The Wife Tree (18 page)

“Morris is damaged,” Olive told William and me back then, and I’ve always been convinced that it was her determination to repair him and all her smothering sighs of
Poor Morris!
that sent him looking for a new god. Soon after they married he met, in a shopping mall, a stranger dressed in a plaid sports jacket like a used-car salesman and shouting out the name of Jesus. The next thing we knew, the Scriptures were pouring like a torrent out of Morris’s mouth and the weight of the bible had steadied the
trembling in his hands and he told William that this Hector Milks from the mall, who’d led him to the Divine Saviour, was like the only father he’d ever had.

Eclipsed by the Testaments, Olive at first ran home to her mother. But two weeks later, she came creeping back, meek and obedient and ready to be shaped by Morris into a lay preacher’s wife, allowed to open her legs only when another baby was required. And babies they had, six of them (so far), named after the books of the Old Testament: Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Zephaniah, Amos, Sirach. Olive dished up one baby boy after another and the more boys that came out of her, the angrier William seemed to become — because a posse of boys was everything he’d ever wanted for himself in life — and the more scornful he grew of Morris. For, William thought, how on earth could Morris deserve such a richness of boys and how could he ever manage to raise them to love history and politics and the prairie? At suppertime, Morris and Olive and the boys join hands round their kitchen table to pray and the children listen attentively while Morris reads from the Bible, his chest so puffed up with the Second Book of Samuel and Ecclesiastes and Numbers and Leviticus that you’d think he’d written them himself.

“What are you eating?” Olive quizzed me tonight. “I looked in the fridge. There’s nothing there but some old withered apples.”

“Oh, I’m managing. I don’t need much to keep me alive. And there are always potatoes. The basement is full of potatoes. William could never have enough of them in the house.”

“Nutrition is important, Mother, even for the elderly. Protein. Protein is essential. Maybe you should see a dietician. Maybe you should have your grocery shopping done by someone. We don’t want to have to worry.”

“I never asked anyone to worry.”

“But your eyes.”

“I’ve no trouble seeing.”

Olive was onto me then like a burr on a blanket. “How can you say that? Prove to us that you can see, Mother.”

“Why should I have to prove anything to you?”

“Look at this, Mother. Look. I’m holding up a number of fingers. How many do you count?”

I opened my mouth to answer, then closed it. They were trying to trick me. How would I know for sure? How would I know how many fingers they’d in fact held up? Whatever I said, they could contradict, making me appear blind.

“How many?”

“Thirty.”

“Be serious, Mom,” begged Morris.

“You can’t possibly continue here on your own. Your medications, for one thing,” said Olive, and I remembered I hadn’t taken my pills for some time. How many days — weeks! — had it been? “Can you read the labels any more? If you get those medications mixed up, you could kill yourself.”

“Wishful thinking,” I murmured, but she didn’t hear.

“Two digoxin instead of one,” she continued. “That would do it. Get them mixed up or forget to take the most important ones and you’re dead. Other things. The dials on the stove. Can you see them? What if you left one of the elements on overnight? You could burn the house down. Fry like bacon in your bed.”

Morris cleared his throat nervously, glancing over at Olive, who shifted in her chair, her stockings whispering as her great thighs rubbed together. “There’s something else we need to discuss, Mom. Olive and I have been looking at houses. What we’re living in now
is too small for six teenaged boys. And Olive has her heart set on a dining room. She’s never had a dining room. We’ve found a place we like but we need help with the down payment. We thought of you.”

“Me?”

“Mom, I want my share of the inheritance right now, or part of it anyway.”

“What do you mean?” I said cautiously. “What inheritance are you talking about?”

“Whatever Dad’s accumulated in assets. He has his government pension and his old age pension and those RRSPs that are paying out monthly. I want my portion now.”

So they’d come not about my eyes but about a dining room. This avarice, I thought, this greed has to do with Olive. When Morris was my child, he hadn’t a grasping bone in his body.

“But I never thought of that as your inheritance,” I stammered. “Your father was providing for our future. That’s — that’s supposed to be my nest egg. To carry me through — through old age and —”

“Death?” said Olive unflinchingly. “With your eyesight gone, who knows what will break down next? Pretty soon you’ll be in a home and that eats up a lot of money. There’ll be nothing left for us.”

“I want a portion of my share up front,” said Morris. “We’re short ten grand.”

“Ten…?” I said, uncomprehending.

“Ten thousand.”

“Thousand!”

“You won’t even have to touch your investments. You’ve got cash in your accounts.”

“But I don’t have a dining room myself. Why should I pay for yours?”

“The dining room is really only incidental,” Morris changed his argument. “It’s the space we need. For the boys. Your grandchildren. They’re growing into monsters.”

I imagined them howling like Indians around the new spaces I was to pay for.

“You’ve got enough cash, between your accounts, to write us a cheque,” said Morris.

“How do
you
know?”

“One day when you were out, I looked in that dresser drawer Dad keeps for finances.”

“But those are our private papers. You went through our private papers?”

“I didn’t look at anything other than the passbooks. It’s reparation I want.”

“Reparation?” I repeated.

“I deserve a piece of the assets before they’re all gone.”

“
Why
do you deserve?” I asked.

Morris glanced helplessly at Olive, who took a deep breath and pressed her breasts toward me across the table.

