The Wife Tree (14 page)

“A package of Buckingham cigarettes,” I said, stepping up to the counter.

“We don’t carry Buckinghams,” he said apologetically, then added, a little mockingly, “That’s a man’s brand. It’s not fit for a delicate woman like you.”

“A Sweet Marie, then, and a Canada Dry,” I said, ignoring his remark.

“We don’t carry those either,” he said sheepishly. “They’re not items much in demand out here.” He seemed more disappointed than I. I looked around and saw cans of baked beans and corned beef, sacks of potatoes and oatmeal sparsely arranged on the shelves.

I left the store that day empty-handed but, the next afternoon, William appeared on Alfreda’s porch with a carton of Buckinghams, two dozen Sweet Maries, a case of ginger ale.

“Compliments of the store,” he said. “I hate to think you walked all that way in the dust and I let you down.”

He began to appear at Alfreda’s door every night after he’d closed up the store. Evenings on the prairie are long and golden, the light lingering in the sky until well after ten o’clock. We took lengthy walks along the country roads, William holding my hand lightly. Sometimes he climbed down into the gullies to pick
bouquets of wildflowers for me — blue-eyed grass, prairie lily, coneflower. I was seduced by his evident passion for life. One day he showed up with a black eye. “I’m a fighter, Morgan,” he admitted proudly. “I’m not afraid to use my fists. I don’t start a row, but I don’t back down from one either. You can’t be a coward and survive on the prairie. A man learns that quick enough.”

Alfreda decided to ask William to supper one Sunday. It was the day Seamus was finally posted overseas and she had to face the fact that she was stuck in the West for the duration of the war. Did she want to know William better, thinking perhaps that, after I’d gone home, he might be company for her from time to time? Not having made much effort to get to know people, maybe she was experiencing an attack of loneliness. She put on a dress with a big tulip appliquéd on the skirt and tried to read poetry to William while the girls and I got the food on the table. But he asked, “Who is this silly bugger Yeats?” and she began to sulk. Glancing through the kitchen door, I thought she’d never looked homelier, with her schoolmarm’s hair, the gap in her front teeth, her fallen arches, her fierce intelligence.

Right after the meal William said, “Why don’t we go riding, Morgan?” He’d brought a pair of horses with him. God knows where he got them. They weren’t his. We rode off into the grasslands. Hanging enviously on the chicken wire fence, Alfreda’s children waved sadly.

“Goodbye, Aunt Morgan!” they called, their voices full of longing and finality, as if to say,
Goodbye Aunt Morgan! Goodbye! Keep riding! Keep riding and don’t come back. Don’t come back, because we know, don’t we, that Mother is never going to get over her love affair with William Butler Yeats?

“‘Just look at those beautiful fields, Morgan,’ you said to me on
our ride. ‘Don’t they just take your breath away? What more could a person want?’ And I could see you were one of those people who believed all the earth should be as flat as Saskatchewan. ‘I’ll teach you to love the prairie, Morgan,’ you said.”

When I arrived back at Alfreda’s after dark, she confronted me. “I’ve washed up these dishes on my own while you went trotting around the countryside like some kind of queen. Maybe it’s time you packed up your hat boxes and went home.”

I was just as happy to leave, because I’d grown weary of trying to love the West and I longed for the sight of a tree.

I’ve read that in Canada deaths among the aged begin to rise in November. They say it’s because in winter the immune system is depressed, that an octogenarian has only twenty percent of liver and kidney function, that we should be grateful for pneumonia, which is in fact called the friend of the elderly. And it seems to me that death in winter is more natural and easy to bear, gentle as a soft snowfall, and that far better it be an old man or woman passing on than a child snuffed out in the flower of youth.

Thomas died the year after I gave birth to my baby in the convent. Following his funeral, my mother disappeared. She simply walked away from the farm one day when everyone was out of the house. She ended up in Bayfield, the small lakeside town where Billy Bond and I had gone the summer before to lie together in the sand at the bottom of the rickety stairs. Walking down the main street, my mother came to a yellow stone inn and remembered hearing that an old boyfriend of hers from Kitchener had bought it. She called in, found him behind the counter. He showed her up to the hotel’s best room, overlooking the street. Reaching into his pocket, he said, “Here’s spending money for you. You’ll have free access to the dining room. Stay as long as you want until you get through with your grieving.”

My mother’s room, on the second floor of the hotel, had a high canopy bed, a crimson velvet couch, lamps with gold fringe, antique chests, a Persian carpet, a luxurious bathroom with a deep claw-legged tub. To pass the time, she took lengthy walks along the beach or up and down the shady, cottage-lined earth streets of the town, returning late in the afternoons to rock in a chair on a second-floor balcony running the width of the hotel facade. At five o’clock the first evening, the innkeeper sent a girl up with a glass of sherry, “to wash away this dusty life,” he wrote on a little stiff card. He was a widower with a fourteen-year-old daughter working the reception desk and keeping the books.

Eventually, someone going through town recognized my mother and told my father where he could find her. He hightailed it down to Bayfield and, following the main street in his buggy late in the afternoon, nearly passed her by because she was wearing a pink sundress he’d never seen before and the shade cast by a wide straw hat softened the bones in her face and her black hair cascaded around her shoulders so that she looked like a beautiful young woman again with her cheeks rosy and plump from the fresh air and the lake winds and the long exhilarating walks. It was just as well that my father found her, because already it was September and the swimmers on the beach had all gone home and the smells of candy floss and caramel apples had evaporated from the earth streets and the signs advertising ice cream cones and Cracker Jack popcorn had been folded up and brought in off the wooden sidewalks. What would she have done after the shops hung up their
Closed
signs and the hotel rooms were mothballed and the innkeeper departed with his homely daughter to Brazil for the winter and the town shut down completely until spring?

