Dropped Threads 3 (33 page)

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The story of the drunken horse sits side by side with my mother’s tales of my grandfather’s strictness and pride, his meanness to her and her six siblings on their Saskatchewan farm. As a kid, if she hadn’t done the chores exactly as he’d wanted or if she’d come home late from a dance in the schoolhouse three miles down the road, he went after her with a willow switch, slashing at her bare legs as she squirmed on her belly into the farthest corner under the bed. Though he’d mellowed in old age, his daughters, wary of his temper, tried to keep me and my cousins from getting in his way.
Often when the family gathered at the farm for holidays and celebrations, he’d retreat to the barn to curry the wide backs and haunches in the stalls or haul hay to the feed troughs, the tall animals swinging their massive heads to watch him lift forkfuls of dry grass. The qualities the Shire draft horse was bred for—endurance and willingness to work—were also his, and almost all I got to know of him.

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A cat sleeps sixteen hours a day because owning so much wears him out. “In a cat’s eyes, all things belong to cats,” so the English proverb goes
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Bitterness intact, my grandfather pounded home his hatred for teachers and school, told me to pinch a dog’s ear to make it listen and to down a healthy dose of castor oil to clean a body out in spring. His and Billy’s shenanigan is the only complete story I can remember him telling. It shows a warmth I never saw in him, a sweet affection for a creature that was more to him than just a beast that pulled a plow or wagon and lessened his own heavy labours on the farm. I tell it to myself over and over because it gives me something I need to know: Nothing and no one are wholly what they seem, especially those difficult to love.

Sometimes I think we’re allotted a predetermined amount of pleasure that we can take from life. The measure the blessèd receive is enough to fill a water tower, a bounty that would provide for all the houses in a town. In my grandfather’s case, his limit was a dipperful. He used his pleasure up when he was young except for what he kept alive in Billy
and their story. Thinking of my grandfather and that horse, the two alone weaving their way down the narrow country road under stars unwashed by city lights, both having to rise at dawn to work in the fields, I feel a tenderness for what gets lost in living. Now when I give my horse her head she leads me to the country of my grandfather’s birth and the years of his young manhood. Thin child from the future, in the barn’s close scent of hay and horses, I wait for him and Billy to come safely to their rest before the sunrise, a rest companiable, bone-deep, and brief.

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Swallow two whiskers from the cat you’ve loved since she was a kitten. Now without a torch, you can navigate the neighbourhood at night and walk without bruising through any stooped and narrow doorway
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When I was four, into the kitchen of our house my dad carried a toy Pomeranian tucked in his coat pocket. He had traded, unbeknown to his boss, a half tank of oil from the green Co-op delivery truck for one of Mrs. Rittinger’s purebred pups. Furry and red as a fox, the pup was smaller than my father’s hand. Lying on my belly on linoleum warmed by the fire in the wood stove, I watched her small pink tongue lapping milk. The thread of white stretching from the surface to her mouth didn’t break until she’d licked the bowl clean. Never had I gazed at anything so long and hard, sensing for the first time that beauty, when you open up to it completely, brings both a wonder and a wound.

My mother named her Tiny, and she became my brother’s dog. Seven years older than I, he’d sometimes let
me tag along when he and his friends played kick the can or built a soldiers’ fort out of the log ends waiting to be chopped for the stove. As soon as he grabbed his jacket from the hook, I was at his heels like a second dog, dumber in canine ways but just as loyal and underfoot. Some days he’d order me to stay in our yard. Other times, by the caragana hedge, he’d tell me to hide and he’d count to ten, and then he’d never find me. Tiny wasn’t sent away unless the games spread too far afield. “Go home, Tiny,” he’d say, and she’d wend slowly down the block, head and tail lowered. I knew exactly what she felt. She made an image of my sadness.

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Cats are confounded by mirrors and the surfaces of pools. Strangers to Narcissus, they don’t need the compliment of their reflection. There’s so much in the world: sunslick and dapple, moth blunder, black spider skating on the porcelain of the bathroom sink
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On winter mornings from the picture window, I’d watch Tiny and my brother head off on his paper route, her trotting ahead, running up the steps to the houses that took the news and passing those that didn’t. Our neighbours thought this was the smartest, cutest thing and tipped my brother with change left over from the milkman. Once I went off with them because Mom was curling in a bonspiel out of town and left the house early to make the first game. All down the block every house or so, Tiny leapt straight up as if springs had been buckled to the bottom of her paws so she could see above the snow piled on both sides of the shovelled walk. When my brother’s bag was almost empty, he lifted me and
set me inside on top of the papers he had left, Tiny bounding ahead on her short legs and doubling back. I was so happy then. If he’d told her any time, “Go home,” she’d have known exactly where to go, but she didn’t have to. The three of us had work to do, lights coming on one by one in the windows down our small town’s winter streets, blue as they were back then, before the dawn.

Because my brother tossed too much in bed, Tiny slept with me. A cranky little dog, she’d nip if I moved my feet. I learned to lie like a courtly lady’s effigy on a tomb, dog on a carnelian cushion at my feet. I can still sleep like that, the blankets and sheets flat and smooth when I wake in the morning as if no one lay all night in that neat bed. What else did I learn from her? No matter what I did, she remained my brother’s dog. No matter how much I loved her, the same love didn’t come back. My brother reaffirmed this lesson when he left home. He was eighteen, I was eleven, and though I don’t blame him any more, he rarely wrote and never visited. I missed him, but he didn’t miss me. Two years ago, a friend stopped seeing me because of some terrible thing I’d done, she said, but she couldn’t explain it. Next to my husband and mother, she was the most important person in my life. My saying that out loud meant nothing to her. Again, my love for her was more than what she felt for me, and there was nothing I could do to make things right.

