PAUL AND ANDY had been married for twenty-six years. Sometimes Paul found this hard to believe. When they started out together at nineteen they’d had lots of energy, lots of momentum, and then, running the farm and their lives, they’d slowed themselves down. They’d got into the habit of talking things over, planning things out, and they were conservative with money, deliberate. No one had told them that they should live this way, in sync and carefully. It was a kind of gut instinct that came naturally to them, from their careful natures, from their natural affection for each other.
Besides the farm, for almost fifteen years they had been operating the feed mill in town, hiring extra help when it was needed to keep things moving. Now Neil was almost old enough to take over. He appeared to be a mature twenty-five and it looked as if he might be able to handle it.
Right after Murray’s parents died he had come out to offer them the mill for a lot less than he should have got for it and the steady income from that had paid off both the loan and most of the mortgage on Andy’s parents’ farm, which was now their farm because Andy’s mother had sold it to them and moved into a bungalow in town out near the golf course. Over the last ten years there had been enough extra money to modernize the old farmhouse, to put on a new roof and insulate the draughty walls, to replace the furnace, and then to build a fourteen-by-thirty-foot addition with an efficient, sunny kitchen that Andy had designed herself and a breakfast nook and a downstairs bathroom with a shower. And recently there had been enough money for the seventeen-foot Bowrider that Paul docked at Grand Bend.
With a dedication that was a surprise even to himself, after the crop was off and between Oldtimers’ hockey games, Paul had begun to look into his ancestry. It wasn’t a deadly serious hobby but he was interested enough to make a couple of trips to the county library, to talk to the people there and let them help him with his searches. He had got his start from Grandma Ferguson, who was not just old now but elderly, frail, although she was still getting along all right in her own place. Near the end of one of what she called Paul’s too rare visits, she had opened a closet door on three cardboard boxes of very old pictures, most of them formal in the extreme, all of them black and white. And, while not inheriting any land, wheeler-dealer Grandpa Chambers had been left in recompense a very old, dried-out journal called “Our New Life in Lambton County,” which he handed over to Paul casually, as if he himself had no use for it. The formal faded script described in full the back-breaking demands of daily life without the ease of technology, the awkward, slow-moving courtships, the sicknesses and some of the early deaths, the marriages, the many births, the stillbirths, the visitors, the families that moved on, often to the West, to the promise of sections of very good land. It described the years of stubborn work, the need to clear farmland properly, the threshing crews, the accidents, the food poisoning, the quilting bees, the prized horses and the barns that burned in the night, the roar of the fire and the frenzy of the prized, dying horses that could be heard for miles around. The journal had been written by a woman who would have been Paul’s distant, many-times-removed aunt, and the assumptions she made, the attention she paid, could not have been mistaken for anything but a woman’s, although she had tried, she had taken some trouble to describe the life completely, as a whole.
Paul didn’t talk much about his little project and no one pushed him, not even Grandma Ferguson. He guessed they were waiting for some finished product they could hold in their hands, and dispute.
Even after twenty-six years of marriage, Andy was still very small and this pleased Paul because it made her body so available to him. And she was still outgoing, easily friendly with people. She was tired of course. She had been tired since the summer Meg was born. Neil and Krissy had always been good with Meg and still were, but they had a perfect right to get on with their own lives.
With a bit of help from Paul and Andy, Neil and his wife Carol had bought a house in town down near the arena, which Carol called the big old dilapidated monster but lived in quite happily, talking nonstop to her toddlers as she painted all the rooms, commandeered a crew to jack up the porch and got the yard in shape. Krissy was in Sarnia working as a dental assistant, making pretty good money as far as Paul could tell. Although there were guys around now and then, she hadn’t yet found anyone permanent. Paul believed privately that Krissy might be a bit headstrong, independent, perhaps to her own detriment. Most of her friends were the same. Once he had heard a bunch of them, all of them flashy, long-legged, good-looking girls, sitting around on the front step talking about not getting married until they were at least thirty, not giving up their freedom one split second before they absolutely had to. Privately he hoped that Krissy would settle soon, that she would find someone good enough to make her want to break away from these friends and get a young start, a head start, as he and Andy had. Independent or not, he didn’t like to think about her alone. It made no sense to him.
Usually he left this kind of thing to Andy. She would come up with a way to describe Krissy’s situation, a way to make it sound right, like it was nothing to worry about. Once in a while he wondered if he and Neil and Krissy didn’t just dance to Andy’s tune but then he would pull back from that line of thought. There were worse things than listening to a smart woman.
Meg, their youngest, was twenty-three. She was living at the group home in London now. Like Neil, like Paul himself, she was extremely tall, but where Paul and Neil were lanky, Meg was bulk. She’d got really big when she hit puberty, and although Andy had trimmed her down with more vegetables and less meat, had stopped baking altogether, since she’d left them she had filled out again. She was heavier and stronger by far than her brother or her father.
Given her circumstances, Meg got along well enough. She could talk with people if she felt like it, if she decided she liked them, and when she was home to visit she could work with Paul in the barn. There was no question of her going out into the fields because today the fields meant massive machinery, the fields were about as close to industrial as you could get.
They had held Meg at home as long as they could, the teachers at the school in town doing their best to keep her occupied with some bit of busywork at the back of the room while the other kids progressed. The parents of her classmates, many of whom Paul and Andy knew or had known one way or the other, were ready to understand Meg’s limitations, her frustration, they were ready to understand almost anything theoretically, but when the fights started, when their sons and sometimes their daughters started to come home with broken glasses and torn clothes and bloodied noses, they’d had to complain. And who could blame them? Certainly not Paul and Andy.
They got the chance to put Meg in a group home in London when she was thirteen. Their names had been submitted by their family doctor, the fourth young guy from somewhere else who had taken over what everyone still called Cooper’s practice, which meant they were contacted, sent information. They had decided to try the home, at least for a while, and it had worked out. A group of people from London with problems of their own had put the thing in motion, got their hands on a good chunk of government money to get it up and running. It was in an older, ordinary residential neighbourhood and from the outside it looked like just a really big brick house. It looked like the kind of ridiculously oversized new-money house that was going up regularly in the suburbs.
Meg had liked it there at first, or said she did. They had a young staff to run the place, to teach the kids things, normalization, it was called, how to go shopping for groceries, how to go to the dentist, how to have your parents come for lunch on Saturdays. Their meds were strictly supervised and they were often taken out on excursions in a van donated by the Kinsmen, which was fine except for the big sign on the van advertising exactly who was inside it.
Every morning through the week all ten residents, six young men and four young women, Paul wasn’t supposed to call them kids, were packed into the van and delivered to a sheltered workshop where they sat at long tables with a hundred other similar souls to do contract piecework for 3M or some small local company. They were paid, the point being that their work was worth something, but not much, a token really. Most of the money from the contracts went back into the place itself because there was a large staff. A lot of individual attention had to be available to each worker.
Paul and Andy were allowed to visit while Meg worked and from the start they had wanted to make these visits. People were stupid and cruel, all the time, people who should know better, adults as often as kids. You got to recognize that, to watch for it, if you had a daughter like Meg.
