Sanctuary Line (5 page)

Sometimes my aunt (taking Mandy and me with her) would attend these events, having heard that “a particularly good piece” was going to be on the block. She would return with a pressed-glass tumbler or goblet for the collection she was amassing. The glass was displayed on specially built shelves in the house, and admired but never used. We children learned some of the patterns, by osmosis, I expect, not being all that interested in the objects themselves: Nova Scotia Grape, Butterfly and Fan, Diamond and Sunburst, Apple Blossom. My uncle, who couldn’t leave the family’s history out of anything, told us stories about the Canadian glass houses or glass works of the nineteenth
century, claiming that one of the more obscure old great-greats was a blower in the Mallorytown Manufactory. Every Labour Day, he said, there were magnificent parades in that town, during which the glass-blowers would march in battalions, row after row, wearing glass hats and carrying glass walking sticks, sometimes even glass rolling pins and glass hatchets. I came to doubt that tale in my adulthood, along with many others my uncle told, and was therefore startled when leafing through a book on the history of glass one evening a few months ago to find that it was indeed true! The Glass Bottle Blowers’ Association of the United States and Canada was both powerful and proud and enjoyed showing off even the most whimsical of its wares. My aunt would collect only Canadian glass, which was surprising in that she was American by birth and by sensibility. Perhaps it was her way of claiming some of the heritage of the country where she had chosen to live her adult life.

Teo, as I’ve said, came to my attention during a summer when we were all between the ages of eight and twelve and our games had become more elaborate and geographically scattered. During the warm, bright hours of those seasons, the rest of our lives utterly disappeared as we children closed ranks, became almost tribal, our imaginations looping around one another’s. My auctioneer uncle would sometimes arrive with what he called “failed job lots” from one auction or another, wooden orange crates filled with cracked dishes and rusty tableware that Mandy and I — and
Kath when she was there – were given full access to in the assumption that we would want to play house. Because she was reading
The Children’s Treasury of Poetry
, Mandy once recited two verses of a poem she had found in those pages, the lines causing us to pause while we sorted china and wonder how the poet knew about our secret:

This is the key to the playhouse
In the woods by the pebbly shore,
Its winter now, I wonder if
There’s snow about the door?

I wonder if the flower-sprigged cups
And plates sit on their shelf,
And if my little painted chair
Is rocking by itself?

We had only just become aware enough of the differences of gender to want to segregate ourselves and stake out territories: the boys had their tree houses, the girls had their forts. The orange crates became the furniture of leafy, green rooms, the dented pots and colourful plates were argued over and often stolen during raids on one fort, or tree house, or another. A turquoise plate, I remember, was much coveted, and once, when it was firmly in my possession and therefore on its way to the girls’ fort, the boy, who by then I knew was called Teo, pointed to it and said,
“From my country, from Mexico.” I think it must have been the first time that I had heard him speak, certainly the first time that I remember hearing his voice. Before that, he was simply a rather odd and not altogether successful adjunct to the boys, often running just behind them, as if struggling to keep up, but really slowing his gait in deference to their knowledge of his differences, and his suspicion, well founded, that they really wanted little to do with him. It was my uncle who had taken him out of the bunkhouse and placed him in our midst. There were no explanations. “This is Teo,” he had said. “He is learning English. Play with him.”