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A cat can walk on snow without breaking through; it can walk on clouds. If you follow one for a day in the garden, your feet will grow lighter. By night, you’ll be walking on your dreams. This is the first lesson in flying without wings
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A few Januarys ago, a freak snowstorm hit the West Coast, where I now live. Before the worst of it when we couldn’t make it through the backyard, the snow thigh-high, my husband and I walked to the pond to check on the goldfish. Two of them lay still, embedded in a skin of ice. He broke through to scoop them out and set them on the snow at the edge of the circle of stones while we peered in the pond to see the others. Alive, they drifted in the cold viscous water as if suspended between two elements like someone waiting to be born.

I stared at the two dead fish. Their presence seemed magnified, weighted with significance. Part of their power was the startling beauty of paradox—against the snow, two gleaming fish the size and colour of candle flames broken from their wicks. No matter how long I looked, I couldn’t figure out what they meant. They remained unreadable, like glyphs from a language not my own. Looking at the fish, a still life on white canvas, was like looking at the sky where some believe a paradise is waiting. If it does exist, there are few signs of it more powerful than the small miracles you find right here.

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The inventor of the camera’s shutter and light-filter mechanisms had been studying the pupils of his cat. Every photograph has a parallel a cat has taken—without a touch of sentiment, a perfect composition of the never-seen and shadow
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The black-and-white cat on my lap under the apple tree stares at the fir against the fence. When I follow the translucent arrow of her gaze, look over and up, I see the raccoon I didn’t know was there, peering down at us. The blue-eyed cat on the deck fixates on the ivy that climbs the chimney, his ears swerving left then right. I sit beside him and hear a woodrat’s feet scuttling along the stems of the vines under the sticky leaves. Instead of multiplying cat years by seven to figure out how old they are in human terms, I divide my age when I’m around them. I grow younger, alert to what a cat attends to. This morning I am eight and full of wonder. Over a hundred years ago, Charles Baudelaire wrote, “The Chinese read the time in the eyes of cats.” The time, he said, was eternity. When I spend my hours with cats, make my eyes their eyes, note the twitching of their ears and their nostrils’ flare, this is the eternity I sense: the smell of rust in the air before rain; all things the wind startles into beauty; the winter hare in the belly of the moon, its heartbeat soft and sure as the fall of paws.

I’m not sure anyone
can explain how wisdom is attained; yet many people are wise. Unhappily, human development is an exceedingly private matter, so secret and individual that it leaves no footprints for someone else to follow. The nature of inner growth is mostly snail-paced and evolutionary, rather than the clap of a revolutionary resolve that calls attention to itself.

For instance, my work habits are of the nose-to-the-grindstone, obsessive-compulsive variety, but I don’t know why. My parents were hard-working people; maybe that accounts for my somewhat driven behaviour.

Also, I find that adversarial situations depress me, my strong preference being for the bliss of amiable collaboration, but the anguish I feel when tempers rise can’t be attributed to early influences because there wasn’t much open conflict in my childhood. If my family members didn’t like one another, they kept it to themselves. Unless you count as a contributing factor to my horror of conflict the fact that my mother hated it too. It would drive her out of the house, and her mother was the same. A clue there.

The literature on the subject of early childhood maintains that good (or bad) behaviour is shaped early in life according to a seamless twining of the infant’s innate character and the environment in which the small person is raised.
Conditioning often results in a degree of permanent patterning, but it is also true that most adults retain a capacity to be impressionable. Profound change can happen in a click because of someone’s example, or a casual comment that sinks in because it holds a truth. The power of random events to alter behaviour is grist for fiction and the real stuff of human lives.

It takes practice, I’m told, to upgrade a personality. Aristotle said that humans are what they repeatedly do. It’s hard and lonely toil, without end, as people stumble from peaks of sweet harmony to the caustic depths of regret. I’m a work in progress myself and I’m in my eighties.

Jean Piaget, a Swiss child psychologist of note, decided that humans acquire knowledge and their distinctive dispositions by a process of accretion and substitution. Accretion is the layering of information (how to tie a shoe, the names of clouds) and substitution is the factor of
Oops, that was wrong, better not do that again
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In my experience good people can’t explain why they are good. I once asked an outstandingly fine woman who lives a selfless life why she is such a good person. She said, “My parents were good people.” That’s a reasonable answer, since people are shaped more by parental example than anything adults may pass on in the way of instruction. But in her case it doesn’t really explain much. Her brother is in jail.

If people are a mystery to themselves, which is what I think I am getting at here, I don’t know what any of us can offer the young beyond loving them and setting as decent an example as possible. The rest is rules, such as to be punctual (it is inconsiderate to keep people waiting); to strive for economic self-sufficiency (you’re safer); and don’t step on ants (they have a life too). The objective is to shape a conscience that neither produces crushing guilt nor forgives bad behaviour easily.

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I can’t think of any life-enhancing counsel I have ever passed on successfully to our children, except that they all know not to interrupt writers when they are thinking—only when they are typing. One of my grandchildren, indeed, was asked this very question on television. Said the interviewer, “What life lessons has your grandmother given you?” She responded, “How to butter bread.” Oh well, good table manners always come in handy.

Similarly, on a television show I was hosting, the producer scheduled an item which featured my mother and older daughter. The point was that we were to discuss the continuity that flows from mothers to daughters, and back. I addressed the pivotal question to my mother. I asked, “What do you think we three have in common?” She answered thoughtfully, “We all wash dishes the same way.”