For the first few years a former army man had managed the workshop but now a Mrs. Bradley was very much in charge. She was a British woman in very high heels with orangish hair that she puffed up and sprayed way too thoroughly every morning, who was nevertheless polite and forthright in her comments to Paul and Andy. She said Meg was aggressive, yes, but they often saw that in their clientele and she could be distracted, she could be calmed, and when she was calm she was a very good worker. And the others were learning to keep their distance and never to tease Meg. In fact there was one boy, a Down’s syndrome boy, who had taken a shine to her, who followed her around like a puppy, who liked to sit beside her at breaks and when they ate their lunch. Mrs. Bradley told Paul and Andy that Meg was extremely patient with this boy, very understanding. She said Meg had an enormous heart.
Paul and Andy visited the group home too. During their first visit they were led upstairs to see Meg’s room, which she shared with the three other girls. It was large enough and bright enough, but after they’d had a cup of tea downstairs in the oversized, beautifully furnished living room, as soon as they were in the truck on the way home, Andy erupted into a small rage, turning on Paul to ask, Lord, didn’t he notice? She said the room was just horrible, that it needed a good cleaning, a good airing, that it smelled of old food and sweat and stale underwear. She said she would give anything to be let loose for an afternoon in that bedroom.
On their next Saturday visit, sitting on Meg’s bed, trying not to look perturbed, Andy asked Richard, the supervisor who was on duty that day, why didn’t he either stand over them and make them do it or get someone in to do it for them? She told him she could see no reason for them to live like that. But Richard just looked around the room and shrugged his shoulders. The girls were expected to do their own wash and to keep their room clean. That was the rule. They were pretty slack, sure, but according to Richard the idea was that they themselves would get sick of the mess and the smell, he believed they were capable of getting sick of it, and then they’d clean it up. And anyway, he didn’t think it was particularly bad. “Maybe you should see my bedroom,” he said.
They didn’t go in quite so often after that visit, maybe once a month, once every six weeks. At home, hoping to help Andy get used to things as they were now, Paul told her that Meg was absolutely safe and cared for and at least slightly happy some of the time and that this was likely as good as it was going to get. “You don’t have to think about her so often,” he told her. “She can make a life for herself there. And better there than here with us. There is nothing for her here.” He didn’t know if he believed any of this to be true, but it was important to him that Andy believed it.
Meg came home every Christmas and for a couple of weeks in the summer, and any time Krissy or Neil and Carol and the kids were going to be around for a few days someone drove in to get her. Later on she would fall to them. Everyone knew this.
* * *
WHEN MEG HITCHHIKED home the first time, on a Tuesday afternoon in the late fall of 1985, Paul and Andy had just got back from Bill and Margaret’s and were sitting in the breakfast nook having a coffee together, talking about their mutual suspicion that something was up with Patrick and Mary, that they were in trouble, and that as usual Margaret knew more than she was willing to say. Margaret had been willing to say that Sarah, who would no longer answer to Sally, had called the night before from Vancouver to tell them that she and Rob had decided to get pregnant.
Sarah and Rob had been out in Vancouver nearly four years. Rob was an English software engineer who had come over from London just before they met to take a big job with one company and then, six months after they were married, unsatisfied, he’d moved to another company and they had been transferred west. After Margaret had told Paul and Andy her bit of news, that it looked as if she was finally going to be a grandmother in her own right, she confessed that she had been almost ready to accept that there wouldn’t be any babies because Rob didn’t appear to be big on family, his own or anyone else’s. And then she said it was likely just the waiting that had thrown her off, the idea that a woman could bide her time and then decide to do it when she felt ready. “A modern convenience,” she’d called it.
Paul saw Meg first because he was facing the window and then they watched together as she ran up the long laneway toward the house, a large woman running like a child, her strides clumsy, her arms wild, clouds of cold panting breath bursting from her mouth as she ran. Her new jacket was wide open to the wind, her Blue Jays hat pushed firmly down on her head.
She had been dropped off at the end of the lane by a grey Chrysler, they could see the car waiting out there for her safe welcome. She turned back several times to wave at the driver, a lone male, who returned her wave and honked the horn several times.
Andy went to the door and opened it, letting in the cold air, and when Meg saw them she stopped running and began to walk in long strides across the frozen grass. She stopped once to bend over to catch her breath, lifted her head to look up at them, grinned her widest grin. Paul waved at the driver of the grey Chrysler, signalling that it was all right, he could carry on.
Slumped down on the step, Meg said to Andy, “I came home. I got rides home.” She was so proud of herself.
“Who was that man?” Andy asked. “Did he tell you his name?”
“Mr. Brown,” Meg said. “That was Mr. Brown from Sarnia.”
Andy hesitated but not for long. “He didn’t touch you or say anything creepy, did he?”
Meg had been taught that she was vulnerable to strangers, to unkindness and worse, that she had to understand this and work to protect herself from it. “Nobody touches me unless I say so,” she said. She made a tight fist in front of her face and shook it hard. She knew what her fist could do because when she was nine and very annoyed with Neil one morning, getting ready for school, she’d knocked him out cold in the back hall.
They took her in and Andy got started calming her while Paul dialled the phone. Meg pulled her cat’s cradle out of her jacket pocket and began to work it.
Richard was the head supervisor at the home now and he said he had been calling them and that he’d been just about ready to call again. He said Meg hadn’t got in the van after work, that there was a new driver who wasn’t used to everyone yet. He said Meg must have been hiding because no one noticed that she wasn’t around, and by the time he’d got hold of Mrs. Bradley, who was home herself by then and who had no idea that Meg hadn’t got on the bus with the others, they knew they had lost her. He said nothing like this had ever happened before and that he was so sorry. And was Meg all right?
Paul didn’t see any point to anger. “I think she had herself a fine time getting home,” he said. “I’ll bring her back in the morning.”
Richard said that would be appreciated. And then he asked could Andy come along too because he had been planning to call them anyway to come in for a talk, and maybe this would be as good a time as any.
Paul said fine and hung up. He assumed it would be something about aggression again, maybe shoving some of the other people around, yelling, maybe throwing another wrench through a window. Likely it was time for a trip to the doctor to ask one more time about upping Meg’s downers.
Andy cooked sloppy joes and apple crisp and after supper Meg pushed back her chair and announced that she wanted to go into town to see Grandma and Grandpa. Everything about her, the way she sat forward in her chair, the way she held her chin up and out, told them, If you won’t take me, I’ll get there on my own, I know how to do it now. They took the truck. Meg sat in the middle between them and played with the radio, played air guitar when she found a station she liked.
Sitting at her kitchen table doing a crossword, Margaret heard the truck and, knowing the sound, walked to the sink to fill the kettle. Just before she looked out the window she thought, This is odd, they just left here three hours ago, and then she looked. Bill was in the living room watching television and she called loudly to him, “Bill, come out here. Something’s wrong. Meg’s home.”
