Alone in the Classroom (28 page)

This stopped me. “We talked on the phone on Saturday. She said she was fine.”

Connie immediately said, “She wouldn’t have wanted to worry you. The pain in her shoulder was really getting her down, but it’s under control now. She’s back in her studio, as productive as ever.”

“They don’t
tell
me. They always say they’re
fine.”
I
set down my coffee cup. By not worrying me, they were excluding me. It made me angry. And it hurt.

Connie looked at me for a moment. “You’re so lucky to have your mother still alive. I can’t imagine what that would be like.”

We said goodbye outside the cafe. Our leave-taking was tender hearted, almost too effusive. The sort of effort you then have to recover from. You take a long walk and ponder your failings. I thought about how much I loved Connie and how little we had to say to each other. I thought about her search through the dry genealogical past for traces of her mother, while mine was a living creative force on the other side of the country.

Halfway home, I passed a flower bed that spilled over onto the sidewalk and I stopped to examine the delicate, bluish-purple blossoms inhabited by a few bees. I asked the man who was walking across the lawn if he knew what they were. Lavender, he said, which surprised me. I thought I knew lavender.

It was five in the afternoon by the time I got home. I felt uncommonly tired, worked over and sad, as if a death had occurred.

My thoughts turned more and more towards home, towards Ontario and my aging mother and father, and after seven years in Vancouver I moved back with my teenage children. After a few months Leo followed me, and we have been together ever since, my piano player and I. I’m not like Connie, I do get lonely. We found this house in Old Ottawa South and took over a garden that was like a cemetery full of white wooden stakes bearing the Latin names of the old botanist’s various plantings; some of the stakes were readable, some too faded. From neighbours I learned that the former owner had been a big man, white haired and stoop shouldered, garrulous, opinionated and abrupt, who worked in suspenders and slippers as he documented everything that crossed his path, not just the thousands of plants he collected and labelled and sent to
herbaria around the world but features of his daily life. He liked to smoke at the table beside the kitchen window and sometimes cigarette butts fell on the floor; he wrote the date beside each scorch mark.

With almost the same accuracy, I can date the moment when my life came into focus for the first time since falling in love with Michael. It was late July of 1993. We had driven up the Ottawa Valley, turning off the highway at Argyle and picking up the road towards Algonquin Park. Near Golden Lake we parked and proceeded to hike up Blueberry Mountain, a steep and shady climb crowned by a view of the Bonnechere River valley, its fields and glistening lakes a part of the larger Ottawa Valley. The hilltop was covered with blueberries. The ones in the sun were very small and warm to the touch, the ones in the shade were big and worthwhile, and all of them had the dusky bloom that’s like the film of chalk after a blackboard has been erased.

I knelt down. The berry-heavy twigs were low to the ground, and I lifted them up like tangled hair off the back of one’s neck and combed the berries into a pot. Under the small green leaves and small dry twigs, they hung unblemished, seamless, their sheen disturbed by my warm fingers moving like my mother’s and I was with her in a new way, feeling an old and deep emotion, the rapport I had been looking for all my life.

So much of coming home is wondering why. You make a long journey
for
something and what is it once you have it in your hands? It’s a series of second thoughts. A bundle of doubts. A nest with no eggs. And so you look at the nest and think about the missing eggs. You look at this
nothingness and after many months start to see the intricate basket, the catch basin for your empty guts, the twigs, the leaves, the undersides of the leaves, and the beautiful, beautiful berries.

I picked, relaxed at first and careless of results, then more feverishly and more possessively once I heard the voices of other pickers deep in the woods, and in the back of my mind was my mother’s first memory, of being carried up Blimkie’s Mountain by her father and set down among the blueberries that she picked and ate all afternoon - a memory of love, colour, abundance, on the ground and in her father’s arms.

I was back in the land of her wounded childhood, and the land fascinated me and so did the childhood. It seemed to me that going deeper into my mother’s past would help me understand all the life that was blocked up inside me, that is blocked up inside each of us.

