Many of my most recent paintings, paintings that make up the series now universally referred to as The Erasures, are based on vivid fragments, on ragged-edged episodes from my own life and the lives of the others. Often the making of them is painful to me. The underpainting is inadequate because although the scenes painted within it are powerful, the information contained there is scant. Slicing into the lives of others, I have walked away with only disparate pieces; walked away with both permanent and fugitive colours, with distinguishable and vague shapes. But it is simply not possible to fit everything together with any real accuracy, despite my overdeveloped powers of recollection. Sara always attempted to give me her autobiography — whole. But I tore it apart, silenced her, tossed the parts of her narrative I felt I couldn’t use, like shredded paper, into the wind. I was constructing her, after all, in my paintings. I wanted no interference with the project.
Augusta Moffat was different. Although there was no attachment between us, I carry the whole of her life with me into every room I enter. I have not recomposed her. What I came to understand of her nature would simply not allow it. She was her own full canvas — we had no relationship. Almost everything I know about her I learned in the course of one long night in the winter of 1937. She unfurled her history in my presence not because she wanted to explain herself to me, or because she was trying to move me in any way, but simply because the story had to be told and there I was. I am certain she would have spilled her words into empty air had there been no one there to listen. When the need for disclosure is that fierce, one’s motives cannot be anything but pure. Augusta’s was the narrative that precedes a private gesture, a kind of review, I suppose, of everything that had led her to that moment.
It had to be spoken. And it has to be remembered. Entire.
That night while she talked I could see our dark bodies reflected in the large front window of the China Hall, each of us seated on either side of the counter. My own silhouette something I had come to know in other night windows; hers almost completely unfamiliar but gaining weight, substance, as the hours slid by.
Augusta was Georges woman. They treated each other with tenderness. One long winter night in the China Hall she told me the story of her life. There is nothing to modify, to obscure.
She had been raised on a farm northeast of Davenport, the eldest child and only girl in a family made up of what appeared to be a never-ending series of baby boys. Her brothers broke her dolls, soiled her embroidered handkerchiefs, interrupted her studies with their fights, spilled her bottles of rose water, and ate all the chocolates her father invariably gave her for Christmas. As a young child she had had to throw rocks and sticks to keep them from surrounding her on the way to school. Later she had never dared bring a suitor home for fear of the taunts, their tricks and jeers.
They jumped up and down on her bed, breaking the springs. They left a small pet pig in her closet. They wrestled in the front yard, flattening her first attempt at a flower garden. They caused even the oldest and most subdued of the calm workhorses to run away with her if ever she tried to ride one of them. Once, in her teens, when she had been out later than she ought to have been and was stealing carefully through the dark parlour in an effort not to wake her father, she opened the door to the stairwell and was met with a sudden cacophony. Pots and pans that had been tied together with a string and wound at one end around the doorknob came tumbling down the stairs towards her. Her parents would not allow her out after supper for a month while, night after night, the boys who were old enough to do so swaggered across the kitchen and out the door.
There was a swift river of male children running enthusiastically through the house all winter long. The younger boys were so dedicated to activity that they literally had to be tied to chairs and pushed towards the long kitchen table in order to finish their homework, while the older brothers were isolated in various rooms so that they would not fight. As the tribe increased, the pantry was locked and the key kept in Augusta’s mother’s pocket, otherwise the cupboard would be bare. For many years Augusta never experienced a full night when her sleep was not interrupted by a baby’s demanding cry.
And yet her love for her brothers was fierce, bright, and pure. She knew their bodies better than her own, had seen them saw and pitch stripped to the waist in the summer heat or slouch under coats into dark winter dawns towards barns and chores before school. She had sponged their hot skin when epidemics swept through their ranks, had bandaged knees and elbows, had combed lice from their hair. Because of them, before the age of puberty, she had experienced the full range of human emotions: grief, terror, loathing, loyalty, passion, and tenderness. If she had died before the age of twelve, it could have been said that her life had been almost full.
