the day I would be the Cove's first female Member of the House of Assembly. Indeed, I would be the first female Member of the House of Assembly in Newfoundland. And best of all, Dennis Walsh was back in my life, and I would be with him as soon as we both could discharge our day's duties, mine to my constituents, his to Dolph.

To be favoured so magnificently, I was certain I had to be the darling of the gods. In fact, I was so sure I had fate clasped tightly in my fist that I neglected to hedge my bets. I didn't knock on wood, say God willing, throw salt over my shoulder or make the sign of the cross over the single crow that sat on the telephone pole waiting for the Cove to wake up. Grandmother would not have been so smug. She would have known that such cockiness would offend the gods, or the saints or the angels or whoever keeps tabs on the unbridled conceit of human beings.

Before the day was over I came to believe that my cockiness must have been exceedingly offensive to those who tally up sins of conceit; otherwise they would not have brought me to the ground so mercilessly, would not have trounced me so savagely. Surely it wasn't simply a stroke of bad luck that had placed that car from St. John's en route to a village beyond the Cove, its driver and passenger intoxicated, on the same road and at the same time as the car Dennis was in as he drove to Dolph's headquarters.

Chapter Three

Sitting behind the sheltered rock at the beach, my mind leaping across meadows and hills and oceans and years, searching for yesterday's faces and voices, I forget time. I forget that Philomena has no idea where I went when I left the house. I am even oblivious to the fact that it has turned very cold, and I am chilled to the bone by the time I arrive back at Philomena's house and grateful for the warmth of her kitchen.

“What happened to ye?” she asks even before I'm fully in the door. “I wondered where ye'd gone. I was worried.”

“Just out for a walk,” I dodge, feeling guilty. “Just wandered around. Just wanted to get away from the house for a while.”

“I know how it 'tis,” she says, foregoing her usual cross-examination. “I knows you loved Hube, too, and the packing away of his things must have hit you as hard as it hit me. Meself, I put me head down but I couldn't sleep a wink. The house is so bare with him gone. Not even an old shirt of his hanging on a nail. I sat in the den and tried to smell his tobacco. Couldn't even do that with all the airing out that's been done, so I decided instead to do some baking.”

She pulls open the oven door and, using a dishcloth for an oven mitt, hauls out a pan of jam-jams and brings it to the table, setting it on a Simpson's catalogue that she always uses as a trivet. The scent of allspice and molasses is inviting to my nostrils after the cold tang of the salty beach air.

“Sit yerself down, girl, and we'll have a bite to eat. Looks like yer half-frozen. Tea's already on the table. And fresh biscuits made. I was goin' to help meself if you didn't show up soon.”

Philomena always makes a great cup of tea, and I tell her so after the first swallow.

“Ye only have to do it right, that's all,” she says modestly. “Boil the water until 'tis lurching back and forth in the kettle like a big swell. Heat up the teapot with water first. Throw that out. Then add the tea and more water. Let it steep for a few minutes. And loose tea. Never those tea bags. I always keeps King Cole on hand. Wouldn't use any other brand, although every time I goes to the store there's a new brand on the market that they're flauntin' in front of yer face. ‘Try this! Try that!'” She twists her mouth. “And those perfume teas. Rose hips. Apple blossoms. Chamomile. Poison stuff, if you ask me. Don't know whether to drink it or splash it over you to fight off the BO.”

I remind her that I have to go back to St. John's in the morning, and I repeat Greg's invitation before he left: that she should consider coming back with me and staying with us for a few weeks.

“Never!” she says. “Like I said to Greg, much as I'd love to be close to Brendan, much as I'd love to see that child every day of me life, I couldn't live in St. John's. I'd smother to death in there. Houses piled on top of one another, scrunched together. Cramped up like hens on a roost. Hills so steep ye have to tack like a schooner to get up them.”

She waves her hands to take in the fields and cliffs and beach that stretch out beyond her kitchen window. “Here I can breathe. Here I can have a clothesline stretching halfway across the meadow if I wants to. I can let me drawers flap in the wind fer days on end. Can't do that in St. John's, certainly not on those lots as small as a postage stamp. Yer drawers would be flapping up against yer neighbour's window.”

