Remembering the Bones (18 page)

F
emur, tibia, fibula. Radius, ulna.

I’m desperate for water. I must have water. I’m closer to the lump near the car. Why do I so badly want to cry? I could cry all I want and there wouldn’t be a tear to squeeze out. There isn’t enough moisture left in me.

There have been times in my life when I’ve cried myself out. Cried until there were no tears left. For months, the carrot man was the only person I talked to after Harry died. Case and Rice came up the hill as often as they could. I attended plays at the theatre; I even volunteered at receptions for opening nights. I appeared to be a normal human being. But it was the carrot man I talked to. Going to the Saturday morning market was my feeble attempt to get my willpower working again. It was early summer and I told myself to get out and breathe fresh air, look at the world around me, start making meals again. I admonished myself for standing at the kitchen counter with a can of tuna and a fork. I stared out at the chokecherry, and
tasted nothing. Sometimes a whole meal was a cracker slathered with marmalade.

What was I supposed to do? I’d slept beside the same man for more than fifty years. I was alone for the first time. Truly alone. I had been familiar with every daytime cough from another room, every adjustment of mood, every sideways step away from his usual behaviour. The months of his illness had been difficult, but I’d shared every one of those painful days. My life had been tied to his, long before his surgery.

I drove down the hill into town and walked past market stalls, keeping my head down so I wouldn’t have to speak to anyone I knew. I did know people, but I nodded when they greeted me and they left me alone. I began to loiter at the carrot stall because, even when there was a lineup, the vendor, a wispy sort of older man with muscular shoulders, singled me out and began to take time to explain his produce. Dozens of carrot bundles were arranged along the top of his fold-up table. He explained how much moisture they required, how he sorted and priced and sized; how they cost a dollar less if I bought two bundles instead of one; how he dug a hole in the earth in the fall and buried them in a burlap sack so they’d last the winter months and into spring. He spoke with tenderness. He was never in a hurry. I loitered because he was a stranger and knew nothing about me.

How many new facts are there to learn about carrots? On subsequent Saturdays, he began to throw in extra information: what time he’d risen that morning to get an early start; how many years he’d had a market garden; how many times he washed the carrots before spinning and bagging—three. I began to believe that my skin would turn orange. Were carrots
good for rods or cones, or both? Neither of us could remember. He was a widower, he told me. Did he pity me? Did I clutch my cloth shopping bag in a way that exposed my despair? If I had asked, he’d probably have told me that sorrow emanated from me like a scent. On the other hand, his future lay in carrots; he had dirt under his fingernails. He was speaking of loneliness. His, mine. I never learned his name. I drove back up the hill and thought of running away. But running away from what? Who was holding me back? And where would I run? I could not think how to plan the details, and suddenly remembered Phil running away from the Haven. I wondered how she had organized her escape—not that anyone had held her back, either. She had escaped without notice on a warm fall day, two years after she’d moved in. She lifted her coat from her locker, slipped her arms into it and pushed the walker out the side door. The rest of the inmates, including Tall Ronnie, were having afternoon naps. She began to walk.

It was Phil herself who helped put the pieces of the story together later. Old as she was, she had the necessary strength to escape. She still has. After I stopped worrying, I understood why she had left. I admired what it must have taken to make the decision. I marvelled at how she’d managed to get so far.

The reason she left was because of the
Wilna Creek Times
, which had run an item in the morning paper about a home for the elderly in Germany. A performing bear had been brought in to entertain and amuse the residents of the home. The bear was supposed to sit on a bench and eat fruit. Instead, it sat on the lap of a ninety-year-old woman and crushed her to death.

Phil was in the common room when she read this, and scrunched the paper into her lap. She began to laugh and
couldn’t stop. She laughed until she cried, which is what the women in our family have always done when we are upset. And then, she made her plan to escape.

She travelled back to her beginnings. She was not confused. She pushed her walker with the air of someone out for a daily walk. A woman who lived on a crescent three blocks from the Haven glanced out her kitchen window and saw Phil pass by, twice. She had gone around and around the circle by mistake. Hours later, when word got out that a resident was missing, the woman called police.

On her third pass around the crescent, Phil found an egress that hooked up to the highway out of town, a road she recognized as the old Wilna Creek Road. By this time, she was tired and discouraged, and she plunked herself down on the seat of her walker. Two men from the town Works Department drove by in a flatbed truck, rakes and garden equipment sticking up out of the back. The driver stopped, reversed, and asked Phil if she was lost. She brightened and told him she’d started out for a walk and had come too far. She needed to get home, and gave the men directions. They were happy to take a break, and hoisted her up into the back of the truck. They set the walker on its side and fastened it, told Phil to hang on to a chain at the side, and drove slowly so she wouldn’t fall out of the truck as it bumped along.

