A Hard Witching (17 page)

“Here.” I handed her the paper. And then, casually, “Where’s Boyd?”

For a moment, she looked hurt, just as she had that day by the schoolyard. But then she shrugged and said, too gaily, “You know Boyd!” I stood there, scratching stupidly at a mosquito bite that had scabbed over on my elbow, wondering why he had not come to say goodbye, but knowing the answer:
What for?

“Well,” Cora Mae said, rising with that unmistakable poise, “I guess I’ll be going. I’ll write. But you have to write back.” I
nodded as she swished off down the street, her sandals clicking against the hot concrete. At the corner, she turned briefly and waved.
“Au
revoir!”
she shouted. And then she was gone.

It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I really thought of Cora Mae and Boyd again. Cora Mae had written twice after she’d left town that summer, but I felt I couldn’t live up to the stylish, looping writing, the purple ink, the
i
’s dotted with circles instead of points. I never wrote back. I didn’t really have anything to say anyway. And Boyd, well, I thought of him, of course. Quite a bit the first few months after they left. I couldn’t shake the feel of his hands, so detached and efficient, moving through my hair. Once, I caught myself writing his name in the back of my math scribbler. I got a strange kind of comfort knowing he was somewhere in the world. I was curious about what he had done with my hair, if he still had it. But as the months passed, I thought of him less and wondered just briefly the following summer whether they would return. They didn’t, and I soon forgot them almost entirely. By then, I’d found other friends, other interests. I say almost entirely because I could not forget that glimpse of Boyd down by the pond, his thin, nervous arms stretched wide across the water.

So when my mother returned from the coffee shop one afternoon just before graduation to tell me Cora Mae was in town, it was Boyd I thought of first.

“Oh, Audrey,” my mother said in that dramatic way she had, “you should see her. To think she could let herself go like that. All that makeup, and her skin such a mess. She bleaches her hair now. It looks terrible, of course. And I always thought so highly of her. I told Alec and Marion so. I was sorry she never came back to stay with them. I always thought she would
have made a good companion for you. But to look at her now …” She shook her head.

I was stretched out on my bed, doodling in my biology textbook. “Who?” I asked.

“Why, Cora Mae. That’s what I’ve been saying. You remember Cora Mae.”

For a few seconds, I didn’t, but then the name clicked. “What about her?” I asked.

“Exactly what I’ve been telling you,” my mother said, plumping my pillows. “She’s come to stay with Alec and Marion. Problems at home, I think. And to look at her, I can believe it. But they’ve had a hard time, that family. Alcohol and drugs and God knows what all. It’s no wonder.” She sighed. “Such a shame. She was a delightful little girl. You should just see her now.”

Try as I might, I could not imagine Cora Mae looking any different from what I remembered, could not picture her as an adult. To me, she’d seemed an adult back then.

“What about her brother?” I finally asked. “Boyd.”

My mother stared at me blankly, as if she’d never heard of him. “Boyd?”

“Yes,” I said, annoyed, “the one with the bird. Skinny kid, always moving.”

“Yes,” she said, “I know who you
mean.”
She began shifting perfume bottles into alignment on my dresser.

“Well,” I said, flipping my textbook shut, “is he here, too?”

“Audrey,” she said, as if I’d suddenly gone stupid, “he died. That was ages ago.”

Her words did not immediately register. I stared at her.

“Lord,” she said, brushing dust from the dresser with the palm of her hand, “that was years ago. I’m sure I told you.”

I looked down at the cover of the book before me, tried to make sense of the words, but they seemed foreign and obscure.
An unexpected stillness seemed to descend over the room, my own body.

“Audrey,” my mother was saying, “I’m sure I told you. There was all that hush-hush about it, of course. An accident, they said, but I told you long ago that boy was strange. He always was. I could have told you back then he’d come to no good. Cora Mae, now, that’s a real how-do-you-do. But I always say, it comes down to the parents.” And she shook her head. “I
know
I told you,” she said again, moving toward the door. “Anyway,” I heard her call from the hallway, “I need you to run downtown. I forgot milk.”