When she was born, that summer they were out at Dunworkin, none of them had any way to know precisely what Meg’s future might hold, but Bill had a sense of it, from the war, he told himself, because he had seen things you couldn’t imagine. Because he’d had to accept things no one should have to accept and say nothing.
When Meg was four or five and just beginning to hide under the combine, to run deep into the rows of corn and deliberately try to hurt the barn cats that followed her, to bust nearly everything she touched, to eat so fast she choked herself, Paul and Andy tried to discipline her with a sharp tone of voice or a quick slap on the hand or on her little squirming rear end. But Bill had intervened. It was the first and only time he had ever done such a thing with any of his kids. He told Paul he was likely going to have to find another way. “We’ll help you,” he said. “Margaret and I will be here to help you. And your brother and sisters will help you.” The drugs had started then. The doctor experimented until he found something strong enough to keep Meg steady but not dopey and for quite a while the drugs had done the trick.
Watching Paul and Andy and Meg approach the back door now, Bill asked himself one more time what God could possibly mean with all this bullshit. He knew there was no God to wonder about, had known this since the North Atlantic, since Sylvia, but that didn’t change things. He still caught himself asking. And not less often as he got older, but more often. He thought maybe it was a kind of weakness, like his legs going, or the hair all over his body turning white.
Opening the door he opened his arms to his granddaughter, knowing his own hug would be overpowered, braced for the strength of her arms. “Meg o’ my heart,” he said. “What the hell are you doing home?” He grinned and stood back to look up at her. “Have you quit your job or did you get yourself fired?”
Meg laughed down at her grandfather and stomped her feet on her grandmother’s doormat. “I got rides home. Three of them. All the way.”
As they took off their coats, Margaret made the pot of tea and got a Pepsi out of the fridge for Meg, which she poured into one of the indestructible glass mugs they still had from 1972, the year the town celebrated its centennial. She set Meg’s drink on the table, an invitation for her to sit down.
Leaning forward over his tea, Paul said to Bill, “She hitchhiked. They didn’t know she was gone until she was halfway home.”
Margaret lifted Meg’s ball cap from her head and took it onto her own lap. “You’ll go back in the morning, sweetheart,” she said, meaning to say, Listen to Grandma, this is acceptable to us only as a one-time-only whim, a lark. “They need you at that home,” she said. “I could see that. You were helping Richard paint the back hall when your grandfather and I dropped in to see you in the summer. You could hardly take the time to visit. Do you remember?”
Meg looked at them, each of them, one at a time, turning not just her eyes but her whole head. “Richard always makes me and Matthew do the hard stuff for him, the shit work. Matthew says he pisses us off.” Matthew was Meg’s friend at the home.
“And Richard is lucky to have you,” Bill said. “He told me that. He told me you did a good job of whatever you put your hand to.”
This was a lie but Bill thought, So arrest me. Tonight was going to be one more of those nights they’d just have to get through. Maybe he would go in tomorrow with Paul and they could talk together to this Richard, find out just what jobs needed doing, what kind of jobs they were, find out who was on a salary at that home and who wasn’t, who was maybe picking up a bit of extra cash by saying he’d paint the back hall for instance. Although he did believe work was good for Meg. About the only thing that was.
“So everybody wants me to stay there,” Meg said.
“Oh, no question in my mind at all,” Margaret said, cheerfully. “You can do all kinds of things in the city that you can’t do on the farm. And with people your own age.”
Meg didn’t say yes, she hardly ever said yes, but she didn’t say no so they left it there. Margaret poured more tea for herself and Andy. Bill got out the rye and the Coke and two more of the centennial mugs because Meg liked everyone to use them. Meg put on her hat and her jacket and went out into the backyard to walk down to the creek, which was running slow under the bare branches of the willows, and perfectly safe. Bill had often taken her back to the creek when she was small, to show her the wonders, the surprises, and to teach her how to keep herself safe near water.
Bill poured Paul his drink, asking, “What’s she been up to?”
“I have no idea,” Paul said. “Likely more of the same. They want us both to come in tomorrow for a talk.”
“They want us both?” Andy asked. “You didn’t tell me that.” She laid her head down on the table. “They’ll want her on stronger drugs,” she said. “She’s going to be so souped up she won’t even know her own name.”
Margaret stroked Andy’s hair, combed through the grey-blond streaks with her fingers. “Such a time,” she said. “Such a time.”
Sitting, waiting for Andy to lift her head, Paul was telling himself to smile, to make the effort. Just a quick we-can-get-through-this kind of smile. Waiting, he realized that they likely smiled a lot less for each other now than they did for other people, people they didn’t even like much, and why should that be?
Meg rode back in the truck bed on the way home. When she was small she rode there with her old dog Stanley as often as they’d let her, both of them happy, full of themselves, barking for the fun of it.
Before she went up to bed Margaret called Patrick and Murray and Daphne and Sarah, to tell them. She didn’t expect them to rush home, she didn’t expect them to do anything. Paul and Andy could handle this on their own. But she believed the others should be told.
She had long ago taken it on herself to make sure these kids stayed aware of each other. And she shared the good news as quickly as the bad, never exaggerated, never betrayed a confidence, not even to their father.
* * *
IN THE MORNING, Paul and Andy took Meg back into London, first to the group home to change her clothes and then across town to the workshop. After they’d delivered her into the safe hands of Mrs. Bradley, who chastised Meg, told her that her work was waiting and that she would have to move fast to get caught up because they had a new contract coming in that afternoon, they drove back over to the home to talk to Richard.
It wasn’t aggression this time, it was sex. When Richard said the word they both knew they had been waiting to hear it, prepared to hear it, for a long time. When she’d hit puberty they had tried to anticipate her behaviour, they had talked with each other and with the doctor about the difficulty the most common urges would cause her. Since then they’d hoped her apparent disinterest was either the result of the mix of drugs she’d been on almost all her life, or hormonal, because why shouldn’t her unhappy hormones be screwed up too? But it seemed they had just been lucky. And now it seemed they weren’t.
The boy in question was one of the other residents at the group home. It was her friend Matthew. Richard said that when he caught them in the basement, just getting started, Meg spoke right up, told him that Matthew loved her and that she loved him. She’d looked to Matthew to back her up but he had gathered his shirt in his hands, was hiding his face in it, crying, embarrassed to be naked in front of Richard. Finally, as if to explain everything, Meg said, “It’s my fault, Richard. It’s my fault because I like it so much.”
Richard told Paul and Andy that he had seen no evidence of birth control. Meg’s city doctor hadn’t put her on the pill because he would have been the one handing them out to her every morning and of course she hadn’t been sterilized or anything and he was certainly not recommending that. He said he had no reason to believe that Matthew could be trusted with condoms. And what did they think?
Of course Matthew’s parents had to be told. It was easy enough to agree to that.
In the end, both Meg and Matthew were allowed to stay. They were told they could be friends, that everyone understood how much they needed each other’s friendship, which was a good thing, a normal thing, but they shouldn’t go down to the basement any more, not alone. The deal was that they would both be given something to quiet their needs and Meg would take the pill, to be doubly sure.
