Sanctuary Line (6 page)

They have been here for a long, long time, these volumes, ever since Mandy graduated from the military college and went out into a world so transient it was impossible to cart books with her from posting to posting. There are the usual classics, some of which even I was forced to read in the one English course required for my undergraduate degree in biochemistry.
The Mill on the Floss, Jane Eyre, The Mayor of Casterbridge
. But there is a good deal of poetry as well, a world I have ignored until now, though I admit that Mandy tried now and then to make me enter it. I began by reading Robert Frost, as she said I should, because as she pointed out he is both profound and easy to understand, especially for those of us who know farms or who come from farming stock. Most of Mandy’s poetry books are paperbacks, but those written by Frost are hardcover editions, complete with dust jackets, and I was surprised to discover my uncle’s name, rather than Mandy’s, on the flyleaf of each collection. But then I remembered how often literature surfaced in the tales of the great-greats, as if some of them had been afflicted by it in one way or another. One of them was known as “the ex-reader,” for example. The other night, a line or two from Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” struck me as being the perfect epitaph to inscribe on my uncle’s grave, if he had a grave. Something like:

For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.

Once during that long-forgotten summer, or a summer just like it, when Teo was suddenly one of us, my uncle took it into his head that one of the many ways the boy could learn English was to participate – albeit informally – in square dancing. None of us children, and certainly not one other adult, could come close to matching my uncle’s enthusiasm for such bizarre activities. But because we loved him, we all dutifully gathered near the portable record player he had first hauled out into the yard and then attached by a series of extension cords to the power in the house. Teo and I were required to be partners, which meant holding hands and embarrassed us both, while Kath was paired with Shane, Mandy with Peter, and Paul with Don, which, in turn, embarrassed them.

Because it was the close of the afternoon, the mothers, as we called them, were sitting on the porch facing the lake, smoking cigarettes and drinking gin and tonics. My uncle rarely instigated an act for which he did not want an audience, and this was to be no exception. I remember him calling his wife, urging her to leave the veranda. “C’mon, Sadie,” he was shouting, and then again when
there was no response from her. “C’mon, Sadie. And you too, Beth, get over here.” His unacknowledged voice began to sound a bit tired, some of the eagerness fading from it as the women continued to ignore him.

Teo’s mother and the man we knew was her brother were standing at the edge of one of the orchards, on the other side of the fence, watching. Though they were still wearing their green cotton overalls and brown sunhats, work was over for the day. She must have come to collect her child for the evening meal only to be presented with this odd partnering and the sound, coming from the record player, of a man’s voice chanting nonsense over music. She just stood there beside her brother, the trees and ladders behind her, a tentative smile on her face. Teo looked in her direction but likely felt unable to leave the weird ritual into which he had been introduced. At that moment my own mother rounded the corner of the house and moved to the fence where the woman and her brother stood, greeting them quietly with a nod, from the opposite side. The brother disappeared back into the orchard. A bang of a screen door announced my aunt’s withdrawal indoors. No one spoke. The sound of the waves on the beach stones mixed in a strange way with the artificial sounds coming from the scratchy record, and I remember thinking, while Teo and I stood very still, that recorded music played outdoors brought something tinny and almost unpleasant with it into a space where it had never before been heard.

All of this presents itself as a tableau in my mind, but one that eventually breaks apart into slow action moving toward full chaos. My uncle followed Teo’s gaze and settled on the Mexican woman who was Teo’s mother. “Dolores!” he shouted. “Come and join the dance!” She hesitated, then did as she was told, climbing awkwardly over the fence near which my mother stood, seemingly impassive, not looking at us or the Mexican woman entering our territory. Teo made an involuntary movement, one that travelled up my own arm, and I could tell that his instinct was to run to his mother and that he was holding that instinct back.

What, I now wonder, made my uncle believe that hearing lines such as
star through, pass through, circle round the track, drive through, pull through, box the gnat
would help to teach a child English? But perhaps he knew more about this boy than I did at the time. Perhaps he felt that language married to music and gesture might nudge the child toward speech.

What resulted was a kind of pandemonium. Dolores was the only one among us who could master a dance step – my uncle was either pulling notes out of his pocket or sending her into one whirling pirouette after another, while the old record player skipped and repeated. My cousin Shane began to breakdance in a clownish way. My mother bent over in laughter. Mandy broke away from Peter and began to fight with Shane, rolling in a tangle on the grass. Teo and I stood entirely still, dutifully holding
hands, quiet in the midst of this, looking at each other, then shyly looking away, as children will.

My aunt burst into this peculiar miracle play like a cop breaking into an after-hours club, her face flushed with sun and gin. All she had to do was walk toward the fracas, her arms folded across her silk blouse, for the momentum of the group to falter and stall. We children, knowing we were not permitted to make noise before her morning alarm went off at eight o’clock, and that she had on occasion been able, at seven o’clock, to hear us roll over in our beds three rooms away, were particularly sensitive to her approach. As were all the Mexican workers. Teo immediately dropped my hand, and he and his mother walked quickly toward the field, hastily climbing the fence, sensing their exemption from exclusion was over. My mother unfolded from her clench of laughter. My uncle, however, more fervently involved than the rest of us, was chanting along with the calls on the recording:
Swing your partner round and round, turn your corner upside-down
. Then he stopped, looked up from his notes. “Where’d she go?” He laughed. “What happened to my partner?”