At age seventy-one, Perpetua Resch could honestly say she had loved only four people: her mother, her father, her brother Martin and her sister Magda. At one time she had hoped to include Joe, but she had long since recognized this idea as the romantic illusion of a teenaged bride and the expectation attached to a young and promising marriage. This was not to say she felt no affection for her husband. On the contrary, she was very fond of him. Over the years, there had been almost nothing to complain of about Joe. The worst she could think to say was that he tended toward complacency. But even this characteristic was a minor flaw given his easy nature, his generosity and, of course, his patient and seemingly unwavering capacity for love. But to speak in terms of loving him in return … no, she had none of that fierce blood-rush of feeling that could thrum music from the rib cage and swell one’s throat to bursting, as though it contained some beautiful, terrible balloon. Though she knew she would rather not do without Joe, she suspected that she could certainly make the adjustment
with little emotional strain. Once, long ago, in a tender moment (there was a moon, she remembers), Joe had said to her, “Don’t you ever die on me first. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” And she’d looked into his shining eyes, so pleasantly dark, and thought,
Well, all right,
even though she knew her heart should have wrenched at the thought of living without him. Oddly, she had not felt dismayed to discover, early on in marriage, the truth about her feelings for Joe. After all, it was not particularly rare in those days to be married to someone you did not love. Not unusual at all. So she had waited, instead, for the arrival of children to kindle the sort of love she knew she could expect with some degree of certainty from motherhood. When it became clear that the long-awaited arrival was not to come, Perpetua suspected that the number of those she could say she had truly loved would remain limited to four. And she briefly grieved.

Perpetua’s inability to love Joe (or anyone else she had met—there had certainly been opportunities) was the result of a too-happy childhood; this she knew. Looking back, she recalled none of the petty tensions and jealousies, none of the potentially grave, deep-rooted resentments that she knew sprouted in other families. There had been quarrels and sometimes tears, even the occasional fit of temper (Martin, once, after an argument with their father—Perpetua could not now remember over what—had broken his knuckle taking a swing at the barn wall), but these had been rare and short-lived and, once past, entirely forgotten. What made possible these easy family relations, she could not suppose. But the lack of conflict and strife neither amazed nor puzzled her—after all, her own marriage had rolled along easily for fifty-five years. Rather, it was the absolute, unshakeably deep love that Magda and Martin and Perpetua and their mother and father had all seemed to feel for one another, and only for one another. Even now,
when she conjured up an image of Martin, sickly always, with his too-skinny legs, walking to school through ditches bloated yellow with buffalo beans, or the unbeautiful Magda coaxing a kitten to take milk from a saucer in the little sunless back porch, she felt that huge swelling of her heart, at once so agonizing and so tender. And she was keenly aware, yet again, that she had never once had this feeling for Joe.

She liked to believe Joe had never known. She had certainly always done her best to conceal it from him. She had cooked his meals and washed his clothes and once, before they were married, when all things still seemed possible, she had danced with him under the stars on a summer night choked with the scent of hot sand and wolf willow and sage. She had held his hand and changed his sour sheets when he lay delirious with rheumatic fever, she had worked beside him in the field and in the corrals, and they had prayed every Sunday shoulder to shoulder in the little church at Johnsborough. She had lain next to him each night, peaceful or tired, sometimes angry. She had stayed, after all. And been happy, more or less. Back then, she had still had Magda and Martin and, for a few years after her mother’s death, her father. And that had been enough.

Perpetua supposed her parents were to blame. Somehow, they had produced a tight iron band of love that could not be expanded or reshaped or broken. They were good people, unexceptional people. Perpetua’s father was a quiet man, a German, from Odessa, given to long absences, days sometimes, out in the hills, from which he would return peaceful and oddly rested—younger-looking, as though the sandy blasts of wind across the land had polished him smooth, like a stone. He could read and write German fluently—an unusual ability, she learned later, for a man of his background and means. He took the German papers and read each one carefully
all the way through, puzzling his forehead in the light from the coal stove as though solving some unpleasant mystery. And on Sunday mornings without fail, until the children were too old for him to do so, he would take each of them in turn on his knee—Magda and then Martin and then Perpetua—and he would tell them in German,
You are the light of my heart.
And then, while the children stood grinning expectantly, he would rise and wrap their mother’s thickened waist in his big hands and whisper something in her ear—they never knew what, but they could tell by the look on her face it had to be the same thing each time. And she would smile and put the palm of her hand just so across his lips, as if she had placed a kiss there. She seemed to do this secretly, as she seemed to do all things, almost as though she worked some sort of magic in the everyday acts of living—in coaxing hot brown loaves of bread from the oven; or conjuring from that terrible gritty earth string beans fat and green as elves’ stockings; or polishing the scuffed pine-board floor to a shine that made Martin giddy with sliding in his stocking feet, and Perpetua and Magda foolish with imagined dancing shoes and shimmering satin gowns the colour of birds’ eggs. She was a large woman, broad-shouldered and wide through the hips, but she moved quickly and lightly, with the grace of love upon her limbs. No one outside the family would have called her beautiful. But there she was, nevertheless, soft and sudden and full-blown for them all like the wild roses by the gate in summer. And love, love, it was as if someone had dreamed them.