At home, the doctor told Paul and Andy that he was sorry he hadn’t anticipated or recognized Meg’s enthusiasm. He said the new drug would work with Meg’s other drugs to further blunt her aggression, which could only be a good thing for her, and that it would not necessarily kill her capacity for ordinary affection.
Meg and Matthew both claimed they understood. They were supposed to be friends. Just friends. They began to volunteer to do the supper dishes and a little later they started to do their wash together again in the basement, mixing whites with whites and darks with darks, being sure to talk a lot and really loudly because Richard or someone would be standing up there listening. They volunteered to rake the twigs and the dead grass off the lawn in the spring and as a reward they were allowed to go downtown on their own to see a movie starring Jack Nicholson, who was Meg’s favourite actor because he was both handsome and out of his mind. At the workshop they were inseparable, most of the time allowing the Down’s syndrome boy who’d taken a shine to Meg to hang around with them, taking him along if they were going to the lunchroom or outside on a break to sit in the sun, to lean against the warm brick wall at the side of the building and neck.
Their public touching was soft and discreet. In Mrs. Bradley’s opinion, it was in fact charming. If they engaged in anything more forceful, if they found a way through the haze of pharmaceuticals handed to them in little paper cups each morning, they weren’t talking.
For a while after this business, Paul and Andy themselves stopped making love. Andy had always called it that, making love, refusing to use the other words even in the midst of their slippery, lusty acrobatics. When they were just starting out, before they were married, she’d said that was what they did, they crawled into an empty place where no love existed and made it, created it every new time from nothing but themselves.
“What power,” she’d say, laughing, grinning up at him from the comfort of a pillow or mounting him, taking his shoulders in her hands for balance.
* * *
THE SECOND TIME Meg hitchhiked home, in early summer, she had Matthew in tow and they went first to Bill and Margaret in town. This time they were expected, although not by Bill and Margaret.
A young woman wearing cowboy boots had stopped to pick them up from a corner in downtown London. They had got the morning off to do some shopping on their own for clothes when the stores weren’t crowded. This was a big deal, a big responsibility that they had earned with mature behaviour and an eager willingness to help Richard with his little jobs. They were supposed to take a city bus out to the workshop at eleven but after Meg told Matthew what they could do and how much fun it would be, they decided they didn’t want to get on that bus.
The woman in the cowboy boots dropped them off at the end of Wellington Street where it meets the 401, and when Meg asked with the door hanging open which way they should go now, the woman pointed to the ramp. They walked the long curve down to the highway, staying safely to the side, off the pavement, and before long they were picked up by a trucker who was just coming off the ramp himself.
As soon as they were up and into his cab, the trucker could see what he had on his hands. He asked them if there might be someone looking for them right now, and when Meg politely said no and told him honestly where they lived and where they worked and less honestly that they had the day off and had been invited to visit her grandparents, he didn’t necessarily buy in, but he let it be. They seemed smart enough to him. In spite of her size the girl was pretty, she had a perky little face and a great rack. And he thought the kid looked like he could almost take care of himself.
He veered off the 401 onto the 402, telling them about Michigan and Chicago, about his wife and kids in Windsor. He let them play with the radio. After forty-five minutes, when they were coming up to the turn-off for the town they said they were going to, he told them as much as he’d like to he couldn’t take the time to make a detour. He dropped them and watched them walk up the ramp to the old two-lane, waited the five minutes it took for someone to stop. The someone was Margaret’s longtime friend Angela Johnston, who was just coming back from Sarnia where she’d had an appointment with a chiropractor. She recognized Meg before she stopped for them because, except for her size, she was just so much like Andrea, her colouring, her mouth especially. She had seen her close up at Margaret’s once before an evening of bridge when she’d come in with her dad to pick Bill up for a hockey game down at the arena. In the car, when Meg asked if Angela could take them to the Chambers house, she said she would be pleased to do that. She said she knew Bill and Margaret, they were her grandparents, wasn’t that right? She assumed correctly that Meg didn’t know her from Eve.
Bill’s car wasn’t in the driveway so Angela got out and went to the back door with them, which made Meg quite angry, she could tell. But they found Margaret home. She told Margaret what she knew, the 402, the trucker who waited until she picked them up. Then she accepted Margaret’s gratitude and left, knowing she would be counted on to keep her mouth shut about this.
Margaret called Andy, who said that they had been expecting the kids there, that they’d got a call from Richard this time, and that they would be right in to get Meg. She said she had better hang up and call Richard back and then she’d better phone Matthew’s parents in London, which was another number she didn’t have to look up now. Matthew’s parents seemed to Andy and Paul to be very fine people. They hadn’t overreacted at all the year before when the kids were first discovered and they might have, they would have been forgiven a bit of shouting, a bit of protective rage. Perhaps they, too, were tired. Perhaps they too had long ago given rage its chance and found the returns negligible.
Paul backed the truck out of the drive shed to pick Andy up at the front door of the farmhouse and after she climbed in and was belted up he smiled over at her. “We can do this,” he said. “We’ve done harder things.”
Andy didn’t say anything. She was remembering when Meg was younger, when she was Meagan, and how easy things had become when they could finally make her obey them just by asking, how she used to grin proudly and say, “I’m going to do what I’m told,” accepting it as just another skill she’d learned, an accomplishment.
And she was thinking about the last time Meg had pulled this stunt, the effect it had had on them, the comfort of touch gone, the possibility of its absence unforeseen and astonishing, as if all through these long years the comfort had been not their own creation at all but only a visitor to their bed.
When they were very young, it had been so easy to tell Paul that she loved him, to watch him shine when she used the words. If she’d known then what she knew now, she would have said instead, I trust you, Paul. It’s trust. Meaning, these are the naked, sweaty, only times when the world is safe for me. Meaning, it’s not love that makes it so fine, so reckless, it’s trust that makes our skin shine in a dark bed.
But it was love everyone believed they wanted. Love was supposed to make the world go round. And what a big job that was. How could she ever hope to make trust measure up to love?
They were passing the Fulbright farm, just minutes from the turn-off onto the highway into town, when two things happened. First, although Paul was driving as he always drove, which was just a bit too fast, he saw in his rear-view mirror that they were being tailgated by a red pick-up. Watching in the mirror, he asked, “Whose truck do you suppose that is?”
Andy turned around to look but she didn’t recognize the truck either, nor did she know the driver, who was alone in the cab. When the truck came alongside them, taking its time passing, they got a good look at the driver’s unknown but uncommonly serious profile, and then they saw something they found even more difficult to believe. An elderly, well-dressed woman with thin white hair was getting a very rough ride back in the truck bed. She seemed to be trying one more time and with great difficulty to sit up straight, but she couldn’t get purchase, her arms were not strong enough. Seeing her struggle, Paul laid on the horn. When the driver picked up speed, Paul yelled, “Asshole,” and laid on the horn again, pounding it with his fist to make himself understood.
