The Wife Tree (34 page)

“Is this a good day to bury the ashes?” Morris asked me. “That’s a fifty-mile-an-hour wind out there, Mom.”

“You’re here and we’ve got them,” I told him, “and I don’t want to keep them in the house. I’m all dressed up.” I’d brought out of mothballs my green wool suit to look good for William. It hung on my thin shoulders as shapelessly as from a wire hanger. I’d put on stockings, my Sunday shoes. I’d slept in rollers, teased and sprayed my hair.

“I did you a big favour going down and getting these ashes,” Morris had told me when he returned from the funeral parlour with what looked like a shoebox, an ordinary rubber band holding it closed. “Considering how I feel,” he said. “This is wrong, Mom. I don’t know why we couldn’t have just buried Dad. I don’t know why you had to cremate him. It’s a desecration. A violation of the human body. The human body is a temple of the soul.”

“It’s not a temple of the soul after death,” I said. “That is, if you believe in the soul at all.”

“I don’t know how you could do this to Dad.”

“It’s what your father requested.”

“Well, what did he say about disposing of the ashes? Didn’t he say
he wanted them sprinkled on the Trans-Canada Highway? Didn’t he say he liked the idea of the transport trucks picking the ashes up on their tires and carrying them all the way out to Saskatchewan?”

“Maybe he was joking.”

“How can you say that? How can you say in one breath that we have to respect his wish to be cremated but not his request to have the ashes disposed of the way he asked?”

“I don’t know,” I said, torn. “I don’t know. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I’ve always found the 401 so —
bleak
. Haven’t you? Bleak and soulless. A wasteland? The thought of your father’s ashes blowing around out there in that wilderness — it — it sends chills down my spine. And I feel — I feel like I want him close to me for a little while longer. His gardens were so important to him. I’m almost sure he’d be pleased. They say that ash makes wonderful fertilizer.”

“Well, you’ll have to carry this,” he said, handing me the box. “I don’t even like to touch it. It’s against my religion. And you’ll have to dig it all in by yourself. I can’t help you. I wouldn’t feel right.”

I slipped the elastic band off the box, lifted the lid.

“This is him?” I said, disappointed perhaps by the small quantity of ash, by the absence of familiar lineaments, something to tell me this was indeed my husband. My hand darted into the box involuntarily. I withdrew it just in time, uncertain of decorum. Would touching William’s remains be considered disrespectful, like poking at someone’s private parts? I was intrigued by the calcified lumps lying in the otherwise powdery ash, imagining these to be knuckles, teeth, vertebrae that had stubbornly resisted the fire.

We’d had a week of gentle rains, fine drizzles that, on my afternoon walks, cleansed my face and hands like a healing bath. Now, Morris and I went outside, stepping across the softened ground,
which heaved and sweated after the days of warm rain, releasing its powerful gases. There was indeed a fierce wind. It blew hot, out of the West, with the lonely sigh of the prairie in its throat. It bent the trees double and flattened the long spring grass. It pressed my suit against my old slack thighs, my rocky pelvis. It lifted the hair from my forehead, which was no longer the splendid curve I vainly displayed the year I travelled out to visit Alfreda in wartime, but a shrivelled naked stretch of bone, like the elderly battered hairless cracked scalp of an antique porcelain doll.

As we rounded the corner of the house, the prairie wind snatched the lid off the box and threw it up into my face, blinding me temporarily, striking me hard on the bridge of my nose. But I managed to clap it back down with the palm of my hand before any of the ashes could escape.

It was a Saturday. We could hear the neighbourhood children out on the street throwing balls and turning skipping ropes and riding their bikes round and round like circus performers, their shining caps of hair golden in the sun. Morris, to give him credit, had dressed up for the occasion too, in a blazer and striped tie. Looking like a pair of churchgoers, we passed out of the shadow of the house into the sunshine. When we came abreast of the Man Tree, I tripped on one of its roots rearing up out of the earth and nearly went down. I heard the ash sliding inside the box, the rocky deposits rattling against the cardboard sides.

“Watch it, Mom!” barked Morris, who caught my elbow in his big evangelist’s hand, gripping with the force of all his holy convictions, sending shooting pains up my arm. “Are you okay? Can you see the footing?”

“Of course I can,” I said, though in fact these days the ground beneath my feet seems an untrustworthy support, a dark blur.

We moved on, Morris bearing his hefty bible under his arm and myself carrying William, no great burden now that he was ash. My nose still stung from the flying shoebox lid, causing my eyes to tear. My old blind feet seemed to strike every obstacle before me, roots leaping up like serpents everywhere, so that my weak ankles rolled as though on ball bearings and my knees buckled and I jerked across the grass like a faulty mechanical doll. Grateful for Morris’s presence, for his strong hand supporting my elbow, for the heat of his body penetrating the fine wool of my sleeve — like it or not, he was my only close next of kin now — I pressed on into the same alien wind that had swept me along the prairie road to William’s tarpaper store half a century before.

Though I was fearful of my knees locking, of toppling over into the garden, I knelt down on the cool ground, in the long damp grass, my ankle burning from the twist it had taken. Morris handed me a trowel and I sank the blade into the glistening earth, found it loose, oily with nutrients. Its intense fragrance nearly knocked me over. This soil was William’s creation, the blackest, richest, most pungent earth he could concoct by hauling in manure, compost, mulch. He used to brag that he had the deepest, darkest, most powerful soil on the street, possibly in the city. The richest soil this side of the prairie, he said. Gripping the trowel, I turned the earth over, digging deep even while I shouldered the gale.

Something fluttered past my head. At first I thought it was a small creature — a hummingbird? — flown up mysteriously out of the soil, out of the hole I was creating. But then there were more of them, hundreds, lifted out of the earth by the wind, grazing my cheek as they fluttered by, whispering past my ear. Enough of them swirling up now to form a funnel, rising like a twister and then soaring skyward in a gay arc.

“Mom!” Morris cried. “Mom! Stop digging!”

But I kept probing and turning, not catching on to what was happening, digging and digging in amazement, giddy, bewildered, until I realized that this was my money, swirling past my face, my nest egg, flying away from me now like hundreds — thousands — of hatched birds. I’d forgotten about burying it in the garden and now the prairie wind was carrying it away. My trowel had opened up the wet and rotting brown banker’s wrapper, releasing my fortune to the skies.

“Jesus Christ!” Morris shouted. He dropped his bible and ran across the lawn, leaping shamelessly, snatching the bills out of the air and stuffing them into his pockets. I turned and watched him go.

Soon I heard shouting in the street, a cry going up, as at a baseball game, screams of joy, and later I heard that the children, seeing the airborne money, had dropped their balls and skipping ropes and thrown their bicycles down onto the pavement. They’d run after the flying cash, pursuing the green twenty-dollar bills, which were delicate in their colouring as spring leaves, twisting and lifting and spiralling in the wind. The children clattered down the street, reaching into the sky with their small fingers.

This afternoon I came upon the thin leaf-raking man, sitting in a chair before his house.

“You’re going to wear out the sidewalks of Simplicity,” he called across the shallow lawn.

“I won’t stop until I do.”

“You haven’t passed this way for a long time.”

“This used to be my hospital route,” I said, “but my husband died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you contented there?” I asked.