Although she could not imagine awakening in a house from which chaos was absent, the architecture of her own character in the face of all this was, not surprisingly, built around a desire for order and restraint. Privacy was an alien concept, but tidiness was not, and so the achievability of folded shirts and dusted shelves made her glad, frustratingly short-lived though these things were. Often the results of an entire Saturday of labour were undone in the half-hour before sundown, and she would be forced to watch, unhappy and powerless, as everything she had put together flew apart again.
Still, the truth was, this team of boys was the energy that drove her self into being, wrenching her out of sleep in the morning, keeping her alert all day, flinging her, exhausted, into bed at night. Unconsciously she attributed all change and each event to her brothers’ existence in her world, believed that without them the crops wouldn’t grow, the animals would not give birth, and that time would be suspended.
Among them, Fred was the only quiet boy. Two years younger than Augusta, he stayed close to her skirts, eager enough to be near her that he would stand on a stool and slowly, methodically dry the dishes that she had washed, or he would hold the dustpan when she swept up discarded flakes of cedar in the woodshed. Throughout her life she kept a picture of him in her mind; he was standing by her side on the long front porch that faced the gravel road. “That was the road,” she told me, “that would lead us both — all of us, actually — away from the farm, towards brutality.”
In the end, it seemed to her, that the road itself was a kind of weapon.
By the time she was ten, in 1905, Augusta’s domestic abilities were better than those of a female three times her age. Her skills with a needle, for example, or with utensils in the kitchen, were breathtaking. I could imagine that each task she undertook was completed with the same earnest serenity, her small face calm, on occasion, radiant.
In early morning, while the boys were hollered at and often shaken from their beds by their father, Augusta would already be downstairs with her mother, her dark hair combed and pulled straight back from her forehead, her two braids tracing the curve of her back as she kneaded dough or bent over the oven to remove a loaf of bread. I imagine she would have loved the talcum texture of flour, how it would make her pale hands paler and cling to the seams of her fingers; this and the brightness and sharpness of needles entering, and emerging from, cloth.
Sometimes her mother, Kaziah Moffat, would allow Augusta to pull shirt after shirt from the perilous rollers of the wringer, while she herself cranked the handle round and round. Then Augusta would take the damp garments out to the platform her father had built beside the clothesline and pulley, pin the clothes to the rope, and run them out to dry in the wind. Occasionally one or two of her own cotton pinafores or dark calico dresses would appear among the more masculine laundry, and Augusta would like the look of this; her ghost family performing in the air, the landscape of her own farm as far as she could see.
Her father barely noticed her, she was so quiet, so predictable, and he so busy moulding his battalion of rowdy boys into dependable farm hands. Once in a while he would stop and look at her and his expression would be one of surprise, as if he had forgotten, or couldn’t quite believe, that he had helped to bring something this feminine into the world. Then he would speak to her respectfully, as he might have spoken to a stranger whose good opinion he sought, asking her about her school work or about the Bible passages he insisted all his children memorize. He would sometimes praise her, but not lavishly for fear of encouraging vanity, and two or three times a year he would take her hand and press a dime into her cool, dry, curiously unchildlike palm.
She loved him, of course, though she would never come to really know him. When she was twelve she gave him a cross-stitch sampler she had made for Christmas. It was decorated with rigid flowers, a perfectly symmetrical house, the alphabet, the numbers one to ten, and a verse she thought he would approve of:
“Fragrant the rose is but it swiftly fades in time.
The violet sweet, but quickly past its prime.
White lilies hang their heads and soon decay,
And winter snow in minutes melts away.
Such and so withering are our early joys,
Which time and sickness speedily destroys.”
On Christmas morning, Edward Moffat held the piece of unframed fabric in his large, calloused hands and read all the words of the verse, his mouth silently forming each syllable. Then he looked at his only daughter, glanced in the direction of her mother, who was pregnant with their seventh child, then stared at his daughter again. Augusta met his gaze with solemn expectancy. It had taken her two years to complete the picture and the words. There was not a tangled thread among the stitches. Her own name was at the bottom with her age and the date, Xmas 1907, and then the message, “To Father.”
