Swing Low (13 page)

That night, I read and reread all of Elvira’s letters to me, each one signed with our traditional “As Ever” and I thought, I have nothing, nothing at all but her.

I
couldn’t wait for Elvira to finish her year in Omaha. She only had two months to go, but it seemed to me like a lifetime. Three days before she was due to arrive back in town, her brother George stopped me on the street and asked me if I’d come to a welcome home party he and her other brothers and their wives were throwing for her. He said it was a family party but I’d probably be part of the family soon so I could come too. Then he put his arm around my shoulder and winked at me!

I had no idea that she had ever mentioned me to him, let alone implied that we were planning to be married. I hadn’t even found the courage to kiss her yet. If I hadn’t stopped taking signs from the sun I would have thought the intense warmth of that day’s sunshine was a harbinger of good things to come. I was very fond of Elvira’s older brothers, and to be accepted into this jovial family made me want to sing with joy.

At the party, held in her father’s large home, we played ping-pong on the dining-room table, a pair of Elvira’s old nylons strung across as a net, and supervised the nieces and nephews as they slid down the stairs on cookie trays. We fed the bear cub they kept in the backyard farmer sausage and vrenike, we watched in awe as George, Edward, and Cornie consumed vast amounts of pie, and we fetched blankets for Johnny, the simple man who slept in the back porch when he’d had too much to drink and couldn’t make it home. Elvira told us hilarious stories of her American classmates and their opinions of Canada, and Elvira’s father gave us three bars of Lowney’s chocolate each.

As the evening progressed, the most extraordinary thing of all occurred. The story of my fiasco involving D.W. and W.F. Harder came up. Elvira’s brothers could barely tell the story without crying tears of laughter. I was horrified that it had come up at all, because I had intended for Elvira never to have to hear it. I had hoped that we would move to the city, she in her nurses’ residence and I in my teachers’ residence, complete our training, move back to town, marry, have children, and never speak once of the incident. Now here were her brothers laughing hysterically as they attempted to relay each and every detail of that hideous experience!

I managed to chuckle along here and there, keeping a close eye on Elvira so as to gauge her reaction. Naturally she laughed as hard as they did, and then, when at last the story had been told, she squeezed my sweat-soaked hand, sighed, and said affectionately, Oh, Mel,
ha die nich dum.

After the party she announced to her family that she would walk me home. Her brother George issued a brief
warning: No stilt racing! We left the house amid gales of laughter and wandered into the darkness of the night. Elvira maintained a running monologue, skipping merrily from one subject to the next, while I battled internally with my plan to somehow, in a seemingly natural way, get ahold of one of her hands, which were flying and flapping and fluttering about like two crazed white doves trapped in a milk crate. I would soon learn that every member of her family spoke with their hands. There is a well-circulated story here in town of C.T., Elvira’s father, who, one day, was deep in conversation with a friend of his. They were standing outside and it was very cold, and C.T. was doing all of the talking. Finally, he stuffed his bare hands into his pockets and told his friend, “Now it’s your turn to talk, my hands are cold.”

I wish I could tell you that the sky was full of stars and that the warm, clover-scented breeze ruffled our hair, or that my voice had a husky timbre to it and my complexion was clear and Elvira’s laugh tinkled like a Japanese wind chime, and that everything from that magical day on fell into place. The truth is that I was so consumed with love and need and longing and confusion that I can’t for the life of me remember the details of what happened. Except for one, and that one I’ll never forget. As Elvira and I clumped along through P.J. Guenther’s freshly tilled potato patch, her shoelace came undone, and we stopped for a minute so she could retie it. She was wearing flat black and white saddle shoes and thin white socks. As she bent to tie her shoe, I looked at my useless hands and willed myself to move them, to do something with them, anything other than dangle them at my sides like Muschel Heinz, who spent his entire life sitting
in front of the post office with a grimy book of stamps in his lap, ready, with postage, for the day he was to be delivered unto the Lord.

I’m seventeen years old, I thought, my girlfriend’s back in town after a year’s absence, it’s dark, we’re alone in a potato patch, she still, miraculously, likes me, and I’m acting like a side of beef on a freezer hook. At that moment my hands began to move, rather convulsively and quite involuntarily, like a nearly drowned person who, after being resuscitated, begins to vomit, and I reached out and placed my right hand just below her shoulder as if to steady her. I kept my hand on her back as she rose to her full height of five feet and I smiled briefly, in a casual way I hoped wouldn’t terrify her, stooped, and kissed her on the mouth.

After the kiss, which lasted for a good three seconds, I looked at Elvira like a schoolchild looks at his teacher after completing a math problem at the blackboard, and she smiled and said, Correct! No, she didn’t. She smiled and said nothing. But she took my hand and held it all the way to my house.

I realize it’s slightly unusual for a girl to walk a boy home, but if she hadn’t done so we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to kiss in P.J. Guenther’s potato patch, and knowing her like I do I can’t help but think she had it planned.

Years later, when she and I were both twenty-four or twenty-five, I happened to be flipping through Elvira’s Bible. I was teaching a Sunday school class and I must have been looking for a certain verse in 1 Corinthians to use in my lesson. She had various verses that she found significant underlined, just as I had in my own Bible. In my search for
this particular verse I hadn’t bothered to read what she had underlined until I came to
chapter 6
of 1 Corinthians, verse 18. With a very faint pencil, she had underlined the first two words of the verse: Flee fornication!

