The Wife Tree (7 page)
Authors: Dorothy Speak
Tags: #Fiction, #Rural, #Sociology, #Social Science, #General
Dear girls,
…Are you taking your medications, Mrs. Hazzard? Dr. Pilgrim asked me the night your father fell. He placed his hand on my shoulder as though I were a child and not a quarter-century older than he. Sometimes these crises make us forget, he said. You must preserve your health. Mr. Hazzard will need your support if he’s to recover.
And so I’ve been faithful in taking my dozen pills each morning with a glass of orange juice. Lazix for fluid retention. Vasotec for blood pressure. Digoxin for tachycardia. Aspirin to thin the blood. Zantac for stomach ulcer. Robaxisol for pain from bone breaks. Isomex to build the bones. Ocuvite to nourish the eyes. Indocin for arthritis. A potassium binder. A multivitamin. A calcium supplement.
Since your father’s fall, I find I choke on the pills. My throat contracts, rebels, coughs them back up at me. They begin to dissolve, bitter as hemlock on my tongue. I try again, pour down more juice. Large as stones, they lodged yesterday in my esophagus, clinging like barnacles to the dark, humid walls, resisting the rush of fluid. And it seems
to me that, if my body is so dysfunctional, if these pills are all that keep my heart beating, my blood flowing freely, my femur from snapping like a wishbone, wouldn’t it be better to give up on the machine altogether?…
Dear girls,
…Dr. Pilgrim is in fact a hobby sheep farmer. Whenever we went for our appointments, your father was always full of questions about the extent of his acreage, the size of the sheep herd, the success of the spring lambing, the quality of the wool each year, the price fresh mutton would fetch. I wish he’d invite me out there someday, Morgan, he used to say longingly, I’d love to go. And the more I think of it, the more I believe your father had grown to love Dr. Pilgrim like the son Morris never turned out to be…
Dear girls,
…As your father continues to sleep, I’m uncertain what to make of his apparent tranquility. For surely his soul is imprisoned within his lifeless body, with no voice now that he’s mute, so that it can converse only with itself and that, I think, must be a difficult dialogue indeed…
Dear girls,
…Yesterday, on my way to the hospital, I came upon an old man in a thin grey cardigan, raking leaves and stuffing them into a big plastic bag.
A lot of stooping, I said sympathetically, pausing to talk to him. He straightened up. He had a rather jagged white moustache, a widower’s hump on his back.
It didn’t used to be this way, he said. Do you remember the bonfires?
Oh, yes, I answered.
End of October, he recalled fondly, early November. We’d all come out on the same night and light ’em up. Bonfires all up and down the street. It was a beautiful sight. Illuminated the entire city. Neighbourhood children running around, excited. On a cool fall night, the heat from the flames on our faces. The smell of burning leaves — that bittersweet perfume — I’ll never forget it.
It was a simpler time, I agreed.
Life seemed purer back then, he said.
But it’s a relief — don’t you find — to outgrow innocence? I asked. He shook his head.
All the glory of the old days is gone, he said. All the imagination. Now they want us to use these bags. Everything these days has to be packaged. In the old days, I would have gathered up the leaves, piled them, burned them, swept up the ash and put it on my gardens to fertilize the next spring’s flowers. It was a perfect cycle. It made sense. Now they come with their trucks and cart the
leaves away and God knows where they end up. Glad my wife didn’t live to see the changes.
She’s gone?
A year ago. Diabetes. Our kids flew the coop long before. All that’s left now is me and the leaves.
We stood together on the sidewalk, enjoying the heat of the day. The sun fell on our narrow shoulders, our weathered hands…
I’ve become so used to my daily excursions to the hospital that it hardly seems possible I ever had an existence other than this. I’d completely forgotten that the small celebrations of life are still glowing like candles in these darkening days. I seem to have missed Thanksgiving altogether, though something inside me says I’ve more to be grateful for this year than at any other time of my life. On my journey to the hospital one day this week, I saw a skeleton in a house window, taunting me with its sardonic grin. My eyesight is so feeble that I was frightened by it, thinking for an irrational moment that it was William mocking me, for he’s grown alarmingly thin. Then I realized that, of course, Halloween was nearly upon us. Hadn’t I noticed pumpkins piled in grocery store bins or carved and grinning on household verandas? Still, I couldn’t shake the notion that this leering skeleton was a bad omen. Clammy with fear, I rushed to the hospital and up to William’s room. There he was still, breathing shallowly but quite alive. I reached out and touched his feet, found them cold as stones. He’s lost weight on his diet of clear, life-sustaining fluids and his false teeth lie in an envelope somewhere, leaving his face quite hollowed out and foreign. I sat at his window, which gave me a view of trees raining leaves.
