The Wife Tree (6 page)

Morris arrived today at three to sit with William. Because I couldn’t bear any more of his Bible readings, I headed home. But on my way out of the hospital, I became disoriented. I took a wrong turn and found myself in front of a window in the maternity ward. There, in a room that seemed to glow with a miraculous light, I saw dozens of newborns stored in acrylic bins floating in rows like a fleet of small craft. They wailed and twisted their aubergine heads and hurled their tiny shell-like fists at the air. An angry choir of small voices shouting grievances, obscenities at the world penetrated the window.

The sound threw me back to my own infancy. I was a notorious howler, with the lungs, it was said, of an opera singer. I lay one spring day in the cradle, a newborn screaming blue murder.

“I’ve a notion to smother that child,” my mother said.

“Don’t worry,” said my grandmother, trying to make herself both useful and invisible. She was one in a generation of old, frightened widows with no other refuge than their daughters’ homes. “Leave her to me. I’ll mind her. You go out to the fields. I’ll quieten her down.”

My grandmother resembled a tiny Buddhist monk: her head was small and round as a hazelnut, her face wise and plain, her mouth pinched with discretion, her thin hair pulled back into a punishing knot, her high-necked black dress buttoned up at the throat, chaste as a religious habit. She was five years a widow. One day her husband, a butcher, had developed a nosebleed. He lay in bed while she handed him one rag after another to mop up the flow. “Shouldn’t we call the doctor?” he kept asking her. “It’s just a nosebleed,” she told him. “We don’t need to bother a doctor for that.” She let him bleed and bleed until the soaked rags formed a crimson mountain beside his bed and his veins were drained dry as a summer creek.

Little wonder that she’d wanted him dead, as it was common knowledge that for years he’d been supporting a mistress, a younger woman named Honey Halpern, whom he’d installed in a gingerbread cottage on Lake Huron. For a decade, my grandmother, betrayed, humiliated, had prayed for my grandfather’s death, dreaming all the while of retiring to the West Coast on the strength of their small savings. She’d come to Canada as a young girl, following the death of her mother. Her father, a German watchmaker, had wanted to make a fresh start in the New World. The passage with him to Canada over glittering seas in a first-class ship cabin was, she said, the happiest and most vivid memory of her childhood. As she grew old, she’d begun to long for the sight of the ocean. She’d spoken of blue waters, white boat sails, the smell of salt air, perfume of blossoming peach trees.

But when her husband’s will was read, she learned that she was penniless. He’d squandered every cent on the lakeside mistress. The house had been mortgaged. The butchery was in debt. She wore the look now of someone stunned by her fate. In her lifetime, she’d journeyed from Munich to Toronto to Kitchener to this subsistence Huron County farm. Deeper and deeper into the narrow heart of Ontario she’d come. But she was a practical woman. Even as she looked out at the soulless landscape, breathed in the corrosive dust of the country, heard the crickets singing tunelessly in the long grass, she said she was grateful at least to have escaped the reek of the butchery, the sweet heavy smell of slaughter, of ripe flesh and rapid spoilage.

They say that, the morning I howled, the parlour curtains lifted in the spring breeze, revealing, beyond them, the apple tree shimmering, its blossoms suspended in the air like a snowdrift, snow in spring. The blossoms had burst forth overnight with a sudden
rush of heat. On her way out to the fields, my mother paused to remark on it.

“It’s a sign,” she said. “It flowers like that only once in a decade.”

Out in the barnyard, the four boys had hitched up the horses, climbed onto the flatbed wagon and waited now for my parents to appear. My sisters, carrying the day’s lunch in wicker baskets, joined them there. Once the wagon had rattled off, my grandmother, her arms light and hollow as reeds, lifted me from the cradle.
Hush
, she whispered.
Hush
. But evidently I wouldn’t be silenced. Out in the fields, my mother was seen raising her head again and again, turning her face toward the distant house, listening to the sounds carried on the May winds.

“She’s still crying.”

“It’s only the crows you hear,” my father told her. “It’s only the wind.”

“No, it’s the child. That howling will be the death of me.”

It had been a cold and rainless spring and the corn and barley were going in late. The steel plough blade tore into the dry soil and the horses’ hooves, big as flatirons, hammered the packed earth, throwing up clouds of dust that drifted and settled like sand across the fields. At noon the ploughing party halted directly north of the house, took shelter from the sun beneath a maple tree in spring leaf, ate a lunch of cold chicken, loaves of fresh bread, potato salad, gallon jars of preserved beans, baking-powder biscuits spread with peach jam, Thermoses of steaming tea. When they returned home at five o’clock, they immediately noticed the stillness in the house. The fire had gone down, which was a blessing, as the day had warmed to July temperatures and all the windows stood closed, making the house hot and airless as a tomb.

“She’s quiet at last,” said my mother with relief, pulling off her
boots at the kitchen door. Then she noticed that no preparations had been made for dinner. On the kitchen table lay three unplucked chickens, bunches of spring carrots awaiting scrubbing, potatoes with the skins unpeeled. A row of loaf tins, bread dough spilling over their sides, stood unbaked on the counter. Entering the front room, she found my grandmother’s brittle body crumpled on the floor, her head dashed, heavy as a stone, against the hearth, on her brow a welt the size of a plum.

