1
It was snowing again, like ack-ack in a dream, like slow-motion shrapnel. And thick enough to asphyxiate the streetlamps in front of the library, whose eerie rectangle interrupted the blank landscape like a redoubt along the smoky Somme. No wind ruffled this February evening. The snow fell with the absolute illusion of innocence upon the sills, upon the eaves, upon the nervous domesticity of a post-war winter village.
“An’ so to wrap it all up,” the Reeve was saying to the assembled councillors, “she’s an old, old lady who’s lived here for three generations; she’s got legal entitlement to the property if she’s willin’ to pay fair market-value; an’ she definitely wants to live out her days in peace in that rag-taggle shanty, whatever we think of it. I already asked our lawyers to find out a proper price. Any questions on item one?”
The worshipping hand of the junior Miss Robertson came to a breathless halt at the end of the Reeve’s remarks, certain there could be no further question to record. She took advantage of the pause in her note-taking to tilt her calf’s-eye upward in hopeless adoration. Hence she did not, as the Reeve himself did, notice that although there were no questions on the issue, the room was electric with anticipation, with secret understandings on the brink of disclosure. Neither the heat undulating from the floor-register (inconsiderately located beneath the table) nor the imperturbable silence of the snowfall against the night could distract the council from the matters of state before it. So palpable was the undercurrent that Half-Hitch inadvertently crushed a tailor-made in the trigger of his artificial thumb. Stubby Fielding’s rubber jaw sagged grotesquely. Sandy Redmond felt the Boer’s bayonet strike his thigh like a fish-knife. An improbably icy wind burred along Sunny Denfield’s cheek. Young MacIntosh’s flat feet ached with humiliation and regret. Canon Stokes struggled valiantly with the insurgency of his wife’s roast-beef supper.
“Then I’ll ask Sandy to speak to item two.”
The village grocer, whose own father had come to the Point with the railroad in 1862 and stayed to found a dynasty of shopkeepers (Sandy’s son, Red, now returned a hero from the War, was already a fixture in the business), rose and presented the report of the subcommittee for selecting a designer and builder for the proposed war memorial. As luck would have it – or Providence in the case of the Presbyterian Redmonds – they had been able to locate a man who could both design and build a monument to meet any specifications they wished. It turned out that he had done just that for three villages in Grey, two in Huron and one each in Middlesex and Kent Counties. His specialty, verified by references, was erecting impressive monuments – but simple and noble in design – in small towns at reasonable rates. If the stories told were true, it seems he had a grudge against big cities and ‘government’ types, and had devoted the last three years exclusively to building cenotaphs in underfunded villages that would outshine those overpriced calamities indulged in by the senior municipalities. The man’s name was Sam Stradler. He hailed from a hamlet near London. He had been a stonemason and tombstone carver before serving overseas. Once a site was chosen and the ice broke up, he would begin work – about mid-March or early April – and finish in six to eight weeks.
Approval was audible and unanimous. Miss Robertson recorded the verdict with a proud flourish. Sandy Redmond sat down. A feeling that something significant and abiding had been done suffused the meeting place. The snow emptied itself into the darkness outside.
Half-Hitch clicked his hickory thumb-and-forefinger and rose to speak to item three. Stubby Fielding and young MacIntosh, who had fidgeted and looked embarrassed during the earlier presentation by the Reeve, resumed their fidgeting. Stubby preferred the direct statement of an artillery barrage to all this oblique conniving, but he had been convinced by the devious Hitchcock of the necessity for secrecy. There were times , he allowed, when battle-plans had to be kept under wraps if the strategy itself was not to be jeopardized and the humane goals themselves forever compromised. Stubby had grunted assent and shut up. Horrie MacIntosh, on the other hand, was in no position to argue any side of the matter: he was the recruit, the cadet untested by battle and not yet sanctified by its scarring.
“Our committee’s reached a unanimous decision,” Hitchcock said rigidly from memory. “We explored every angle of the…the issue-at-hand, and we found only one spot – site – that meets all the requirements.” He fished the requirements out of the recall-box: “(1) central location, (2) flat land of at least one-quarter acre in size, (3) property owned by the village or available at nominal cost, and (4) ah –” He flipped the stuck card in his head. “Presence of shade trees.”
“Get on with it, Hitch!” barked the Boer veteran. “This ain’t church! No offense, Mort.”
The Reverend Mort, unaware that high drama was ravelling its sinuous subplots around him, took neither offense nor heed.
Half-Hitch had now irreparably lost his place. He plunged ahead recklessly. “We all agreed, all three of us, there was only one spot to fit the needs we set out here last meetin’. The spot we chose is in the dead-centre of town. It’s on a main street where the city-trolley passes every hour. It’s got a marvellous big shade tree, an’ shrubs an’ hedges to boot. You can see across the marsh to the docks an’ up to the dunes by the Lake from the back-end. An’ best of all, it’s almost owned by the village.”