“You can’t imagine what fun it was to dangle my legs over the back,” she told me later. She turned her head from side to side to show how she had taken in the scenery. “But everything on the old road has changed. Even so, the fall colours were glorious. And I saw geese overhead, line after line of them. I tilted my head to watch those wonderful wavering Vs.”

After two miles, the men dropped her off at the place she
identified as home. “I wasn’t being untruthful,” she said. “The Danforth house ‘was my home for a century.”

“You sure came a long ‘way, lady,” the driver said when he lifted her down. “Good thing we found you when we did. Maybe you shouldn’t go quite so far next time.”

Phil thanked the men and sat down on the seat of her walker to let them know that she would stay in the sun for a while, in front of her house.

When the search began and the Works Department men heard a radio bulletin about a missing senior, they too called police. After she’d been picked up by ambulance and returned to the Haven and collapsed in bed, only then did she recount her adventure. I had been phoned and told that she was safe. I arrived at the Haven and sat beside her bed until she woke after a long, untroubled sleep. When she began to tell her story, I understood that she had been plotting for some time. She had planned every detail except how she was actually going to get to the house and back. The bear sitting on the lap of the old woman was the straw that decided
when
she should leave.

She had also not reckoned on the house being empty when she arrived, though she was glad it was. She took her time trying to reconcile the differences between what she saw and what she remembered. She pushed the walker into the backyard, caught the wheels in dead grass and stumbled over squares of cement that formed a narrow walkway from the door to a new opening in the stone wall. She found a crumble of stone that might have been part of our summer kitchen. Renovations had taken place and the house appeared to be smaller. Grand Dan’s wagon-wheel garden was still there, but no rose bushes. How could everything change in such a short time? Phil was irritated by tangles of weed and undisciplined growth. She pushed her
walker in circles, trying to remember where the chicken coop had been. She thought of her father driving the Model T that had given him so much pleasure into the tilting shed before he left for the war and never came back. She thought of Mott leaving cans of milk and cream at the back door when Ally and I were children. Then, she thought about the skim milk Mott had fed to his pigs and the skim milk that was served at the Haven, and she gave up. The past had gone and she hadn’t caught hold of it.

She lowered herself to dry grass, took off her shoes, lay on the ground and slept. When the owners returned, they found her curled up next to the old stone wall. So peacefully was she tucked into the landscape, they were reluctant to wake her. The police were called for the third time, more than three hours after Phil had disappeared. By then they were already on their way.

W
ell I’m not about to run anywhere. My bones ‘won’t move ‘when my brain orders movement. The muscles of my arms and legs keep cramping as if they’ve been bound and tied in knots. I want these fractures treated! I want my bones set right! My face must be battered and swollen. There’s nothing like real pain to clear the head. Though, admittedly, my head has begun to feel a bit foggy; I keep going in and out of sleep. Did I leave my bankbook on the table? Did I destroy the photo of Anonymous-she? Damn the cheese, going rotten in the fridge.

And now I hear the bell again. I might not be able to stand, I might not be mistress of my own fate, but there’s nothing wrong with my hearing.

Never send to know for whom the bell tolls…

There is absolutely no point in bellyaching. Didn’t I teach that to Case?

Maybe I won’t mind so much, if the bell does toll for me. There’s a bar that is crossed—about minding—though I’m not exactly sure where it is.

For God’s sake, Georgie. Think of what you just said.

Well maybe I won’t. I didn’t get to choose the place, but I might get to choose the time.

I’m turning into a raving woman.

Maybe she’s been inside you for a long time.

Maybe she has. Maybe I’m already dead. I’m weary. My skin is numb. There’s a feeling of heaviness inside my chest. I can’t feel my feet. I remember now, falling in and out of a dream in which I saw my own heart, my own mitral valve. It lay above a mess of carrot tops in a garden gone wild. When I woke, I had a moment’s disappointment at finding myself sealed inside my own skin.

Who dreams of seeing their own mitral valve?

Someone who grew up reading
Gray’s
, that’s who.

The crow comes and goes as it pleases now; my presence doesn’t bother it one bit. It flew low over my head and stared into my squinted face with its beautiful dark eye.

A crackling sound again, and this one’s nearby.

Come closer. Please. Is someone there?

Don’t then.

If you don’t want to show yourself, then bugger off!