This was not an unusual gift, nor was the cross-stitch an unusual pastime for girls (though its popularity had waned somewhat with the advent of the present century), and thousands of these projects hung, proudly framed, on parlour walls all over Ontario. The verse was taken from a booklet entitled “Sayings Suitable for Samplers,” which could be got, along with “The Women’s Institute Cookbook,” from the Methodist Church at any bake sale or bazaar. Yet when Augusta’s father read it, then read it again, the fog of habit and toil was swept from his mind and it seemed in its bleakness to carry with it a vague, but nonetheless terrible, portent. Life’s something miserable for girls and women, he thought, for the first time in his life.
To Augusta, at whom he was still staring, he said bluntly, “Thank you for this, you have done it well.” Then he cleared his throat and announced, “You will go outdoors, for two hours a day, twice after school and once on Saturdays.” He paused, then added two more words, though they probably sounded foolish, even in his own ears. “To play,” he said.
“What shall I play at?” asked Augusta gravely.
“That,” said her father, glaring at the boys who were noisily demanding equal privileges, “you must discover for yourself.”
“I was not at all happy with this decision,” Augusta said to me, “but my father prided himself on never changing his mind, and his word was law. It would have been pointless to argue and, besides, it would never have crossed any of our minds to be that impertinent.”
She told me her father, Edward Moffat, was known as a taciturn man but was, nevertheless, much given to the telling of family legends during the evening meal and had often explained at his quiet table (the children were not permitted to speak unless spoken to) that no Moffat within living memory had ever changed his mind. The children knew that it was the Moffat men he referred to and that this statement included all of their uncles, their great-uncles, their grandfather, and their withered and aged great-grandfather, all of whom lived on the Moffat farms sprinkled liberally throughout Northumberland County. Because Augusta had told her mother that she had no wish to go out to play, and Kaziah Moffat had passed this information on to her husband, Edward Moffat felt compelled to remind his children about the Moffat men.
“They never change their minds,” he said at the supper table a few days after New Year’s. “Their word is law.”
“What about great-uncle John?” asked Fred suddenly. He was ten years old and even more taciturn than his feared father, but he loved Augusta and wanted her inside with him. Augusta and the boys turned to look at him in amazement: he had spoken without being spoken to. An awful silence fell over the table. “Didn’t he change his mind and come back from the Klondike?” continued the child weakly, his voice barely a whisper.
“Did I ask you a question?” Edward Moffat peered at the boy from under a severe ridge of thick dark eyebrows. “Did I speak to you?”
Fred stared at the mashed potatoes on his plate. Augusta reached for his hand under the table.
“Fred,” said his father, “I’m speaking to you — I’m asking you a question now. I am asking you if I spoke to you.”
“No, sir. I forgot, sir.”
“Don’t forget again.”
“No, sir.”
Edward Moffat picked up his knife and fork, and his relieved wife and family reached for their own utensils. He chewed thoughtfully and then laid his knife and fork back on the table. His pregnant wife and silent children followed suit, all except for baby Cecil, who banged his spoon once or twice on his mug.
“Fred,” said Edward Moffat, “do you remember what Uncle John said before he departed for the Klondike?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, what did he say?”
“He said, ‘I shall never return.’”
Edward Moffat had begun to eat again, as had the rest of the family. Except Fred, who was recovering from being spoken to.
“And Fred,” his father continued, “do you remember what happened to Uncle John after he changed his mind and returned from the Klondike?”
“Yes, sir,” he said. “A horse kicked him in the head.”
“And then?”
“And then he walked slowly like, across the field, through the gate, up the walk, through the back door, through the woodshed, past the kitchen, into the parlour, where he lay on the sofa and died.”
Their father had one more question for Augusta’s favourite brother. “And what did he say before he died, Fred?”
