Small Beneath the Sky (18 page)

“She's sick,” I said for the hundredth time. “She's not going to get better.”

“Peggy's sick? I didn't know that.”

I told you, Glad, I told you and told you and told you. Some days I had to repeat myself three or four times in one phone call because she wasn't wearing her hearing aid. I said the words I didn't want to say over and over again, my voice breaking with weariness and anger.

During one of her calls, I suggested she start thinking about moving to a place that could provide her with care. She wasn't able to keep track of things, and Mom wouldn't be able to help her any more.

“I'll die if I leave this house,” she said.

“Well,” I said, echoing my mother, “you have to die sometime.”

I was ashamed to feel so little compassion. I just wanted her off my back, and I didn't want her bothering my mother, who refused to talk to her. “Tell her I'm asleep,” Mom said when the phone rang.

“At least get a housecleaner,” I told Glad. She had already fired two that year for pilfering things—a garden rake, a small roaster, her underwear. Mom had usually found the missing loot later, the panties in the cutlery drawer, for instance, but there was no convincing Glad that people weren't thieving.

She exploded, her voice suddenly hard and strong. “I'd rather be up to my ass in my own shit than let someone steal from me!”

I hung up the phone.

AT TIMES,
I sensed impatience in the voices of my friends, slight yet noticeable as knots in a string. After all, as Mom said, I'd had a mother for a long time. Many people I knew had lost theirs decades earlier. Sixty million people die every year, half of them children under five. How could I explain that this impending death felt so huge it left me breathless, as if a rogue train was roaring out of the earth and bearing down on me, its round light blinding me to everything but sorrow, no one in the engine room, no warnings at the crossings, no one pulling on the brakes? Of the sixty million people who'd die that year, one of them would be my mother.

THE WINSTONS
had two daughters. One of them was away at boarding school; the other, a few years older than my mother, did nothing to help around the house. The slave child spared her from the work most farm kids had to do. “She just watched me,” Mom said.

My mother took meals by herself on a backless chair in the summer kitchen even when summer had passed. Besides baking bread, pulling weeds and doing dishes, the little girl my mother was cleaned the outhouse, limed the walls and scrubbed the floors. She cried on her first Christmas there, she told me, because they wouldn't let her go home. Angry that she wouldn't stop, they took away her present before she could open it.

The Winstons also held her back from grade 1—she didn't go until she was seven. No one had taught her how to count from one to ten or say the alphabet. No one had read stories to her or showed her pictures in a book.

Her first day in the one-room school, my mother raised her hand like everyone else when the teacher asked who could recite their
ABC
s. He picked her out. She sat in silence, kids turning in their desks to stare at her. Glad, who was eight grades ahead, walked to the front of the classroom and told the teacher her little sister had lied. Peggy didn't know anything.

ONE MORNING
Mom looked at her ankles, which resembled the tiny bumps on poplar twigs where smaller twigs have broken off. She'd lost forty pounds in three months, and she was under five feet tall. “Poor little fellows,” she said of her ankles. “They've disappeared, poor little things.”

TO THE END
of her life, my mother had a terrible fear of the storms that raged across the prairies. Mrs. Winston had always panicked when she heard thunder. In the parlour, she made Mom turn the handle of the phonograph so the music would block out the rumble and crash that shook the farmyard. She pushed back and forth in her rocker and yelled, “Faster, faster,” the child's arm going numb, lightning flashing her small forlorn figure into the silver template of the sky while the needle bounced and screeched over the grooves of “Beautiful Dreamer,” booms of thunder like a big hand slapping her head, making the bones jump in her inner ear.

ON THE PHONE
from Cochrane my brother suggested I call Patrick and ask him to fly to Swift Current to be with me. Patrick had kept offering, but I'd been telling him to wait because I'd need him down the road. Barry said, “Sister, we're
on
the road.” He was right.

