Patterns of Swallows (10 page)

Graham was still on salary.
He'd need to learn more about the managing of the business before he
was made an official partner, his father thought. But his salary was
more than adequate since he'd been living at home and spending all
his spare time with Ruth who had no expensive tastes. Ruth had her
savings, as well. They were better off than most newlyweds, really,
Graham was quick to point out.

"Will you want to keep
working?" Mrs. MacKellum asked Ruth.

"I think so," Ruth
said at the same time as Graham said, "Wha'd'ya think? My wife
won't need to work!" They looked at each other, slightly
dismayed. They hadn't discussed it before.

"Well, I don't know. I
guess we hadn't ..." Ruth hedged, and Graham said nothing
further on the subject.

But Ruth felt her first doubt.
She hadn't realized it, but she wanted to keep working. She couldn't
imagine life without seeing Jim and Glo and Phoebe and Eva and Sally
and all the regulars on a nearly-daily basis. What would she do at
home all day long while Graham went to the office? The days of
married life as a housewife began to wear a blank, empty look in her
imagination.

Still, she could see Graham's
point. If she kept working, it would look to the rest of the town as
though she needed to. And that wouldn't sit well with Graham's ego.
Besides, he'd probably want meals on the table at a certain time and
shirts ironed and all the rest. Was she ready for this? She'd
hardly had time to think; it had all happened so fast. This was a
whole different ballgame from just seeing Graham every day and going
places with him.

But she'd adjust. Of course she
could find plenty to do in running a home. She'd learn to do things
the way Graham liked them done. Her days would fill up. And she'd
make sure she still saw plenty of Jim and Glo and the Morning Glory.
Maybe Graham would let her continue part-time.

Jim and Glo were next on the
visiting list.

There were no tears on Glo's
part, just a breath-stealing squeeze for Ruth and a breath-stealing
pounding on the back for Graham. Jim's congratulations were quieter
but just as sincere.

"You couldn'a found a
better gal to marry if you'd looked for a thousand years," Glo
told Graham in characteristic hyperbolic fashion. (She always
believed her own hyperboles, though.)

Ruth didn't let it go to her
head. It was the kind of thing people always said to new husbands.

"You've got yourself a real
treasure there," Jim told Graham in a moment of unusual
expressiveness. "You have to handle her gently. She's just a
fragile, little thing, like a little bird."

Ruth had never dreamed that Jim
possessed a poetic streak. She wouldn't have been more surprised to
discover him cracking jokes and bursting into song while flipping his
pancakes and frying his ham and eggs.

"I am not fragile, Jim!"
she said, pleased. No one had ever called her fragile before. She
knew it was far from the truth, of course, but it touched her that
Jim saw her that way.

One part of her mind worried
that Graham would feel that Jim and Glo thought he'd got the better
end of the bargain, even though she knew it was just the fashion to
congratulate the groom in such a way as to let him know that he'd got
the better end of the bargain.

But what did it matter? She
knew full well that Graham's parents thought she'd got the better end
of the bargain. Would it matter to Graham what Jim and Glo thought?

"I aim to handle her
gently," Graham said, putting an arm around her and pulling her
to him, all the while looking at her like a prize he'd fought hard
for.

"Does this mean we'll be
losin' you, Ruthie Darlin'?" Glo asked.

Ruth looked up at Graham.

"We haven't really
discussed it. Everything happened so fast. I'll certainly give you
at least two weeks' notice before you lose me, though, when you do.
If you do."

"Doesn' matter how much
notice you give us. We're not going to be able to replace you. I
mean, we'll have to hire someone else, but that doesn' mean you'll be
replaced. You're like one a' our own, y'know, and I hope you'll
always see us as your family. I hope that for you, too, Graham. You
bring that little girl 'round to see us from time to time, now,
y'hear?" Glo said.

"Will you have a honeymoon
anywhere?" Jim asked.

Ruth nodded. "A short one.
That is, when you can give me the time off. Graham's dad said he
could have a week whenever I can get the time off."

"And where will you be
going? Or shouldn't I ask?" Glo asked (whether or not she
should). As she was quick to inform people, she always said the
things other people would have if they only had the courage.

"I don't think it's a
secret. You two won't tell anyone, anyway. It's just a week, and
we're trying to save money, and I can't think of any prettier spot in
the world than Kissanka Lake, so that's our plan. Graham knows a
couple who own a few cottages on the lake for rent by the week."

"Well, if that won't be
just gorgeous this time of year! The colours'll be just startin' to
turn. You better go soon, though, before it gets too cold."

"Well, we'll go whenever
you say we can," Ruth said, laughing, and before they left the
cafe, the dates were set for her taking a week starting the Monday
after next.

Also before they left, Jim
slipped an envelope into Ruth's hand and said to her, "Just a
little weddin' present for y'all. We didn't know anythin' about it
beforehand or we woulda bought you somethin' real nice. Put this
toward the honeymoon if you like. Hope it'll be real special. And
hope you two'll be real happy. You deserve all the happiness in the
world."

My primary interest in any story
is not so much in what happens to a person as it is in what a person
thinks about what happens to her. That's what holds the interest for
me.

Unavoidably, as I tell you this
story, I tell it to you through my eyes. Some of the things I tell
you are facts – things that anyone will tell you happened.
Some are also facts though only a certain few know the way they
really happened. And some are things the way it seems to me they
must have happened. Those things are not facts though they are about
facts.