And so on a Thursday afternoon in March of 1994, about half past three, I sat down at a long white table in the Ottawa Room of the Ottawa Public Library and began to go through abstracts of births, marriages, and deaths from the Argyle
Mercury
. As I read I imagined Connie doing similar research and I felt closer to her too. In the first abstract I found my grandmother’s birth, and a quiver went through me.
1884 - April 13, Mrs. Thomas Stewart, a dau., Easter Sunday Morning
. Then I turned to the Deaths and saw the mother listed five days later,
wife of Thomas Stewart, aged 25 yrs
. I paused, considering all the consequences that poured out of that birth and that death. Sifting through more pages, I discovered the record of my grandmother’s
marriage in 1908 and then I came to my mother’s birth in 1919.
Soper, Nov. 26, a dau
.

I used to brush my mother’s hair when I was a girl. I learned texture, thickness, solidity, scalp smell, scalp colour: the pallid blue-greyness under her thick brown hair like a broken piece of china, the view you have when a plate breaks in half. My mother’s patience in this one regard. She liked to have me stand behind her chair after dinner and brush and brush and brush her hair.

In the mornings it was her turn. I sat on a stool beside the kitchen window and looked out at the snow as birds flew by, arrows of red, arrows of blue, while my mother brushed and combed and braided and quizzed. She had me spell
wear, were, where. There, they’re, their. Where were the birds going in their finery? They’re over there wearing their feathers
. I learned hard little words as my hair was tugged into French braids by rapid, relentlessly competent fingers. Later, when I read in Levi-Strauss about language arriving from heaven on a long braid of hair, I felt I had known this all along.

Her merciless fingers were undistractible. Never waste a moment, they drummed into my skull; the world is a slate and you must have some further inch of learning to show for yourself at the end of each day. Words were synonymous with insistence, short jabs of pain, stoicism, my mother’s moods.

She inherited her father’s hands, as I’ve said, his bony, capable hands that planted gardens and grafted fruit trees
and worked with furniture and corpses. Unhappy undertaker. He had no choice, my mother believed, but to take over the family business, though what he really wanted was to go west and be a farmer. He left uncollected bills worth thousands of dollars when he died and no life insurance, but seventeen bushels of gladiola bulbs.

These details I discovered in my uncle David’s photocopied memoir, my mother’s oldest brother, an inveterate note-taker and chronicler of his own life. I learned more when a cousin sent me her father’s brief but revealing account of his ancestors. Much of it was nothing my mother knew, despite her lively memory, and nothing she was interested in. “You can’t imagine my
un
interest,” she said to me once, “in all those Sopers.”

I was discovering a past ruined for her by her father’s early death and her mother’s bile, a past that was coming into leaf for me and never would for her. But the leafiness contained her, whether she knew it or not, cared or not.

They had been piano and cabinetmakers in England, my grandfather’s people, coming to Canada in 1860 with some means, but little in the way of luck or savvy. They bought a cabinet-making business in a small Quebec town in decline and the business was so unprofitable they had to abandon it after a year. They moved across the Ottawa River to Ontario and took up land on the Opeongo Road in Admaston Township precisely when deep snow concealed the abundant rocks and general unfitness for settlement. They built a commodious house, which contained the most valuable collection of books in the district - a detail that touched me to the core - only to see it
burn to the ground in 1864, thanks to a fit of helpfulness on the part of the father, who set fire to the brush piles in the clearing and the house went up too. See where helpfulness gets you. By this time the son had married a young woman, eighteen years old. Hannah, after whom my mother was named, stayed in the rebuilt house and raised the first several of what would be eleven children. She managed the cows and chickens and garden and children, while father and son opened a furniture and undertaking business in Argyle, travelling back and forth, the two of them, between country and town.

