The Wife Tree (12 page)

“I’ve just lost my goddamned hand,” Lance said bitterly, “and all you can think of is Thomas! Don’t let Thomas see anything bad. I have to protect Thomas.”

“He has nothing to do with this,” my mother said. “You leave him out of it.”

Lance, a stocky man of twenty-six now, with a big, fleshy face, had always fancied himself a lady-killer. He liked to have a new girl on his arm every week. On Saturday nights, he splashed around in the kitchen basin after supper, slicking back his hair, cleaning his long fingernails, getting in my way when I needed to be doing the dishes. Reeking of Aqua Velva, he took the buggy into town, returning in the small hours of the morning, liquor on
his breath. I prayed every week that he’d meet a girl he wanted to marry and leave us in peace.

“Thomas is the only one you’ve ever cared about,” Lance told my mother in the kitchen.

“Hold your tongue, son,” my father said. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

Then Lance seized the severed hand from among the bowls of fruit and threw it across the room at my mother. It struck her full on the cheek with the force of a stone, leaving a streak of blood. Turning away, her face a wooden mask, she bent protectively over Thomas. My father dragged Lance outside and we heard the wagon rattle off.

“Get that hand out of here,” my mother told me. In the confusion, they’d left it behind. It had rolled under Thomas’s cot. Little use it would have been to the doctors, anyway. They didn’t sew limbs back on in those days. They didn’t have the know-how.

I drew back in horror.
“Me?
”

“Go and bury it somewhere.”

“But —”

“Don’t be so squeamish. You’ve chopped the head off many a chicken and lived to eat the bird.”

“But they weren’t —
human,”
I said faintly.

“Get rid of it. It’s no good to anybody now.”

My stomach heaving, I wrapped the hand gingerly in a tea towel and carried it out into a field. It was heavier than I’d expected, roughly the weight of a large rat, and strangely potent, making me dizzy with its power. The sky tipped, the sunny field swam in my vision, a yellow rocking sea. Sweating with the day’s heat, employing a shovel I’d found in the barnyard, I managed to dig a hole. I threw the hand in, eager to be rid of it, and quickly covered it over with earth.

Lance’s name wasn’t mentioned in the house while he was in hospital, but sometimes in the late afternoons, after the chores were finished, my father slipped away to town to visit him. A month later, he brought my brother home, a steel hook strapped to his wrist. Passing him in the barnyard the first day he was home, I couldn’t look at it. He saw my discomfort and grabbed me.

“What’s wrong with
you?”
he sneered, his teeth bared. “Afraid of this lovely thing?” He shook me. “Well, you’re going to have to live with it, just like I am. Look at it.
Look!
You’d better get used to the sight.” He gripped me by the chin and turned my face into the hook, rubbing the cold steel curve hard against my cheek. “Where did the hand go?” he hissed, his breath hot and moist against my neck.

“The hand?”

He shook me again. “Don’t play dumb! Where is it?”

“I — I got rid of it. Mother told me to.”

“How?”

“I buried it in — in the field.”

“Take me there. Show me where it is.”

“I — I don’t remember exactly where I put it. And it’s a month now. It’ll be —
rotted
!”

Since William’s fall, I’ve remained faithful to our daily diet of a potato, thinking that my consumption of it might somehow give him strength. Tonight, reaching into the burlap sack, I found the potatoes grown cold with winter, cold with a subterranean chill, reminding me of William’s icy feet beneath his thin and rationed hospital blanket. Just as I set my foot on the bottom stair, the bare bulb flickered and went out, plunging me into utter darkness.

I was thrown back immediately to a dark night, the winter after Lance lost his hand. I’d gone out to the root cellar around five o’clock to collect vegetables stored there at harvest time. Bushel baskets of apples, crates of cabbages, turnips, parsnips, onions, squash stood about, so numerous you had to pick your way carefully across the floor. I’d thrust my fingers deep in a tray of sand, searching for carrots, which, stored this way, kept well into the
winter. The light from the lamp I’d set nearby on a shelf holding jars of plump sausages preserved in fat and poached chicken floating in broth — delicacies we brought out when unexpected company dropped in — suddenly died. For a moment I thought the lamp had run out of oil, but then I remembered a good supply swirling in the glass receptacle as I’d come out from the house after sundown, and I knew that the wick had been turned down by an unseen hand.

I sensed someone behind me, then felt my long hair gripped painfully at my nape and I was guided so roughly across the uneven floor that I nearly tripped over my own feet. The figure turned me around and pinned me against a bank of potato sacks stacked in a corner. In the pitch black, I could see nothing. Something hard and cold was then pressed against my throat, cutting off my voice, and I knew it was Lance’s steel hook. He lifted my skirts and then I felt a great stab, like that of a knife, as he forced himself inside me, his breath tight, anguished, excited in his throat.

My own wind cut off, I grew dizzy with shock, lack of oxygen. From the house drifted the cheerful music of the kitchen radio, a fiddle playing a lively jig, floating down to me through the trap door. Lance’s thrusts drove me into the wall of potatoes, bruising as stones against my back. Then it was finished, as abruptly as it had begun. As Lance collapsed against me, I felt the humidity of his shirt, his chest and soft gut pressing into me, and his face, hot and slippery against my cheek.

“You breathe a word of this to anyone,” he whispered, “and I’ll take this hook and sink it into your soft little neck and rip you open from top to bottom. Do you understand?” Then he slipped away. My legs gave out and I slid to the earth floor, unable for some moments even to move.

