Sanctuary Line (3 page)

What can I say about my Uncle Stanley? That he was the father I never really had, the man who would guide my way into adulthood? No, he was the father I never
could
have had, the performing father, full of jokes and hijinks and important-sounding, often conflicting — but always oddly believable, at least to us — pronouncements concerning politics, history, animal husbandry, grafting, and pruning. There were the spontaneous summer adventures: trips in pickup trucks to ghostly old mills and abandoned cheese factories situated in parts of the back townships that only he seemed to know about. “I’m going exploring!” he would announce, springing up from a chair on a Sunday afternoon. As children, even as young teenagers, we would call after him, running to keep up, begging to be included, and he would relent with an air of feigned resignation, as if he hadn’t intended us to join him all along. All that celebration and enthusiasm! And then there were the dark moods, also significant and admirable simply because they were his.

We all adored him, of course, and madly courted his favour, which was not always visibly present, no matter how we tried to please. Seldom unkind, he was nonetheless seized by bouts of vague withdrawal, sometimes by downright absenteeism in our midst, as if a grey veil had been woven between him and us. I now see that as we tried harder, he withdrew further. Then abruptly, some small thing that not one of us had thought of would bring him back, and almost always this would be an external phenomenon, something that really had nothing directly to do with him.

Once it was my cousin Shane, who at the age of about eleven had begun to whittle farm animals from pieces of driftwood he had found at the edge of the lake. My uncle would be interested, you see, not so much in the carvings themselves but in Shane’s absorption in the carving – a window, perhaps, that he hadn’t noticed before into his son’s character. Then, without warning, he would lunge into the whole idea of carving animals, scouring libraries for books on the subject, finding just the right piece of driftwood on the shore, insisting we all become involved until Shane himself would be completely overwhelmed by his father’s enthusiasm. In this way, I now understand, my uncle was a variety of appropriator, a hijacker or robber, having to make everything his, having to own the lion’s share of any experience. Were he here now, he would undoubtedly follow me to the lab, keep records of
the fall and spring migrations, and in no time know more about the monarchs than I do, I who have been studying for so long.

But during those summers it would be the sailboat that Don was trying to build or Mandy’s fossil collection that might seize his attention. The fossils were a hobby she had been working on for years, one that her father had never, to our knowledge, even noticed, until he
did
notice and became a connoisseur. Soon he had found a quantity of fossils among the pebbles of the beach, each one rarer, more unlikely than the one before. A week later he was using words such as
trilobite
or
protozoa
in many of his sentences and reciting long lists of Latin names for prehistoric life forms at dinner. Then, while Mandy reddened and looked at her plate, he would make ridiculous demands, insisting that she tell him the life story of a brachiopod or suggesting that the two of them leave the table immediately to see who would be the first to find a graptolite on the pebbled beach. I don’t believe there was malice or even competitiveness in these actions; perhaps he was only teasing. He sensed, I think, a calmness, a steadiness around the tasks that other people loved, a reliable contentment, and in his own unhappiness — if he
was
unhappy — wished to enter the zone where that contentment came into being. He may simply have been seeking some sort of refuge.

It was essential that some of the members of my family or, more accurately, my mother’s family live near water – the men in particular. Exhausted by making both nourishing pastureland and decent crops flourish in wilderness landscape, they seemed to need to sleep somewhere in the vicinity of an unruly element they could see but knew they were not expected to control. If we were to believe my uncle, it had always been that way; every single Butler farmer had ploughed a field or driven his animals through a pasture that had a shoreline for a shoulder.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the family had bifurcated, one half continuing to pursue – fruitlessly, no doubt, judging from the southwest part of Ireland where they pursued it – the agricultural life, the other half entering a profession, that of lighthouse-keepers.

The keepers would have been eventually taken into the world of the elegantly named Commissioners of Irish Lights and would have been considered fortunate indeed by their brothers in that they would have been given a recognizable job, a house, monogrammed silverware, and solid ironstone crockery with the motto
In Salutem Omnium
etched on its surface. They would have been given lamps to light, storms to contend with, lives to save, and an elevated vantage point. Their brothers, on the other hand, while they were still in Ireland, dealt with drenched, unmanageable land, large, cold houses, sickly livestock, depressed wives, and poverty-stricken and eventually starving tenants.
The North Americans of my uncle’s generation healed the bifurcation by coming solidly back to the land. By the time I was born, there hadn’t been a keeper among us for half a century, though the lighthouse my great-great-uncle had manned was still visible to us and shone, and still shines, completely mechanized now, from the end of nearby Sanctuary Point.