In 1869, while Hannah was still on the farm, snow fell without interruption for nearly six weeks. It began falling on the morning of February 11 in a slow obliteration that coincided with one more sudden, for that same morning a crowd of five thousand had gathered outside Ottawa’s Nicholas Street jail to watch Patrick Whelan, who had been convicted of murdering Thomas D’Arcy McGee, hang by the neck until he was dead. It was the last public execution in Canada. By noon, a raging blizzard enveloped the city and the surrounding countryside. Many of those heading back to their homesteads on the concession lines had to seek shelter with friends or relatives or strangers, and there they remained, marooned for weeks. Drifts twenty feet high stopped trains in their tracks, and cattle died lowing in their stalls.

Hannah had a book of fairy tales rescued from the fire, tales of magic cloaks and yearned-for wealth and small children who lose their way in the woods. She read the stories to her children and then stepped outside into
the spellbound Year of the Deep Snow. She used snowshoes to get around, cutting up fences for fuel, shovelling her way to the barn, tunnelling her way to the woodpile, working in the moonlight: a figure of surpassing stamina. My grandfather, her second child, would become the tenderest of fathers. These are the stories my mother tells, that when she was small, she sat in her high chair beside him and held his hand while they ate their supper. At bedtime, he would give her a piggyback ride upstairs and half a dozen somersaults on the big bed beside her crib before they knelt together on the floor to say, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” He settled her in her crib and kissed her good night, but as soon as his foot hit the landing she would call out, “Daddy, I need a drink of water,” and back without fail he would come.

On April 19 of that legendary winter, it started to rain and it kept raining until all the rivers flooded and the countryside was under water. When the roads were finally passable, Hannah went into town with her four children, including my grandfather, and moved into the apartment above the store and refused to return to the wilds. She slept in a big bed known to her offspring as the funeral bed for the carved plumes on the dark headboard and footboard that resembled the purple-feathered plumes on the family’s horse-drawn hearse.

Loosen the reins and our personalities take us back to childhood; loosen them more and they take us back to our parents as children. Back to the horses themselves that drew
the hearse in the flu epidemic of 1918-19. My mother was born in a flurry of death, her undertaker father unable to get to bed for two weeks, so busy was he burying the dead.

In his furniture store on Argyle Street, they kept the caskets on door panels that swung up into the wall like stowaway beds. Over the years, my grandfather in his workshop also put hundreds of solid-rubber tires on wagons and baby buggies, pressing the wheels between the pit of his stomach and the workbench, then using a round wooden handle to work the tire and its double-twisted wires into place. Some who knew him, like my uncle David, believed that the continual pressure and irritation to his lower stomach was the cause of the cancer that made him drop in weight from 145 to 98 pounds. At the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, they cut out the tumour and sewed the bowel to the stomach, and this permitted him to eat again, but he continued to fail, and in July of 1927 he died at the age of sixty-three, breaking my mother’s seven-year-old heart.

My mother has always said that he died in the spring, but here it is in black and white in the
Mercury
. A summer death. In her mind she carries the clear image of her father lying comatose in bed, the spring breezes lifting the curtains at the open window as a semicircle of solid, dark Soper bodies sit around him, waiting for him to die. It was too much. She began to cry, and one of her uncles, a minister, resolutely took her by the hand and led her downstairs to the summer kitchen, where he left her.

In her own short and vivid account of her life, which I typed out for her about five years ago, she wrote, “I took
an instant and permanent dislike to that man, which I have, to a lesser degree, extended to all ministers.” She refers to her father as the youngest of the nine Soper children. In fact, he was the second oldest of eleven. I’m reminded of what Michael said about memory: the facts don’t matter; everything you learn blurs and merges and contributes to a way of seeing the world. My mother sees herself in the springtime of her young life losing the person who meant everything to her, and he was the youngest in his family, just like her.

The
Mercury
tells me that the day after he died hailstones the size of plums fell at the lake six miles away, which he had been instrumental in stocking with pickerel. Moments before the storm, a fishing party caught a string of seven pickerel and six black bass, one of the bass weighing three and a half pounds. When I informed my mother of these events with their otherworldly implications, her face lit up as if her father had just walked into the room.