Small Beneath the Sky (20 page)

A FEW DAYS
after we'd settled Mom in the nursing home, Linda took a deserved break. I drove alone to Leader. Barry was in Cochrane and would join us soon. Though only a chair and a small television were missing, the house felt hollowed out and sadly animate, as if it knew the tough, beloved spirit that was my mother would not grace its rooms again. In the bathroom, the door locked, Linda lowered herself into the full, deep tub. She heard the back door open, and then footsteps up the stairs and through the kitchen. “Peggy,” an old woman's voice called again and again. “Peggy, where are you?” Glad wandered through the house, calling and calling. Linda sat still and silent in the cooling water. “Peggy, are you home?”

not waving but
   
drowning

W
HEN I SAW
my mother again, it wasn't where I'd expected. Not in the rose bed in the front yard of her small house. Maybe she knew better than to go there; a year after her death, weeds towered above the bushes I could barely see. The new owners weren't tending them. The whole house looked shabby, as it had never looked before.

My brother had rototilled the vegetable garden before he locked up the house the previous September. Now it was the second week of July, but as I drove down the alley past the backyard, I saw only thistles pushing meanly from the soil. I knew instantly Mom wasn't there, and I felt strangely calm about the house's slide into neglect. It really didn't matter. The house was shaping itself not around my mother but around the people who lived there now. Instead of the garden, the young couple, newly married, had different things on their minds.

I hoped to see my mother at the new house on the coast Patrick and I moved into four months after she died. We'd used the small amount of money that was my inheritance to upgrade to a place on a quieter street with more light. I wanted to show her the garden, fashioned out of moss and water and stones, and the guest room, furnished with her dresser with its round mirror and her bed with the tulip quilt Auntie Glad had made and sold to her for more than it was worth. “You'd think she could have given it to me,” Mom said, “after all I've done for her.”

There was a park across the road from our new house, with a trail leading to the ocean. I wanted to walk with her through the trees to the shore. We could wade in together, me in rubber shoes, her barefoot; surely the stones could no longer hurt her feet. In the nursing home, a couple of weeks before the end, she'd told me one morning that her feet had died in the night. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Are they numb? Did you feel pins and needles?”

No, she said. She had just woken up and known her feet had gone on ahead. They were already dancing. She was so happy. “Soon I'll join them,” she said.

EVERY JULY
for the past twenty-five years, I've spent two weeks at a monastery an hour out of Saskatoon. It turns into a college come fall, but it's also a year-round working farm. It's a place for me to write and to visit the chicken sheds and barns, to talk to the horses behind the fence and to touch the velvet of their mouths if they'll let me.

The year I turned fifty, I was diagnosed with melanoma. On the side of my right foot a freckle had grown to twice its size. The surgeon cut it out and stitched on a piece of skin grafted from my upper thigh. Before I learned that I had to avoid the sun, I used to walk past the tall school building at the abbey to the running track and sit on the highest level of the bleachers where there wasn't a lick of shade.

Surrounded by a curve of spruce, the track hasn't been used in years. For some reason it comforts me to see it so solidly there, the grass it circles overgrown with short white clover, the blossoms exactly the size and shape of the plastic beads we wore as kids. The beads popped together and pulled apart so you could make a necklace or bracelet of whatever length you wanted. That's where I saw my mother, at the track, sitting on the top bench, her sturdy legs brown below her shorts, the pair she had pinned at the waist so she could wear them those last weeks in the home. She had a top to match.

I had driven her to the Wal-Mart on the edge of Swift Current to buy the material, a thin, cheap cotton blazing with red flowers. Her hems were always lumpy, but you didn't notice the imperfections once she pulled on her homemade outfits. She looked so good in them, though nothing she sewed for me fit right. She didn't have the patience to finish things properly.

People respect the need for solitude at the monastery. Normally, I wouldn't have spoken to someone on the bleachers. But there was something about the way the person sat, the shortness of her legs and her rounded shoulders, that made me go nearer.

“Finally,” my mother said, then grinned. “I didn't know you were such a dawdler.”

I climbed to the top and sat beside her, as if our meeting had been pre-arranged. “You didn't expect to see me here, did you?” she said. I dug my elbows into my ribs to keep from crying. That's all she'd seen me do the last two months of her life. Every word I'd spoken was soggy then, and barely understandable.

“You always surprise me,” I said to my mother. I put my hand on her bare arm. Her skin was warm, as if she'd spent all day in her garden, her smell familiar, a mix of dust and sun and the good sweat of outdoor labour. I was afraid to say anything else in case she'd disappear.

A crow from one of the spruce trees started cawing. “At home we would've shot him,” she said. “For stealing robins' eggs. I wish your dad had taught me how to use a gun.”

“I didn't know you'd be thinking of killing things, Mom. I mean, in the place you went to.”

“You have
no
idea,” she said. “And I'm not here to tell you. I'm here for you to see the runner.” She pointed to the far end of the track.

I peered at the track and past it, into the row of spruce lined up like monks in evergreen cowls, but I couldn't see a runner. Just the crow on top of one of the trees, the branch dipping with his weight, and smaller birds I couldn't make out diving around him. From where we sat we could hear the highway, the whoosh of cars and trucks going somewhere fast. The air carried the sound so clearly you could hear the tires strike a patch where the pavement had heaved in the winter or worn thin.

“I can't see anything, Mom.”

“You never could see what was right in front of your nose,” she said, patting me on the knee. “You were always looking for something else.”

“Do
you
see a runner?”

“You writers are supposed to be so smart!” There was mischief in her voice, as if she wanted to get a rise out of me. “You know one thing that happens? The dead get their real teeth back.” She opened her mouth. “See, these aren't false any more, they're real. Oh, there he goes, another lap.”