“The Man Tree is completely naked now, William,” I finally said to fill the silence. After all these years of listening, it seems it’s my turn to speak. “And the Wife Tree has turned orange and gold at last and it’s amazing the way she shines forth on her own, now that he’s all stripped down.” But then I realized this wasn’t an appropriate thing to say and for a moment I hoped that William was deaf as well as mute and hadn’t heard my foolish words.
It was at that very instant, however, that his eyes began to flutter and he opened them fully. I rose from my chair, my knees trembling.
“William,” I said, “you’re waking up from a long sleep. You’re in the hospital. You had a little stroke. It’s me, Morgan. Can you hear me? Do you understand?”
I rushed out to the desk and told them, “William has regained consciousness.” A nurse followed me back to the glass room and took his vital signs. This exercise alone appeared to tire him, and he closed his eyes once more and seemed to sleep, though differently now, for his colour was brighter and there was a glimmer of life and intelligence in his face.
The nurse noticed my weeping. I hardly knew myself what to make of my tears.
“I’m sorry,” I said, wondering if she thought I didn’t welcome William’s revival.
“We put up these walls to protect ourselves against what we fear is going to happen,” she said, gently, “and then things change, events take us by surprise. We hardly know what to feel, do we? It’s confusing.”
“Yes.”
Dear girls,
…Since your father regained consciousness, he has slept less, and is able to sit up in bed, though they keep the tubes in him. Still, though I’ve encouraged him to talk, he remains silent. Finally I asked one of the nurses, William isn’t speaking. Is he ever going to talk again?
We don’t know at this point, she said, smiling at me kindly. Maybe he simply hasn’t anything to say to us yet. Try to be patient, Mrs. Hazzard. Silence can be a great healer.
I considered this for a while, but when I went into your father’s room in the afternoon, I felt very cold toward him, because possibly, I thought, this is deliberate and William has decided to stop talking to me, just as all those times in the past he hasn’t found me intelligent enough to converse with. I reflected to myself: Why, Morgan, do you sit here begging William to speak, because isn’t that just what you’ve done all your life? And I remembered that he’d once said to me, Silence is power, Morgan…
Dear girls,
…Yesterday I tried to read one of my books aloud to your father, thinking it would distract him from his solitude, but my voice came out so thin and wavery, like a fading radio signal, that it frightened me and I stopped. A good thing too, probably, because your father, looking up from a copy of
The Fall of Rome
or
A History of the World
or
The Life and Times of Charlemagne
, used to say to me,
How can you waste your time on those shallow romances, Morgan? Don’t you see they’re just trash? Why can’t you pick up something that will feed your mind? Which surprised me, of course, because it always seemed to me he thought he had a monopoly on brains…
Dear girls,
…Do you ever think of the picture of the Garden of Gethsemane that hung all those years on our living-room wall? Your father never wanted it there. He said it was a portrait in cowardice: that Christ escaped to the garden the night of the Last Supper because he couldn’t face the mission he’d been given. And if there was one thing your father couldn’t stand it was weakness. When he swung his axe the night of the stroke, he struck Christ down before Judas had a chance to arrive in the garden and offer his betraying kiss. And now, like the soldier who lost his ear to Peter’s sword, your father seems to have lost his voice…
Dear girls,
…This afternoon, remembering that Hallowe’en had arrived, I brought out the brown sugar and the corn syrup to make a batch of fudge. By five o’clock it was dark. I sat down expectantly in your father’s chair with the plate of fudge balanced on my knee and listened to the hours ticking away. Eight o’clock arrived and at last I heard a
knock. I hurried to the door and flung it open. A girl of twelve or so stood on the porch. I’ve waited all night for a child, I told her. She was wearing a short skirt, black ankle boots, a puffy silver jacket, a silver helmet. You’ve had an accident, I observed. Blood was running from her knee.