“What took you so long?” my mother asked suspiciously when
I came in at last, carrying the vegetables. “Why is your dress covered with earth?”

I saw Lance watching me from a corner of the kitchen. “My lamp went out,” I stammered. “I tripped in the dark.”

After that, I tried to escape my daily visits to the root cellar by telling my mother that the lamp going out had made me afraid of the dark, but she said, “Do you think I believe that? You’re getting lazy as a pet coon, that’s all.”

This was February, a time when the days were short and the men were underfoot in the house, there being little farm work to occupy them other than milking the cows, feeding the livestock, doing a little butchering when we needed more meat. They passed the time playing cards, listening to the radio, or dozing like kings around the pot-bellied stove. Watching for his moment, Lance was able a dozen times to slip out to the root cellar after me, unnoticed, and no matter how I struggled against him, he got me in his grip and pressed himself upon me, my back hard against the mountain of potatoes, my nostrils filled with the smells of the damp earth walls, the root vegetables. By May, I was pregnant.

In the meantime, I’d been escorted to a few church dances by Billy Bond, a local boy of seventeen with a fresh and innocent face, the only child of a woman widowed when her husband, clearing a field, was crushed by a falling elm tree. Billy was the centre of her affections.

“My son is a gentleman,” she said to my parents, her face glowing with love and pride the first time Billy asked permission to drive me home. “Morgan will be safe with him. You’ve nothing to fear.” In the church hall, Billy was attentive, inquiring after my comforts. Was I hungry? he wanted to know. Tired? In need of fresh air? He brought me punch and a piece of cake, found a chair
for me to sit down on. Outside of dancing, he never so much as touched me.

In August, I discovered, just above my pubic bone, the formation of a hard growth, the size of a lemon, and I knew that time was running out and that I must make Billy believe I was carrying his child.

One Sunday, I asked Billy to take me to Lake Huron. Because of his chores, we got a late start and it was close to dusk when we arrived. As we neared the lake, the quantity of pine forest lining the road increased, forming a dark tunnel around us. We left the horse and buggy on the edge of a cliff and descended eighty wooden steps to the deserted beach. Swallows circled crazily above the shore, their wings silver in the setting sun.

In the shelter of some bushes, I pressed myself against him and eagerly kissed his mouth and soon we were lying together on the warm sand among the seagull feathers and the flat, polished beach stones and the massive pieces of bleached driftwood, entire root systems of trees washed up there like dinosaurs migrated from some ancient shore. One hundred feet into the lake, waves lapped in and out of a sunken freighter, its prow pointed at the sky.

I didn’t tell my parents about the pregnancy, but at the end of September my father came to me and said, “Where did this baby come from? Is it Billy’s?”

“He’ll marry me,” I said.

He went into their bedroom and came out carrying his hunting rifle. “I’ll kill that son of a bitch,” he threatened but my mother told him, “Put the gun away. Do you want to hang for murdering that stupid boy?”

My parents refused to hear a word about marriage. “That’s not an answer to anything. Have you any idea the disgrace this would
bring if the priest found out? Not just your father and me, but your sisters and brothers too? All of us would be shamed. It wouldn’t take long for word to get around. Everyone in the countryside would be talking about us. No, you’ve got to go away.”

Early in October, my father drove me to Kitchener. It was Indian summer. I have a vivid memory of that buggy ride, the hot breezes of the afternoon, the dry, dusty roads, the falling leaves. Seated on the bench beside my father, I rode along, devastated by the painful beauty of the afternoon.

We arrived at a vast, fortresslike building in grey stone, with corner towers, a crenellated roofline, a thick wooden door, the home of an order of two hundred nuns. My father left me with one of the sisters who silently led me through many corridors into the heart of the convent. She indicated a small windowless room, a closet really, behind the kitchen, where there was a cot for me to sleep on. Leading me to a vast steel sink, she handed me a potato peeler.

“This is where you’ll work seven days a week. Get up early. Cook the porridge. Peel and chop the vegetables for lunch. Help with the bread making. Help with the cooking. Wash the dishes. Sweep the floor. Don’t show your face in the refectory. You’re not to be seen there. Many of our community would find the sight of your belly offensive. Do your work well. Pray. Maybe while you’re here you can begin to atone for your sin.”

For four months, I didn’t set foot outside the convent because I hadn’t a coat generous enough to wrap around my girth, but through a window above the sinks I was able to note the arrival of snow, the deepening of winter, the visitation of blue jays at a feeder. On Sundays, a nun led me along a dark underground passage to the chapel, indicated that I should sit in a back pew and handed me a black scarf with which to cover my head.

“Make yourself invisible. Keep your mouth closed. We don’t want to hear any singing from the likes of you.”

Despite my circumstances, I gradually grew optimistic about the baby, because I saw that it distinguished me from the nuns, for whom the evidence of a new life growing seemed so repugnant. Their bodies shrouded in black, their whispers and oblique glances of disapproval when they passed the kitchen door, their habitually bitter faces only made me pity them and begin to carry my swelling body with dignity, even with pride. Lying in bed at night with my fingers spread across my bare belly as though it were a crystal ball, I felt its power, like that of a glowing planet. Feeling the child kick with life, I resolved to slip out of the convent at the first sign of labour, give birth to the baby in an alley somewhere, run away with the infant, raise it on my own.