In the months of my mother’s absence, I’d been the mistress of the house and I hadn’t pined for her in the slightest because for so many years hadn’t all her touching gone into Thomas’s dead limbs? When she returned, I continued to bear the burden of the cooking and cleaning because she retreated to the dim parlour, where she sat as though made of stone, day in and day out, and spoke to no one while, beyond the window, the coloured leaves spun out of the trees. And I did wonder how many times, over the summer months, she’d lain beneath the innkeeper’s ardent weight on the sunset beach, behind the thin screen of sumac bushes that had once sheltered Billy and me. How often had she enjoyed the rhythm of his body moving upon hers, the fine sand shifting beneath her, moulding itself to her thighs, her buttocks, while back at the hotel the motherless daughter totalled up the accounts payable?

One day when the snow began to fall, I opened the glass door and entered the parlour. I stood beside my mother, looking down at her greying hair carelessly fixed in its knot and at her cold blue fingers laced together like iron hinges on her lap. All of the youth she’d brought home from the lake had evaporated. Her jaw was a granite ridge, her eyes sunless, her cheeks hollow and pale. “Do you want me to light a fire for you?” I asked, but she didn’t answer. Finally, gathering my courage, I said sternly, “When are you ever going to speak again, Mother? No one can hear you in your silence. Not Thomas. Not anyone,” and I went outside angrily and crossed to the woodshed through the first storm of soft flakes, which flew, big and wet, down the collar of my dress. Piling wood high in my arms, I prayed that the deep snows of winter would asphyxiate my mother, that we might swiftly set her where she belonged: in the cold earth beside Thomas. But when I returned with my burden of logs, she’d risen at last from her chair and set
to work at the kitchen sink peeling carrots. She said, without so much as turning to look at me, “If you fetch me some apples, I’ll make a pie for supper,” and we never spoke after that of her months by the lake or of the innkeeper’s passion or of Thomas’s death or of anything important.

Snow covers the hospital grounds and now the student nurses fly outdoors in their heavy wool coats, their dark silhouettes against the white lawns reminding me of the soldiers’ greatcoats during the war.

“I left Alfreda, then, William,” I told him, continuing my memoirs while the snow fell thickly outside his hospital window, “I left Alfreda on the prairie and I returned to my life in London, Ontario.” I was private-nursing a woman named Mrs. Formaggio. Though the war had brought some prosperity, it was still hard times and hospital jobs for nurses were scarce. For four hours of daily duty, the Formaggios generously paid me a comfortable wage and gave me a room under the eaves.

“But we didn’t forget about each other, William, did we? Out of sight didn’t mean out of mind. For six months, a river of letters flowed back and forth between us.”

William sent me a silver bowl, and then a framed portrait of himself, which I thought a touch vain of him, and then a small blue velvet box containing a pair of rings, which I thought presumptuous. Yet his vanity and his presumptuousness pleased me. He wrote that he was studying with a local priest, intending to convert to Catholicism.

“But then, William, you must have remembered you were a fighter. The letters suddenly stopped coming and when I continued to write to you, there was only silence. I wrote to Alfreda asking for news. Had you enlisted? I asked. She replied that you’d disappeared, she knew nothing of your whereabouts.”

I went to Mrs. Formaggio’s son, Giulio, about my situation. He was studying law.

“There’s something called breach of promise,” he told me. “If William’s joined up, Regina’s likely where he’s in boot camp.”

After a few inquiries and an official-looking letter, we tracked him down.

“I wrote to you, William. You wrote back. ‘I never promised to marry you,’ your letter said.”

I shot off another. “What about those rings you sent me? Not just an engagement ring but a wedding ring too. What were they supposed to mean? If you’re man enough to go and fight Hitler, surely you could muster the courage to honour your personal commitments.”

Needless to say, I was desperate. I was now thirty-one. I’d had beaus before, but never an offer of marriage. I knew there was something missing in me and that I had to marry William before he discovered what it was. Finally, I managed to get him on the phone. “What about your intentions, William?” I asked. “Were you drunk when you sent those rings?”

“Maybe I was,” he laughed weakly, ruefully. “Maybe I was.”

“I’m coming out there, William,” I told him and hung up before he could object. I borrowed a lace wedding dress from a friend, and a veil and pair of long slippery gloves that reached past my elbows. Two days later, I stepped off the train in Regina.

“I have to confess, now,” I told William in the hospital, “that I don’t remember if love was ever a consideration. It was not something I knew about. And you, William, you never mentioned love either. It was a dangerous and complicated word, and out on the prairie they liked to keep things simple.”

After the civil ceremony, William found us a room in the Frontier Hotel, near the railway station. On our wedding night, I thought he’d speak to me of my beauty and the home we’d have
someday and the babies we could make together, but all he could talk about was the Halifax Bomber and incendiary bombs and how he could hardly wait to kill his first Kraut bastard. Once we were under the bed covers, he penetrated me roughly, and I thought: Why do they call it the Act of Love?