AUNTIE GLAD lived across the street in a bungalow that could have been the twin of my mother’s. The same white siding, the same slope to the roof, the same narrow verandah. At ninety-five, she was the eldest in their family, and of seven siblings, she would be the last one left. Like my mother, Glad was severely independent, living alone since her husband had died over thirty years before. Recently, though, she’d begun losing track of time. The day of the week, the year, even the seasons seemed to slide into one another like water pouring from the pump into a half-full pail.
During my aunt’s years of canning and preserving, on the labels of her jars of fruit, jams and jellies, she’d note in pen and ink a significant happening from the day. On the glass jar glowing a burgundy-red in her cupboard, the label said, “August 12, 1999, Chokecherry Jelly. Frieda Fitch broke her hip.” On a taller jar of saskatoons on her cellar shelf, she’d printed, “July 21, 1980. Jock MacPherson died in bed,” and on a stubby sealer, brown inside, “September 8, 1972. Mincemeat. Russia 5, Canada 3.” She’d also kept journals over the years, starting in 1932 when she was a young woman. Most of the entries were as brief as her labels, the thin books full of the weather and simple daily tasks. “Went to the Yuricks for water today. Stopped for coffee.” Or, “Hens not laying. One egg this week. Rusty and I played crib for it.” Or, “Had a bath,” an event important enough to record every time. In the journal for 1948, on May 24 she wrote, “Peggy had a baby girl”—those five words alone on the page, no other entry for the rest of the year about the newest member of the family. I was that baby. My aunt’s unadorned notation marked the written beginning of my long relationship with her, with my mother and with words.
HOW CLEARLY the scene unwound, burned into the oldest part of my brain. Going down the wooden steps into our dirt cellar (was I four?) to get a jar of pickles. The descent came back detail by detail—my little-girl shoes, the sundress I wore out to play, my hand clutching the smooth railing. I had to be careful; there was a gap between each step where the dark poured out. The cellar was an open mouth dug into the earth. Outside, there was a small wooden door you could lift if you were as big as my brother and crawl inside and no one would ever find you.
Alkali grew through the cellar’s damp walls like a poisonous white mould. And the smells were funny there. Something sweet, something rotten, something growing. The bare light bulb burned above me, its long string hanging just within my reach. Water made noises in the cistern even when it wasn’t raining and nothing inside its tin walls should have been moving. I was sure I heard the lapping of waves, as if a blunt, fishlike creature had surfaced and was blindly swimming for the light.
To get the pickles, I had to walk across the dirt floor on the sheet of cracked linoleum, past the bin where potatoes stretched their thin arms through the slats to pull you in. The only good thing was the shelves loaded with preserves, the crabapples and saskatoons casting their own soft glow, ripe sun trapped inside glass. I was on my toes, my hand reaching for the jar, when suddenly I heard a scuffle near the bin. A lizard scuttled from the dark, then stopped in the middle of the floor and stared. I ran to the steps and screamed for Mom. Down she came, apron flapping, a butcher knife in her hand. She stepped on the lizard’s tail, stabbed it in the back, opened the furnace door and threw it in. How fierce she was, how strong! This is my first memory, I told Patrick, the first picture of my mother. All my life I’ve carried this image of her bravery, her lack of hesitation, the strange blood on her hands.
“But Lorna,” Patrick said, “it wouldn’t have been a lizard. They aren’t any in Saskatchewan. It was probably a salamander. Remember you were four and it would’ve looked big to you. Your memory’s playing tricks.”
How I argued for memory, the green body writhing on the knife, the boldness of my mother’s hands, the flames dancing on the black door of the coal furnace as she swung it open on its big hinges and slammed it shut. A lizard. At least a foot long.
“Phone your mother,” Patrick said. “Ask her how big it was.”
I dialled the number I’d been dialling all my life. “Mom,”
I said, “remember that time in the cellar? You stabbed a lizard in the back and threw it in the furnace?”
“What are you talking about?” she said. “You must’ve been dreaming. I never would’ve done that.”
Her response stunned me into silence.
She must have forgotten, I thought, or her battle with the dragon was so frightening she’d had to bury it deep in her mind where she couldn’t call it back. Nothing I said on the phone convinced her.
“You were always such an imaginative child,” she said.
That scene in the cellar, as much as anything in my childhood, shaped how I saw my mother—her courage, her invincibility. Years later I came across a passage from the Talmud. If I’d known it then, it might have made me feel better when she insisted I’d been dreaming. I could have replied, “I am yours and my dreams are yours. I have dreamed a dream and I do not know what it means.”
