The Wife Tree (8 page)

Finally, one of my sisters came up to fetch me. After the darkness of my room, the house downstairs, ablaze with candles and lanterns, seemed like a bright ship sailing in the night. When he saw me coming down the stairs, Harper broke away from the crowd.

“Well, now,” he said, leaning down toward me, “what are you doing up so late?”

Alarmed by his flushed face, nauseated by his whisky breath, I drew away.

“I’m going to sing,” I told him shyly.

“Is that so? And what are you going to sing?”

“‘The Girl of the Golden West.’”

“Well, that’s a mighty big song for such a little girl.” He was the county gravedigger, fit, broad-shouldered, with bright blue eyes and a thick head of wavy hair, stiff that night with styling cream.

The house seemed grand and foreign, with the long lace-covered table and the candlelight flickering against the walls, and flowers, brought in from the garden, sweetening the air. In the parlour, all the furniture had been pushed back, the rug rolled up, the floor
dusted with cornmeal. From the kitchen, where my sisters were toiling, came the sounds of plate-stacking, the jangle of cutlery, the rattle of cups and saucers. Though the windows had been thrown open to let in the spring breeze, the parlour was steamy with the heat of dancing. The neighbours, sudden strangers in their starched collars, their taffeta and chiffon skirts, grinned at me and backed away in a circle, their swollen bodies forming a soft wall. Yeasty with exercise, breathing heavily, the ladies mopped their throats. The men, jackets stripped off, suspenders stretched taut against their great bellies, faces glistening with sweat, reached up to loosen their ties, thrust their chins forward, freeing their thick necks.

My father, who neither smoked nor drank spirits, who was content to fade to the back of a throng, invisible, observing and listening, came forward shyly. Guiding me to the middle of the room, he nudged me gently onto an inverted soapbox. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of his tie, broad as his hand and bearing a peacock, its tail exploding like fireworks.

Wearing the only dress I owned, a hand-me-down in rough brown wool with the bodice gathered unflatteringly at the hip, I stepped up onto the soapbox. Though a question from an adult could leave me shy and stammering, when it came to singing before an audience, I never had trouble finding my voice. Now I opened my mouth and my song floated out. My voice was famous throughout the county and beyond. Every December, I was driven by buckboard from school to school to sing “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” and “How Far is it to Bethlehem?” and “In the Bleak Mid-winter.”

By this time, my hunger had subsided and I longed only for a slice of dessert. During my song, I eyed the long table of glistening pies, tortes, gingerbread. Then, catching sight of my mother in the crowd, I was nearly felled by her radiance. She looked
impossibly young, her skin flawless as an eggshell, the grey vanished from her hair, which formed a soft pile on her head. Her blue dress shone like the ocean, its hem scalloped like waves. I thought sadly: Why does she hide this beauty from us and bring it out only for strangers? Her cheeks pink from the elderberry wine, she ushered me off the soapbox when I’d finished singing and guided me toward the stairs.

“Go on up now,” she said with a firm nudge. No word of dessert as a reward for my performance. “Up to bed with you,” she said.

Alone in my bedroom, I removed my dress, shoes, leotards, and donned my nightgown. But, thinking of the tall cakes, of their tender flesh and shining skins, I couldn’t sleep. I crept out of bed and down to the turn in the stairs. There I saw my mother and Uncle Harper pressed together in the shadowy niche beneath the steps. They were kissing. He had pulled up my mother’s frothy skirts and thrust his hand between her legs, his arm moving with a strong, steady rhythm. Their bodies rocked together, my mother moaning softly. Then Harper dropped her skirt. His hand came away from between her thighs, glistening. When he slid the slippery fingers into my mother’s mouth, her lips closed hungrily on them.

That night, I dreamed I was stuffing cakes into my mouth, biting down into the soft, yielding flesh, the icing smearing over my lips, over my chin, my fingers buttery with it. I awoke hot with pleasure and discovered my hand working between my legs, my fingers busy among the velvety folds. They came away fragrant and slick. Horrified, I ran to the bathroom, where I tipped the ceramic pitcher until cold water gushed into the basin. Lathering my hands with glycerine soap, I scrubbed and scrubbed until I thought my skin would fall cleanly away from my fingers like a shell from a nutmeat.

Oh, I am choked with memories!

When I arrived in William’s room this morning I was deeply shocked to find the monitors gone, the tubes and bags and apparatus removed, his bed empty and changed, the new sheets tucked in tight, smooth and barren as the windswept prairie and looking quite final. My legs, turning rubbery, wouldn’t support me any longer and I sank down on a chair, thinking: Now, at least, I’ve been given an answer. For don’t we all long for the comfort of absolutes? But then a nurse came in and said, “What’s wrong, Mrs. Hazzard? You look very pale. Goodness! It’s not what you think. Your husband has been transferred to Second East, the chronic care ward.”