Today is the kind of day that would have been a lighthouse-keeper’s dream: bright sun and a steady breeze strong enough to make cumbersome sailing vessels dart like insects around nautical hazards, but not so strong that those vessels would be smashed to pieces on the shore. Everything is either shining or sparkling: the waves are picturesquely topped by white foam, but the swell is not large enough to cause danger. The onshore wind moves the branches of trees, making an interesting play of light and shade on the grass, but it is not stiff enough to ground the butterflies, many of whom are undoubtedly making use of its updrafts to travel easily from blossom to blossom.

Occasionally, I can hear the drone of one of the old aircraft they use for training purposes across the lake at the Ohio air base solemnly circling above the water. Just before Mandy enrolled in the Royal Military College, during her Great Lakes search-and-rescue phase, she trained for a while in a Canadian military plane, sailing right over Lake Erie, her old farm, her old life. Eyes fixed on the instrument panel and the sky, and then the few scattered patches
of forested terrain, she never once looked down at the remains of the orchards. Or so she claimed later, when I asked her.

Year after year in my childhood, my mother and I left the city of Toronto in June and drove west for three hours to this farm, our summer clothes in the back seat of the Buick, the windows open for air. We lived for most of the year in the brick house my father bought before he died, long enough ago that I barely remembered him or living anywhere else, long enough ago that my mother, and I, had fallen easily back into her family, its generations of agriculturalists, its Irish origins, its identification with the Ontario land it had adopted and has now abandoned. The city house was a convenience; it sheltered us when I went to school and my mother went to work as a secretary in the same school. But it had none of the allure, the glamour of the farm on the lake, the place where she had been born and her father and her father’s father before that. There, each summer to greet us, were the trees planted in the yard and the fences built in the fields by dim ancestors whose stories were reinvented for us by my uncle. And there, also, was the man I always thought of as my other uncle – my mother’s other brother – who lived in the town of Kingsville with his wife and children, whom I thought
of as my other cousins. There were views of the lake and sessions of play with Mandy, Don, and Shane and the other cousins, who did not sleep at the farm but who burst out of their parents’ cars on weekends and ran with us, as if by instinct, toward the lake.

Mandy was almost two years younger than me, but it had never really seemed that way. This may have been because, when she wasn’t cavorting around the farm with the rest of us, she was reading, increasing her knowledge of experiences outside of the world of this place and its ancestral narratives. She consumed all of Dickens, I remember, and could speak about orphanages and evil step-parents with authority. By the time she was twelve, Walter Scott had grabbed her imagination and with him came wars and love affairs. This addiction to books was something she came by honestly, an inheritance from several of the great-greats, but I’ll tell you more about this later. Robert Louis Stevenson was her introduction to poetry, which had happened at a very early age. I have begun to read Mandy’s books now, and the other night I let
A Child’s Garden of Verses
fall open in my hands. How could I not think of those summers when I read the following stanza:

To house and garden, field and lawn,
The meadow-gates we swang upon,
To pump and stable, tree and swing,
Goodbye, goodbye, to everything!

My mother was the sibling in her generation who had, through marriage, taken the first tentative step into the domain of business, professions, and cities. The next generation – all those cousins – would follow her with enthusiasm. There is no one, no one left. I live in a landscape where absence confronts me daily. But my uncle’s disappearance – his departure to nowhere – was the most dramatic, and the most deliberate: the most final abdication of them all.

Moving around the house, I often pass by the roll-top desk, which was my uncle’s and his father’s before him, and his grandfather’s before that, and I know that the accounts he tried to keep during that last summer still lie, untouched, in the drawers. I have not opened the files, not wanting to go anywhere near this evidence of my uncle’s last, sad attempts to maintain some kind of order. The list of Mexican workers is hidden in there, I suppose, and if I were to examine the paper it is written on, I would likely discover the boy’s last name, which, incredibly, I had no notion of at the time. And all the preparations for buses, and the pick up from and delivery to the airport cargo terminal, are in there as well, I expect, yellowing in darkness. Quite likely there are some earlier, ancestral documents pertaining to this farm
in one of the desk folders. In the top left-hand drawers, no doubt reeking of mould, lies the Essex County phonebook from 1986, the tradespeople named in its pages perhaps retired or dead now, and a listing of small businesses that have likely vanished into air. There is also a harmonica my uncle sometimes played and a timetable for trains that no longer stop at the abandoned station and probably a schedule of Saturday events for the Sanctuary Point Summer Dance Pavilion, which closed and then was burned by vandals at least fifteen years ago.