“Mom,” I said, “I don't get it.” Dragonflies bucked in the air like small winged ponies trying to toss the sun off their backs. They hunted in posses, and I felt good sitting in their midst as they devoured mosquitoes.

Mom looked at me the way she used to when I'd done something that pleased her, when I was the apple of her eye. “I'm really here to tell you to wear a hat.”

“You've come just to tell me that?”

“Yes,” she said, the wind in the spruce trees picking up. I thought that might be a signal for her to vanish; she never liked the wind. I wanted to say, Mom, don't go, but I didn't. I knew how ready she'd been to leave the world.

“Okay,” she said, “one more thing. I'm glad you took the dresser. The first time you saw your face, almost sixty years ago, was in that mirror. I held you up and introduced you to yourself. Baby, I said, this is you. Think of that and maybe you won't feel so sad.” She pointed again at the track. “There he goes,” she said.

My god, I could see him! A teenage boy in a red baseball cap running in the sunny half, his thighs and arms pumping. He wasn't a ghost. He had the grace of the living and the young. In fact, I'd seen him yesterday in the Muenster post office picking up a parcel from the woman behind the counter. He told her he was going to school that fall to finish the high school classes he'd missed. He wanted to go into criminal justice and maybe become a Mountie.

The boy stopped in front of us, bent over, catching his breath. The sun burned behind him. “I don't seem to get any faster,” he said. When he straightened, I could see he wasn't the teenager who wanted to be a Mountie after all, but the middle-aged man who helped with the haying on the abbey. He lived in a trailer near the big barn. Just as I was wondering if he could see my mother, I sensed an emptiness beside me.

She was gone, and in the time it took to look at where she'd been, the runner was halfway down the track. Why had she wanted me to see him? Was it to remind me life goes fast? It's as short as a run around a track, a boy turning into a man the age of his father, just like that? My mother had never talked in symbols. About my poems, she used to ask, why don't you just say what you mean? Surely I was missing something.

I let the wind blow over me and through my hair. That was one of the reasons I didn't wear a hat; the wind blew my stale thoughts away. The surface of the track was pocked like the dips in an old bathing cap. Rain had hammered the earth two nights before, the sheet lightning so bright and frequent it was as if the sky were taking pictures with a flash.

The birds that had been dive-bombing the crow were gone. The crow was gone. When I tipped my head, the sky held the reflection of my face, though I couldn't see it, like in the bevelled circular mirror of my mother's dresser. Baby, she had said almost sixty years ago, this is you.

I SAW HER
again two weeks later. It was my last day at the abbey, and I was walking the grid in the early morning. I stared at the wheat field to the east, trying to measure how much of it had turned to gold. It had been green when I arrived. At first I thought it was a trick of the light, but in the middle of the field someone seemed to be waving. It could only be my mother, I thought. No one else would be in the middle of a wheat field in the middle of nowhere.

She and I were no strangers to walking. How often the two of us would trudge home from somewhere downtown through blinding snow. Maybe that's why she thought it wouldn't bother me to plow halfway down a wheat field. I was anxious that the farmer would catch me and bawl me out. Anyone, even people born in cities, knew you didn't do that. You didn't tread through perfectly good wheat, flattening a row the combine couldn't pick up. My mother had been a farm kid. I wondered why she'd chosen this spot to turn up again. If it had been her father's field, she'd have been punished.

“Wonderful here, isn't it?” she said. “You almost disappear.”

She was right. If she hadn't raised her arms and waved she would have been invisible. A few inches taller, I could barely see above the ripe seed heads. She might have been light enough for me to hoist on my shoulders, but I didn't try. She stood on a small flattened circle in the field, but there was no wheat trodden down, no path leading to her. You would have sworn a dozen gophers had stampeded to where I stood. I felt hot and sticky, the sun branding the back of my neck. “Where's your hat?” she asked. I showed her the hood on my T-shirt. “I pull it up when the sun's out,” I said. I demonstrated how it covered my head.

“If you're going to do something halfway, don't do it at all,” she said, familiar words from my childhood. Then, “Don't worry, I won't nag. You'll only get stubborn and not listen.”

“Mom, are you going to disappear like last time, with no warning?” Mosquitoes were starting to find me, buzzing and diving for my skin. I slapped my arm, then my shoulder, the tops of my hands. Though her arms and legs were bare—she wore the same outfit as before but in a different material, this one a pale blue denim—the mosquitoes didn't bother her. I didn't want to think about that.

“There was something I'd forgotten to ask,” she said.

“How is he?”

“Barry's fine,” I said. “I saw him a month ago.”

“No, not your brother. I know how
he
is. I mean Dr. Phil.”

Dr. Phil? I didn't remember Mom being so intimate with any of the doctors at the Swift Current hospital or the care home in Leader. It had always been Dr. and then some long last name we found difficult to pronounce: once it was Pakistani, once Nigerian, once Sri Lankan. To the first doctor, the internist whose skin was the colour of mahogany, she'd said, “Your shirt is so white. Your wife must take good care of you.” It had made me cringe.

“Dr.
Phil,
you silly, on
TV
. You know who I mean.”

Dr. Phil
was one of the daily programs I'd watched with her when I was home on a visit. The other was
Regis and
Kelly
from New York. She didn't miss either show except on the days they conflicted with her aqua exercises. I never watched them on my own. It was one of the things we did together to pass the time. “Why do you want to know about Dr. Phil?” I asked.

“There's something you need to hear from him,” she said.

I couldn't imagine what that would be. I found Dr. Phil a self-righteous bully. And I had his message down pat after watching only a few programs with her: you have a choice in this life, you don't have to accept someone else's bad behaviour and you must own up to your own. Didn't I know that already? After all these years was I still blaming my regrets and flaws on my parents?