The Wife Tree (3 page)

I climbed my front porch.

“Morgan?” Harry called from the foot of the drive. I turned. “I feel young even today,” he boasted.

“Do you?”

“I feel at the peak of my form.”

“That’s good, Harry.”

“You’re young too, Morgan,” he called, grinning encouragingly. “You just don’t know it.”

I picked the evening paper up off the porch and carried it into the house. Weighing it in my hand for a moment, I considered
the idea of suspending delivery. It’s William who subscribes to the news. I never open the paper myself. Everything I’ve ever read about current events has flown out of my head like a swallow from a barn the moment I put the paper down.

In the kitchen, I pulled down a little card, which I keep tucked behind a corner of the church calendar. On the card is printed a grid. I have one good eye and one bad. Behind the bad one there is bleeding that pushes out of shape something called the macula, which lies at the centre of the retina. Everything in the centre of that eye is out of focus. On the perimeter of that blur, all is clear, giving me what they call
peripheral vision
. Each day, I must remember to cover my bad eye, the left, with one hand and peer with the good eye at the grid on the card. If ever there is damage to this good eye — blood and fluid suddenly leaking behind the macula as in the bad one — the grid lines will waver and sink like a whirlpool and I must rush to the ophthalmologist for help.

William has laughed at the sight of me with the card pressed to my face.

“If you can see a straight line, Morgan,” he said, shaking his head with irony, “it’ll be the first time in your life.”

“I can see them, William.”

“You’ll be walking with a white cane soon.”

“I don’t even like to think about it.”

Slipping the card back behind the religious calendar, I looked at the picture of Christ in his red tunic and rich folds of blue cloak, drawing back a flap of chest muscle like drapery and pointing with a finger at his heart, which blazes like a flaming planet. Not the hands of a carpenter’s son at all, but soft and manicured, as though they’d never touched a hammer or a nail or a length of raw fruity wood. What does Christ, breaking open this deep chamber to
show us a supernatural heart shooting out holy rays of light like fireworks, have to say to us?

“Christ never did an honest day’s work in his life,” William often remarked. “He never held down a job. Whereas me, Morgan? I was born for physical labour. It’s in my blood. The prairie did that for me. Nothing has given me greater joy than swinging a sledgehammer or using a pitchfork. All my life, the only thing I ever wanted to do was work. There doesn’t seem to be any other reason to live.”

Propped up in bed at nine in the evening, I tore this page off the writing pad, put it under the spare pillow next to me, and began again in my wobbly script.

This letter too I pulled off and stored under the pillow. Putting my pen away, I picked up my rosary from the night table. But as I whispered my Hail Marys, progressing through five decades, I did wonder if these words, mumbled as my fingers moved along the beads, would do William any good, or if prayer is just an empty dialogue with oneself. Does William believe in God any more? Since his heart attack, he hasn’t attended Sunday Mass, insisting that all the kneeling and genuflecting and prolonged standing tax his heart, but also that Catholics are a pack of hypocrites, all the way up to the pope in his palace of gold and lapis lazuli.

William converted to Catholicism in order to marry me. But he was a rebellious catechumen, challenging the idea of the Trinity, of transubstantiation, the miracles of Christ. Jesus was nothing but a shaman with a bag of tricks up his sleeve, he told the priest, hiring actors to pose as cripples, blind men, lepers.

Why did he go to the trouble of converting, just to marry
me?
I wonder now. But back in those days I was beautiful, wasn’t I? With thick black hair swept up in rolls and a high curved brow at a time when such a smooth expanse of polished bone was considered a mark of beauty in a woman.

“We know Mr. Hazzard had all the high-risk factors for a stroke, don’t we?” Dr. Pilgrim said to me after William was admitted. “High blood pressure. Atrial fibrillation. A history of smoking. You do understand what a stroke is, don’t you, Mrs. Hazzard?” he asked patiently. “A blockage of blood flow to the brain? When the brain cells are robbed of vital oxygen and other nutrients, they die. In time they may or may not regenerate. That regeneration will determine which faculties Mr. Hazzard recovers. Does that help to explain things a little?”

The skin of the house anticipates winter. Today after lunch, I pressed my hand to the kitchen window, felt in my bones the cooling of the earth.

“Why is the house so cold, Morgan?” William had asked me the day of the stroke.

“It’s the change of seasons, William,” I told him. “It’s the first true autumn day.”

“Well, you’d better get that furnace fired up, then.”

Peering at the thermostat on the living-room wall, I turned the dial clockwise. Beneath my feet I felt a small tremor and heard the
furnace boom and complain, like a bear awakened from hibernation. Out of the old tin pipes rose the oddly sweet smell of burning dust. The heat now blasting up through the vents was a comfort to William.

“It was so bloody cold out west, Morgan,” he told me. “I remember the winter I was fourteen and I got laid off in February by a man named Vandeusen. He sent me packing with empty pockets. Said he’d get my wages to me when he could, maybe in the spring.

