Small Beneath the Sky (17 page)

HOW CLEARLY
the scene unwound, burned into the oldest part of my brain. Going down the wooden steps into our dirt cellar (was I four?) to get a jar of pickles. The descent came back detail by detail—my little-girl shoes, the sundress I wore out to play, my hand clutching the smooth railing. I had to be careful; there was a gap between each step where the dark poured out. The cellar was an open mouth dug into the earth. Outside, there was a small wooden door you could lift if you were as big as my brother and crawl inside and no one would ever find you.

Alkali grew through the cellar's damp walls like a poisonous white mould. And the smells were funny there. Something sweet, something rotten, something growing. The bare light bulb burned above me, its long string hanging just within my reach. Water made noises in the cistern even when it wasn't raining and nothing inside its tin walls should have been moving. I was sure I heard the lapping of waves, as if a blunt, fishlike creature had surfaced and was blindly swimming for the light.

To get the pickles, I had to walk across the dirt floor on the sheet of cracked linoleum, past the bin where potatoes stretched their thin arms through the slats to pull you in. The only good thing was the shelves loaded with preserves, the crabapples and saskatoons casting their own soft glow, ripe sun trapped inside glass. I was on my toes, my hand reaching for the jar, when suddenly I heard a scuffle near the bin. A lizard scuttled from the dark, then stopped in the middle of the floor and stared. I ran to the steps and screamed for Mom. Down she came, apron flapping, a butcher knife in her hand. She stepped on the lizard's tail, stabbed it in the back, opened the furnace door and threw it in. How fierce she was, how strong! This is my first memory, I told Patrick, the first picture of my mother. All my life I've carried this image of her bravery, her lack of hesitation, the strange blood on her hands.

“But Lorna,” Patrick said, “it wouldn't have been a lizard. They aren't any in Saskatchewan. It was probably a salamander. Remember you were four and it would've looked big to you. Your memory's playing tricks.”

How I argued for memory, the green body writhing on the knife, the boldness of my mother's hands, the flames dancing on the black door of the coal furnace as she swung it open on its big hinges and slammed it shut. A lizard. At least a foot long.

“Phone your mother,” Patrick said. “Ask her how big it was.”

I dialled the number I'd been dialling all my life. “Mom,”

I said, “remember that time in the cellar? You stabbed a lizard in the back and threw it in the furnace?”

“What are you talking about?” she said. “You must've been dreaming. I never would've done that.”

Her response stunned me into silence.

She must have forgotten, I thought, or her battle with the dragon was so frightening she'd had to bury it deep in her mind where she couldn't call it back. Nothing I said on the phone convinced her.

“You were always such an imaginative child,” she said.

That scene in the cellar, as much as anything in my childhood, shaped how I saw my mother—her courage, her invincibility. Years later I came across a passage from the Talmud. If I'd known it then, it might have made me feel better when she insisted I'd been dreaming. I could have replied, “I am yours and my dreams are yours. I have dreamed a dream and I do not know what it means.”

THE MAY
of her eighty-eighth birthday, my mother was not strong enough to clean her windows. By July she couldn't pick her peas or dig potatoes, though only two months earlier she'd planted a garden huge enough for two big combines to park side by side. I thought a good death for her would be to fall between the rows; when she didn't answer the phone that day, a friend would find her among the tall peas. She was not strong enough to walk the half block to the park as she had done the week before, leaning into me, not strong enough to make her meals or to pull the wide blue blinds down in the morning in the verandah to keep out the sun. One day she told me she couldn't dress herself. She perched on the edge of the bed, and I asked her to raise her bum so I could pull on her underwear, then the summer shorts she'd chosen for the heat. She didn't need to tell me she was strong enough to die. I could see it in her face, in the brown hand that clawed my forearm when she pulled herself slowly to her feet. She was not just getting off the bed but starting her difficult climb, rung by rung, up the invisible ladder to the sun.