The Reeve leaned forward in his chair. He now understood the edgy quiet during his earlier speech. His anger, alas, was tempered by the force of the logic in Hitchcock’s report. The only other vacant lot in the middle of town was the one right beside them; but it was the last of the railroad properties: a memorial on its ground would be the ultimate betrayal. Foolishly he had assumed they would choose the original site of the old Anglican Church where the cubscouts pitched their tents. He’d underestimated the opposition.
“I move,” Half-Hitch was saying through his smug smile, “we agree on the Coote property as a site for the monument, an’ begin legal proceedin’s to take back title.”
The motion passed.
2
Granny liked the snow the way it was tonight. Once, with Eddie on her knee and nothing but dark days ahead and only two small presents under the tree, she had watched the Christmas Eve snowfall through the child’s eye, and called it the snow of remembrance. Back then she had thought ‘someday I’ll be sitting in another place with times as bad as these and I’ll remember the wonderful gentleness of this falling without motive or design’. And here I am.
In the Carpenter’s yard she could see the outline of the spruce windbreak, shawled and scarved by the snow – white on green, shape lending shape, all voices hushed inward. This could be any of the snowfalls upon any of the spruces she had lived beside or under in the many seasons of her childhood, girlhood, womanhood, dotage, deathwatch. “Who wants to live to be old?” Cap said to her many times, his flesh wan and shivering after a bad bout. “What would you do with a useless body and all that time on your hands? Sit and remember when your elements used to work and your brain could count to three? How many good times can you re-live anyway before they’re worn out and you come to despise them and despise yourself for staying alive?”
She had no answer, then; neither of them had been old enough to speak from experience. Well, I’ll tell you now, she thought. It’s not the way you imagined. Yes, I live on my memories – what else is there? – but they are not summoned up like individual pearl buttons, like heirlooms, to be turned over in the hand and admired till the eyes water. It doesn’t work that way, Cap. Not for me. Some moments do come back almost whole, like Eddie and me watching the Christmas snow of 1897 with different versions of hope in our hearts. Like the snowy night of 1886 that was like this one except for the wind that blew through it like an invisible beam when Lucien and I rode out to find heaven on a one-horse sled. Or any of a dozen more – from parts of my life you never surmised – full of sweetness and pain of course, but more often marked by the exquisite surge of innocence against experience, by the raw edge of questions which remain more beautiful and durable than the answers we invent merely to stay alive. You would be astonished, Cap, to hear me talk – think – like this, use words in such a way. Then again perhaps you wouldn’t. In any case, you must take the blame for some of it. You maintained, didn’t you, that the world wouldn’t be a safe or sane place to live in if ever women were taught to read and write. But then you didn’t know Eddie, or his father. They taught me that poetry can be gossip made glorious by language. That would shock you. But Sophie knew so, she lived it and died for it. You saw in her only what your prejudices allowed.
And you’ve got no prejudices of course, you silly old coot, she said sharply to herself. Then laughed. You see, old darling, that is how the memory works, that is how I fill these hours before I am overtaken by exhaustion and the dread of the Night-Dream, the one I fear must have shaken you each day of those last years. Forgive me if I failed to acknowledge your anguish. Anyway, you see how the mind refuses to accept the denial of a present or future. I think of Eddie, of snow, of you, of Lucien Burgher, of Sophie’s battered face, of sweet Arthur – separately or together. They have voices, you know, like you; they can be talked to. They can speak with one another in the special existence I lend them, here on a February evening in 1922 with a snow falling that thinks it’s special too but is really the same one whose breathlessness drew a little girl’s wonder to her cabin window miles from this spot more than seventy years ago. You gave it all up too soon, old pessimist. I am alone. I am ready for death’s surprises, if he has any. But I am not lonely. I am still, after all these years, waiting for something to happen.
Like the stove going out, you day-dreaming old fart, she thought, shivering and shuffling over to the Quebec heater. It stared at her, one-eyed and glum. Against the protest of her rheumatism she shook the grates as vigorously as she could manage, but several intractable clinkers had lodged between the flanges. She’d have to get Sunny to clean out the firebox when he came over to tell her about the meeting. He had left her a fine white notepad on which to write out requests and things she needed. She was grateful, though it was very difficult at first to scrawl anything legible there. It wasn’t just the arthritis, she knew. Whatever had afflicted her throat had spread to her writing hand. But it was easier now to list the few supplies she needed for either Sunny or Wilf Underhill to take to Redmond’s or Turnbull’s. It made her feel better about possessing Arthur’s house, at last. They won’t think I’m completely batty. Just old. Maybe I’ll be allowed to die with a little dignity, she mused, trying to recall anyone she loved who had.
