The Search for Joyful (36 page)

My stomach knotted, remembering.

“He left a diary. Mama's going to read it to us tonight. We'll know what he thought, what he felt. It will be Georges talking to us, saying goodbye. I always thought if I'd had a chance to say goodbye, it would be easier.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “there are special messages for each of us. Or at least for you.”

“You think so?” She caught at my words so eagerly that instantly I was afraid I'd stirred up too much hope.

That evening as we sat together, I told them about the letter I'd received from Austria. Not from Erich, not even from his mother. His attorney wrote that a petition had been approved by the archbishop and cleared with the Vatican. There would shortly be papers of annulment for me to sign.

Connie was momentarily pulled from the endless repetitive grief that mired her. While she didn't comment directly on what I'd said, she did talk about the baby. She said over and over how excited she was to be an aunt, and agreed with me that it was a girl, and that of course she was Kathy. But I knew what was on her mind.

Mama Kathy took the diary from the pocket of the old leather chair. Connie went chalk white as Mama opened it and began to read. Connie's hands were clenched, and she leaned forward as though to draw the words out more quickly.

 
Yes, yes, I thought, glancing at Connie. Get around to the family, Georges.

 
There was a grunt of satisfaction and a wry laugh from Jeff. Connie's face was marble. A sense of panic began to rise in me. She was waiting for that special word, she was waiting for Georges to talk to her, and he went on and on about dry technical stuff that no one cared about now the war was over.

Mama had a sip of Coke and continued reading.

 
Georges went on to describe special buddies. Steve, whose digs he had been on his way to when it happened. Alan Turing was another, a somewhat remote figure, but the undoubted genius of the operation.

 
I made a gulping sound.

Connie jumped to her feet. “Don't read any more, Mama. I'd like to take it to my room.”

“Of course,” Mama started to say, but Connie talked through her words, “Did you hear what he said? Did you? He could have stayed right here in Canada. He said so himself. And done the same work. In Ottawa. Why didn't he wait? Why didn't he?”

Jeff started after her, but Mama motioned him to stay where he was. “They were very close,” she said by way of explanation, and brought the diary in to Connie.

This worried me more because by now I was convinced that the word she wanted, the special thought for her, wasn't there. Georges had been caught up in the business at hand, fascinated by the deadly game he played for lives and ships and ultimately for the war itself. His twin was over here on the other side of the ocean. He'd kept his focus fixed. It was natural. It was natural for Georges, at any rate. And I worried.

I didn't sleep well. Too many dreams collided, broke apart, and couldn't be called back.

A faint sound disturbed what rest I had, and I found myself listening, not with my ears but with my pores. Something about it upset me, perhaps not being able to identify it. It came, I decided, from the living room.

I got up and very quietly stole across the room and opened the door. I don't know what Hell or Hades or any of those tormented places looks like, but it was there in front of me.

Connie was on her hands and knees, her hair falling in wild disarray around her. She searched through page after page of what had been Georges's looseleaf notepaper. The diary was scattered like a snowstorm. Scissors in hand, she was cutting out individual letters and pasting them on a large cardboard, her lips moving as she tried to press the letters into words.

The code. She was attempting to reconstruct the Twins' Code, like a psychic at a Ouija board, desperately trying to make sense of random letters, force meaning into them. But I could see they followed no pattern. Frantically she interchanged a letter here with a letter there. She was still working with every fifth word.

“Perhaps,” she muttered, “perhaps I started in the wrong place. Perhaps I shouldn't have started at the beginning—” Her hands swept the letters lying in piles into new configurations.

“Nothing,” she concluded. “He couldn't spare a word, a thought for me.”

“Words, no. But thoughts—Connie, you told me yourself you knew in your own body the moment he died. What was that except his last, his very last thought? Be content with that.”

She looked up. She hadn't heard me. “He could have stayed right here. He could have been in Ottawa the whole time.”

I sat down beside her on the floor and began to gather the pages together.

“No, no,” she said, stopping me. “It's here. I counted wrong. I'll start again.
I
is the first word. Count five. Second word is
that.
Count five. Third word is
to.
Count five. Fourth word is
The.
Count five. Fifth word is
determined.
So, it's ‘I that to The determined.' But the capital letter in
The
, that's our signal to switch from words to letters. Every fifth letter. But I'm not sure whether to go on, or go back to the beginning. If you go on, it's
b, e, i, u, w, r.
That starts out a word,
being,
and if you skip ahead you get
n
and
g,
but the count is wrong. Go back to the beginning.
I, c, o, k, G . . .
” She looked at me hopelessly.

“It's not in the diary, Connie.”