“‘I should never ’ov changed my mind. I should never ’ov left the Klondike.’”
Edward Moffat gazed meaningfully at each of his boys in turn, including baby Cecil. “Let that be a lesson to you,” he said.
“And so,” Augusta explained to me, “when school started again after Christmas, I was dispatched twice during the week out into the dark, cold winter late afternoons. On Saturdays I remember looking out the window with dread while I ate lunch, knowing that soon I’d have to be out there in all that snow, all that snow and nothing to do.”
At first she would merely stand stunned, quite still, inside the confines of what her mother called “the yard.” She did not weigh enough to break the crust on top of the snow so she was able to walk back and forth alongside pickets that had been as high as her waist in summer, pickets that now only reached her ankles. What drew her to the fence was that it was connected at each end to the house and so was soothing to her mind in that the territory inside it could be thought of as just another chilly room. Augusta spent much of her time remarking to herself that on Saturday afternoons her shadow on the snow was two times taller than she was, that after school it grew to ridiculous lengths as a result of the setting sun, and that on dark days or as supper approached, her shadow grew in the opposite direction, as she was lit from behind by the wonderful lamps in the warm house.
Once it became dark, Augusta was able to look with longing directly into this comfortable domestic world from which she had been banished. Fred sometimes waved to her from the kitchen window, where he kept watch, not wanting to let her out of his sight. The other boys made faces through the glass or scratched their initials in the upper panes where frost had formed. Sometimes they called her names when they were forced outside to shovel a path through the accumulating snow to the back door. Augusta eventually learned that it was necessary to keep moving, otherwise her hands and feet would become unbearably cold. Gradually, like a caged animal pacing in a pen, she beat a deep circular path around the edges of the yard.
Her father passed her on weekdays as he returned from the back acres where he carried on a small lumber business in the winter. He would walk right up the path one of the boys had shovelled and often not notice Augusta at all, such a shadow she was in the dusk. But, as the weeks went by and the days lengthened, she became, of course, more visible, and one day he actually stopped and stared at her with that odd combination of surprise and tenderness that visited his face whenever he looked at her. Then, as he remembered why she was outside, his expression changed and he asked her what she was playing.
Augusta looked at her brown boots on the white snow. She always told the truth. “I am playing at nothing, Father.”
Her father turned to give directions to one of the boys who was to take the two draughthorses into the barn. Words concerning water and straw and harnesses were exchanged. Several minutes passed before Edward Moffat turned to his daughter again.
“You say you are playing at nothing?”
“Yes, Father.” And then hopefully, “Do I have to play, Father? Do I have to stay out here?”
Edward Moffat considered Augusta’s question for a few moments. Then he said firmly, “Yes, I have not changed my mind. I know what’s good for you. You must learn to make your own play.” He looked at the circular track in the snow. “Why, you have not even left the yard,” he exclaimed. “Go to the edge of the woods or down in the meadow. You should go to the other side of the barn, near the creek, then the playing will be more natural-like. It will just come to you.”
Augusta’s heart sank.
“You will go where your mother can’t see you from the house,” he continued in a commanding tone. “And the playing will just come to you.”
Two days later, with great reluctance, Augusta trudged out behind the barn and then followed the lane that ran beside the creek. She stopped just short of the woods into which her father so often disappeared on winter days, looked down the white path that bisected the two dark armies of fir trees, and thought about play.
Other girls had dolls; hers had all been broken by her brothers. Some of the children she knew at school spoke of game boards and dice and even, occasionally, of cards. These were all considered immoral by her Methodist father. There were books — schoolbooks, almanacs, The World’s Great Exposition of Civilization, and World of Strange Wonders — but they were not to be removed from the house.
The early March snow, heavy now, dense and wet because of rising temperatures, was beginning to seep through her boots. Her socks were damp.
“I will not play,” she said aloud, though no one heard her. “I won’t do it.”