Many thoughts rushed through my head at that moment. This particular Bible of hers had been given to her by her parents on Christmas Eve in 1949, when she was fourteen years old. I knew for a fact that, since we’d been married, she had used a different, more modern edition of the Bible (which I loathed), and so, I surmised, she must have underlined “Flee fornication!” in pencil when she was a teenager, and, I further surmised, she would not have underlined these stern words as a reminder if she had not been tempted. Therefore, I concluded, she had had feelings for me that were similar to the feelings I’d had for her, which meant that I hadn’t been such a gangly, undesirable no-account after all!

Later that evening, after putting Marjorie to bed, I showed Elvira the words she had underlined and of course she laughed like there was no tomorrow. I didn’t even know what it meant! she howled. We were kids! Imagine! she cried, I’m running for the hills, fleeing fornication, and you’re right behind me breathing down my neck! And little do I know as I’m running for my life, she elaborated, that you’re fleeing it too and not even interested in my … temple! The tears spilled onto her cheeks. I must admit I found it funny too, but I’m not so sure she was telling the truth when she said she hadn’t known what it meant. Her faith in a loving and forgiving God is strong, but she worships laughter.

Even today, I like to think, for my own amusement, that she had known and that she had underlined those words the very day of the party knowing she’d be alone with me later and understanding all too well the proclivities of her flesh, and that only God had stopped her from melting in my arms that evening and pulling me down, knees buckling, into the coarse earth of P.J. Guenther’s potato patch.

A
nurse has, again, asked me about my writing. I’m writing about a few things that have happened in my life, I told her. Something to do to pass the time. Do you know why, for instance, I enjoy teaching grade six most, of all the grades? No, she said, kindly not mentioning that I’m not teaching any grade at this moment, why? Because, I answered, at the grade six level, children can read, write, and reason. Well, she said, I guess that’s pretty important. Very important, I corrected her, very important. Yeah, I guess, she said. Now wait a minute, I felt like saying, how can you guess? How can you guess that reading, writing, and reasoning are important? How is it that you do not know? How is it that you have become an adult, I wanted to ask her, without knowing the importance of being able to reason? But, she said, I’m kind of curious about something, Mel — how come you can remember parts of your life from
back whenever but, like, you can’t remember who your visitors are now, and, you know, when you talk to your wife, and stuff like that. I had no idea what to say. Because, she went on, that’s sort of like reason, right? I mean, like, in terms of knowing what’s going on right now? Yes, I suppose so, I said, thoroughly confused. It dawned on me that this nurse believed me incapable of rational thought, that I had slipped, mentally, below the average capacity of an eleven-year-old. This nurse regarded me as she would a child. I felt my face flush, and I mumbled something about old age re the ability to remember details of an event that occurred fifty years ago but not necessarily what you had for dinner the night before. Even as I said it I knew she wouldn’t buy it. She patted my hand, though, and murmured, Mel, I know you’re insane. No, no, she didn’t. She said, Mel, I know you’re in pain. Before she left she promised to bring me an extra dessert from the kitchen. How can I ever thank her enough? (I’m ashamed of my lack of gratitude. She is doing her best.)

What’s Mr. Toews up to? One nurse to another in the hallway.

Oh, about six-two, says the other.

As the weeks passed and W.F. (Whiplash) Harder’s collarbone mended itself, my resolve to become a teacher grew. I continued to deliver eggs all through the spring and summer
of ’53. While making these deliveries I routinely passed a house in Winnipeg’s north end and was struck by its big picture window and long brick planter. One day I asked Elvira to accompany me on my route so that I could show her this lovely house and ask her what she thought of it. I pulled up to the curb, pointed at it, and asked her if she could be happy in a house like that. Of course, she said, and so immediately (with uncharacteristic nerve on my part) we went and knocked on the front door and were greeted by none other than the famous Chicago Blackhawk, Hockey Hall-of-Famer, fastest three goal-scorer ever, Billy Mosienko!

He was exceptionally friendly and showed Elvira and I the entire house, including his trophy room, and afterwards gave me the original blueprints, told me to keep them, and wished Elvira and I a wonderful life together. I kept those blueprints and did eventually build a house identical to Mosienko’s.

In the fall of that year I began my teacher training in the city. There were two things, however, that were bothering me. First of all, Elvira had told me that she was interested in becoming an airline stewardess after completing her nurses’ training. The idea of her flying around the world in airplanes frightened me, and I knew I couldn’t bear to lose her in a crash or in some sort of crazed hijacking scheme. Not only that but she would be gone for days at a time, I thought, and I would miss her terribly.

So I went out of my way to draw her attention to tragic news items having to do with airplanes. More people die in cars, Mel, she said. Then I pointed out that she would be gone for two or three consecutive days at times, and she said, Isn’t it wonderful? I kept my mouth shut and hoped
that she would, during the three years of nurses’ training, change her mind. Although nurses’ training seemed not without its own hazards. Elvira had recently informed me, to my horror, that she had been snatched from the corridors of the hospital by an older group of fellow nursing students, thrown into a large stainless steel tub, and doused with ether. Apparently this is the initiation rite for nurses about to begin their training in the O.R. Elvira thought the incident hilarious although she nearly lost consciousness and claimed that the ether was ice-cold and rather painful.