When Patrick arrived we slept in Mom's room, in the bed she'd shared with my father. It should have felt stranger than it did, photos of Barry and me, our younger faces looking down at us from the wall. My mother had dragged herself like a wounded animal into the smaller of the two bedrooms, the darker one with her old sewing machine, the room I used to stay in. She'd begun to demand a simplicity of space, a nest, a cave. She said she'd never sleep in the other room again.

The first night on her old mattress Patrick had to wake me. I'd been shouting. In the nightmare I was searching through a many-roomed, three-storey house in a panic, looking for someone who needed me. I couldn't find her.

The next morning Patrick asked, “Who's Trudy?”

“Trudy?” I said.

“Do you know, Peg? That's the name Lorna was shouting in her sleep.” Mom didn't know either, but suddenly I remembered. More than fifty years earlier a little girl my friend knew had wasted away in bed with leukemia. I had visited her once. Her name was Trudy.

“That's right,” Mom said. “She was around six, and she died. You didn't know her well.”

In the night I'd struggled to save a girl I hardly knew, my shouts echoing from her deathbed to my parents' room half a century away.

BEFORE THE OPERATION
, a nurse had attached wires at various pulse points on my mother's body to check her heart rate. Her gown was open in the front. A wire went under each breast. I stared at the one nearest to me, fallen to the side. Since I was a baby, held to her nipple, I'd never looked so closely at my mother's naked breast. She was shorter than I was, we weren't the same shape, but our breasts had the same contour and colour. Her pink nipple could have been mine caught in a mirror. The awareness sank inside me like a stone, one with many sides to it, its light refracting. I wanted to think of it as a rose quartz. That came closest to the colour of our nipples, and it's the stone that heals the heart.

I STAYED
with Auntie Glad on her and Uncle Rusty's farm only once. It had been my idea. I was around thirteen; I'd wanted to visit her because I was making a yellow-and-white-checked sundress with spaghetti straps for a Teen Town dance, and I couldn't get the straps right. Mom had tried to help me, but Glad was the better sewer. Besides her impeccably hand-stitched quilts, she fashioned coats and jackets with shiny linings, complicated lapels and smoothly rounded shoulders.

There was little warmth or affection in the farmhouse. Just cleanliness and hard work and the practicality of the day-to-day. An hour or so after my parents dropped me off, I got my period. It was the first time it had happened away from home, and I felt shy about it. I was mortified at having to ask my aunt what to do with the soiled pads. “Throw them in the burning barrel,” she said, her tone suggesting I'd asked a stupid question. As if my period wasn't bad enough, I got a terrible nosebleed and dripped blood spots across the kitchen floor she'd waxed and polished just hours before. “Bleeding out of both ends,” she said to Uncle Rusty when he came in from the barn. I don't think she meant to be unkind or crude. It was just her way.

I, like Mom, couldn't do anything right around Glad. When she asked me to make sandwiches out of the canned jellied chicken, I buttered the bread too thinly and she snapped at me. I'd heard all the stories of her cheapness and thought I was doing the right thing, saving her a teaspoonful of butter with each slice. My worst error was to correct her on how to make the straps on my sundress lie flat. I'd learned enough in home ec to know we needed some kind of binding. She'd never heard of such a thing. “If you're not going to listen you might as well go home,” she said.

It was a relief to both of us when Dad picked me up at the end of my visit. Mom had warned me I wouldn't be happy at the farm. To avoid her saying “I told you so,” with the assurance that made me furious, I claimed I'd had a great time and I would go back again. I wore the dress to the dance that weekend, but the straps felt bumpy on my shoulders, and they wouldn't stay put. Mom was in bed when I got home. I slipped into my pyjamas, walked into the dark of the alley and threw the dress in the garbage can.