THE MAY of her eighty-eighth birthday, my mother was not strong enough to clean her windows. By July she couldn’t pick her peas or dig potatoes, though only two months earlier she’d planted a garden huge enough for two big combines to park side by side. I thought a good death for her would be to fall between the rows; when she didn’t answer the phone that day, a friend would find her among the tall peas. She was not strong enough to walk the half block to the park as she had done the week before, leaning into me, not strong enough to make her meals or to pull the wide blue blinds down in the morning in the verandah to keep out the sun. One day she told me she couldn’t dress herself. She perched on the edge of the bed, and I asked her to raise her bum so I could pull on her underwear, then the summer shorts she’d chosen for the heat. She didn’t need to tell me she was strong enough to die. I could see it in her face, in the brown hand that clawed my forearm when she pulled herself slowly to her feet. She was not just getting off the bed but starting her difficult climb, rung by rung, up the invisible ladder to the sun.
ONE REASON she was ready to go, my mother said, was that she could finally leave her sister Glad behind. What a relief! Glad had been a burden since she’d moved in across the street, Mom having to do her bills, mail her letters, buy her groceries and sometimes cook her meals. That April, even though my mother’s illness had sapped her of energy, she’d done Glad’s spring cleaning after she’d finished her own. And Glad was never appreciative. All their lives she’d found fault with my mother, and she’d carried her nastiness from childhood into their adult relationship. I kept telling Mom that she was too old to take care of her sister, but Glad was in her nineties, she said, and her mind was going. Over the last few years she’d had a number of mini-strokes. My mother had to remind her to go to the doctor, to see her hairdresser for her weekly shampoo, to put her meat in the fridge and throw away the moulding leftovers. People kept stealing from her, Glad told my mother: money from her wallet, an old rubber garden hose, her hearing aid and glasses, one day a sheet of oatmeal cookies she hadn’t baked. Mom said her sister had always surmised things. Childless, Glad explained to the hairdresser that her mother had sewed her up when she turned eleven, stitched her shut with a long red thread. The gypsies showed her mother how to do it. “Grandma was a good sewer,” Mom said to me, “but she didn’t do that.” Glad’s husband was sterile because he’d had the mumps. The town doctor had warned her of the problem before the wedding and advised her to back out before it was too late.
When they were kids, Glad kept her siblings under control with a horsewhip and tattled to their strict father when he came in from the fields for supper. Because of her snitching, usually one of them, though the meal was sparse, had to go without the rice pudding Grandma made for dessert every day of the week. Not even any raisins in it, just white rice and milk with cinnamon sprinkled on the top. Grandma baked it in the oven in the big enamel pan they used later to wash the dishes and, once a week, to wash their hair.
“WHEN I SEE your dad again,” Mom said, “we’re going to go skating.” So far, that was the most astonishing thing she’d said about her readiness to go. After all they’d been through, after all the difficulties his drinking and selfishness had caused, that was what she saw them doing when they met sixteen years after his death. I caught a sob in my throat when she told me that. When she saw Dad again, they were going skating.
MY MOTHER never spoke badly of her parents. Her silence was a pact she’d signed in blood, like many of her generation. No use complaining; there were worse off than you. She’d told me about being sent at five to the farm down the road, to live with the Winstons. For the next ten years, she was their slave child.
One of her tasks was to pull weeds from the field where the Winstons had planted their crop. When we drove near Success one August, my mother pointed at the yellow flowers in the ditch. “See,” she said, “they’re sunflowers and they grow in the gumbo.”
“I think they’re brown-eyed Susans, Mom.”
“I don’t care what you call them. I hate them, they’re what I had to pull out day after day in the heat.” I’d never heard that detail of her story before.
There’s a photo of my mother around age six with her siblings and her parents. It must have been taken one of the times she was allowed back home. Behind them, the dust settles just for the time it takes the camera to catch the scene and its gawky, bird-boned children. Her hair’s “straight as a board,” her dress shapeless. She has no shoes, same as her brothers and sisters, and she doesn’t smile. She never smiles in any photograph taken of her and her family.
“I must learn a new way of weeping,” the Peruvian poet César Vallejo wrote. For now, I thought, the old way would have to do.
ONE OF THE sweetest memories from my childhood is the smell of freshly baked bread wafting through the porch door as I came into our yard from school. Mom learned to bake her bread at the Winstons. Too short to punch it down, she stood on a stool at the kitchen table, her fists pummelling. If the bread didn’t turn out, she didn’t get any supper, and after the others had eaten and she’d done the dishes, she had to start again, mixing the sugar, water and yeast, adding the liquid to the big bowl of flour, staying awake until the bread had risen, punching it down, letting it rise a second time, punching it down again, then putting it in the oven, and finally, the house in darkness, sliding its pans onto a wooden board to cool. She kept herself from sleeping by standing up, trying to balance on one leg, then the other. Even then, she dozed off like a horse on its feet, and the bread would have burned if something hadn’t made her jerk awake. Mrs. Winston’s yelling down the stairs, the tolling of the hours from the tall clock in the hallway, the image of her mother waking her up in the early morning to pick berries before the sun got too hot.