Now the good burghers and pewsters of the town would be able to pity her with a clear conscience. However, if they’d been able to observe her wrestling with the paper and kindling in a plugged stove with smoke polluting the chill of her front room, they’d have cried gleefully: “Poor old soul, used to be strong as an ox, you know, scrubbed floors in The Queen’s for years, but then age and arthritis gets the best of us all, don’t it. And of course she never did take care of herself, you know, livin’ in that drafty shack in the Lane all those years, an’ never settin’ foot in a church or a decent body’s house.” I prefer the children, she thought. They only think I’m a witch, an outcast – with status.
She felt pain firing through both her knees. She was on the floor among the spilled cinders and ash. The kindling had burned itself out, the smoke had escaped with the brief heat through the cracks in the walls. Had she blacked out? A tumour? Tiny strokes? She winced at the bruising in her knees and the scalding of tears. Get up. Get up. The room spun on the axis of a single candleflame in the front window. Lie down. Let it be.
The temporary blaze was taking the chill off quite nicely, and the hot tea warmed wherever it went. Granny pulled the kimono more snugly around her throat and continued her vigil at the snowy window overseeing the street. Arthur was such a sweet man, so different from the others. He loved to walk, as she did, with no aim or purpose other than the pleasures of being in motion in the woods or along the beaches or among the cattails or under the parliament of stars that had supervised conception and birth and all the rest. Often they would pull Eddie on his sled through snows like this over to the dunes, where he would fling himself into semi-flight down their slick slopes to the borderless prairie of the beach below. When they got home, after a brisk fire and some mulled wine – with Eddie snug in his cocoon – she would make slow mutinous love to Arthur. Always he was too shy, too untrusting of the tender impulses that throve in him, to initiate lovemaking. She would think of him, though she never told him so, as an instrument – say a curling rosewood mandolin – that she would rub and thrum till its music wakened and overwhelmed. “We shouldn’t, love, we’re too old, too ridiculous,” he’d murmur unconvincingly, and she’d say, “Keep your eyes closed, sweet; it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful in here.”
So rare in a man was that refined reticence, that rare combination of resignation and engagement, gentility and passion, music and masculinity that she – Cora Burgher – would have scoffed at the very notion; certainly Cap would have laughed out loud, and Sophie no doubt would have smiled indulgently and offered some devastating quip: “I know he’s sweet and kind and does the dishes, dearie, but has he got a dick or a doily down there?”
In a letter she wrote but never sent to Eddie, she said about Arthur: ‘He was the kind of man every woman should marry. As lovers only should we take the adventurers, the wanderers, the plunderers; and when we’ve taken our pleasure on them, we’ll turn them loose again to waste themselves upon the world’.
I’ve had my share of the other kind, she thought. And their children. They’re dead and gone, all of them: willing victims of whatever demons drive the male flesh to annihilation. And the innocents along with them. Eddie. Eddie, I can’t even say your name out loud. The gods that could have helped us are still in hiding. When Arthur left he took some of the earth’s music with him, but you were my last cause for hope. What am I doing here now? The gods won’t answer from their skulking-places. Even death has passed me by. Cap was right: waiting is not living.
You’re waiting for something to happen. Yes, of course. That’s it. I almost forgot.
She heard a commotion in her front yard and turned in time to see the blurred outline of Sunny Denfield, the puffing portliness of Mortimer Stokes and the loping strut of Harry Hitchcock. From the gait and bearing of these harbingers she recognized, from long and repeated experience, the peculiar footfall of officialdom. And the news it bore, she knew, was never good.
3
And Granny again dreaming Lily, dreaming the longago as if it were real or had actually happened or could happen again only differently so everything would be changed in the wake-up world, she was eight and she was alone under the moon and the shadows around her blurred into smoke when she touched them and the night-air was jarred and riven by a music that had no sound to it, no melody in it, only cadence and verberation and blood-thrumming titillation, she was wild with it and as her body’s bird-bones sang and sailed in their weightless jubilance, she was aware that the smoke-wreaths and shadow-substances about her were other souls twisting in the same silence, driven by the same yearnings towards the bliss of oblivion, and they shared a simultaneous cry of release and not-a-single-regret as the dark struck back, as the shadow reclaimed its dominion in the fallible flesh of all dancers young and old, native and alien and she awoke to find herself sleeping the sleep of the exhausted upon the shoulder of the Southener, the last of the Shawnees from the legendary battles of the war-with-the-States, his eyes half-lidded and undreaming and his arm around her more fatherly than she had ever known and in the clearing among the Pottawatomie wigwams around them they watched with their separate intensities and under the moon’s clairvoyance the midnight ceremony repeating itself before them as for the first-and-only time the virgin among the priests of her family and the ghosts of her ancestors and the wraiths of the children she would bequeath to the future, the shivering Pottawatomie girl-child with woman-needs bone-deep and thriving in her to be blossom and spur, and when all the chanting was done and all the fleshly transformations had taken place within their spheres, she was able to smile into the moon-varnished dark with the face of her new name, no longer White Blossom was she but Seed-of-the-Snow-Apple and all that was promised therein if summer should ever come or the darkness imbedded above the moon ever lifted itself from the dreamer’s eye…