She bent down, picked up a handful of snow, ate some of it, and threw the rest at the trunk of a cedar tree, where it stuck, making a white circle on brown bark.
“Anyone who plays is stupid,” she whispered angrily.
She squatted, made another more solid ball of snow that she rolled across the ground, watching the way it grew as she pushed it in front of her. Soon she was standing beside a large white sphere almost as big as she was.
I have made something, she thought.
Half an hour later she had constructed seven of these globes and had positioned them side by side so that they made a kind of wall with open triangles at their tops and bottoms. She filled in these areas with more and more snow until her mittens were soaked and her hands were burning.
By the time she heard the dinner bell she had completed a second wall at a right angle to the first and was standing a few yards away admiring her white handiwork in the grey light.
She was hugely pleased with herself.
I will come back tomorrow, she thought, completely forgetting that tomorrow was Sunday and that she would be forbidden both work and play.
“We could make a snow sculpture tonight,” I said to Augusta. Although the streetlights were still lit, because of the storm I could barely see Victoria Hall, which stood adjacent to the China Hall. A thin coating of snow was beginning to inch its way up the large front window. “God knows there’s enough of it out there.”
“Not one like mine,” said Augusta. “We couldn’t make one like mine.”
In the end, it took Augusta four and a half sessions to finish her snow house. She had remembered to leave a space for the doorway and had entered and exited several times. It wasn’t until she had completed the roof — which was made from scrap boards she had found behind the barn — that she realized she had no window. She crouched in the dim interior, on a floor of packed snow, and thought. If she returned to the woodshed to fetch a shovel, the boys would want to know what she was up to, follow her back to this spot, and gleefully smash her walls. This was her house; she was the only one who knew about it. It was hidden by a clump of cedar. No one could see it from the farmhouse. She imagined she was the only one who had ever thought to make something like this. She wanted it to remain unwitnessed, to have it all to herself.
Using a stick, she dug through a wall, first from the outside in, then from the inside out. This project took her the better part of an hour. The snow had settled in recent days, and hardened, and there were thick inexplicable pieces of ice here and there that made the going difficult.
When the light finally broke through, it was in the form of a single beam thrown from the intense orange sun. Augusta had thought to create a west-facing window. It was always going to be afternoon in her house so the light was always going to be perfect. She enlarged the window as much as possible with the stick, admired the view, squinting, her face taking on the colour of the sun, which was by now quite low. Then, in the last half-hour of perfect light, she rolled several large balls of snow through her door and constructed one white armchair, finishing it just as she heard the sound of the dinner bell travelling across the field to fetch her home.
Augusta returned to her snow house two days later after school. She had every intention of making a snow bed, a snow table, was, in fact, designing these pieces of furniture in her mind as she walked the path behind the barn. When the small structure came into view, Augusta noticed with pleasure that her roof of boards had disappeared under four or five inches of fresh snow, making the whole house white, as if it had always been that way. Though it was now late March, they were experiencing what her father called a cold snap, and the snow was not as manageable as it had been in recent weeks. There was a stiff wind that made white wavelike drifts in the meadow and that cut through Augusta’s coat. She lowered her head so as not to hit it on the doorway and entered her snow house.
“There was a grey girl,” Augusta said, looking directly at me to gauge my response. “A grey girl sitting in the white chair.”
Concealing my bewilderment, I nodded. I wanted her to continue.
She must have blown in through the window, was Augusta’s first thought. She was startled — how could she not be? — but she was not as startled as she should have been and this intrigued her. Augusta squatted near the window and studied this grey girl. She was quite beautiful and older, more grown up than Augusta. Her hair was so fair it was almost white, the skin on her hands and face a little darker. Narrow drifts had settled in the folds of her blue-grey skirt, as if she had sat very still on the snow chair all day long. She had breasts under her grey-blue bodice, Augusta was certain of this.
The grey girl didn’t seem at all surprised to see Augusta, and she didn’t appear to be uncomfortable with the way Augusta was staring at her. She just sat, entirely still, in the white chair. It was a sunny day but, because of the wind, curtains of snow were entering through the window. Occasionally the grey girl’s face was obscured, but it always came into focus again when the wind died down.
