Perfection of the Morning (5 page)

Also, when urban people want to describe me as living in Eastend I always correct them, pointing out that I live out in the country. This distinction appears to seem to them irritatingly trivial, as if I am merely nitpicking. But town life, too, is a different kettle of fish than true country life.

Because I’d never lived on a farm before, and because Peter’s main interest and daily work wasn’t farming, often I didn’t understand even the simplest remarks about what everybody’s husband was up to at the moment, much less could I contribute any of my own. Not that it would have been any easier if the women were all married to ranchers, since ranch women tend to be horsewomen, real outdoorswomen, with the same practised eye for cattle as the men, and many of the same hard-earned skills, none of which I had or, to be truthful, wanted very badly.

How the women worked! I’d never seen anything like it. They kept enormous gardens and canned or pickled or froze everything in it, often at the same time as harvest when they had a crew of men, albeit a tiny one compared to the days of threshing crews, to cook for; they knew how to handle every piece of meat from a side of beef, even how to can it, as well as lamb and pork, and how each had to be butchered although the men did the butchering. They understood the mysteries of keeping a milk cow, milking her and using the separator and cleaning it, and raising chicks up to chickens without the coyotes getting them, and of gathering the eggs without being pecked; they could make cottage cheese and headcheese and it wasn’t uncommon to make an angel food cake from scratch. In a country where bakeries were either too far away or not much good
they made all their own bread; they could and did run the farm machinery and haying equipment, and did all this while driving the boys to hockey practice and the girls to skating lessons and music lessons and a thousand and one extracurricular activities at the school; they nearly all had their hobbies, chiefly handicrafts, and they all did community work besides, in fact, were the organizing force that kept rural communities alive. Beside them I felt like an incompetent idiot, and the longer I knew them, the less I thought that traditional women had it easier than the new breed of urban career mothers. They had husbands, that was all, who presumably shared if not the work, then at least provided moral support and companionship.

My own growing sense of inferiority to these marvelous women, combined with a lack of desire to be like them, since I knew I would drop down dead at the end of one day like every one of theirs, and also because I believed something was missing from their lives that I had myself and didn’t want to lose (even though, if asked, I wouldn’t have been able to say what it was) also got in the way of friendships. Well, I told myself, true friendship takes time to build; I can wait.

That some of the difficulty had nothing to do with me as a person was brought home to me when I asked a woman my own age, who seemed to me subtly different from the others in the room at the time, how long she’d lived in the district. “Twenty years,” she said, and sighed. I had been in the community a dozen years when a woman, listing members of the community for some reason I’ve forgotten now, remarked to me that she’d left out a certain family. “They didn’t move here till the forties,” she said, “so I never think of them.” She meant that even though that family had lived here for almost fifty years, in her estimation, they would never be truly local people. By that time I was the one to sigh.

When I first came here to live, country people were country people to me; big farmers, small farmers, it was all the same to me. I didn’t know the basic fact that there’s a social hierarchy out here, too, or of what it consisted. Although in a strange way the class system I was familiar with—based on income, visible affluence, education, job type, whether manual labor, blue collar or professional, and to a small degree, family background, as well as whatever else urban sociologists are arguing about these days—didn’t entirely hold, there was indubitably a class system at work.

This was a world which at first appeared to me to be nearly all working class, where education wasn’t particularly valued since you could be a well-educated bad farmer or a poorly educated top-notch farmer, where differences in jobs were minimal, and where having leisure time wasn’t especially desirable—too many farmers lost interest in life when they retired, sometimes turning to alcohol for consolation, or suffering a heart attack suddenly and dying. Yet there were still the aristocrats, plebeians and untouchables, and the trick was to figure out which was which and why.

Land springs to mind at once, for with land comes money, and wealth is certainly a measure of class in both town and country. Yet, when people began to buy more land regardless of the escalating prices, Peter, who had no shortage of land, would quote to me the old Russian dictum, “How much land does a man need?” which his Slovakian father, who’d arrived penniless in this country in 1913, used to quote to him, and the answer to which is, “Six feet to bury him.”