THE FAMILY took care of Mom at her house in Swift Current. We were a small group, just my brother, Barry, his wife, Linda, Patrick and me. We took turns coming from our homes, theirs in Cochrane, Alberta, and ours on Van–couver Island. Everything had happened fast. I’d arrived at her house on June 5, planning to drive her to her grandson’s wedding in Calgary. On June 7 in the morning she had a colonoscopy, part of a regular checkup, which revealed a large tumour; by the afternoon we found out the cancer spotted her liver and had spread to her lymph nodes; the next morning she was under the scalpel. When the doctor told her he had to operate to remove part of her bowel, she said, “Oh, but we have a wedding to go to.”
“We’re not going to the wedding now, Mom,” I said. It was the first time during her illness that her eyes had looked frightened, their blue blurred like startled water.
I was alone with her the week of her surgery. They wanted to take out the tumour, or at least part of it, to prevent the bowel from blocking completely. Pre-op, she told the nurses the last time she’d been in the hospital—the same hospital, as it turned out—was to give birth to me. Maybe because she’d been amazingly healthy all her life, even when she’d started losing weight and energy we thought she’d get better. Back in the winter she’d been diagnosed with diabetes; she’d be her old self soon, we believed, back to aqua exercises three times a week, meeting with her friends and single-handedly running a house and a big garden once her sugar levels got sorted out. No one, including her, had expected cancer. “At least I know what I’m going to die of,” she said. “I always wondered about that.”
Afraid I might never see her again, I sat with her before the operation, held her hand and choked out the words, “You are my shining light.”
“And you’re still my little girl,” she said, “my skinny little girl who I couldn’t get to eat.” People would stop her on the street and ask why I was so big-eyed and thin. What was she feeding me? The truth was I’d eat almost nothing but bacon. Outside the porch on a wooden chair she’d leave pieces for me to snatch as I flew by like some wild child, not wanting to come in from playing. Who else could tell me that? Who but my mother held those small pieces of my childhood? Where would they go when she was gone?
It rained heavily the morning of her operation, as if the sky were the source of the tears pouring out of me. I went for a run for the hour and half it would take, my shoes pounding through puddles, and part of me, for her sake, wished she’d die on the table. No matter how the operation turned out, the liver cancer was devouring her from the inside out. There was no treatment, no cure, no lizard to stab and throw into the fire. Alone in her house in the shower, I started screaming as the spears of water hit my scalp and broke over me. Mom, mom, mom, mom! A yowl rose from my gut, my bowels, my womb, raw as a birth cry but with no hope in it, a maddened howl, a roar, the water a wailing wall shattering around me. Unsyllabled, thoughtless, the cry rose from the oldest cells in my body. I hadn’t known grief could be so primal, so crude. The violence shook me. When it stopped, I fell to my knees in the shower, and the water called to the water in me; I wanted to melt, to run down the drain and under the city to the creek and then to the river thirty miles away. Mom, mom, mom, mom!
ON A HIGH frozen river, clouds piled like snow along the banks on either side, my mother and father are skating. The blades of their skates slice into the ice, their thighs strong and muscular. Arm in arm, they stride forwards, push, slide, push, slide, their faces flushed with cold and happiness. It is long before the drinking starts, long before my brother and I are born—and long after. That winter, the wisps of cloud I saw streaking the hard blue sky after the first night of freeze-up would be their joyous exhalations, their breaths intermingling as they glided down the glassy river somewhere past the moon.
THROUGHOUT MOM’S illness, Auntie Glad drove me crazy. She phoned at least five times a day. When I’d tell her Mom couldn’t talk, she was lying down, Glad asked, “What’s wrong with her? Sleeping at this hour!”
“She’s sick,” I said for the hundredth time. “She’s not going to get better.”
“Peggy’s sick? I didn’t know that.”
I told you, Glad, I told you and told you and told you. Some days I had to repeat myself three or four times in one phone call because she wasn’t wearing her hearing aid. I said the words I didn’t want to say over and over again, my voice breaking with weariness and anger.
During one of her calls, I suggested she start thinking about moving to a place that could provide her with care. She wasn’t able to keep track of things, and Mom wouldn’t be able to help her any more.
“I’ll die if I leave this house,” she said.
“Well,” I said, echoing my mother, “you have to die sometime.”
I was ashamed to feel so little compassion. I just wanted her off my back, and I didn’t want her bothering my mother, who refused to talk to her. “Tell her I’m asleep,” Mom said when the phone rang.