SOMETHING FUNNY
happens to time when the world shrinks to a sickroom. Wind blows through the hours and shreds them into ragged strips. There's no definite beginning or end to one hour, two, three. In my mother's kitchen, meals weren't meals any more but vigils of waiting, as we watched each mouthful to see if she would chew and swallow. Our own eating seemed gluttonous, excessive. I wanted to push cake in my mouth with both hands and choke on thick gobs of sweetness. It was hard to shop for groceries. It was hard to cook something without onions or garlic or citrus or sugar or bite. Nights weren't eight or ten hours of sleep but a dark pane a brick had shattered into parts. Patrick and I listened to her shuffle from the bed to the bathroom—“Mom, are you okay?”—prayed she'd make it before her bowels exploded, the nerve damage from the operation shutting down her warning system. How many times that night? Four? Five? Would there be spoor to clean? She'd be worn out tomorrow. In the afternoon, who would come to visit, who would stop me in the street and ask me probing questions, who would phone, phone, phone? When was the ball game on? Would she want to watch it? Should she lie down now? Was it time to check her sugar level? Write down the number, throw out the cotton batten with the spot of blood, count out the pills, count out her years and years, and soon the afternoon was over. Should we wake her to eat? There was no pain yet; we prayed there never would be. How long, how long, how long, the invisible clock kept ticking, the two hands meeting somewhere out of sight. “I'm ready to go,” she said. “Time. It's time.”

On my wrist I wore my father's watch, an old one I'd found in a kitchen drawer at Mom's a few years after he died. It wasn't his last watch—that was a gold-banded Seiko Mom had bought him for his seventieth birthday. It was the kind a high school teacher would wear, or a businessman, or a lawyer. Even in his final days, when he didn't know the day of the week or the month, he'd ask my mother for the exact time and then move the hands to get the numbers right.

The watch I found was much older. He'd worn it when he was in his forties and working in the oil fields. It had a luminous blue face and a wide leather band still dark on the underside from his sweat, and it was one of the earliest automatics. It depended on the movement of your arm to keep it going. If you took it off, it slowed and eventually stopped. With new holes punched in the strap so it would fit me, the watch felt heavy and significant above my left hand, as if the ghost of my father's fingers encircled my wrist. I removed it at night and placed it on the bedside table. In the mornings it was always slow, about five minutes. It gave me the kind of time I could understand, one that needed my body in all its strength to power its wheels now that my father lay still.

OUT OF A DEMEROL
sleep my mother sat straight up in her hospital bed, terror in her eyes. “There's a big hole in front of me. Lorna, fill it, start filling it.” Later she tried to send me home. “I don't understand why you're here,” she said. “You should be with Patrick.”

On one of her good days back at home, though she hadn't been on her feet for over a week, she walked into her backyard, checked out the rows of plants with her sharp gardener's eye, walked to one particular potato plant and pulled the top. The bounty underneath filled the bowl she used for baking bread. Linda took a picture, the bowl larger than Mom's lap. That night for supper, standing at the stove with one hand on the counter to hold her up, she boiled potatoes and fried fish for Barry and Linda. Later in the week, when they had gone and it was my turn to care for her, she fried some for me, too—so I wouldn't think my brother was her favourite, she told me, a smile on her face. With shaky hands, before she let me eat, she tried to pick out the bones as she had when I was a child, afraid one would catch in my throat and choke me. No one has ever loved me better.

THE CITY WHERE I
grew up, where Mom had lived for almost seventy years, had hired an ad agency from Calgary to update its image. The councillors voted to change the city's original slogan, “Swift Current, the Frontier City,” to “Swift Current, Where Life Makes Sense.” I wanted to write the local paper and rage. How could they claim that life made sense anywhere, especially there, especially then? The slogan proclaimed its simple-minded self-satisfaction on the sign that greeted you when you arrived in town. It was printed on banners on the streets; it appeared on gas and water bills. Hundreds of great philosophers and writers had come to the opposite conclusion, but in Swift Current you could figure things out—why there was sadness and cheating and inequity and wife-beating and racism. Why most of the wildflowers and songbirds from my childhood had disappeared. Why my friend's eleven- and twelve-year-old sons had died in a car accident, why the local history teacher had hanged herself, why the hockey team had hired a pedophile for a coach. It all made sense, by gosh, in my hometown, where my heart was ripping out of my chest like a blood-soaked bird.