But to say land is the basis of the class system is to give an inadequate description of the situation. At least as important is the length of residence of a family in the country. “In the country” means in any particular district. Such is the degree of pride in this
that I’m told there is in Maple Creek, an organization which holds an annual dinner which may be attended only by those whose families have been in the country a hundred years or more. And even I, I confess, am proud of being able to say that my Manitoba relatives still live on farms established by their families in 1884 and 1885. That my Québécois and Acadian relatives have been in Canada since the mid-seventeenth century counts for less out here than the other.

But as a caveat to the above, to earn respect within this system of landownership and length of residence, a holdover, I think, from pioneering days when all the work was manual, it is also essential to have a reputation for being a hard worker. A man could be a drunk, a wife-abuser, a fighter, I used to tell Peter indignantly, but if he worked hard every day, nonetheless, other men respected him. In fact, it seems to me that that ethic, basic to the besieged rural value system, was the one most in need of revamping to meet a modern agricultural society, and yet was one of the most basic strands to its unraveling fabric.

I learned to be constantly aware of the amount of work accomplished by others. If I felt that in this something was puzzlingly out of sync with reality as I knew it, I still couldn’t help but notice that if the men worked hard, it was evident to me that they hadn’t a patch on the women, whose work never ended. As an extreme example, one woman told me angrily after she’d—temporarily, it turned out—left her husband: “I work all day out in the field with him and when it’s mealtime I come in and cook it while he sits with his feet up and reads the paper.”

Eventually, after more than a dozen years, I could see that the reasons for the way people were treated by other community members were frequently things I would never know because they had
happened two generations back, or in childhood, or had nothing to do with anybody living today. They were so embedded in the fabric of the community that they could never be teased out, and the people who were responding to them didn’t even notice anymore, or never had noticed, that they were. And I, a stranger, would be years in learning what they were, if I ever did at all.

Truly belonging to the community of women in the way I’d belonged to my community in the city was going to be much harder than I’d thought. I still didn’t understand that I would never have the conversations with my rural women friends that I had had with my urban friends. I would never have them because not just the daily round of activity but the approach to life, the view of it, was utterly different.

In time I was invited to join clubs whose work, unfortunately, I wasn’t interested in, so that after debating with myself, and much as I wanted to belong, I declined. To this day, no matter how it has been here or how lonely I have been at times, I don’t regret declining. I longed to belong, but without realizing it I was resisting. Although I hadn’t yet figured it out rationally and was acting strictly from the gut, I had enough presence of mind in this case to follow my intuition which said that there was no choice involved; belonging would have to be on my own terms, whatever I might finally discover those terms to be.

Many of us have childhood dreams that are unfulfilled and that we carry with us for life. Mine was to be a visual artist. Despite the fact that my two undergraduate majors were art and English literature, so complete was my rejection of what I now know to be my true nature that when I returned to the university after ten years away in the work force I had deliberately chosen to do a master’s degree in
the Education of Exceptional Children. This was how I had made my living for the previous seven or eight years, and when I had decided to go back to university, I’d rejected doing a master’s degree in art because—it was the early seventies—it seemed to me that fine arts departments had fallen into such chaos that a Virgoish person like myself would be driven crazy in one. I rejected doing a master’s degree in English because I thought after all those years of working first with street kids in Halifax and then developmentally delayed teenagers in Saskatoon the sheer boredom of nitpicking over words would be the death of me. At the time I really believed these were the true reasons, and looking back now, I can only add that it is just possible that I refused both courses not only because making a living would be so precarious after but, more than that, because I so loved both fields that I was deeply afraid of failure in them.