“Are you sure he was ready?”

“He’s out of danger now. We need his bed for the next stroke victim.”

Down to Second East I went then, carrying only the thin cotton pyjamas in which William had been admitted and his false teeth, sealed in a brown manila envelope. But the further I travelled the more alarmed I grew. From the rooms along the hall came wails, shouts, cries of indignation and despair.

Mummy mummy mummy mummy mummy
.

No no no no no
.

Martha, come and get me. For God’s sake, Martha, I’ve wet myself again!

I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care
.

I’m a little teapot short and stout. Just tip me over and pour me out. Fuck you fuck you fuck you
.

On Second East there was a shocking level of noise and traffic, nurses rushing up and down the corridors with medications and instruments mysteriously wrapped in white towels, orderlies
wheeling by with bins of soiled linens, with trolleys of rattling kidney pans, urinals, metal pitchers. The floors didn’t shine like mirrors as they had upstairs and there were windows here to be sure but they were grimy and didn’t let in the sun. I thought of the intensive care unit, a bell jar at the heart of the hospital, where as soon as a fingerprint appeared on the glass, a custodian was called in and it was immediately rubbed off.

Here, the patients who weren’t lying in their own defecation or calling like children for their lost mothers drifted out of their rooms after lunch. The ward was like a cemetery with these patients floating about, so white of hair and skin that they seemed like ghosts. I looked at their watery colourless eyes, at the housecoats sliding off their thin shoulders. Shuffling along in disposable paper slippers, which rasped on the dull tile floors, they paused in front of a bulletin board. Posted there in large cut-out letters was the message:
The day is: Wednesday. The season is: Autumn. The weather is: Sunny. The next holiday is: Christmas. The next meal is: Supper
. They turned away unchanged by what they’d read, if in fact they could still read at all. From a speaker above our heads spilled a voice paging this doctor and that doctor, the same names repeated over and over, for it seemed the doctors never came.

When I found William’s room, I saw that they’d pulled the tubes out of his nose and arm and urethra, and that they were no longer pouring miraculous liquids into him or tracing the behaviour of his heart on a television monitor. He looked shockingly thin and strangely naked without his tubes and electrodes and plastic bags. He slept until the supper trolleys rattled onto the floor at four-thirty, filling the ward with the smells of canned gravy and bitter tea. William wouldn’t eat. Pushing his tray away, he turned to me and slurred, “You see…”

Strangely, these first words spoken since the stroke failed to fill me with joy. I realized that, while some days I’d longed to hear William speak, there were other times when I wasn’t so very anxious for him to open his mouth, because it seems that for so long he’s spoken for both of us.

But he could go no further. I stepped closer to the bed. He tried again. “I can’t…” but once more his voice trailed away. His eyes bulged with concentration and I sensed the pressure of the message trapped in his head, pushing like water against a dam. He looked at me with a small bewildered smile, his eyes filled with fear, his face cleaved down the centre like an earthquake’s rift. Which half, I wondered, is the man I know?

“What is it you want, William?” I asked quietly. “Tell me. I’m listening. What can I get you?”

He said what sounded like
kitchen kitchen kitchen
. With his finger he drew a U shape over and over on the table.

“A letter? The letter U? A cup? A curved road?” I said, perplexed that I could not understand this new language of his. “Write it down, William,” I urged, drawing a pencil and paper from my purse. He took the pencil, looked at it, puzzled, tried to put it in his mouth. Seeing this, I felt a wind blow through me, cold as the wind that cut through William in the prairie winters, turning his bones to ice. I took the pencil from him, noticed my own hands shaking as I wrote
William
in capitals on the paper and showed it to him. He stared at it without recognition. Beneath it I wrote
Morgan
in even larger letters, but he didn’t understand that either and I saw for myself how meaningless the two words looked, stacked one on top of the other. William sighed and stared out the window. Following his gaze, I wondered what he saw out there, if he could still remember the words
sky clouds trees
.

“Maybe, William,” I said, offering a thin hope, “maybe if we put your teeth in, you might be able to speak more clearly.” Then he glared at me, his face turning very red and he swept the supper tray from the table. The dishes crashed down, soft foods sliding across the floor, metal lids rolling cheerfully into the corners of the room.

“Ge out!” he shouted at me. “Ge out!” And I wondered: What exactly had the ICU nurse meant when she said William was out of danger?

Now that William is awake, I wondered on my way out of the hospital, now that he’s conscious and seemingly strong and able to lose his temper, will they ask me to bring him home? And if they do, how will I haul the weight of his stricken frame around with me? And why, I thought, should I be made to shoulder this burden, when it seems to me I’ve spent so much of my life doing my level best to keep him healthy, moving his whisky bottle around the house while — searching for it — he ransacked one cupboard after another? And denying him, in recent years, egg yolks and red meat, on the doctor’s orders, while he fought me every step of the way?