“At least get a housecleaner,” I told Glad. She had already fired two that year for pilfering things—a garden rake, a small roaster, her underwear. Mom had usually found the missing loot later, the panties in the cutlery drawer, for instance, but there was no convincing Glad that people weren’t thieving.
She exploded, her voice suddenly hard and strong. “I’d rather be up to my ass in my own shit than let someone steal from me!”
I hung up the phone.
AT TIMES, I sensed impatience in the voices of my friends, slight yet noticeable as knots in a string. After all, as Mom said, I’d had a mother for a long time. Many people I knew had lost theirs decades earlier. Sixty million people die every year, half of them children under five. How could I explain that this impending death felt so huge it left me breathless, as if a rogue train was roaring out of the earth and bearing down on me, its round light blinding me to everything but sorrow, no one in the engine room, no warnings at the crossings, no one pulling on the brakes? Of the sixty million people who’d die that year, one of them would be my mother.
THE WINSTONS had two daughters. One of them was away at boarding school; the other, a few years older than my mother, did nothing to help around the house. The slave child spared her from the work most farm kids had to do. “She just watched me,” Mom said.
My mother took meals by herself on a backless chair in the summer kitchen even when summer had passed. Besides baking bread, pulling weeds and doing dishes, the little girl my mother was cleaned the outhouse, limed the walls and scrubbed the floors. She cried on her first Christmas there, she told me, because they wouldn’t let her go home. Angry that she wouldn’t stop, they took away her present before she could open it.
The Winstons also held her back from grade 1—she didn’t go until she was seven. No one had taught her how to count from one to ten or say the alphabet. No one had read stories to her or showed her pictures in a book.
Her first day in the one-room school, my mother raised her hand like everyone else when the teacher asked who could recite their ABCs. He picked her out. She sat in silence, kids turning in their desks to stare at her. Glad, who was eight grades ahead, walked to the front of the classroom and told the teacher her little sister had lied. Peggy didn’t know anything.
ONE MORNING Mom looked at her ankles, which resembled the tiny bumps on poplar twigs where smaller twigs have broken off. She’d lost forty pounds in three months, and she was under five feet tall. “Poor little fellows,” she said of her ankles. “They’ve disappeared, poor little things.”
TO THE END of her life, my mother had a terrible fear of the storms that raged across the prairies. Mrs. Winston had always panicked when she heard thunder. In the parlour, she made Mom turn the handle of the phonograph so the music would block out the rumble and crash that shook the farmyard. She pushed back and forth in her rocker and yelled, “Faster, faster,” the child’s arm going numb, lightning flashing her small forlorn figure into the silver template of the sky while the needle bounced and screeched over the grooves of “Beautiful Dreamer,” booms of thunder like a big hand slapping her head, making the bones jump in her inner ear.
ON THE PHONE from Cochrane my brother suggested I call Patrick and ask him to fly to Swift Current to be with me. Patrick had kept offering, but I’d been telling him to wait because I’d need him down the road. Barry said, “Sister, we’re on the road.” He was right.
When Patrick arrived we slept in Mom’s room, in the bed she’d shared with my father. It should have felt stranger than it did, photos of Barry and me, our younger faces looking down at us from the wall. My mother had dragged herself like a wounded animal into the smaller of the two bedrooms, the darker one with her old sewing machine, the room I used to stay in. She’d begun to demand a simplicity of space, a nest, a cave. She said she’d never sleep in the other room again.
The first night on her old mattress Patrick had to wake me. I’d been shouting. In the nightmare I was searching through a many-roomed, three-storey house in a panic, looking for someone who needed me. I couldn’t find her.
The next morning Patrick asked, “Who’s Trudy?”
“Trudy?” I said.
“Do you know, Peg? That’s the name Lorna was shouting in her sleep.” Mom didn’t know either, but suddenly I remembered. More than fifty years earlier a little girl my friend knew had wasted away in bed with leukemia. I had visited her once. Her name was Trudy.
“That’s right,” Mom said. “She was around six, and she died. You didn’t know her well.”
In the night I’d struggled to save a girl I hardly knew, my shouts echoing from her deathbed to my parents’ room half a century away.
BEFORE THE OPERATION, a nurse had attached wires at various pulse points on my mother’s body to check her heart rate. Her gown was open in the front. A wire went under each breast. I stared at the one nearest to me, fallen to the side. Since I was a baby, held to her nipple, I’d never looked so closely at my mother’s naked breast. She was shorter than I was, we weren’t the same shape, but our breasts had the same contour and colour. Her pink nipple could have been mine caught in a mirror. The awareness sank inside me like a stone, one with many sides to it, its light refracting. I wanted to think of it as a rose quartz. That came closest to the colour of our nipples, and it’s the stone that heals the heart.