Excited by the blaring of the horn, the Fulbrights’ new dog, a black Lab who had been sitting in the shade of the barn watching, waiting for some action, came tearing out onto the road barking. The dog wasn’t exactly a pup but it wasn’t old enough or experienced enough to know how to run after a truck and stay clear at the same time, and in an attempt to accommodate the dog’s inexperience Paul swerved. Swerving, he braked too hard and lost control of the truck.
Normally, he would not have taken the dog into account at all. He would have kept the truck moving at a steady speed because this was what charging farm dogs expected from you. He’d learned this at fifteen behind the wheel of Bill’s 1952 Ford Fairlane and he had never in the thirty years since run over a dog.
The truck jumped the ditch and came to rest on its side, stopped there by a substantial old maple.
* * *
ANDY CAME TO consciousness still belted in. She could hear a woman crying, crying out as if from some distance, and she thought, Oh, that poor woman, and then the sound got louder, closer, and she recognized it as you might recognize a friend approaching down a country lane on a dark night. It was her own voice calling out for Paul.
Opening her eyes she could see, and almost could have touched if she’d thought to move her hands, the solid blunt mass of a tree, ridges of grey bark. She could feel her own weight against the seat belt. And the sharp sting of a hundred small cuts. Shards of glass had pierced her face and her scalp and her arms, she could see the blood trickling across the skin on her bare arms, feel it seeping into her eyes. And she could taste it. A man was climbing up across the hood to get to her, taking his footholds on the bent frame of the windshield, which had shattered and collapsed.
Ed Fulbright got her door pulled open and her seat belt cut but as small as she was he couldn’t hold her. She fell down onto Paul’s body. She had no way to stop herself. Ed had to ask her to try to turn toward him, to try to give him her hands, and when she was able to do this, to turn and reach out for him, he gave her a smile of encouragement.
As soon as Ed had her laid out on the side of the road, his wife was there carrying a blanket and sheets in one arm and a shotgun in the other hand. Amy Fulbright nodded toward the barn, where the dog was curled up and panting hard, refusing to look at them, and handed Ed the gun. Then she knelt down beside Andy in the gravel and covered her with the blanket. She began to rip some of the sheet into strips, starting the rips with her teeth, and as she pulled the shards of glass from Andy’s face, she brought the cloth to the cuts to soak up the streaming blood. Pressing very gently, smoothing Andy’s hair, she said, “I’ve called the ambulance. They’ll be here soon. But I think you’re all right.”
Andy didn’t want this woman’s care, this soothing, didn’t want the hands trailing over her arms and her face and her neck. She wanted an answer to the question, the only question.
Amy Fulbright composed herself and said that Ed didn’t think he could or should try to get at Paul. She said that because Ed was afraid to move him she didn’t know for sure but likely Paul was just still unconscious, likely he was just more badly hurt. She said, “We’ll pray for that,” and bowed her head, covered her entire face with her large hand, and began to mumble.
When the gun went off, even though Amy Fulbright was the one who knew it was coming, who had insisted it be done, she jumped nearly out of her skin. Andy didn’t flinch. She had gone into shock and she stayed there.
* * *
THE POLICE CAME to the kitchen door, two of them. Meg was there immediately, with Matthew right behind her, but Bill let them in. When the police said what they had to say, Meg dropped to the floor wailing and Matthew backed himself up against the stove, his hands raised in front of his face for protection. Bill turned from them all to sit down at the table, his seventy-four-year-old body collapsing in on itself, becoming instantly and permanently smaller. He sat very still, clasped one shaking hand in the other. His face was calm, his mouth closed. His eyes were wide open and fierce, focused on something that doesn’t exist in the real world.
Margaret came into the kitchen knowing nothing, assuming this commotion would be about Meg. When she looked down at Bill sitting at his place at the table, she thought, He’s lost his sight, what’s the hell’s going on, he’s gone blind. And then she took in the uniforms in her kitchen and realized the kind of thing it must be. She knew that there was only a certain kind of news that came this way. “You are going to have to tell it to me too,” she told them.
The police let themselves out, but even after they were gone, Bill would not let her touch him. He said he was finished with God. He said he understood now that he’d thought he was finished when Sylvia died but all the time since he’d been holding out the possibility, he had left some room in his doubt for doubt itself. He told her it wasn’t disbelief he felt this time. Disbelief meant you allowed yourself to hope for something and then found you couldn’t believe in it. Climbing the stairs, he called back loudly that God was only a black hopeless hole, God was nothing.
Margaret made all her phone calls. When she was finished she called Angela Johnston to please come back over to stay with Meg and Matthew until Matthew’s mother could get there and then to sit with the wailing Meg until Daphne or Patrick arrived from London. She didn’t know if Angela could manage this, but there was no one else she wanted to ask. And then she drove alone into the hospital in Sarnia.
Sitting behind the wheel on the four-lane highway, for the first time in all her driving life made uneasy by the semis that one after another gained on her and then thundered slowly, stupidly past, she thought, I don’t know how to live the next few days of my life. I do not know how. She sobbed hard around each of these simple words, wrenched finally, now that there was no one to witness the wrenching. It didn’t stop after five miles, or ten. It didn’t end until she was in the hospital parking lot, where it had to end. She turned off the ignition and took the deepest possible breath. She wiped her face dry with a Kleenex and tidied her hair with her fingers and then she adjusted the rear-view mirror to try a brief smile. The smile was a horror, as false as anything she’d ever seen. But in the horror she was able to anticipate, able to prepare herself, for Andy’s larger grief. Her own sorrow would be as nothing. That was the truth of it.
She found Andy in a ward. Her mother was there with her, sitting on a chair close to the bed, stroking the sheet over Andy’s shoulders. Margaret found another chair and watched quietly while Andy’s mother tended to her, watched her bring the water glass to Andy’s mouth. The few nurses hurrying around the hall clearly had little time for anything but the wounds, the dressings and bandages. They were kind enough and respectfully gentle and they moved quietly but they could only do so much.
When Margaret thought Andy was ready, she told her what she knew, that they had been told that Paul was alive when they got him out of the truck, that he lived for a while in the ambulance. But he hadn’t regained consciousness, hadn’t spoken. “So we’ve got that,” she said. “The suffering he didn’t have to go through.”
“The old woman in the truck,” Andy said, her words slurred with sedative. “He was so mad. He died angry.” They didn’t know what she meant and they didn’t ask.
Later in the afternoon, when Neil and Carol and Krissy came into the room, Margaret stood up and said she’d best go home.
Patrick and Mary were the first to arrive in town. Right after she’d got the call from Patrick at work, Mary had phoned Stephen at McGill and then gone to the high school to pull the other two, and by the time they got back to the house on Piccadilly, Patrick was there, locked in the upstairs bathroom with the shower running, although when he came out he was still in his suit and bone dry. She’d heard him, his dry screams, when she was walking to the front door with the key in her hand. They were packed in half an hour and on the road. Patrick had not wanted to let her drive. She’d had to take the keys from his fist and lead him around to the passenger door. She’d had to do up his seat belt.
When they got to the house they thanked Angela and sent her home and soon Daphne arrived with Maggie and Jill. Murray and his wife Kate were driving from Toronto, he had told Margaret they should be there around nine or ten that night. Patrick went out to the golf course motel to arrange for rooms.