“Morris never had it as good here as the girls did,” she said. “He never had a bedroom. He slept on that living-room couch —”

“Look at this, Mom,” said Morris. He turned his back to me and pulled up his shirt-tails. I leaned forward and made out a pattern of horizontal scars, skin raised in pale rippled welts that made me shudder.

“This is Dad’s handiwork,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?” He turned back to me grimly, tucking his shirt into his trousers. “It happened in this house, downstairs. You were up here in the kitchen where it was safe, when any loving caring mother would have been down there calling Dad off, stepping in between
me and him. The first time it was just the leather strap. I couldn’t have been more than fourteen. I’d been to that party down the street. All I had was a cigarette. I didn’t even have a drink, Mom. There was booze but I didn’t have any. Only a cigarette. Such an innocent thing to have done. But he smelled the smoke on my clothes when I came in. A pack-a-day smoker himself, but what’s a little hypocrisy among family?

“He ordered me downstairs and made me take my shirt off. Started to hit me with the strap. I tried to get away from him, hide behind the furnace, run up the stairs, but that only made it worse. He caught me by the seat of my pants and forced me half-naked down on that cold cement floor with his foot on the small of my back. He really let me have it. Like a fool, I took it silently. Full of my father’s stupid pride. If I’d screamed, maybe he’d have been satisfied sooner. And then, afterward, do you know what he said to me? ‘That’ll toughen you up. That’ll put some prairie in you.’”

I remembered. I remembered the sound of the beatings, blow upon blow, the racket carried upstairs through the heating vents. Morris’s efforts to escape, a chair knocked over, falling tools, quick footsteps on the stairs, pursued by another set of feet. Then a retreat. A noisy struggle. For William, often drunk of a Saturday night, the thrill of the chase. In the kitchen, the girls, their expressions flattened with shock, the blood drained from their faces, clapping their hands over their ears and running upstairs to their bedrooms to slam the doors behind them. Sometimes among them the trembling and the weeping I never managed myself. Then, after it was over, the whole house fallen eerily silent, like nature after a storm, the cellar door opening slowly, William emerging, exhausted, satiated, his face red, sweat on his brow, his eyes sliding guiltily away from mine.

Weep! How could I? Tears seemed a trivial product at a time like that.

“It was like he’d been waiting for the opportunity,” Morris went on, “looking for an excuse to beat the living daylights out of me. He got a taste for it that first time and I had to watch myself from then on. Every word or look in his presence was dangerous. I had to be careful or I’d be down there again. He never punished the girls. Oh, no. They were untouchable. I was the whipping boy for the whole family. Why didn’t you stop him, Mom? Why?”

“Your father was bent on destruction, Morris. Nothing could stand in his way. He was a hard man. Prairie through and through.”

Morris looked at me sadly: Morgan Hazzard. Almost a good mother.

It was all too long ago. Too long ago. I might have wept now, but I heard Olive sniffling noisily, saw her sweeping the great tears from her face. I imagined her wet shining cheeks, her small black drowning eyes, her crumpled mouth. And I couldn’t join her. Suddenly I pictured her in bed at night, gently tracing — as though to heal it — tracing the landscape of Morris’s naked back, her fingertips following the raised welts where the flesh had been ploughed up like cultivated earth, the scars he’d concealed from me, his mother, until now. Why? Why had he hidden them? Shame? Shame for me? Shame for his own disfigurement?

“What Dad did to me was abuse,” Morris said. “They didn’t use the word back then, but that doesn’t make it any less a disgrace. It’d be considered a crime now.” He paused. “So, will you give me the money?”

“Yes, I suppose I’ll give it to you.”

“Will you write the cheque today? If we got the money today, we could put an offer in on that house before someone else does.”

I went to the dresser drawer and came back with my chequebook. I sat down and, my hand trembling not just with elderly palsy but with — what? fear? humiliation? anger? — I filled it out blindly — blindly, because of course I couldn’t see the lines, could only guess where to place the figures and inscribe my signature.

“There,” I said, pushing the completed cheque across at Morris. He snapped it up before the ink was dry and examined what I’d written.

Olive gave a hefty sigh, as after finishing a satisfying meal. “Did she make it out properly?” she asked.

Morris folded the cheque and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

“I think I’d like you to go,” I said quietly.

“But, Mother,” said Olive, all sociability now, “we haven’t cut the cake. The tea is ready.”

“I’m tired. I don’t feel hungry. I’d like to be alone.”

“Shall I take the cake back home with me, then?” asked Olive, reaching for it. “My boys love this recipe. My boys will polish it off in two seconds flat.”

In the living room they pulled on their coats. “While we were waiting for you this afternoon,” Morris told me, “I got the spare key from the hall hook and went downtown to have extras made. Now, Olive and I will be able to get into the house any time. It’s a favour to you, Mom. Someday you might be lying unconscious on your bedroom floor and be glad I’ve got a key to get in and help you. Which reminds me: We should be arranging for power of attorney. In case your mind goes.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my mind.”

“There could be any time. It could happen tomorrow. You could have a stroke, like Dad. Or a heart attack. Anything’s possible. When it happens we can’t have your assets in the hands of the
banks and the lawyers and the government. Red tape. Taxes. Probate. I’m the closest one to home now, of all the family. It makes sense for me to hold the power of attorney. When we see our lawyer tomorrow about the house purchase, I’ll get the proper forms from him. I’ll bring them for you to sign the next time I come down to see Dad.”