I understand her need for space and fresh air because I spend my days in a building with sealed windows, recycled air and a foyer filled with trees that have a perpetual hangdog look. I once told Greg that if the save-the-seals gang wanted a real cause they should hijack the trees in my foyer and carry them back to Botswana or whatever exotic homeland they're pining for.

“All jokin' aside, girl,” Philomena says, as if long before this moment she has given a lot of thought to the subject, “there's no place like home. Nothing like yer own bit of sod.”

She sets aside her partly eaten jam-jam, dusts the crumbs from her hands and says, “Now, girl, I've been meanin' to talk to you about somethin'.”

Her tone, solemn and weighty, makes me think she is finally going to agree to have a will drawn up, something Greg had been trying to get both his parents to do to no avail. What she says is even more surprising.

“I've been meanin' to tell you yer a good daughter-in-law. A good daughter, really.”

Taken off guard by her compliment, I can't think of a response. To cover my confusion I reach for a jam-jam, hoping that by the time I take a bite she will have swerved the conversation in another direction. But Philomena has another intention: to go down Memory Lane and bring me along with her.

“For the life of me,” she says, “I can't understand now why I kicked up such a fuss when you and Greg said you were going to get married. Don't make that much sense to me now. And it all seems so long ago.”

“You did what you felt you had to do,” I reply, absolving her. “I understood that even back then.”

“I knows that. But it seemed so important at the time. And I'm wonderin' now, wondered fer some time in fact, but especially now that Hube has died and Danny is gone back, whether it was all worth it. All that fuss about you and Greg. All that sparrin' with poor Hube about the children goin' to this church and not to that one. I feels so bad about that now. What the hell odds, I say to myself today, where ye goes to church, jest so long as ye goes. And even if ye goes to no church as long as yer good to yer neighbour. That's all that counts. Jest so long as yer willin' to haul somebody's cow out of the muck or give some poor child a pair of mitts to keep his fingers from gettin' frostbit. That's all that counts. That's what Christianity is about. Not about churches.

“That's all very well for me to say now, but 'tis not what I could say back then. Wasn't brought up that way, I guess. Those changes Pope John brought in during the sixties really should have made me think. But they didn't. He turned the Catholic Church ass over kettle, I say. Even unsainted St. Philomena. Hard to know what to believe anymore.

“Did you know that about Philomena? Me namesake! They unsainted her. Only a few months ago I read about what they did to her, although apparently they did it years ago. And to think I've been praying to her all along and she with no more pull with the Lord than meself. I don't even know if she is Miss or Mrs. Or fer that matter, Ms, like the liberateds.”

“I remember reading about that,” I say. “Saw it in a church bulletin, I believe. It happened in the sixties, I think. But they didn't unsaint her exactly. I don't think you can do that once someone has been canonized. I think they just took her off the liturgical calendar. Sidelined her, you might say. Much like being a backbencher, don't you think? Or a member of the Opposition. You don't get the same respect.”

She laughs mischievously — Danny's mischievous laugh. Although she always maintains she doesn't know where Danny comes by his scampish nature, anyone can see he gets a lot of it from her.

“Yer dead on, girl.” She pours herself a second cup of tea and offers to refill mine. I pass my cup over to her. “That's just the way I sees it.” She gets up to put the teapot on the back burner of the stove where it will continue to steep. Danny has always maintained she makes the tea so strong you can float the anchor of the Queen Mary in it.

“And poor St. Christopher. Just Mr. Christopher now. They didn't have enough facts on him. You have to have so many documented miracles in order to be sainted. So they must have rushed him through. Probably somebody with pull did it because Christopher had done something for him. You know how it goes, you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. It's the same with everything.”

She takes a sip of tea, savours it before swallowing it. “A shame really. And all those people with him hanging in their cars to protect them. Might as well have had one of those stinky fir trees — you know, those paper things ye hangs on the mirror — fer all the good St. Christopher could do if he was just Mr. Christopher.”

She laughs, takes a bite of a jam-jam and wipes crumbs from the side of her mouth with the tail of her apron. “Shockin' to do that sort of thing to people. They had such faith in him. Poor old Mrs. Chassie Bailey used to say it was St. Christopher who protected Chassie when he'd get a snoutful in the taverns in St. John's and drive out over that narrow road in that old truck of his. But I never believed it. I said all along it was that old dog of his that he used to take everywhere with him in the cab. I swear to God that crackie could drive the truck as good as Chassie any day. Even without a snoutful Chassie was a menace on the road. One time he lost his headlights, and he drove out from St. John's with a flashlight strapped to the front bumper.”