Margaret had called Sarah in Vancouver and she was trying to get on a flight. Sarah had been planning to come home in a couple of months to show off her baby and Margaret had told her on the phone that maybe she shouldn’t come now, not alone, it was such a long flight she should check with her doctor and do what was best, that they would understand if it was better for her to come later, after the baby was safely born. But Sarah had said no, she would be there. She’d get on the first available flight.
After a dazed supper of scrambled eggs and toast, Margaret tucked Meg into Daphne’s bed, which was where she liked to be, making her promise to sleep. Someone turned the television on and, one by one, Patrick and Neil drove all the cars uptown to gas them up and run them through the carwash. Just before eleven, Daphne and the girls went out to sleep at Paul and Andy’s, to check on things as much as anything because Krissy had decided to stay at the hospital overnight with Andy, sleeping if she had to on one of the plastic couches in the waiting room. The others went out to the golf course motel because there wasn’t room for everyone any more and because Rebecca, Patrick and Mary’s youngest and only daughter, was afraid of Meg at the best of times.
The next morning Patrick and Neil took Andy’s mother into Sarnia to get Andy from the hospital. When Margaret called, the hospital had told her today or tomorrow, depending on what she was going home to, whether there would be any help at home. They hadn’t mentioned clothes and Margaret didn’t think of clothes until Patrick had backed out of the driveway and was halfway down the street, too late. She had told Patrick and Neil to bring Andy back to her, that her mother should stay too, maybe on the McKellars’ rollaway. She was sure of just two things: that Andy’s kids would need her help in ways no one could begin to anticipate, and that Andy would be strong enough to give it to them only if she was cared for herself.
Krissy had sat awake all night beside her sedated mother. In the morning, when she sensed the others coming into the room behind her, she stood up and walked straight into Patrick’s arms. She told them a nurse had given Andy another shot of something at midnight and that she had finally fallen asleep around two. They had just made her wake up. A breakfast tray sat untouched on the table at the foot of the bed and she was supposed to be getting another sponge bath. Andy was curled on her side, dressed to go home in her bloody clothes, shivering.
Neil half carried his mother from the wheelchair to the car, and making his way through the heavy city traffic, Patrick told them that Margaret wanted Andy there, that Andy’s mother was to come too, that he hoped this would be all right.
Murray and Daphne had volunteered to make the airport run. Murray had been able to tell her at the kitchen table how wonderful Maggie and Jill were, because this was something he could say in front of anyone, but as soon as they were in the car and belted up he said it again. “You are doing such a job.”
“They are wonderful in themselves,” Daphne told him. “It’s possible that you and I don’t even matter all that much.”
They were both in a stupor. Murray took the old highway because he said they had lots of time and this was a chance to get a few minutes away from it. They didn’t talk for miles and then Daphne told him that every time she looked down at her hands they were clenched. “My palms are sliced with fingernail marks,” she said, examining her open hands. “These extra little curving moon lines cutting across the normal lines, what are they called?” She did know the names. “The heart line,” she said. “The head line. The health line. The life line. The fate line.”
Murray reached over to lay his free hand in her lap and she took it, touched her fingers to the warm, soft pad of skin on the back of his hand, lifted them away, waited a hard few seconds and then touched the skin again, over and over again giving herself the pleasure of his existence. Anyone seeing this, she thought, even from a distance, would recognize it as love. Easy love.
But sometimes, most often those times when the bully guilt dislocated her ease, she wondered if the thing she had always been after, and still wanted, even now when she had no earthly use for it, was semen. Only his, but still, only semen. For a long time, from the first time, she had been able to feel her cervix moving in pleasure, the knowledge sent to her every time from just behind, just beyond the sweet delirium, and because she’d wanted an image of this mystery, a miniature image that might be worn in a gold locket, she had imagined a small, hidden, happy muscle yawning open like the mouth of a fish. But recently she’d seen a documentary, a film of a woman in orgasm, the woman on her back in some lab, the minuscule camera and light carefully inserted, this for the sake of science, of knowledge, and she had seen that it was not at all as she’d imagined. The cervix was not like a fish. It dips down into the pool of semen, again and again, like a small, thirsty dove.
They hadn’t been together for three years. Two months before he married Kate, Murray had told her, in a rehearsed, controlled phone call, that it had to be over. He’d explained that while he probably could continue on alone, he didn’t want to, not any more. He needed someone who was ready to sign on full-time.
A trusting soul, she’d thought, listening. Could this be what you want? What you’ve found somewhere?
He told her he thought he might have fallen in love. It felt like that.
He had tried something similar once or twice before, when it wasn’t true, hoping with his practised lies to shake her loose. But this time it was true.
As she’d listened to him tell the truth, Daphne had recognized the change immediately. He had given himself away because the other times there had been a trace of bravado, a whiff of threat in his voice, and this time there was only a dull regret, only the quiet retreat of a man who had made up his mind.
“Then I guess we go on,” she’d said, saving herself, “slightly altered.” She was sitting at her window overlooking the muddy Thames, with Maggie in school and Jill at her knees offering one of her storybooks. “This can’t come as a big shock to me. You have been more than generous. All this time you’ve been generous.” She waited for him to speak but he evidently wanted her to say something more. “What about this for a plan,” she said. “We go straight to remembering the best of it. Full bolt. No detours.” Still he didn’t speak. “And of course the girls,” she said. “They’re yours. No games will be played there.”
Murray had not been surprised that her control was absolute, that she didn’t even ask who it was he thought he loved. He knew she wouldn’t fight for him. She didn’t have to fight for him. He didn’t push for any kind of guarantee about Maggie and Jill because Daphne did not waver, she did not say things she didn’t mean. Her promises were few and far between, but they were kept. And he didn’t ask what she would do, who she might find for herself, because if he’d asked, she would have said only that he was not to worry, she would be all right. And so, as easily as that, it was done. Twenty years, done.
When they turned onto the airport road, she was holding his large hand completely in her own two smaller hands. “I like Kate a lot,” she said. “Everyone seems to.” She was quiet again for a minute, thinking of a way to convince him. “I’ve been trying to figure out why whenever she sits down at the table, the kids come alive for her, every one of them. I’ve decided it’s because she doesn’t make them nervous. She makes them the opposite of nervous.”
“I’ve named the girls in my will,” Murray said.
“Your will?” she asked. “Is something wrong?” She was staring at his hand in her lap, as if its strength had deceived her. “You’re not sick?”
“No,” he said. “I’m fine. It’s just a normal update.”
She lifted his hand to her mouth, briefly rested her lips on his warm skin. “Does Kate know about this will thing?”
“Yes,” he said. “I told her it was because they have no father and I have no children. It’s fine with her. She has quite a bit of money of her own. And a very good pension plan with the university. She’s been there for almost twenty years.”
“Will you tell them?” she asked.
“We should maybe let it wait,” he said. He slowed to make the turn into the airport parking lot. “And I want to sell you the house,” he said.
“The house in town?” she asked. “I don’t live in town.”