“I walked fifteen miles through a blizzard to our own farm, so frozen by the time I got there I wasn’t sure I was still alive. I went into the house and didn’t even have time to take my coat off before my father asked, ‘Where’s your pay?’

“‘He said he’s broke,’ I told him.

“‘The son of a bitch.’

“‘He said he’d settle up with me in the spring.’

“I stood there with the snow on my shoulders and my feet so dead with cold I was afraid they’d have to be cut off. I took a step toward the stove to warm myself, but he blocked my way.

“‘You stand there till I’m finished with you,’ he shouted. I could smell the liquor on his breath clear across the room. ‘You look at me,’ he said. ‘That bastard’s a goddamned liar. You should’ve parked yourself on his doorstep.’ By this time he was unbuckling his belt.

“‘I would’ve froze,’ I said.

“‘You should’ve knocked down his goddamned door.’

“‘What good would that have done?’ I asked. ‘He said he had nothin’ t’ give me.’

“‘Don’t talk back to me,’ he said. ‘Don’t give me any of your lip.’

“Then he swung his belt, hitting me everywhere. My shoulders. My arms. My stiff red hands. I was brittle as ice. Why I didn’t shatter into a thousand pieces I don’t know.

“‘This’ll teach you to believe a goddamned Dutchman!’ he shouted.”

“Do you remember the apple trees in the yard?” I asked William today, though he hasn’t opened his eyes since the stroke. He remains very still beneath his white sheet, which is like a wintry landscape full of gentle hills and valleys as though already he’s entered another season.

Did he remember, I asked, how we used to call them the Man and Wife Trees because they stood so close together, so united and loyal and enduring, their branches intertwined?

At one time the Wife Tree lifted her arms gently, modestly into the sky, but now her branches are clipped and topped and pruned and painfully twisted and lately William’s been telling me that, because she can no longer bear fruit, she must be cut down. But I now wonder if, after all these years of hacking at her limbs, he simply can’t rest until he sees her fall to the earth.

I noticed today that the Man Tree has shed all his coloured leaves. His skeleton stands gaunt and dark and vulnerable against the sky. But the Wife Tree seems to be giving the lie to the season and is still green as green and full and lush and refusing to die.

Two weeks have passed since William fell and I haven’t seen Dr. Pilgrim again. He does come in, the nurses tell me, but he’s never around when I’m visiting and I’m afraid that if he knows why William hasn’t yet awakened, he’s reluctant to tell me. After many vain attempts at questioning the nurses, I’ve begun to understand that truth is a very foolish thing to ask for in a hospital. Truth can’t be measured out in milligrams or recorded on a graph in a patient’s chart. And even with all their fancy machines, the nurses can’t seem to tell me anything more than I’m able to see with my one weak eye.

Released from the day shift at his factory, Morris arrived in intensive care today at four o’clock.

“Medical intervention isn’t the answer here, anyway, Mom,” he said, “no matter what Merilee or the professionals say. God will decide what happens to Dad, not the doctors.”

“There’s more to your father than his soul, Morris.”

“I’m making it my mission to convert Dad to our church. I’ve got my whole community praying for him right now.”

The thought of all those
Glory be to God!s
and
Hallelujah, Brothers!
and
Praise the Lord!
s shooting William’s way alarmed me.

Morris stood over his father’s bed with his bible open, his chest puffed out, as though he were more powerful than the doctors themselves. He carries the Good Book everywhere, even to work, where twice it’s cost him his job.

“You can’t feed those boys of yours on the New Testament,” William told Morris the first time he got fired for preaching at the factory. “The Gospel according to St. John won’t put meat on their bones.”

“I’ll find another job, Dad. I’m not worried. God will provide.”

Until he was a man of thirty carting the Testaments around, Morris was never able to stand up to his father. The Scriptures have become his voice, which is a pity, I think, because they contain the wisdom only of men and none of women. For a slow reader like Morris, the Bible is a very thick book.

“Why was that boy nearly illiterate until he tripped over the Scriptures?” his father has often asked me.

“I don’t know, William.”

“I don’t care if you want to waste your time reading the Bible,” he’s told Morris, “so long as you think and question as you go along.” But Morris, like me, is not a thinker, and so he’s swallowed the Good Book whole, chapter and verse.

“Come to just one service, Dad,” Morris used to beg William.
“That’s all I ask. Just come and see what our church is like.”

“I’ve converted once already. I don’t need to do it again. There’s little difference from one religion to the next, anyway. You get the same hogwash everywhere.”

“But that’s where you’re wrong, Dad. Our God is a better God than your God.”

“I didn’t know they were running a competition.”

Morris was once a small, skinny boy and it still surprises me to see him standing six feet tall, with thick shoulders and broad hands and a big square jaw. When he was young, I tried to fortify him with carbohydrates, at every meal placing a stack of white bread at his elbow. Dutifully, he buttered the slices one by one on the flat of his hand and ate them. Despite this, I was never successful in putting flesh on his bones. But he’s filled out in recent years and I’m not sure if it’s Olive’s cooking that’s fattened him up or the way he now feeds so greedily on Jesus, who called himself the Bread of Life.