My aunt removed the needle from the record, scraping it noisily across the vinyl as she did so. A dull stillness entered the late afternoon. Then, when she was certain she had our attention, she smiled brightly. My other uncle was conducting a twilight auction that evening in one of the back townships, and his wife, my other aunt, had gone with
him for company on the trip, so my other cousins were staying for dinner. “Who wants spaghetti?” my Aunt Sadie called cheerfully as she turned back toward the house.

It occurs to me now that monarchs show every appearance of being cheerful creatures. Their beauty, the fact that they dance across our summer gaze, stunningly adorned and always in the vicinity of brilliantly coloured flowers, their poise, and the apparent effortlessness of their movements give us every reason to believe they are in a state of grace. But, in fact, few insects have such a fraught existence. First, right after conception, there is a series of vigorous and possibly painful transformations: from the splitting open and shedding of larval skin to accommodate the growth of the caterpillar, to the making of the cocoon to house the pupa. This is followed two weeks later by the butterfly itself struggling in the most critical way to free itself from the prison of the chrysalis. Then there is that brief, lovely season of riding the breeze and feeding on nectar in preparation for the most lengthy and exhausting migration, and a collapse, afterwards, into a period of winter dormancy. All of this inconceivable exertion and unpredictable exposure to danger leads in the end to mating, and not too much later to death.

My uncle stood out on the lawn for what seemed to me to be a very long time, tilting the record my aunt had scratched back and forth in the light to see how much it was damaged. I watched him through the window while I
was putting knives and forks on the table. Something about the way his head was lowered as he examined the disc made it possible for me to see that during his most recent trip to the barber the back of his neck had been shaved. The thought of him sitting in the chair with his chin resting on his chest, utterly submissive and covered like a child in a large white bib, coupled with the way he carefully slid that vinyl record back into its sleeve and slowly closed the lid of the record player, made me heartsick, though I couldn’t have explained, at the time, why I might feel that way.

I have been wondering these days about charisma, about what goes into its makeup. Is it is a sensual experience? Does visual or auditory extraordinariness, for example, determine its properties? Is it is learned, or acquired, or is it present in the configuration of an organism from the beginning? And what about butterflies? Mysterious and graceful, abundantly colourful, no one can deny that they are charismatic. But is this also true when they are larvae or pupae? In the mid-nineteenth century, a theory flourished among entomologists: if one were to possess a microscope powerful enough, one would be able to see all of the exquisite features of the butterfly trapped within the organism, even at the larval stage, but this was subsequently disproved. And other life forms, drawn to the charismatic, do they come as predators or worshippers? Perhaps prey is always worshipped to a certain extent, or maybe there is always an unconscious desire to destroy attached to all that is worshipped. We should speak about the spiritual, I suppose, and about worship. It would be interesting to
talk about what form your prayers take and why I have no prayers at all.

Because cardenolides, a poisonous chemical contained in the milkweed upon which they feed, moves through them and is broadcast to the world through their colour and markings, monarchs have few predators. It is not uncommon, therefore, to see a monarch and a starling lounging on the same branch. This gift of toxicity is so powerful that the viceroy butterfly has evolved over centuries to both look and to smell like a monarch in order to increase its own chances of survival. But all viceroys – and even a handful of monarchs – are born lacking the chemical and, though they appear to be no different than their brothers, as beautiful and charismatic and immune to harm, jays, grackles, and cardinals instinctively sense their weakness and know that they are killable and consumable.

My uncle was like one of those few vulnerable monarchs, or perhaps more specifically like its mimic, the viceroy. Most of us sailing in his midst saw only his colour and his grace, and we assumed, therefore, his indestructibility. His enemies, if he had any, would have been impressed by his persona and respectful of his colourful territory and his accomplishments. Only someone very, very close to him would have been able to sense his defencelessness, his helplessness in the face of attack. Only someone who had slept beside him for thousands of nights could have picked up the scent of his weaknesses. There may very well have
been – part of me still wants to believe this – no latent poison in him. There may have been nothing manipulative associated with his charm.

But he
was
charismatic. We all followed him, we all worshipped him. Everywhere he went we ran after him, sensing an adventure, wanting to be in his company. And yet I think the charm that emanated from him was a force that evolved as he matured, rather than something that was with him from birth. It was the bright shield he used to draw others into his orbit, to keep them in his line of vision, and to protect himself from the destruction he could always imagine. But evolution, once it is set in motion, is a natural phenomenon rather than one that is willed. As time passed, his magnetism may have become a burden to him, one he was unable to discard, even when he was absent, even when he had disappeared behind the grey veil I mentioned earlier and was not available to anyone at all.

The first time I went to The Golden Field to visit my mother, she told me what my uncle was like as a child, his timidity and silences, and how he broke out of the vagueness and reticence of that and into something more splendid and precise, how that glittering shield was forged.

I was looking at his picture on the table, his picture and the photos of the others she had chosen to display. Lovely Mandy in her dress uniform – with its red worsted material, white braid, back cuffs, and gold buttons, her white gloved hands resting on the hilt of a splendid sword – put
my own graduation photo and those of her brothers’ in the shade. She was ablaze with purpose, with confidence, or so it seems. The photo of my uncle was not as large, and he himself appeared to be smaller and thinner than my memory of him.