“It’s been rented out. You could continue to rent it out.”
“Even so,” she said, “I don’t really have the money. I haven’t been able to save very much. Sweet-shit-all is how you might describe what I have been able to save.”
“The price would be negligible,” he said. “A dollar, just to make it a legal sale. Patrick is going to send you the documents for your signature, the deed of land.”
“And we tell no one?” she asked.
“We tell no one now,” he said.
“All right,” she said. She reached into her satchel for her wallet, got out a soft one-dollar bill, and tucked it into his pants pocket. “I love that house,” she said. “Maybe I’ll retire there. I could grow roses in my dotage and give them to people. Buckets of fresh-cut roses from the odd, old woman who lives alone in that big house with the wraparound porch. Who wears earmuffs and high heels and overalls. Whose nails are too long.”
“Or you could live an ordinary life there,” he said. “Another option.”
When they approached the terminal they could see Sarah and Stephen waiting with their bags at the pick-up curb. Stephen already had his suit on, he had apparently worn it on the plane from Montreal. As she was getting into the car Sarah told them she’d been able to make an earlier connection at Pearson because the flight from Vancouver had got in a bit ahead of schedule, so she and Stephen had waited together in the coffee shop. She said she had called the house from Toronto but the line was busy. Except for her eyes, which were without make-up shadowed and puffy, she looked fit and healthy and strong. She was wearing a dark green maternity jogging suit, the material stretched taut over her high, broad belly. Daphne was a bit surprised at the jogging suit because Sarah had always been a disciplined, slightly flashy dresser. She would not normally have been caught dead in this outfit, not in public.
They put her in the front seat with Murray for the ride home. Stephen rode in the back with Daphne, his head turned toward the passing outskirts of the city, the small industries, the packaging plants, the car dealerships. Sarah didn’t break down until they were on the highway, after they had answered some of her questions.
Paul had been fifteen when Sarah was born and four years later he was married and gone out to the farm, but of all of them he had been the one closest to her in age. Before Andy married Paul, before her own kids were born, she had pretty much taken over with Sarah, dressing her up in little sunsuits, taking her out to the lake on her days off to play in the sand with bright plastic pails and serving spoons from the kitchen drawer, colouring with her at the kitchen table, cutting out paper dolls from one of Daphne’s old books. Daphne guessed that Sarah was remembering some of this. She stopped talking to let her remember in peace.
* * *
MARY AND KATE had gone back over to the house to stay with Meg while the others went in to the airport because Margaret had to get some sleep and Bill was still in very bad shape, it was all he could do to stand up from his bed and get to the bathroom. The two of them switched off, took turns, one of them lying down with Meg up in Daphne’s bed while the other answered the kitchen door. Mary didn’t recognize many of the men and women who arrived carrying gifts of food but she bluffed it through, claimed to remember meeting them somewhere when it was suggested that she had. The people who stood at the door had the advantage of course.
Kate wasn’t expected to recognize anyone because she and Murray had not been married very long. She was understood to be the second wife, a wife who wouldn’t know much. But she was not unfamiliar with the gestures, the nature of the gestures, the men slowly shaking their heads, saying almost nothing, the casseroles in their hands wrapped thickly in newspaper, still warm from someone’s oven, the pies and all the desserts recognizably made from scratch because the women who sent them were careful to send only the very best ingredients, the very best effort.
Although her parents had moved to Oakville after she and her sister left for university, which turned out to be for good, Kate had grown up this way, in Dresden, a town not far away and almost this small. Her great-great-great-grandparents had been brought up north just a few months before the Civil War, when slaves were pouring across the border. Dresden was where they’d ended that trip, where they’d built their lives. As she took the warm dishes into her hands she watched the friends and neighbours stare briefly and discreetly at her pink upturned palms.
Meg could not be consoled. Margaret had said she was to be kept at home, that she was not to be taken back into London before the funeral, that they should be able to calm her down somehow. But Meg could not or would not sleep. She was wide awake crying for days and nights running. She could not cry herself out.
After Andy was settled into the boys’ room, quiet and clearly needing quiet, Neil and Carol tried to take Meg home with them but she wouldn’t stay, Neil had to get dressed in the middle of the night to bring her back to Andy. Margaret waited up with Meg until dawn and then she called the doctor at the clinic and asked him please to prescribe the biggest belt of whatever he had in his arsenal because it simply could not go on. One of the two new druggists, a young East Indian with a red Mustang and large, calm eyes who had been in town long enough to know that he should come to the back door at a time like this, brought the prescription over himself and Meg took the first capsules standing at the sink, asking as he handed them to her with a glass of water why was she the only one, why was she always the only one?
After the druggist left, Kate, whose field was chemistry, lifted the capsules to read the prescription and then Krissy said that she would do it. When the funeral was behind them she would arrange to take her holiday time and go back into the group home with Meg and stay there with her for as long as it took.
Although most of the flowers had been sent to the funeral home, a few plants, mostly mums, were delivered to the house and there were already over a hundred sympathy cards. Meg, who was calmed by mid-morning and sluggish, decided that she should be the one to open the cards and with her fine-boned, beautiful hands she opened and arranged them in larger and larger circles on the dining-room table. She took great care with this, did not swear or punch herself when one card knocked another over.
* * *
THERE HAD TO be two afternoons and two nights of visitation because one way or another Paul had known so many people. The funeral director, who was almost ready to take over the business from his father, was very considerate, very attentive. At Patrick’s request he had not tried to darken Paul’s high forehead to match his tanned-from-the-fields face.
Andy’s mother stood just inside the doors with her sister and brother-in-law, Don, who had come down from Barrie where Don had been for all these years a cop. Their job was to greet people as they entered the main room, to ask that they sign their names in the book. Neil and Carol and Krissy and Meg took their places beside their mother, Meg securely wedged between Carol and Krissy. Andy stood closest to the casket, braced to take the brunt of it. Her face and neck were sliced with small stitched cuts but otherwise, thanks to Carol’s steady hand, she was properly made up, her lips and her eyes. She was dazed and sick with sorrow but soon grateful too, for the kind words, for the extravagant praise she was accepting on Paul’s behalf. She had gone through lines like this herself, many times. She knew people struggled.
The rest of them flanked the casket on the other side, Bill first. Not many people had ready phrases for Margaret and Bill. Margaret guessed this was because they hadn’t had nearly as much experience offering their condolences to the parents of the deceased, and she thought, Wasn’t this a good thing. She recognized clearly what she saw passing in front of her. One by one by one, these people made the larger circle and most of them knew to keep a certain distance, to come just so close and no closer. Standing in that one place, Bill sometimes seemed to stagger a bit and when he did he reached back to touch the glossy wood to steady himself. He had not yet cried. His eyes were still firmly focused on the thing that didn’t exist.
Except for Daphne, the others were able to fall back on their social graces, to smile and thank people they hadn’t seen for years, even ask them brief questions about their own lives. Daphne said nothing to anyone. Standing in this room with the body of her brother, with the masses of flowers and the syrupy music, hearing over and over all the useless words of comfort, she had found God, she finally had God squarely in her sights. Her head was packed solid and the hate seeped through to her unruly face, was recognized by the people who took her hand and then quickly moved on past her down the line to the others.