Sobering, she veers to another topic. “And I wanted to tell you that I knows that candle stuff is being done away with. I knew that all along. Yes, I did, girl. Mind you, it hasn't been done away with completely. Some people still do it. But I like the custom and I wasn't about to give it up just because someone said it was time to give it up. Just as I still prays once in a while to St. Philomena, no matter what I'm told.” She smiles, Danny-style. “Ye might say, covering me bets. If the church fathers were wrong in one direction, that's not saying they can't be wrong in another, and fifty years from now they'll be admitting they were wrong when they unsainted her. Mark my words.”

She wipes her mouth again with her apron, this time patting her forehead and cheeks that glisten with perspiration from the heat of the open oven door. “But back to the candle, girl. Everyone always said it gave comfort to have a loved one holding that candle at the end. And it must give comfort to the dying one, too. I knows it would comfort me. And I wanted to give that comfort to Hube.”

I am about to agree that there was no harm done by putting the candle in Mr. Hube's hand whether the custom is in or out when she abruptly switches back to the subject of Greg and me.

“But to think I made such a holy to-do about you and Greg getting married. And you've been so good fer Greg. Couldn't have picked a better wife. You really loves him, I can tell that.” She lets that statement hang in the air for a second or so before adding, “But still and all I often wonders if he would have gotten a look-in if Dennis Walsh had lived. Priest or not. I've heard tell you were pretty fond of each other.”

“Greg's a good man,” I say, by way of sidestepping her implied question. “He's a good father. He's easy to love.”

Just as she had done, I switch without notice to another topic, one far removed from the subject of Dennis, in the hope that she won't chase after me for it.

While it is not the sort of information you can easily share with others, particularly with your mother-in-law, I have to admit, if only to myself, that I never loved Greg, nor for that matter any man, in the same extravagant way I loved Dennis. Ours was an enchanted love, and I have often wondered whether it would have endured — could have endured — if fate hadn't taken such a grievous hand in bringing it to a close. As heady as it was, I think it would have eventually collapsed had it been allowed to run its full course. It would have fallen in upon itself like the fences around the meadows in the Cove. And it would have collapsed not because of flaws specific to us but because mere mortals are incapable of sustaining a prolonged ecstasy. I remember reading somewhere that for love to endure it must have a future, not just moments. Dennis and I had only moments. Unsanctioned moments at that.

My love for Greg had always been more earthbound, and from the very beginning I was sure it held just the right mix of heat and desire, admiration and companionship for a long-lasting marriage. At the time, however, Philomena hoped otherwise, hoped there would be no marriage at all, not merely one with a short shelf life. Always an uncompromising sort of woman, she was particularly uncompromising when it came to the spiritual well-being of her children.

“This marriage will not only be a scandal,” she had declared. “It will be the death of Greg's soul.”

It was a Sunday afternoon when we told her. We had just come back from church and we were standing in her kitchen waiting for the water in the kettle to finish boiling. The minute the news hit her ears, she yanked off her sweater as if readying herself for a scuffle.

“Count me out!” she had said, “I won't take hand, act or part in a mockery of religion or the undoing of me son. I've got nothing against you, Tess. Not personally. Not a blessed thing. In fact, the first time Greg brought you to meet us — that was right after he became your campaign manager — I said to Hube that I hoped you two could hit it off because you were just the person I'd have wanted for a daughter-in-law. That shows you how aware I was of things. I had no idea in the wide world that you were divorced.”

She tossed up her hands. “But how was I to know? When we moved into the Cove in the early sixties because the government uprooted us from our own place and this was the closest I wanted to live to St. John's, you had already left. And when I heard you were running in the election, all I knew about you was that you used to live here and had moved away. And just because it wasn't your fault that yer marriage to that fellow up in Montreal fell asunder, that makes no difference.”

She looked at Greg and from him back to me. “At least
he
says it wasn't your fault. But like I said, it don't make a thimbleful of difference. It don't change the water on the beans one iota. It don't alter the fact you
are
a divorced woman.
Divorced
! I certainly can't approve of my son marrying a
divorced woman
.”