I STAYED with Auntie Glad on her and Uncle Rusty’s farm only once. It had been my idea. I was around thirteen; I’d wanted to visit her because I was making a yellow-and-white-checked sundress with spaghetti straps for a Teen Town dance, and I couldn’t get the straps right. Mom had tried to help me, but Glad was the better sewer. Besides her impeccably hand-stitched quilts, she fashioned coats and jackets with shiny linings, complicated lapels and smoothly rounded shoulders.
There was little warmth or affection in the farmhouse. Just cleanliness and hard work and the practicality of the day-to-day. An hour or so after my parents dropped me off, I got my period. It was the first time it had happened away from home, and I felt shy about it. I was mortified at having to ask my aunt what to do with the soiled pads. “Throw them in the burning barrel,” she said, her tone suggesting I’d asked a stupid question. As if my period wasn’t bad enough, I got a terrible nosebleed and dripped blood spots across the kitchen floor she’d waxed and polished just hours before. “Bleeding out of both ends,” she said to Uncle Rusty when he came in from the barn. I don’t think she meant to be unkind or crude. It was just her way.
I, like Mom, couldn’t do anything right around Glad. When she asked me to make sandwiches out of the canned jellied chicken, I buttered the bread too thinly and she snapped at me. I’d heard all the stories of her cheapness and thought I was doing the right thing, saving her a teaspoonful of butter with each slice. My worst error was to correct her on how to make the straps on my sundress lie flat. I’d learned enough in home ec to know we needed some kind of binding. She’d never heard of such a thing. “If you’re not going to listen you might as well go home,” she said.
It was a relief to both of us when Dad picked me up at the end of my visit. Mom had warned me I wouldn’t be happy at the farm. To avoid her saying “I told you so,” with the assurance that made me furious, I claimed I’d had a great time and I would go back again. I wore the dress to the dance that weekend, but the straps felt bumpy on my shoulders, and they wouldn’t stay put. Mom was in bed when I got home. I slipped into my pyjamas, walked into the dark of the alley and threw the dress in the garbage can.
SOMETHING FUNNY happens to time when the world shrinks to a sickroom. Wind blows through the hours and shreds them into ragged strips. There’s no definite beginning or end to one hour, two, three. In my mother’s kitchen, meals weren’t meals any more but vigils of waiting, as we watched each mouthful to see if she would chew and swallow. Our own eating seemed gluttonous, excessive. I wanted to push cake in my mouth with both hands and choke on thick gobs of sweetness. It was hard to shop for groceries. It was hard to cook something without onions or garlic or citrus or sugar or bite. Nights weren’t eight or ten hours of sleep but a dark pane a brick had shattered into parts. Patrick and I listened to her shuffle from the bed to the bathroom—“Mom, are you okay?”—prayed she’d make it before her bowels exploded, the nerve damage from the operation shutting down her warning system. How many times that night? Four? Five? Would there be spoor to clean? She’d be worn out tomorrow. In the afternoon, who would come to visit, who would stop me in the street and ask me probing questions, who would phone, phone, phone? When was the ball game on? Would she want to watch it? Should she lie down now? Was it time to check her sugar level? Write down the number, throw out the cotton batten with the spot of blood, count out the pills, count out her years and years, and soon the afternoon was over. Should we wake her to eat? There was no pain yet; we prayed there never would be. How long, how long, how long, the invisible clock kept ticking, the two hands meeting somewhere out of sight. “I’m ready to go,” she said. “Time. It’s time.”
On my wrist I wore my father’s watch, an old one I’d found in a kitchen drawer at Mom’s a few years after he died. It wasn’t his last watch—that was a gold-banded Seiko Mom had bought him for his seventieth birthday. It was the kind a high school teacher would wear, or a businessman, or a lawyer. Even in his final days, when he didn’t know the day of the week or the month, he’d ask my mother for the exact time and then move the hands to get the numbers right.
The watch I found was much older. He’d worn it when he was in his forties and working in the oil fields. It had a luminous blue face and a wide leather band still dark on the underside from his sweat, and it was one of the earliest automatics. It depended on the movement of your arm to keep it going. If you took it off, it slowed and eventually stopped. With new holes punched in the strap so it would fit me, the watch felt heavy and significant above my left hand, as if the ghost of my father’s fingers encircled my wrist. I removed it at night and placed it on the bedside table. In the mornings it was always slow, about five minutes. It gave me the kind of time I could understand, one that needed my body in all its strength to power its wheels now that my father lay still.
OUT OF A DEMEROL sleep my mother sat straight up in her hospital bed, terror in her eyes. “There’s a big hole in front of me. Lorna, fill it, start filling it.” Later she tried to send me home. “I don’t understand why you’re here,” she said. “You should be with Patrick.”