Several times throughout the two afternoons and evenings, Patrick moved out of his place in the line to go across to Andy or to Neil or to the girls. Going to them, to encourage and reinforce their strength, their forbearance, he would stand straight with his head high and reach to put a firm hand gently on a shoulder. “You are doing just fine,” he’d say, or, “Hang in there. Only another half hour and then we can go home.” And once, to Krissy, who was having some very bad moments, especially after her girlfriends had come through, wrapping his arm around her small, quivering back, “Honey, it’s only harder for people when you cry.” It had to be done. Someone had to do it.
Although he had insisted that, to the extent possible, Paul’s skin should be left alone, that the pale high forehead should ride as it always had above a ruddy, bronzed face, and although he escorted several of the older aunts and uncles to the casket and stood waiting with them there as they blotted their eyes, and although he had several times counted the profusion of baskets which had been placed around the casket and on the closed bottom lid, and could have described in some detail the stems and leaves and petals of the robust arrangements of flowers held in those baskets, he did not once look directly at the body. Two afternoons and two evenings and not once did he look. Because Paul was gone. Not dead but gone.
Late on the second afternoon Charlotte arrived with her condolences, alone. She moved down the line to take their hands in her own, embracing only Andy and then Bill, who would not remember her thin arms encircling him. She spoke to no one at any length, certainly not to Murray or to Kate, whom she had never properly met. Watching everyone give Charlotte the courtesy of a disciplined, civil greeting, Margaret thought, You could part water with that woman.
On the third day the young United Church minister conducted the funeral service. He was a very sincere man. He hadn’t known Paul but this was not unusual now, ministers buried people they hadn’t known all the time. And he had done his research. He tried to capture some part of the kind of man Paul had been. He told the mourners that so many people had mentioned Paul’s sense of humour, how much they had come to enjoy it. And what a good father he’d been. And how he had borne his burden, meaning Meg, with courage.
The tone of his delivery was friendly, familiar, his phrasing casual. The words he used were everyday words, even a bit slangy. He talked this way at all his funerals because he was a city man who mistakenly believed that rural people preferred a less formal approach, that they wanted to be talked to this way, appreciated it. For his text, he turned to John, Chapter 11, to the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, and when he spoke about the sisters, the distraught Mary and Martha, he called them “the girls.” He finished his lesson with Verse 23: “Thy brother shall rise again,” and for the rest of her long life, whenever she thought about Paul, before she could get the words stopped, Margaret would think, Thy brother.
After the story of Lazarus resurrected, Patrick went to the lectern to read an Updike poem, “A Pear Like a Potato.” Although she had never before mentioned it, it was Mary who had stored the poem in her head, who had called the library in London to have it found and read so she could copy it down. Patrick had no words of his own. He held the lines of poetry in his shaking hands and read quickly, aware as he read that it was Krissy who sobbed so loudly. Krissy and Mary beside her.
Four of the pallbearers were friends of Paul’s, men he had curled with, played hockey with when they were kids and who still played for the Stonebrook Oldtimers, as had Paul. The other two were nephews, Patrick’s Stephen, who was twenty-one, and his John, who was eighteen. When it was time to lift the casket up onto their shoulders the older men put the younger men in the middle, one on each side, giving no specific instruction but watching them and patting their backs when they looked to be all right with it.
On the way out to the cemetery, which was a slightly rolling twenty acres of very well treed, nicely maintained land beyond sturdy stone gates just at the edge of town, across the creek, the mourners’ cars followed so slowly behind the steel grey hearse there might have been the beat of a drum in the air. As was the custom, when other drivers saw the headlights they stopped at intersections or pulled over to the side of the road to wait quietly while the procession passed, some of them with their heads bowed, some of them holding kids still in their laps.
The interment was over quickly. Just ten minutes before they’d come out of the service to get into their cars to form the procession, there had been a brief, early summer sun shower and all the headstones shone with rain. Although it had been chosen, Paul’s stone was not yet placed. They gathered tight together under the green canopy at a grave that was not yet a grave, not yet a small part of the world grassed over and marked with a chiselled name, with chiselled dates to mark a time on the earth.
Driving back to the house with Bill at the wheel because he had insisted and Stephen and John in the back seat, Margaret told the boys that she remembered when she was a young girl that men would carry the coffin all the way from whatever church it was and down the rutted road to the cemetery, with the mourners following behind them on foot. “And there was no backhoe,” she said. “What you got in those days was a hand-dug grave.”
Stephen gave no indication that he’d heard anything at all. He was quiet, and watchful, proud enough of the way he’d handled himself but afraid too that more would be required of him. John leaned forward slightly at Margaret’s words because he was interested in history, especially the small particulars of history, the way things worked, the odd things people used to do.
Margaret was thinking about her parents’ graves on the far side of the cemetery, which she did not very often visit. When her mother died in 1941, her father had bought just the two plots, telling Margaret there would be another place for her somewhere some day, meaning there would be a husband so why in hell should he waste his own hard-earned money. When Sylvia died Bill had bought a package of eight, apparently and mysteriously imagining that his kids would marry but have no children, would not reproduce themselves right out of consideration. Now two of the eight plots would be marked with headstones. Andy had agreed to let Paul go beside his mother, it was almost the only thing Bill had said in four days, the only sentence he could put together, but she had insisted that he have his own separate headstone because, and she’d had to say it just once, he had been a husband and a father as well as a son.
Two years earlier, when Margaret and Bill had updated their wills at Patrick’s office, Bill had announced that whatever happened, if it became necessary, she was to go below him or above him. He said he’d checked it out and they sometimes allowed this in special circumstances. He said he wanted her as close as Sylvia because why shouldn’t she be?
Margaret was not at all convinced about the likelihood of this arrangement. Recently, Bill seemed to have no compunction about claiming something was true when it clearly wasn’t, when he simply wanted it to be true. But she’d let it pass. To tell the truth, she didn’t much care any more where they put her.
She turned in her seat now to look at Stephen and John and thought, These are Sylvia’s handsome grandsons. “There used to be a bank of trees on either side of this road,” she said. “They were as massive then as these few are now.” She pointed out the five old remaining maples. “All the men who could would take a turn carrying the coffin,” she said, “relieving each other as they got tired.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It was just the way people thought it should be done.” Facing the front again, she told them, “You did a good job today. Your grandfather and I are proud of both of you.”
She was thinking finally about Paul when he was a very young man. About his attentiveness to Andy, their easy affection for each other, their complete and amazing lack of shame. About his climbing up on a kitchen chair to unscrew the light fixture when Sylvia was dying, simply because he had been asked to, because she couldn’t think of any way to be useful except to clean and cook and wash and tidy. About his Grandmother Ferguson taking him aside and scolding him quietly in the dining room, for his tears. And about her own cowardice. She was a grown woman. She could have gone to him after his grandmother had left to go home. She could have told him tears were exactly the right thing.