The Wife Tree (19 page)

The wind has blown all the heavy snow to the ground and now the trees are dark and sombre beneath a leaden sky. All the world seems painted in subtle variations of black and grey. Today, the pearly light falling through William’s window seemed to leach the colour from his skin so that he acquired the hue of a cadaver.

“Will you not try a little harder to get better, William?” I asked him this afternoon, because each day when I arrive at the hospital, he’s curled up in his bed like a snail. He hasn’t spoken another word since he ordered me from his room, and when he looks at me, I imagine his eyes swimming with doubt and despair. I’ve noticed the nurses still carrying his meal trays away practically untouched and I’m told by Morris that his thin hip bones are pushing through his blue gown like metal blades and the skin on his neck has grown loose as a cock’s. But I’m afraid that my weak entreaties for him to sit up in bed and look out the window and to try to eat a little more of his vanilla pudding lack conviction. I’ve ceased attempting to entertain him with my memories or with descriptions of the weather, for is it not a little cruel to go on speaking of the splendid November skies and the gentle warmth of the pale winter sun when these sensations are sealed away from him beyond his window, like candy in a jar? And I sometimes wonder if the very environment of the hospital ward, if the steady dry windless heat has not sapped William’s strength and desiccated his spirit.

Today, just as the hospital windows were darkening around four o’clock, Dr. Pilgrim appeared in a brown Harris tweed suit. It was clear from his urgent stride that he’d counted on finding me there, that he’d come to see not William but me, and that he had
important news. He drew me outside the beige curtain pulled around William’s bed.

“It’s time to move Mr. Hazzard to a new setting,” he told me quietly. “We feel we’ve done everything for him that we can. He’s refused all attempts to be worked with. The nurses get him out of bed and as soon as they turn away, he’s climbed back in. His good leg and arm are strong enough for him to do that, but with respect to rehabilitating the affected side, he seems determined not to progress. He won’t co-operate with the speech therapists.”

“My husband isn’t a stupid man, Dr. Pilgrim,” I argued. “If he won’t work with the speech therapists, there must be something he knows that they don’t know.”

“Nevertheless,” he said gently, “they’re the professionals. Mr. Hazzard is just the patient. He’s in no condition to understand what’s happening to him.” Under the harsh fluorescent lights, Dr. Pilgrim’s long head, bald and shaped like a butternut squash, shone.

“Have you supported him to your utmost these weeks, Mrs. Hazzard?” Dr. Pilgrim asked. “You’re his lifeline, remember. What we can accomplish here at the hospital is only infrastructure. If your husband has no inspiration to recuperate, all our efforts will fail. He must
want
to improve. Have you encouraged him to get better? Have you ever told him you want him to come home?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“Well, our biggest concern now is Mr. Hazzard’s spirits. A downswing in mood follows naturally after a stroke, but your husband seems to be more depressed than the average stroke victim. Do you have any idea why that would be?”

“No, I don’t. William has always been a fighter. ‘You can’t keep a prairie boy down,’ was what he always used to say.”

“I’m afraid we can’t hold him here any longer.”

“You’re disposing of him then? Of us?”

“Not disposing, Mrs. Hazzard. But there has to be a flow through the system. The administrators look at the figures every day. How many patients in. How many patients out. Bed-blockers, they call people like your husband. These are cutback times, Mrs. Hazzard. Hospital spaces are at a premium. In the modern practice of medicine, there are exigencies over which doctors have no control. Mr. Hazzard seems to have plateaued and it’s time for him to move on. There are two choices here. One is an excellent rehab centre in London called The Cedars.”

“But that’s thirty miles away. How will I get to him? And I’ve lost the sight in my second eye, Dr. Pilgrim. Travel of any kind is difficult for me now.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Hazzard, but I’m afraid it can’t be helped. There is no rehab here in town. The good news is that The Cedars is a very fine facility. It’s absolutely up-to-date, with the most qualified of staff. If there’s any chance of rehabilitation, The Cedars can achieve it. Now, it’s not easy to get in there, but, being a veteran, your husband can jump the queue. We’ve made inquiries on your behalf. There’s a bed waiting for him even as we speak. Their approach is to provide a month of intensive rehab. If the patient doesn’t respond, he’s transferred out. In Mr. Hazzard’s case, the veterans’ chronic care ward, which is part of the same facility, would be a logical destiny.”