On one of her good days back at home, though she hadn’t been on her feet for over a week, she walked into her backyard, checked out the rows of plants with her sharp gardener’s eye, walked to one particular potato plant and pulled the top. The bounty underneath filled the bowl she used for baking bread. Linda took a picture, the bowl larger than Mom’s lap. That night for supper, standing at the stove with one hand on the counter to hold her up, she boiled potatoes and fried fish for Barry and Linda. Later in the week, when they had gone and it was my turn to care for her, she fried some for me, too—so I wouldn’t think my brother was her favourite, she told me, a smile on her face. With shaky hands, before she let me eat, she tried to pick out the bones as she had when I was a child, afraid one would catch in my throat and choke me. No one has ever loved me better.
THE CITY WHERE I grew up, where Mom had lived for almost seventy years, had hired an ad agency from Calgary to update its image. The councillors voted to change the city’s original slogan, “Swift Current, the Frontier City,” to “Swift Current, Where Life Makes Sense.” I wanted to write the local paper and rage. How could they claim that life made sense anywhere, especially there, especially then? The slogan proclaimed its simple-minded self-satisfaction on the sign that greeted you when you arrived in town. It was printed on banners on the streets; it appeared on gas and water bills. Hundreds of great philosophers and writers had come to the opposite conclusion, but in Swift Current you could figure things out—why there was sadness and cheating and inequity and wife-beating and racism. Why most of the wildflowers and songbirds from my childhood had disappeared. Why my friend’s eleven- and twelve-year-old sons had died in a car accident, why the local history teacher had hanged herself, why the hockey team had hired a pedophile for a coach. It all made sense, by gosh, in my hometown, where my heart was ripping out of my chest like a blood-soaked bird.
ON THE PHONE Auntie Glad demanded to talk to Mom. “Wake her up, wake her up. They’re coming to get me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. I think it’s the gypsies.”
“Do you want to go?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I like their bracelets. I like their gold teeth, but they look at you funny—like a horse does. They can’t look at you with both eyes at once.”
MOM DIDN’T want get out of bed. I curled up beside her, laid my hand on her bony forehead. Her face had lost its roundness; her temples were shadowed, as if a printer’s thumb blue with ink had pressed there. Before a baby’s eyebrows appear, there are two delicate ridges above the eyes where the soft hair will grow in. They were apparent on Mom now. It was as if her body was set on rewind, running backwards to an earlier time.
“Do you know how to find Dad?” she said in the perpetual dusk of the room. I didn’t know what she was asking. Did I know where he was in the afterworld she believed in? Had God built for her a mansion with many rooms? Was her husband waiting for her in one of them, or was her heaven a countryside, a series of farms and villages, different roads to navigate, the dead dogs barking?
She was worried we wouldn’t find the spring that fed into the alkali lake on her parents’ farm where we’d scattered Dad’s ashes. The previous July she and I had driven out there and couldn’t locate it, maybe because Uncle Lyn, who now owned the land, hadn’t cut the grass for bales, and the old cow path was grown over.
“I think it was the mosquitoes, Mom. We didn’t walk far enough because of the mosquitoes. But we’ll find it, because the grass will be greener near the spring, won’t it? And there’s that big stone.” Against her pillow, her face was jaundiced. I’d packed away the yellow blouses and T-shirts from her closet. They didn’t look good on her anymore.
“Do you want things to happen as you told me, Mom? Just the family and the lake? All those friends who’ve been phoning, they’re going to want a way to say goodbye.”
“Don’t you dare give me a funeral,” she said, the toughness in her voice a warning signal familiar from my childhood. “I don’t want a funeral. Just toss my ashes on the water. I’ve always loved the lake.”
“Soon you’ll be there forever, Mom.”
“Swimming with the ducks,” she said. “And I’ll have a new bathing suit. Or maybe I’ll go skinny-dipping now that I’m so skinny.”
“And that water,” I said, “that awful alkali water will never let you drown.”
I’d learned it was possible to cry and laugh at the same time, to cry and talk at the same time, to cry and cry though you thought the well of tears was empty. An unseen endless spring kept flowing in and out of me. My mother, however, had yet to cry. It was if she had dried up inside. Was that one of the things that let me know how close she was to dying? The Mycenaean Greeks called the dead “the thirsty” and their place “the dry country.” It would be tragic if after all the years of living in parched Saskatchewan my mother were to spend eternity in a sere country of wind and dust.
For her sake, I hoped eternity was no more than a person’s happiest experience, best imaginings, deepest longings: a lake that tastes bitter on the tongue; a long frozen river a man and woman glide down, arm in arm, among the stars; a clear sky higher than all other skies where no storms gather.