“But I haven't gone through it all. Maybe it's not all here. Maybe the censors got at it, tore out some pages at the beginning. We've got to start the count right and not miss a single word or letter. If you help it will go twice as fast.”

“It's not there, Connie.”

This time the words reached her.

She rocked back on her heels and looked at me.

It was a full minute later that I reached out a tentative hand and continued collecting the pages. She watched me put them in a neat pile and fit them back in the notebook. Then with sudden decision she began painstakingly to gather individual letters from the floor. She folded them in a blank sheet of paper and tucked them into the notebook. “You were always so sensible, Kathy. Even when you were a baby, you were a sensible baby. I'm glad you said that, Kathy. I needed to hear it. If you hadn't said it just like that, so definitely, so positively, I think I'd spend all my life hunting through that diary for what isn't there. Why does there have to be ‘last words'? That's kind of crazy, isn't it, to attach some special significance to last words. This is a diary. An ordinary diary. There's no code. It's just the day-to-day diary of a soldier.”

I listened without saying anything as my sister put her life back. She was doing it methodically with grim determination, but she was doing it. I could do it too.

Connie and Jeff left in the morning.

Seventeen

WINTER MONTHS ARE deep and white and silent here. The snow lodges heavily in tree branches. When the sun shines you can see its structure, a honeycomb of crystals. I think I'd never taken time to notice before. Now things proceeded slowly, calmly, to a new rhythm. My baby grew, filling me. She would be born in the spring. That was when most new creatures arrive. I waited and watched for the first signs of budding.

One day Elk Girl came. Remembering her mysterious appearances at critical times in my life, I was not surprised to see her. She had left me on a stool eating eggs. I had been to war and come back, been married, and soon I'd have a baby. Elk Girl looked exactly the same. She had never been pretty, but from the time we were children, her face was filled with a great dignity.

She didn't want to sit and chat, but when she saw that tea and home-baked cookies would be served, she changed her mind. Elk Girl could always be moved by food. These days I was perpetually hungry and the smell of baking that so often filled the room was one of my pleasures. We sipped the green Irish tea Mama poured from the kettle with the cozy, and munched and talked, Mama inquiring minutely about her various friends on the reserve.

At last Elk Girl pulled back from the table. “Come to my house,” she said. “I have to show you a few things.”

“What things?”

She laughed and winked at Mama Kathy, who laughed back.

So I got my coat, put on my wool cap and muffler, pulled on mittens, fastened overshoes, and we started out. Any semblance of a road was obscured under snow, but we plowed through it. I knew I wouldn't flounder if I stuck close behind my guide.

Elk Girl neither paused or hesitated. It was as though she followed a broad avenue instead of trackless forest. The new life in me, instead of subtracting from my own health and strength, added to it. I had never felt so well, so alert to the day, the crisp weather, the gleam of an icicle hanging just out of reach. Life had doubled in me, and I took in more than my share.

Elk Girl had stayed on in Sarah's house after her death. That's where she lived. It was her house now. I was surprised, first to see a woman emerge from it, then on entering to find that in front of the cookstove a baby lay asleep under a beaver fur.

“Is he yours?” I gasped.

“Yes.”

That was all, no other explanation. Whether he was hers biologically, or a foundling, or adopted, or simply acquired from someone who couldn't keep him I never knew. All I knew was there was no evidence of a father. If it is possible to share a lack, then it was a lack we shared.

“I brought you here to show you how to be a mother.” She closed her eyes and went into her medicine place. “Your time,” she enunciated oratorically, “is at the end of the popping of the trees. March. Or it could be when the leaves become large in the first part of April.”

“I think that's right,” I said.

“I will come then. I will bring
iskwao muskike.
That is a woman's medicine. It stops any bleeding.”

“Good. Thank you.”

“Now, about the baby. Do not wash it all the time. Use the oils that I will give you. And never wash it if it has fever, too much washing can kill it.”

“My goodness,” I said, thinking that Elk Girl and Mama Kathy were on a collision course regarding bathing.

“The kind of medicine you know was not the medicine that was here at the beginning. At the beginning medicine was made from natural things, things like maple sugar water mixed with pitch for a cough. And for a stomachache lard and charcoal with the head of the bullrush stirred in.”

I thought of Mama Kathy's medicine chest: Smith Bros. cough syrup, milk of magnesia, and cod liver oil. I would guess the efficacy of the treatments to be about the same, if you excepted the washing. As a nurse I would also rate them as fairly interchangeable. I drew the line, though, at tobacco juice. It might, as Elk Girl firmly believed, be holy, but it did not stop infection as she claimed. There was a new wonder drug tried on the battlefield for that—penicillin.

Her baby smiled in his sleep.

“Such a pretty little boy. What's his name?” I asked.