My dead grandmother may have tried to sing me a lullaby, and the more she sang, her voice an antique whistle in her throat, the more lustily I’d cried. Unable to calm me, unnerved by this child shouting brazenly at life, she’d suffered a stroke. Together we’d pitched forward like a pair of divers, my grandmother’s cheek pressed at last against the rough flagstone, the radiant apple tree outside the window reflected in her eyeglasses, twin images shining in the small round lenses as though cast there from within her head, a photographic projection. The spill forced her porcelain teeth out, shot them across the hearth. In the corner of her mouth, a ruby scab had formed. Tumbling like a soft bundle of rags across the rug, I’d survived the fall unharmed. The bottle containing the milk my mother had expressed before going out had rolled across the room and lay now against the wood bin.

The year was 1912. I was the eighth child. Two of my brothers were already adolescents. Now they crowded in behind my mother, awkward as cattle, cumbersome in the narrow room, inarticulate, smelling powerfully of the sweat of their labour, big boys already growing fleshy, acquiring farmers’ guts, their necks reddened by the day’s strong sun. The three girls pressed in behind them, the hems of their dresses heavy with dust, hair plastered to their hot faces, long sleeves and wide straw hats worn to protect
their milky skins from the sun’s rays because of my mother’s vow, “No girl of mine is ever going to turn dark as a nigger.”

My father sighed with exhaustion. Things had gone wrong out in the fields. A plough handle had snapped, an old horse had collapsed, another had lost its shoe, the spring soil was unyielding as stone. There’d been shouting and they’d all come inside hot and defeated and murderous and now there was this dead body to contend with.

In the room hung the ripe smell of the old woman. Not the smell of death but simply of this woman’s elderly flesh, a mouldering odour they’d been inhaling for years without noticing it, a strange fruity rot rising out of the yellow folds of her ancient skin. Had the stench of the butchery invaded her pores, hung there long after she closed its door behind her?

“She was the only gentle thing left in my life,” my mother, looking down at her, said. “She was my last connection with the city.”

My mother’s breasts, at five in the afternoon, were hardened and painful with their bounty of milk. She was a tall, robust German. She’d learned to get up out of bed directly after childbirth to bake half a dozen loaves of bread and as many pies for the threshers’ noonday meal. She could peel potatoes, wash dishes, put up canning, juggling jars of boiling vinegar, and hold a baby safely in the crook of her arm all the while. Now, in the window behind her, the apple tree that had so filled her with hope shimmered. Within twenty-four hours, the petals would drop.

The sun began to set. The house grew dim. When my mother didn’t move to pick me up, my father, a soft-spoken man with thin blond hair and ears large as monarch butterflies, stepped forward in his earthy overalls and reached for me. Unaccustomed to handling babies, he held me at arm’s length, like a leaky bucket. Turning, he thrust me at my oldest sister, Alfreda, a brainy gat-toothed girl
studying that spring for her Normal School exams. My mother went to the pantry, opened her bodice, pumped breast milk into a bottle. Alfreda, school books spread open before her on the kitchen table, pushed the rubber nipple into my mouth, never lifting her eyes from the text, her breath singing through the spaces in her great square teeth.

I’m told that, for a month, my mother didn’t go near me. She couldn’t bring herself to pick me up. A mother’s touch is as familiar to an infant as the landscape of the womb. I ached for the physical power, for the knowledge of myself contained in my mother’s strong hands, which had defined me from the moment I’d emerged from her belly. Since birth, I’d been sleeping in my parents’ bed. I’d grown accustomed, in the darkness, to their deep unconscious breathing, to the sound of their coupling, to the rocking of the mattress as my father rode my mother. He may have been shy and docile, but, a man of his generation, he knew his rights in bed. Only through breast-feeding had my mother avoided a pregnancy a year. Now, exiled to a cradle in a corner of the kitchen, I had an oblique view in daytime of my mother moving from stove to sink, erect, a woman whose face had lost its softness, her jawline now lean as a trowel, her eyes hollow with grief. They say that, all that month, while the petals in the orchard snowed from the trees, I didn’t once cry. I learned to be silent, not to draw criticism, to be obedient, to submit.

“If I never hear another sound from that child, it’ll be too soon,” my mother said.

Born in 1878, she was an only and rebellious butcher’s child. My father, a farmer’s son, had met her at a church dance and married her because she had skin like snow and large dark eyes and because she looked strong as an ox. The day of the stroke she
was only thirty-four, but I was the finish of children for her. She knew it, standing beside my father in the cemetery, gazing down at my grandmother’s pine coffin. And he, sensing a resolution forming like a meaty tumour within her, may have suspected that she’d never allow him to touch her again.

But was I really, as my mother often described me, the youngest murderer in the world? How can anyone be sure that it was in fact my howling that killed my grandmother? Is it not possible that on that May afternoon, sealed within the airless farmhouse, a fine widow’s sweat breaking out of her old pores, she’d begun to think about Honey Halpern? Had she pictured the young mistress sitting, not twenty miles from this very farm, on a cottage porch surrounded by its lush growth of ferns, cooled by an offshore breeze, a view before her of wheeling gulls, glittering waters, late reflective sunsets — the precise vista my grandmother had envisaged for herself? And is it not possible that, the more she thought about Honey Halpern, the more embittered she became and the harder she rocked until finally an artery in her brain ruptured like a faulty garden hose and she pitched to her death?

Today, listening to the song of the newborns in the maternity ward, I thought about how, as an infant, I’d had lungs powerful enough to knock an old woman to the floor. Now I’ve grown so timid that this afternoon when a nurse asked me, “Are you Mr. Hazzard’s wife?” I answered timidly, “Yes, I am,” and my voice came out in barely a whisper.