There was a porch without a rail, the girl told me. Two doors back. I didn’t notice. It was dark. They didn’t even have candy to give out. They’re renovating, they said.
Come in and let me help you.
I’m all right, she told me. It doesn’t hurt.
Let me at least wash the blood off.
I led her in and sat her down at the kitchen table. I’ll see if I have a Band-Aid, I said. I went to the bathroom, searched through the medicine cabinet and came back with a small box. She saw me struggling with the brittle wrapping.
Can I help? she asked. She had a soft mature voice. She took the Band-Aid from me, unwrapped it and stretched it over the scrape.
What sort of creature are you supposed to be? I asked, looking at her costume.
An intergalactic alien, she said. I hate Halloween, she added. It’s supposed to make you happy, but it never does.
Then why are you out? I asked.
My mother made me go. She says I have to get out and have fun.
Isn’t there someone you could have gone trick-or-treating with?
Only my sister. But she’s older. She wanted to be with her own friends. She’s very popular.
But you’re a pretty girl, I said, and intelligent-looking. Do you not have your own friends?
I’ve been sad all my life, said the girl. People don’t want to be with someone who’s sad.
Have bad things happened to you?
No. I was born this way. My mother says I got it from my father. It runs in his family.
You do look sad.
I’m best when I’m alone. But my mother says loners are lonely people.
My husband was a loner, I told her.
Where is he?
In the hospital — alone.
He must be happy, then.
Maybe he wasn’t a loner, I confided. Maybe he just didn’t like my company.
Either way, then, it’s good he got sick.
I don’t know, I said uncertainly.
She drew the plate of fudge toward her. You’re not supposed to give out stuff like this any more, she said, taking a piece. Didn’t you know? Everything has to be wrapped and sealed. Everything has to be professional. Homemade and unwrapped treats go straight into the garbage when we get home. Fudge. Popcorn balls. Candy apples. There are sick people out there. You could bite into a razor blade or a shard of glass. Rat poisoning.
She ate the fudge. This is good, she said.
It was a favourite recipe of my children, I told her…
Dear girls,
…Here in Canada the pale autumn sun is cooling day by day, like a dying planet…
Yesterday, on the way out of the hospital, I slipped into the chapel on the first floor. Alone, I knelt in one of the narrow blond pews, looking around at the stained glass windows and breathing in the smell of paraffin and chrysanthemums. At the front of the chapel stood a small organ, the sight reminding me of my soloist days. I opened my mouth, thinking I might sing a bit of Gounod’s “Ave Maria,” as an offering, a small prayer sent up, that William would soon recover his speech. But all that came out was a little yelp, like a trod-upon dog. Where, I wondered, my hand flying up to my throat, has my voice gone?
And suddenly I was a girl of ten once more, clattering down the stairs late on a Saturday night to sing for the company. The occasion was my uncle Harper’s birthday and my mother had decided to throw a party. We weren’t a party-giving family. It was an extravagance we couldn’t afford. But my mother had arranged a potluck supper and somehow scraped together enough money for sugar, candles, coffee. I’d been told to stay upstairs until summoned. From there, I smelled the aroma of food, heard the clattering of dishes and cutlery as my sisters at last cleared away the platters of ham and roast beef, the bowls emptied of potato salad, cucumber salad, coleslaw. Beneath the bedroom window, guffaws exploded. Parting the curtains, I saw a cluster of men in the lane below, passing a bottle of whisky around. I smelled a sweet herbaceous smoke and saw the tips of their lit cigars burning like red stars in the gathering dusk.
Harper was out there. My father’s younger brother, a bachelor, he was fond of cutting up. He was a good-looker, a drinker, a tireless dancer, a champion teller of jokes.
Soon the fiddling commenced, the dancing began and the floor beneath my feet shook so violently that I thought the house would fall down. I listened with a raging hunger. My sisters, helping with the preparations late in the afternoon, had been allowed to nibble here and there, but in all the excitement, I hadn’t been given dinner. I felt certain a plate of food would await me in the kitchen after I’d sung. From downstairs came the thunder of heels on the wood floor, shouts and laughter, a distant mood of incomprehensible happiness.