ONE REASON
she was ready to go, my mother said, was that she could finally leave her sister Glad behind. What a relief! Glad had been a burden since she'd moved in across the street, Mom having to do her bills, mail her letters, buy her groceries and sometimes cook her meals. That April, even though my mother's illness had sapped her of energy, she'd done Glad's spring cleaning after she'd finished her own. And Glad was never appreciative. All their lives she'd found fault with my mother, and she'd carried her nastiness from childhood into their adult relationship. I kept telling Mom that she was too old to take care of her sister, but Glad was in her nineties, she said, and her mind was going. Over the last few years she'd had a number of mini-strokes. My mother had to remind her to go to the doctor, to see her hairdresser for her weekly shampoo, to put her meat in the fridge and throw away the moulding leftovers. People kept stealing from her, Glad told my mother: money from her wallet, an old rubber garden hose, her hearing aid and glasses, one day a sheet of oatmeal cookies she hadn't baked. Mom said her sister had always surmised things. Childless, Glad explained to the hairdresser that her mother had sewed her up when she turned eleven, stitched her shut with a long red thread. The gypsies showed her mother how to do it. “Grandma was a good sewer,” Mom said to me, “but she didn't do
that.
” Glad's husband was sterile because he'd had the mumps. The town doctor had warned her of the problem before the wedding and advised her to back out before it was too late.

When they were kids, Glad kept her siblings under control with a horsewhip and tattled to their strict father when he came in from the fields for supper. Because of her snitching, usually one of them, though the meal was sparse, had to go without the rice pudding Grandma made for dessert every day of the week. Not even any raisins in it, just white rice and milk with cinnamon sprinkled on the top. Grandma baked it in the oven in the big enamel pan they used later to wash the dishes and, once a week, to wash their hair.

“WHEN I SEE
your dad again,” Mom said, “we're going to go skating.” So far, that was the most astonishing thing she'd said about her readiness to go. After all they'd been through, after all the difficulties his drinking and selfishness had caused, that was what she saw them doing when they met sixteen years after his death. I caught a sob in my throat when she told me that. When she saw Dad again, they were going skating.

MY MOTHER
never spoke badly of her parents. Her silence was a pact she'd signed in blood, like many of her generation. No use complaining; there were worse off than you. She'd told me about being sent at five to the farm down the road, to live with the Winstons. For the next ten years, she was their slave child.

One of her tasks was to pull weeds from the field where the Winstons had planted their crop. When we drove near Success one August, my mother pointed at the yellow flowers in the ditch. “See,” she said, “they're sunflowers and they grow in the gumbo.”

“I think they're brown-eyed Susans, Mom.”

“I don't care what you call them. I hate them, they're what I had to pull out day after day in the heat.” I'd never heard that detail of her story before.

There's a photo of my mother around age six with her siblings and her parents. It must have been taken one of the times she was allowed back home. Behind them, the dust settles just for the time it takes the camera to catch the scene and its gawky, bird-boned children. Her hair's “straight as a board,” her dress shapeless. She has no shoes, same as her brothers and sisters, and she doesn't smile. She never smiles in any photograph taken of her and her family.

“I must learn a new way of weeping,” the Peruvian poet César Vallejo wrote. For now, I thought, the old way would have to do.

ONE OF THE
sweetest memories from my childhood is the smell of freshly baked bread wafting through the porch door as I came into our yard from school. Mom learned to bake her bread at the Winstons. Too short to punch it down, she stood on a stool at the kitchen table, her fists pummelling. If the bread didn't turn out, she didn't get any supper, and after the others had eaten and she'd done the dishes, she had to start again, mixing the sugar, water and yeast, adding the liquid to the big bowl of flour, staying awake until the bread had risen, punching it down, letting it rise a second time, punching it down again, then putting it in the oven, and finally, the house in darkness, sliding its pans onto a wooden board to cool. She kept herself from sleeping by standing up, trying to balance on one leg, then the other. Even then, she dozed off like a horse on its feet, and the bread would have burned if something hadn't made her jerk awake. Mrs. Winston's yelling down the stairs, the tolling of the hours from the tall clock in the hallway, the image of her mother waking her up in the early morning to pick berries before the sun got too hot.