This was so like my uncle. There was an educator fighting strong within him, born partly, I suspect, during the time just after his high-school graduation when my grandparents were alive and in full control of the farm. Needing winter work, he had taught for a season or two in one of the sparsely populated and ill-equipped one-room schools that still stood at the time on thin-grassed one-acre lots here and there in the county. He was sentimental about that small episode of his life and once that very summer took us, Teo included, on an expedition ten miles to the north. I expect he wanted to drive out there alone; maybe he was hoping for a moment of private communion with the past. But we had tagged after him as he strode toward the truck, whining and arguing our case until he relented. He told Mandy and I to get in the cab, and the boys to hop
in the back, and we drove out to a mostly abandoned place called Red Cloud, where an empty, weathered schoolhouse creaked in the wind. When we were all inside, my uncle walked up and down in front of the broken blackboard like a ghost, not speaking and tossing the one stub of chalk that had remained on the narrow wooden ledge. Teo watched him, I remember, with frank curiosity in his brown eyes, and for the first time I wondered what school was like where Mexicans lived. Were there large brick buildings, with two classrooms for each grade level, in every Mexican neighbourhood, or did this boy have to take a yellow bus each day to the kind of smaller rural schools my cousins attended? Maybe his school would be like the bunkhouses on the farm, roughly painted, with thin walls, rickety windows, and no playground. Once it had occurred to me that there might not be a playground, I decided not to ask the question that had been forming in my mind. Teo continued to regard my uncle, his gaze following the rise and fall of the chalk.

My cousins were busily removing glass inkwells from the wooden desks that had wrought-iron sides and looked like my grandmother’s treadle sewing machine. Shane was even examining the bottoms of the inkwells for the
D
surrounded by a triangle, which would indicate that they were made at the Dominion Glass Works and were truly Canadian. I imagine he wanted to take a few home to please his mother. “Put them back,” my uncle finally
said. “Someday someone will see how wrong they have been to close these schools and they’ll need everything to be in place.” Even at nine years old I knew this was ridiculous, the building hadn’t been occupied for decades, but my uncle often appeared to authentically believe in such resurrections, his modernity and interest in progress notwithstanding.

He walked to the few shelves of the school library after that and began leafing through the mouldy books, Teo following and hovering, the rest of us lifting the lids of wooden desks, then letting them bang down again, reading the initials and names carved into the varnished oak.

Through the west windows, far off, you could see Red Cloud Graveyard, the odd flash of an upright stone, white among a scant gathering of poplars, practically invisible unless you knew it was there. “Cholera,” my uncle said, explaining the presence of the graveyard in the small woods at a distance from what would have been the village, when a village still existed. “An epidemic,” he added. The boys could not be kept from it then, this information making it so much more interesting than the other graveyards we had known. They ran out the door, leaving Mandy, Kath, and me with my uncle. Teo hesitated, looked out one of the windows until, anxious, I suppose, to conform, he went outside to be with the boy cousins, who had been momentarily distracted by the discovery of a cow skull in the long grass not far from the open door.

I could see Teo bend over the bone, feigning interest, wanting to be part of the group, while the other boys did their best to ignore him, forming a circle that was difficult for him to penetrate. He took a few tentative steps back toward the building and that one moment of retreat unleashed something in Don, who was the eldest.
Te-oh
, Don began to sing, mimicking the Harry Belafonte song that had been popular some years back, and that my uncle sometimes sang at parties,
Te-e-e-oh, Daylight come and I wanna go ho-ome
. In no time the others joined in.
Te-oh
, they chanted,
Te-e-e-oh
.

I could feel a subtle panic rising in me and looked toward my uncle for some kind of intervention or at least a reaction. But he had a geography book in his hands, and the unusual lopsided squint his expression sometimes took when he was absorbed and gone from us, and I knew he was paying no attention at all to the boys in the yard. Teo himself slowly climbed the three decaying steps that led back into the schoolroom, then discretely moved to the other side of the open door, where he knew they couldn’t see him. He looked at me, probably because I was watching him. “Not my country,” he said, “the song.”

That was the second thing I remember him saying aloud.

My uncle glanced up at that moment and walked toward the boy, the book still in his hands. “This is your country,” he said, pointing out the map of Mexico he had been studying. Then he led the boy to a globe that stood on a scarred
table on the other side of the room. “It is here as well,” he said, “and this is where you are right now.” I couldn’t see the globe clearly from where I was standing but knew they would be looking at the chain of Great Lakes and the fist of James Bay punching down from the north. If Teo had been acquainted with maps in the past he made no indication of this, appeared instead to be interested and pleased to be shown something by my uncle, happy to stand in the warmth of his attention. He twirled the globe, which wobbled on its old stand. He, too, it seemed, longed for my uncle’s approval.