ONE OF THE WORST things Mom did as a kid was to accept her older brother Mac’s dare to walk around the rim of the horse trough. She fell in, her siblings laughing, but when Grandpa came with his team from the fields, the horses wouldn’t drink. Water was scarce, and to fill the trough took several trips to the pump with a pail. “Boy, was Grandpa mad,” she said. She didn’t remember what he did to her, but she remembered it was Glad who told.
THERE WOULD be no family for me when Mom was gone except my brother and my beloved, Patrick, nine years my senior. My breath stopped when I thought of Patrick going first.
Barry had left home when I was eleven, and since then, we’d rarely been in touch. I’d thought his love was like hard candies in his pocket; once they’d been slipped to those closest to him—his wife and children—there was nothing left. The weeks after Mom fell ill were different. He was a devoted brother and son. When we weren’t in Swift Current together, we were on the phone every day, wondering if we were doing the right thing and what should happen next. I had a new appreciation of him, new insight into the sensitivity he hid behind gruffness and firm action, habits from his years as a hockey player and then a captain in the air force and a helicopter rescue pilot. When we greeted each other we hugged and kissed, and on the phone he sometimes called me “dear.” Would he be lost to me again, I wondered, after Mom was gone?
We agreed we’d take care of her in her house for as long as we could. We wouldn’t dump her in one of those terrible nursing homes where the old and demented shout and drool. That was no place for our mother.
WHEN DAD LAY DYING, he told Mom he’d dreamed he’d gone to heaven. “Did you meet anyone you know?” she asked. “No,” he said. He’d only made it halfway there. SINCE I’D MOVED to the coast fifteen years earlier, every Mother’s Day, which fell around Mom’s birthday, I’d fly to visit. We’d drive my rental car to the nursery by the creek and buy her rose bushes for her front bed. You’d think we’d have filled it up in that time, but the bed took up half the yard, and many roses didn’t make it through the winter. Usually I’d buy her three each spring, choosing by colour. She had several pinks, a mauve like the underside of a dove’s breast, a pale peach, a yellow the shade of a mango’s skin, four reds, a cream like the tasty pout that rose to the top of the old milk bottles in winter. A sure sign of her illness was that she’d let her rose garden go that year. It bristled with sow thistles and a sticky, nettle-like vine that strangled the stems and buds.
Mom told me not to bother, but I spent hours weeding and deadheading. A lassitude had fallen over the garden, many of the branches bending to the ground as if they’d lost the will to stand upright. It wasn’t blossoms that were weighing them down. I couldn’t figure it out. One red rose had gone wild, shooting out a thin, pulsing brightness on leggy branches. Its scent rode the heat waves and washed over me. Mom insisted I cut it down; then the tea rose that had been grafted might come back. On other bushes the buds were tight and dry. They seemed stopped in time and wouldn’t open. Was something eating them from the inside, too? I lacked my mother’s wisdom and her touch. I couldn’t save them, yet I couldn’t give up. I hacked and weeded and tore, my hands grabbing where I shouldn’t have grabbed and holding on.
“WHEN I SEE your dad again,” Mom said, “we’re going to go dancing.”
“Dancing? A few weeks ago, you said you were going to go skating.”
“I know,” she said, “but who can tell what season it will be up there? Maybe it won’t be cold enough for ice.”
MOM DECIDED in her implacable way that she wanted to go into a nursing home. A space would be available two days thence. Over the phone, Patrick tried to help me understand. “She wants care with compassion, not care with love,” he told me. There was no stopping her. I was afraid she was doing it because she’d become a “bother,” something she swore she’d never be.
“You kids have your normal lives to lead,” she said.
Nothing’s normal, Mom, I thought, not anymore.
She had me confirm the booking and phone the ambulance. She’d be going to the town of Leader, an hour and a half away on the worst road in the province.
“I’ve never ridden in an ambulance before,” she said, joy in her voice. She was like a kid going to the circus, like a country cousin anticipating the train that would take her to the city. Why was I sad when she was ecstatic? What was it I wasn’t getting? Would I ever arrive before she’d left where she’d already been? No trace of her but a pair of abandoned shoes.
I’D ALWAYS liked the idea of a body’s energy returning to the great mass of energy that makes up the world, its spirit and its matter. If I became the force that drove the worm through the rosebud, if I greened a blade of prairie grass—I could live and die with that. Now, though, I wanted my mother to remain intact. I wanted her to be up there looking down at me. I didn’t want to lose her to the grass, the trees, the beetles, the crickets. I wouldn’t be satisfied with her hair blowing from the mouths of the crocuses in the spring, her stubbornness and persistence driving the wind that pushed me along the road. What had sounded earth-affirming no longer comforted me. “Mom,” I said, “you’d better drop a pebble on my head now and then when I’m being stupid, just to show me you’re there.”