“Why do they have to turn the elderly into gypsies?” I asked.

“We’re only trying to find him a suitable place, Mrs. Hazzard. It’s not that we want to disorient your husband. We have to experiment with one thing at a time. We don’t know what’s going to work until we try it out.

“The other alternative of course is to bring your husband home.
You could have a physiotherapist visit a couple of times a week and that would be covered by provincial health care. Also covered would be home care. They could come in three times a day: once to get Mr. Hazzard out of bed, once to shift him around, and once to put him back. But it would essentially mean full-time nursing for you, Mrs. Hazzard, a daunting proposition for a woman in her mid-seventies. No life, really, separate from that. No relief for you. A constant vigil. It would be like having a child again, maybe worse, because Mr. Hazzard, like many stroke victims, has lost the ability to plan and carry out simple activities. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but your husband puts everything in his mouth. We’ve had to take his personal effects away from him. Razor. Comb. Nail file. Eyeglasses. Everything potentially harmful. He’s a danger to himself. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. This too is quite common in stroke patients. They lose the ability to recognize and understand familiar objects. But the recent significant signs of deterioration in Mr. Hazzard suggest that he might be having a series of mini-strokes. Transient ischemic attacks, we call them. Each of these causes a little further brain injury, impairing functions. Time may or may not heal the damage. Nevertheless, some people do bring their spouses home in this condition. It’s the guilt. The unwillingness to institutionalize.”

“But who would be his doctor at The Cedars?”

“There are staff doctors there. At any rate, Mrs. Hazzard, I’m retiring in a few weeks.”

“Retiring? But you’re a young man.”

“I’m fifty-two. I intend to sheep-farm full-time.” He sighed. “I’m tired, Mrs. Hazzard. All I want to do is live out in the country and forget about cutbacks and sickness and death.”

I imagined him waking in the mornings to the sound of his
bleating livestock, comforted by the knowledge that he wouldn’t have to rise and put on his tweed vest and drive into the city where all his old patients are asking him to predict their finite futures and weeping and hugging their bed rails like children and threatening to die. I pictured him surrounded by his brainless flock, hemmed in by their thick warm bodies, sinking into their deep, oily wool the medical fingers that had once searched my old slack breasts, pressing down in concentric circles, feeling for cancer lumps.

After Dr. Pilgrim had gone, I returned to William. “You heard what he said?” I asked, seeing that he was alert, his attention fixed on my face. “I can’t bring you home, William,” I said firmly. “Not now. You must work harder to get better. I don’t see how I could manage it, otherwise. I’d be very tied down. You see, William, I’ve gotten used to getting out. It’s something you’ve always criticized me for, being too much a homebody and not branching out or experiencing anything new. Not growing. But now I go to the library. Didn’t you always say you wished I were like Goodie Hodnet, with her stacks of books? I’ve visited the parks and I’ve rediscovered the reservoir. And I
walk
, William. I walk without losing my way. It’s truly remarkable, my new sense of direction. I’ve got to know Simplicity quite well. And now at this time of year there are beginning to be concerts in the churches. Choirs. It’s been ages since I’ve heard singing. I’ve had nothing profound in my life, it seems, for a long time.

“And I feel so much healthier, William. The exercise has strengthened my heart and I don’t have the stiffness in my legs any more. Even my joints seem to work more smoothly. I look forward to every day now, which is not something I felt even when the children were here and you were endlessly unemployed and I was always so worried about where our next meal would come from.
And the strange thing is, William, that I don’t feel lonely at all. I have the characters on the news for company and I’m meeting people in the library and out on the streets and for the first time maybe in my whole life, I feel I’m part of the world.”