I should say something about the globe that Teo twirled with his small brown fingers. Not too long ago, cleaning out a corner cupboard in this old house, I came across the teachers’ log from Red Cloud School and began, before my evening meal, to read it. I don’t remember my uncle taking anything home with him that day so he must have gone back to retrieve it once he realized that the little building was doomed, that no one was ever coming back. The log was begun by a teacher, a Mr. Quinn, in about 1900. The man himself was a bit of a historian and provided a litany of the school’s adventures since the 1840s: the raising of money for the schoolhouse construction, the volunteer labour, the first trustees, and original teachers and pupils. But when writing about his own tenure, the central drama focused on the decision to purchase and then the eventual arrival of the globe. “The children,” he stated, “were given a
holiday because of the excitement and because they could not be kept from the object of their attention. I sent them outside to play and then allowed them, one by one, to enter the school that they might be allowed five minutes each to look at the new wonder. It was,” he wrote, “as if this one object was bringing the world to them.”

Outside the window were the fields and meadows of what I thought of then as my ancestral countryside, though, as I have since learned, it was the ancestral countryside of a more legitimate tribe, one that had been gone for a long time, leaving in its wake two words,
Red Cloud:
a name stolen and then anglicized by those who came later and pushed that tribe out. Recently, there has been a lot of talk in the biological community about species that have invaded the Great Lakes area, zebra mussels, for example, and a particular kind of Mexican “ladybug,” that, according to the experts, “doesn’t belong here and is upsetting what remains of the ecosystem.” What does belong here? I wonder at such times. Do we?

“Here.” My uncle snapped the book shut and passed it to the boy. “Keep it, take it home with you.” It was unclear to me, and perhaps to Teo, whether he meant to the bunkhouses or to Mexico, though by then the bunkhouses and Mexican schools had amalgamated in my imagination and I wondered if perhaps my uncle was making a donation to what might very well be classrooms that contained no books at all.

I looked out the window into the mid-August afternoon. The boys were running through a grassy area in which grew brown-eyed Susan, Queen Anne’s lace, bachelor’s buttons, and other wildflowers named by colonists. They were cantering through long grass toward the distant graveyard and the horizon, which is always such a dominant feature in this flat county. How odd that I can see that scene so clearly now, the various flowers, the boys’ striped T-shirts. Often that whole epoch seems so far from me that I cannot conjure it at all. Sometimes my only connection to it is the map made by the fine lines on a monarch’s wing. Still, in those days, I would never have examined such a wing carefully enough to know it resembled a map.

“But everything stay,” said Teo slowly, reminding my uncle, the English difficult in his mouth.

“Everything
should
stay,” said my uncle, emphasizing the conditional. “But it doesn’t.”

As I’ve said, now that she is gone, I’ve begun to read the books Mandy left behind in this house. I wish I had done this earlier; I would have known her and understood her better if I had. I might have become acquainted with the hesitancy, the frailty of spirit that attends certain kinds of love, as well as the baffling tenacity of a passion as difficult as Mandy’s appeared to be. If I had read just one book of love poetry, her relationship could possibly have come into focus for me, and maybe I would have seen that certain lovers need to commemorate the knotted feelings, the emotional confusion. And yet, her longing to examine the relationship, to give some kind of voice to it, rode side by side with her desire to protect the secret at the centre of the intimacy. There was, you see, always this sense that naming her lover would be a kind of betrayal, regardless of circumstances. “The loved one is rarely identified in poetry,” she once told me, “and it is that discretion that gives the reader permission to be moved, to own the sentiment.” Sadly, it’s only now, late at night, with these new
thoughts and phrases speaking to me, that I have begun to comprehend what she meant.