Only later, much later, did Perpetua realize her loving family had not taught love, but only collected it and stored it selfishly, like the bushel baskets of potatoes and mealy apples in the root cellar. No, they did not teach love. What they taught was this: everything for the family. And just the family. No friends to go visiting on a Saturday afternoon in December, no
skating parties, no fall suppers; no group picnics at the river with baskets of other women’s roast chicken and pickles and chokecherry strudels; no brandings, as they did not graze their cattle in the community pasture at the Sand Hills. Not even church, for they prayed at home, led by their father in German from the great black Bible brought from the old country. Always just the five of them. Yes, her parents were certainly to blame. When Perpetua thought this, she always paused uncomfortably over the word
blame.
But when she considered the effect of their love, it seemed that a little blame was necessary.

For many years, Perpetua had thought this failure to love was something wrong only in her. Then she had received a letter from Magda, poor Magda, alone in Saskatoon with a child, on the edge of her first divorce, who had written,
Tell me how it feels to go to bed each night and wake up each morning beside the man you love
(she had underlined love).
I feel sickened and empty. And my child, who is flesh and blood, asleep in the next room, her I can’t even speak of, can’t even look at some days without shame.
And Perpetua had read the letter twice over and wept terribly, big wrenching sobs, her apron up over her face and her shoulders shaking as though her body would break itself apart—wept, not for her husband, whom she did not love, nor for the children she had never had, whom she could not love either, but for poor Magda, whom she did love. She had wept that way until it was time for Joe’s supper, and then, seeing him step heavily across the yard, she had slipped the letter into the breadbox, washed her face and greeted him, as she did each day, with a smile and a kiss.

And that letter had made everything clear. This is how it would always be. Magda, ending her marriage because she was waiting for love; Martin, never married, alone for years on their parents’ farm; and Perpetua, married to a man she did not love. It was tragic. And terribly unfair. But, nevertheless, it was. Now, past seventy, with her parents and Magda long since buried in
the little Catholic cemetery on the outskirts of town, and Martin rarely able to know her anymore, and only Joe to fill her days, it seemed a thing beyond worrying about, this love.

So when she looked out the window that Wednesday morning to see a woman in a yellow hat talking to Joe by his woodworking shop, she was taken aback by the great swelling that expanded her old ribs. The feeling came so suddenly and so powerfully that she stepped away from the back door and sank into a kitchen chair, her head swimming with the impossible emotion that trembled her fingers and sheathed her body in a fine layer of sweat. Her knees threatened to give way beneath her, not for Joe, but for the woman in the yellow hat. It took her a few moments to reassure herself that it was not Magda who stood awkwardly among Joe’s larkspur, but Magda’s daughter, Myra, who had written weeks ago that she might be passing through. Perpetua had not seen Myra since before Magda’s divorce, not since Myra had gone off to live with her father in Manitoba. But that had been almost thirty years ago. The woman standing in the garden was not that rather homely, rather unhappy little girl she had known, but a woman approaching middle age, a woman who, for all Perpetua’s rationalizing,
was
Magda, was Magda’s blood, as she once said, Magda’s body—with the same swelling thighs and narrow shoulders, the same straight yellow hair, the same uneasy stance, the stance of someone slightly cowed by the acceptance of her own graceless appearance. Perpetua had consumed all this detail in a flash as she’d looked briefly out the back door, seeing first Joe standing and nodding, clearly pleased with this visitor (so rare now), and then the woman in the yellow hat, wearing a white skirt and a striped blouse, holding a big straw shopping bag over one shoulder (did she mean to stay?).