Pausing for a moment, I sensed such sadness in William’s pose that I hastened further to justify my position.

“But if you
were
to come home, how would I cope with the tubes and the emergencies or with your bottles of pills, now that I’m close to blind? Remember, William, how you always said I was useless in a crisis. I expect you’d find I have too small a brain to be your caregiver. And though there’s little flesh left on you, how would I shift your heavy bones around? At any rate, why you’d want to come home to me at all, I can’t imagine. Because we were never really companions, were we, William? I’m afraid if you came home, I wouldn’t be any more attractive a partner to you than I’ve been in recent years, even though I do now know who Gorbachev is and the meaning of the word
fatwa
and the location of Saltspring Island. But in the veterans’ home you’d be with precisely the kinds of people you’ve been sharing the mall benches with this past decade, while you redesigned the political landscape of the world. This is the very society you’ve craved, William, while, before your stroke, I sat at home in the kitchen nearly every morning, waiting out your absences and watching the minute hand on the clock swing round to noon, the burner glowing like a campfire under the teapot on dark winter days and the brew growing stronger and blacker while I listened to the minutes ticking by, and the sandwiches I’d made for lunch beginning to curl up at the edges. And finally I’d take up my own sandwich and bite into the egg salad and cringe as the bitter tea passed over my tongue and then I’d get up and stretch plastic wrap over your plate and drop the dill pickles
back in the brine. I’d go and watch my soap operas until you came home at your leisure and went about the house in your powerful silence, passing me in the hallway as though I wasn’t there.

“So for the moment, at least, William, I’m afraid you’ll have to go to The Cedars. Dr. Pilgrim says it’s very good. I’m sure he wouldn’t send you there if it weren’t. They’re professionals. You’ll find they’ll do a much better job with you than I ever could. And there will be televisions there, William, and being a veterans’ facility, I’m sure they’ll be tuned into no end of war movies and documentaries and at any hour of the day you’ll be able to see Winston Churchill looking like an aristocrat in his top hat and tails and promising us blood and toil and tears.”

There is a smell in chronic care wards of human waste, of urine and feces and perspiration. Each day now when I go home I immediately run a deep bath to cleanse myself, because the stink of this waste clings to me like a second skin, it sticks, film-like, to my clothes, hands, hair. Walking home this evening, anticipating the pleasure of slipping into my hot healing bath, I thought: What a relief it is to unburden oneself of the notion of love.

The bank manager swivelled round in his leather chair to look at me when I entered. He wore a fawn-coloured suit and a white shirt as bright as a light bulb. He seemed to me a very small man for such a large and important-looking chair. He told me his name was Mr. Burns. I sat down opposite him, my heart knocking against my sternum, beneath my coat my whole body moist with fear.

“The teller says you’ve asked to withdraw all your funds, Mrs. Hazzard,” he said.

“That’s right,” I said, the words coming out in little more than a whisper through my constricted throat.

“Everything?”

“Yes.”

“These are joint accounts, Mrs. Hazzard,” said the manager quietly, looking in a file.

“I’m aware of that.”

“Are you and your husband about to make a big expenditure?” he asked, observing me carefully. It was a corner office, its windows pressing hard on the sidewalk. Cars slid by silently on Main Street, pedestrians hurried past, an arm’s length away, beyond the thickness of plate glass.

“My husband is incapacitated in the hospital with a stroke,” I said, then bit my lip, realizing I shouldn’t have revealed this.

“I see,” he said, thoughtful. “You are of course entitled to withdraw all your funds, Mrs. Hazzard. It is, after all, your money. But your request is a little unusual. We like to make sure our clients are aware of the consequences of their actions. We feel it’s our responsibility. Sometimes it’s necessary to — to protect people
from themselves. Do you have a safe place to put this money? Are you planning on keeping it at home? There’s always the risk of burglary.” He was a neat, meticulous man, close to fifty. A faint, pleasant smell of lime aftershave floated across his desk.

“I’ll find a safe place for it.”