“I am quite comfortable here,” said the grey girl at last. “And you are too.”
Yes, thought Augusta, I am. “I like houses,” she announced, then wondered why she had said this.
“Yes, you do,” said the grey girl. “I myself live in this house,” she continued, “but you may visit whenever you like.”
“No,” said Augusta, “only Saturday afternoons and Tuesdays and Thursdays after school. My father never changes his mind.”
“No, he doesn’t,” agreed the grey girl.
Augusta could think of nothing else to say. She had decided that the girl might be eighteen years old, or even older. There were no mittens on her hands and only a dark-blue cape on her shoulders, but she didn’t seem to be cold.
“I’ve been waiting,” said the grey girl, “for a long, long time.”
“All day long,” said Augusta.
“Longer than that.”
“Longer than that,” said the grey girl. “I’ve been waiting for twelve years. I may have to wait for ten more.”
Augusta said nothing. The grey girl’s voice seemed to be scolding her in some way. But when she looked into her eyes, which were more blue than grey, she saw they were filled with kindness, happiness.
The following week the snow softened and Augusta was able to construct some additional furniture for her house. The table, the bed, a second chair facing the first, which allowed for conversation, and one side table on which she placed a solid white vase. Sometimes the grey girl was there, sometimes she was not. Often she did not appear until Augusta had stopped working and had collapsed into her own chair.
“I’ve been here all along,” the grey girl would say as she came into focus in front of Augusta’s eyes.
One day when the snow was soft enough for Augusta to be able to make several bowls and even a sort of teapot for the grey girl, a robin perched on the outside of the window ledge and looked inside inquisitively. And then, the next Saturday as she approached the snow house, Augusta had to admit to herself that it had begun to lose its shape.
“Don’t worry,” said the grey girl as Augusta entered an interior filled with a kind of slow rain, “one or the other of us will be back. Maybe both.”
The following week the snow house collapsed. Two weeks later there was not a trace of it left. Augusta turned thirteen, just a few weeks later, in May of that year. On her birthday her father gave her a gold locket with the initial “A” engraved on it. After she had opened the gift, thanked him for it and gave him a formal kiss, he ordered her to remain inside from then on, to help her mother and to concentrate on her school work, housework, and needlework.
“In case you think I have changed my mind,” Edward Moffat said to his daughter, “you are entirely mistaken. You are a young lady now and young ladies don’t play. If you were still a child, you would go outside on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.”
For just a moment Augusta envisaged her own thin reflection in the circular lake that had been left behind for several days after the snow house had melted. Clouds mirrored there had sometimes taken on the shape of the grey girl, but the image had dissolved as she looked at it.
“I didn’t think you’d changed,” she said, then paused. She was going to add the words “your mind” to the sentence, but in the end she let them go. “I didn’t think you’d changed at all,” said Augusta to her smiling father.
“Did you ever see the grey girl again?” I said to Augusta. I could hardly believe that I had asked the question without irony, but there it was.
She had moved down to the front of the China Hall while she was talking, was now searching the dark, empty street, looking, I thought, for some sign of George.
“Yes,” she said, “but not until the war.”
“Was she a ghost, was she someone who was haunting you?”
“Yes, no …. She was someone who was going to haunt me. For a time, though, she was very real.”
By now I was genuinely astonished. “She was going to haunt you?”
“Look,” said Augusta, walking back towards me and holding on to something near her throat. “Here is the locket. I have worn it every day since my father gave it to me. There is a picture of my father inside, if you’d like to see it.” She slipped a thumbnail into the seam at the edge of the tiny golden heart.
He didn’t look at all the way I’d imagined him from Augusta’s story. His face was narrow. He looked thinner than I expected, less sure of himself.
“He was thinner and less sure,” said Augusta when I remarked on this. “The photo was taken after the war.”