THE FAMILY
took care of Mom at her house in Swift Current. We were a small group, just my brother, Barry, his wife, Linda, Patrick and me. We took turns coming from our homes, theirs in Cochrane, Alberta, and ours on Van
–
couver Island. Everything had happened fast. I'd arrived at her house on June 5, planning to drive her to her grandson's wedding in Calgary. On June 7 in the morning she had a colonoscopy, part of a regular checkup, which revealed a large tumour; by the afternoon we found out the cancer spotted her liver and had spread to her lymph nodes; the next morning she was under the scalpel. When the doctor told her he had to operate to remove part of her bowel, she said, “Oh, but we have a wedding to go to.”

“We're not going to the wedding now, Mom,” I said. It was the first time during her illness that her eyes had looked frightened, their blue blurred like startled water.

I was alone with her the week of her surgery. They wanted to take out the tumour, or at least part of it, to prevent the bowel from blocking completely. Pre-op, she told the nurses the last time she'd been in the hospital—the same hospital, as it turned out—was to give birth to me. Maybe because she'd been amazingly healthy all her life, even when she'd started losing weight and energy we thought she'd get better. Back in the winter she'd been diagnosed with diabetes; she'd be her old self soon, we believed, back to aqua exercises three times a week, meeting with her friends and single-handedly running a house and a big garden once her sugar levels got sorted out. No one, including her, had expected cancer. “At least I know what I'm going to die of,” she said. “I always wondered about that.”

Afraid I might never see her again, I sat with her before the operation, held her hand and choked out the words, “You are my shining light.”

“And you're still my little girl,” she said, “my skinny little girl who I couldn't get to eat.” People would stop her on the street and ask why I was so big-eyed and thin. What was she feeding me? The truth was I'd eat almost nothing but bacon. Outside the porch on a wooden chair she'd leave pieces for me to snatch as I flew by like some wild child, not wanting to come in from playing. Who else could tell me that? Who but my mother held those small pieces of my childhood? Where would they go when she was gone?

It rained heavily the morning of her operation, as if the sky were the source of the tears pouring out of me. I went for a run for the hour and half it would take, my shoes pounding through puddles, and part of me, for her sake, wished she'd die on the table. No matter how the operation turned out, the liver cancer was devouring her from the inside out. There was no treatment, no cure, no lizard to stab and throw into the fire. Alone in her house in the shower, I started screaming as the spears of water hit my scalp and broke over me. Mom, mom, mom, mom! A yowl rose from my gut, my bowels, my womb, raw as a birth cry but with no hope in it, a maddened howl, a roar, the water a wailing wall shattering around me. Unsyllabled, thoughtless, the cry rose from the oldest cells in my body. I hadn't known grief could be so primal, so crude. The violence shook me. When it stopped, I fell to my knees in the shower, and the water called to the water in me; I wanted to melt, to run down the drain and under the city to the creek and then to the river thirty miles away. Mom, mom, mom, mom!

ON A HIGH
frozen river, clouds piled like snow along the banks on either side, my mother and father are skating. The blades of their skates slice into the ice, their thighs strong and muscular. Arm in arm, they stride forwards, push, slide, push, slide, their faces flushed with cold and happiness. It is long before the drinking starts, long before my brother and I are born—and long after. That winter, the wisps of cloud I saw streaking the hard blue sky after the first night of freeze-up would be their joyous exhalations, their breaths intermingling as they glided down the glassy river somewhere past the moon.

THROUGHOUT MOM'S
illness, Auntie Glad drove me crazy. She phoned at least five times a day. When I'd tell her Mom couldn't talk, she was lying down, Glad asked, “What's wrong with her? Sleeping at this hour!”