From the time I started school as a six-year-old, I’d known I could draw and that drawing and painting gave me great pleasure. As the years of my life as a schoolchild passed, this skill or talent was reinforced over and over again by both my classmates and my teachers, and was cherished at home by our mother. (My sisters were also gifted in this way, my older sister much more than I.) Often I could draw better than anyone else in my class, and I loved art more—though I loathed crafts, which were what art classes more often consisted of and at which I was very bad. I had begun to imagine a life as an artist for myself.

I reached high school and although I attended the high school where the children of the working class and the immigrants went, from which you could graduate already a secretary or a mechanic, by some fluke I’ve never understood, it was at the time the only school in the city with a full-fledged art program and a genuine
artist as department head and the only teacher. I was able to major in art, and to have my thirst for it constantly tended to by my daily classes with him through most of my four years there.

My art teacher (and also my older sister’s) was the well-known Saskatchewan artist Ernest Lindner, and as an immigrant himself he understood that those of us who faced the future without financial security or useful contacts needed to be given confidence, needed to be told that even working-class kids had a right to a fulfilling life, that even I might go to university and take a degree in art, which, armed with his certainty that I could, I eventually did.

I had finished the first year of my B.A. majoring in art when I began to worry about making a living. I had had no other plans, no other alternatives in mind but becoming an artist. Now I began to face the fact of the struggle artists’ lives are for mere survival, and I knew I did not want to spend the rest of my life in poverty. I had had enough of that—or so I told myself. Now I think that I was simply afraid that I wasn’t talented enough, that I simply hadn’t the guts to strike out in the world without a sure way of making a living.

At the end of my first year I switched into education, received my B.Ed. at the end of four years—I’d already been married for a year—and stayed on for one more year to finish my B.A., still majoring in art. I would be a teacher of high school English, and if anybody would let me, I’d teach art, as a rather pitiful substitute for a life as a genuine artist.

After that the inevitable happened—nobody wanted an art teacher. I was so busy working and, by then, being a mother that I had no time anymore to paint, and before I knew it, my self-identification as an artist had faded away to a pale and almost forgotten shadow of its former self. I barely had time to mourn it. Except for
my paintings hanging on the walls of our various apartments, no one would ever have known that was who I had once been. Deeply buried though, deeper and deeper with each passing year, was that budding artist inside me. I always believed, without ever really thinking about it, that one day I would return to my art.

Six or so years into our marriage which, although I didn’t fully comprehend this at the time, wasn’t going very well, during one of our many moves from one apartment to another, my husband threw in the city dump the dozen or so paintings I had kept as proof I’d once been an artist. It was several weeks before I even knew about it; there was then no hope of ever getting them back. I didn’t even look for them.

I was too stunned by this act even to express to him my shock. I’d expressed more anger to him for losing my place in a book. I said virtually nothing; not then, not since. And I didn’t mean to let it matter; I thought if I didn’t let it, it wouldn’t. I didn’t know that there is a place deep inside where one’s real life goes on, much like an underground river in parched, dry country, which flows whether one knows about it or not. Although it was such a blow I couldn’t even respond, having been knocked to my knees metaphorically, it was a blow that I would eventually find had nonetheless left a lasting wound.

It is worth mentioning, I think, that I long ago forgave my young husband for this act, not because I am a saint, but because neither one of us understood our own lives then, and had he understood its significance to me, I know he would not have done it. To this day I’m not sure how I repaid this wound, but I know it had to have been something just as terrible, and in just as uncompre-hending a way.

During the last year of my city life, after Peter and I decided to marry, but before the ceremony, the way I spent my leisure time
had begun to change. For years I had read only in my field, trying desperately to keep up. Now I went back to reading novels, something I hadn’t had time to do for years, even though reading had been, from the moment I learned how in the convent on the banks of the Saskatchewan River so long ago, the single most important activity in my life. It was as if, knowing that the end of my long travail at the university was in sight, I was slowly rediscovering the interests I’d abandoned one by one, mostly out of sheer exhaustion, over the previous years.