As I've told you, I'm more
interested in what a person thinks about events than I am in the bare
events themselves. In order to tell you about the things that
interest me most, I must tell you things that I don't know of my own
knowledge (though there are many different ways of knowing and some
don't involve our five senses).

There are those who would tell
me I can't possibly know the truth about the things which interest me
– that I've blurred the line between imagination and reality.
I know what's real and what I've imagined. As I write, the lines
that are clear in my own mind will blur in the telling. But all I
can do is tell things to you the way I see them.

*
* *

Their first fight happened on
the honeymoon. The first real fight, that is. The first serious
fight.

On the third night of the
honeymoon, Ruth lay awake next to Graham. She could see the full
moon through the top of the little four-paned window next to the bed
in their little cabin bedroom.

She could imagine the lake in
the moonlight. It was all she could do to resist going down to the
lake to scent the pines and watch the moonpath shimmering on the
water, leading where she didn't know, but beckoning to her, luring
her to some unexplored country. She had the impulse to go down to
the lake and plunge into the cold water to swim along the path the
moon made in the water just to see where it would lead.

Graham was sleeping beside her.
He snored slightly. The things a person didn't know about another
person until she married that person.

His snoring was never enough to
keep her awake, though. No, thinking did that, mostly. Tonight it
was the moon that was helping the thoughts keep her awake. Or maybe
the moon had started it, but now that she was awake, she might as
well think thoughts. And her thoughts carried her, willy-nilly, to
places she hadn't been in a long time.

Maybe she really would get up
and go down to the lake. The call of the moon was almost
irresistible. She wouldn't swim, though. That was just silly. She
didn't want to end her honeymoon with pneumonia. But she could at
least see the moonpath if not follow it.

She stirred cautiously, and
Graham's snoring stopped. His hand reached out to her and found her
half-sitting.

"Mmmm," he grumbled.
"Aren't you asleep yet?"

"I can't sleep."

"Sure you can, it's easy,"
he said.

"Easy for you," she
said.

He woke up a little more and
leaned on one elbow to look at her in the moonlight.

"Why can't you sleep?"
he asked.

"I don't know. Thinking, I
guess."

"Thinking! About what?"

She didn't tell him she'd been
thinking about going down to the lake and swimming in the path of the
moon, following it to an unimagined world they couldn't share.

Or maybe they could share it?
Maybe she'd tell him, and they'd go down and watch the moon together,
and swim in its silver light together wherever it took them.

She shook the idea off as
quickly as it occurred to her. She didn't even tell him she'd been
thinking about going down to the lake to watch the moon. It was a
crazy idea, anyway.

"People, I guess. Our old
classmates."

"What put that into your
head? Can't you save the thinking for daytime and the sleeping for
nighttime?" He reached one arm over her and tickled her.

Ruth couldn't help squirming.
She was violently ticklish. Her mind couldn't switch gears from her
thoughts to fun and games quite that quickly, however.

"I was thinking about
people we knew once."

"Like who?" Graham
asked, curiously. He stopped tickling her.

"Oh, like I say, old
classmates. People like Joshua Bella."

Graham lay back with a snort.

"Joshua Bella! Man! Now
there was one ugly kid! Of all people to lie awake thinking about!"

"Joshua Bella was the most
beautiful person I've ever known."

If it hadn't been dark in the
room, Graham would surely have recognized the danger signals in her
eyes. But the darkness, instead of making them more visible, hid the
shooting sparks. Or maybe he wasn't looking at her. Maybe he wasn't
really paying attention. Maybe he was half asleep. Maybe his mind
was elsewhere.

"Oh yeah! Beautiful!
That's one way to describe him. Not the word I'd choose, though.
More like just, plain mutt-ugly. Too bad you couldn't have married
Joshua Bella, I guess, if you think he was the most beautiful person
you've ever known. That's a fine thing to tell your husband!"

"Graham, if you ever say
another bad word to me, even in fun, about Joshua, I'll leave you. I
swear I will! And you know I don't say things I don't mean."
When Ruth's voice got quiet like that, Graham knew what that meant.

"Okay, now, just simmer
down, all right? I'm sorry, if it'll make you feel any better. I
didn't mean anything by it. It's just that no man likes to hear his
wife comparing him to someone else, even Joshua Bella, on his
honeymoon. I forgot about ... I mean, I forgot that you were there
when ... Lookit! I am sorry, all right? Let's say no more about
it."

And no more was said about it.

If Ruth had been on the point of
telling Graham the whole story, she never did after that. As
insignificant and quickly forgotten as the incident on the honeymoon
may have seemed, Joshua Bella was the first wedge.

*
* *

Funny what a gossamer strand is
trust when you think about the enormous weight it supports. Love and
trust, though closely joined, are certainly made of two very unlike
substances. When the brittle thread of trust snaps, one would expect
its burden to fall and be smashed. Yet love survives many such a
fall and carries on unbroken.

To my knowledge, she never did
tell Graham the whole story. Only three or four people in the world
know it. For some reason, she chose that I should be one of them.

*
* *

When Ruth was a little girl,
every morning after breakfast her mother read a portion from the
Bible to her dutifully. They didn't go to church (too many
hypocrites), but she didn't want her daughter growing up heathen.

One passage in particular
haunted Ruth for years. It was from the Sermon on the Mount, a
favourite of Beatrice Chavinski's, and so a passage Ruth heard
regularly.

Ye have heard that it was
said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall
kill shall be in danger of the judgment: But I say unto you, That
whosoever is angry with his brother without cause shall be in danger
of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall
be in danger of the council; but whosoever shall say, Thou fool,
shall be in danger of hell fire.