My God, what’s come over me? Would Lilibet tell a living creature to bugger off? Not someone who owns all those corgis and dorgis, with their pert little fox heads. But she’s had her problems. Her
annus horribilis
was more than a decade ago. Think of the ups and downs with Diana. And I felt sorry for her when I saw her priceless paintings as they were carried out of Windsor Castle, rescued from the fire. She was sturdy in her
boots as she tromped around the grounds in the midst of bedlam, looking as if she’d come from good country stock.

Still, somehow I can’t see her breaking into a fierce yell. Does she swear? Does she shout at Philip, or at Charles and Camilla? Before the car accident, did she yell at Lady Di?

My own
annus horribilis
happened long before that. It’s been with me all of my adult life. Any bad thing that happened rattled against it like new memory whipping up old.

Whatever was moving has vanished, but I wish it would come back. There’s only so much a person can take. I don’t mean the crow; the crow flaps overhead, alone again.

One morning I looked up a word while I was doing my crossword, and opened the
Oxford
dictionary to a page where two words in bold print leapt off the upper corner:
bugger off.
I was so surprised, I checked the entry, which also defined
bugger all.
Gordo, Harry’s lost-and-found brother, used to say, as he stood at the window looking out at the chokecherry, “Sweet bugger all.”

Well Gordo’s alive and I’m alone and Harry’s dead, and that’s all there is to it.

Sweet bugger all.

L
ook where I am. I should be encouraged, but all I can manage is a desperate fatigue. Still, I’m in the open. I see the railing up there, the edge of layered rock—black-tipped like the wings of the snow geese. I see snapped trees hanging upside down, old vines that droop and swing. If anyone looks over the railing, I’ll be seen. Maybe Pete and his yellow dog will come down the path after all.

Alleluia!

If someone is listening, please take away this chill wind that has begun to roll along the ground. Take it away before I lose my train of thought. The wind enters my left ear and shrills inside my head. That bothers me more than the pain in my arm and leg.

Do your ears hang low?

Do they wobble to and fro?

Uncle Fred sang to his sons, and to Ally and me. He sang
to Aunt Fred. He laughed at himself, never took himself too seriously.

Something distracting hovers at the outer edge of memory. Something I can’t quite place. My thoughts are slurring. I must relate the things I know. I must think of Case. If only I had the chance to tell her what I know.

She’s creating her own stories. She has her own life.

Still, I know the bones. I have longevity in my own. Grand Dan lived to ninety-five, and everyone who knew her still mourns her passing. Aunt Fred lived to ninety-one—even after all the handwashing. You’d think she’d have washed herself away. Phil will be a hundred and four in October. Does she manage to look forward more than she looks back?

I’ll celebrate with her at the Haven on her birthday this year, or anywhere she and Tall Ronnie would like to be. Maybe Case and I can bring her to the house to watch a string of old Mario Lanza movies, or to the theatre, or a fancy restaurant. We’ll take her wherever she wants to go. We’ll borrow a wheelchair from the Haven and I’ll help her into it and push her in any direction she points. The leaves will be blazing because it will be fall. Red will slip down over the giant maples like a sheath. We’ll look at the glorious sight and sigh a collective sigh and give thanks for the unasked-for beauty.

I must hire someone to clean out the eaves in the fall. They haven’t been done since Harry died. He climbed down the ladder every October and announced, “The runnels are clean.” His cheeks were rough and reddened. He wore gardening gloves with wide flat fingers, the ones I bought at Home Hardware, so he wouldn’t cut his hands on rusting metal.

Eaves and sheaves, same season.

We shall come rejoicing

Bringing in the sheaves

How difficult to sing when only a pale rasp comes out. Or maybe I was singing in my head.

Verna and Arman danced to that, too. They did an improvised foxtrot. And here’s a leaf now, its rounded contours wafting down. Last year’s dried leaf ousted by a new one, unfurled.

Verna told me that since “Ourman” stopped being a travelling salesman, he sits across from her in the evening and says, as if he’s still behind the wheel, driving through the landscape of their living room, “I’m entering your head, Verna. I’m coming into your thoughts. Make room for me.”

She laughs like a schoolgirl and so do I when she phones. I miss her largeness, her ample body spilling over the edges of my kitchen chair, her generous spirit, her adopted Russian voice—they’re all a comfort. When I get out of this ravine I’ll phone and invite her and Arman to come and stay with me a while. I haven’t seen them for months.

And Ally makes me laugh. She wants me to come to Boca Raton. My beloved sister, she’ll never stop asking—and it’s good to be wanted. Maybe I’ll go after all. Take up my duties at the villa, at last. Shake out the linen and set the table with Grand Dan’s fine old silver.