She grinned a sweet grin that didn’t reach her eyes any more. They’d become flat, like the circle of water inside a well no wind or light could reach. “You better watch out! One day it will be a big stone.”
WHEN MOM went to the nursing home, she’d be leaving her house forever. They’d told her to bring her favourite chair, her television and anything else that would make her feel at home. Linda and I packed her summer clothes and a quilt. In her bedroom hung the old family photos of her wedding and of my brother and me. I asked her which pictures she wanted us to tuck into her suitcase. “I don’t want any of them,” she said. “I’m done with all that.”
When the ambulance arrived, she met the two attendants on the verandah and walked with them down the four front steps to the stretcher. Not once, in her journey away from what she had known and loved for almost thirty years, did she look back.
THE DAY before Mom was to leave, I asked her about Glad. “Do you want to phone and tell her you’re going?”
“No. You go over and let her know. I don’t want to talk to her.”
I walked into Glad’s house without knocking, because I knew she wouldn’t hear. I sat beside her on the couch and turned off the TV. The couch was piled with newspapers, a Kleenex box, ends of wool balls, cards from her birthday a month earlier, and a half-eaten ham sandwich on brown bread. “Auntie Glad,” I said, “Mom is leaving her house tomorrow and going into a home. She won’t be back.”
“I didn’t know she was sick,” Glad said.
“I know you’re confused, but I’ve been telling you for weeks about the cancer and that she’s not getting better.”
“You never know,” Glad said, “you never know what’s going to happen, do you? I suppose I’ll go soon too.”
She was even shorter than Mom, the widow’s hump in her back hunching her shoulders. Sitting beside her, I could see the top of her head where her hair was thinning. Her scalp shone a pale pink. We were both having trouble talking. Her voice was a thousand years old.
I held her hand. “I was so happy,” she said, “when I found out I had a little sister. I’d had two brothers, you know, and then I had a little sister. I took care of her. Should I go over and say goodbye? I don’t know if I can do it.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “She’s sleeping, and we’re leaving early tomorrow, there won’t be time. I don’t want anything to upset her.”
I took my hand from hers and placed hers in her lap. “Do you understand,” I asked, “do you understand what I’ve just told you? She doesn’t have much time left. And she’s leaving her house for good tomorrow. She’s going to a home.”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s so sad, isn’t it, it’s so sad.”
I turned the TV on again and asked if the volume was okay. Our conversation had taken only a few minutes: the commercials were still on. I walked from her house and across the street to Mom’s. I was walking across an entire continent, across years of bitterness and anger and love. No maps, no easy passage. I wanted to lie in the middle of the road and never move again.
WHILE WE WAITED for the ambulance, I’d told Mom what Glad had said about wanting a sister. My mother’s eyes brightened with tears, the first I’d seen, but they didn’t spill over. “This was the best way for us to say goodbye,” she said. “I don’t want to see her.”
IT WASN’T ONLY the roses that defeated us that summer. In the back garden stretched rows and rows of peas and potatoes and beans. Barry and Linda spent two days digging and picking and shelling, until Barry’s back gave out. Linda said she’d never been so dirty in her life. They left the rest for me and Patrick. Our troubles amused Mom in the nursing home. She couldn’t believe we were so useless, so weak.
And what would we do with pails and pails of vegetables? None of us, including the grandchildren, had a basement cold room like she did. We didn’t eat that many potatoes anymore. Their fate concerned her more than the roses. There was too much Welsh and Irish in our family history, too much poverty, to leave them. The flowers could die, even from neglect, but you didn’t let potatoes rot in the ground or peas harden on the vines. If there had been a magical way to call the grackles down, I’d have done it. Mom always flew small flags along the rows of peas to scare them off. I wanted the opposite, a flirtatious flutter. And where were the bad kids who raided gardens like we used to do, just for the danger of it? How had this old woman picked and shelled and dug and dug and dug until this final summer of her life?
A FEW DAYS after we’d settled Mom in the nursing home, Linda took a deserved break. I drove alone to Leader. Barry was in Cochrane and would join us soon. Though only a chair and a small television were missing, the house felt hollowed out and sadly animate, as if it knew the tough, beloved spirit that was my mother would not grace its rooms again. In the bathroom, the door locked, Linda lowered herself into the full, deep tub. She heard the back door open, and then footsteps up the stairs and through the kitchen. “Peggy,” an old woman’s voice called again and again. “Peggy, where are you?” Glad wandered through the house, calling and calling. Linda sat still and silent in the cooling water. “Peggy, are you home?”