Lives of Girls and Women (8 page)

“I’ll get carsick,” I said. “I’ll vomit.”

“No you won’t.” My mother, in her slip, rubbed cologne on her bare arms. She pulled her navy blue crepe dress over her head. “Come and do me up. What a dress to wear in this heat. I can smell the Cleaners on it. Heat brings out that smell. Let me tell you about an article I was reading just a couple of weeks ago. It ties in perfectly with what I’m saying now.”

She went into her room and brought back her hat, which she put on in front of my little bureau mirror, hastily scraping the front hair underneath and leaving some back tails out. It was a pillbox hat of a hideous colour popular during the war—Air Force Blue.

“People are made up of parts,” she resumed. “Well when a person dies—as we say—only one part, or a couple of parts, may actually be worn out. Some of the other parts could run thirty, forty years more. Uncle Craig, for instance—he might have had perfectly good kidneys that a young person with sick kidneys could use. And this article was saying—someday these parts will be used! That’s the way it will be. Come on downstairs.”

I followed her down to the kitchen. She started putting her rouge on, at the dark mirror over the kitchen sink. For some reason she kept her make-up there, on a sticky tin shelf above the sink, all mixed up with bottles of dark old pills, and razor blades and tooth powder and Vaseline, no tops on anything.

“Transplant them! For instance eyes. They are already able to transplant eyes, not whole eyes but the cornea, I think it is. That’s only the beginning. Someday they’ll be able to transplant hearts and lungs and all the organs that the body needs. Even brains—I wonder, could they transplant
brains?
So all these parts won’t die at all, they’ll go on living as part of somebody else. Part of another combination. Then you won’t be able properly to speak of death at all. ‘Heirs of the Living Body.’ That’s what the article was called. We would all be heirs of one another’s bodies, we would all be donors too. Death as we know it now would be done away with!”

My father had come down, in his dark suit.

“Were you planning to discuss these ideas with the folks at the funeral?”

In a back-to-earth voice my mother said, “No.”

“Because they do have a different set of notions, and they might easy be upset.”

“I never mean to upset anybody,” cried my mother. “I never do! I think it’s a beautiful idea. It has its own kind of beauty! Isn’t it better than Heaven and Hell? I can’t understand people, I never can make out what they really believe. Do they think your Uncle Craig is wearing some kind of white nightshirt and floating around Eternity this very minute? Or do they think they put him in the ground and he decays?”

“They think both,” my father said, and in the middle of the kitchen he put his arms around my mother, holding her lightly and gravely, careful not to disturb her hat or her newly-pink face.

I used to wish sometimes for this very thing, to see my parents by look or embrace affirm that romance—I did not think of passion— had once caught them up and bound them together. But at this moment, seeing my mother go meek and bewildered—this was what the slump of her back showed, that her words never would—and my father touching her in such a gentle, compassionate, grieving way, his grieving having not much to do with Uncle Craig, I was alarmed, I wanted to shout at them to stop and turn back into their separate, final, unsupported selves. I was afraid that they would go on and show me something I no more wanted to see than I wanted to see Uncle Craig dead.

“
Owen
doesn’t have to go,” I said bitterly, pushing my face into the loosened mesh of the screen door, seeing him sitting in the yard in his old wagon, bare legged, dirty, remote, pretending he was something else, anything—an Arab in a caravan or an Eskimo on a dogsled.

That drew them away from each other, my mother sighing.

“Owen’s young.”

T
HE HOUSE WAS
like on one of those puzzles, those mazes on paper, with a black dot in one of the squares, or rooms; you are supposed to find your way in to it, or out from it. The black dot in this case was Uncle Craig’s body, and my whole concern was not to find my way to it but to avoid it, not to open even the safest looking door because of what might be stretched out behind it.

The hay coils were still there. Last week, when I was visiting, the hay was cut, right up to the verandah steps, and coiled into smooth, perfect beehives higher than anybody’s head. In the evening, first casting long, pulled-out shadows, then turning grey, solid, when the sun went down, these hay-coils made a village, or, if you looked around the corner of the house down the rest of the field, a whole city of secretive, exactly similar, purple grey huts. But one had tumbled down, one was soft and wrecked, left for me to jump in. I would stand back against the steps and then run at it with my arms spread passionately, landing deep in fresh hay, still warm, still with its grassy growing smell. It was full of dried flowers—purple and white money-musk, yellow toadflax, little blue flowers nobody knew the name of. My arms and legs and face were covered with scratches, and when I roused myself from the hay these scratches stung, or glowed on me, in the rising breeze from the river.

Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace had come and jumped in the hay too, with their aprons flying, laughing at themselves. When the moment came they would hesitate, and jump with not quite sufficient abandon, landing in a decorous sitting position, hands spread as on bouncing cushion, or holding their hair.

When they came back and sat on the verandah, with basins of strawberries they were hulling, to make jam, Auntie Grace spoke breathlessly, but in a calm, musing voice.

“If a car had come by, wouldn’t you just have wanted to die?”

Aunt Elspeth took the pins out of her hair and let it down overthe back of her chair. When her hair was pinned up it looked nearly all grey, but when it was loose it showed a great deal of dark, silky brown, mink’s colour. With little snorting sounds of pleasure she shook her head back and forth and drew her spread fingers through her hair, to get rid of the little bits of hay that had flown up, and were sticking in it.

“Fools we are!” she said.

Where was Uncle Craig this while? Typing undauntedly, behind his closed windows and pulled-down blinds.

The squashed hay coil was just the same. But men were walking on the hay-stubble, all in dark suits like tall crows, talking. A wreath of white lilies hung on the front door, which was standing ajar. Mary Agnes came up joyfully smiling and made me stand still while she tied and re-tied my sash. The house and yard were full of people. Relatives from Toronto sat on the verandah, looking benevolent, but voluntarily apart. I was taken and made to speak to them, and avoided looking into the windows behind them, because of Uncle Craig’s body. Ruth McQueen came out carrying a wicker basket of roses, which she set on the verandah railing.

“There are more flowers than will ever go in the house,” she said, as if this was something we might all grieve for. “I thought I’d set them out here.” She was fair-haired, discreet, wanly solicitous— already an old maid. She knew everyone’s names. She introduced my mother and me to a man and his wife from the southern part of the county. The man was wearing a suit jacket with overalls.

“He give us our marriage licence,” the woman said proudly.

My mother said she must go to the kitchen and I followed her, thinking that at least they could not have put Uncle Craig there, where the smells of coffee and food were coming from. Men were in the hall, too, like tree trunks to work your way through. Both doors of the front room were closed, a basket of gladioli set in front of them.

Aunt Moira, draped in black like a massive, public pillar, was standing over the kitchen table counting teacups.

“I’ve counted three times and every time I come up with a different number,” she said, as if this was a special misfortune that could happen only to her. “My brain is not able to work today. I can’t stand on my feet much longer.”

Aunt Elspeth, wearing a wonderful starched and ironed apron, with frills of white lawn, kissed my mother and me. “There now,” she said, backing up from her kiss with a sigh of accomplishment. “Grace is upstairs, freshening her eyes. We just can’t believe it, so many people! Grace said to me, I think half the county is here, and I said what do you mean, half the county, I wouldn’t be surprised if its the whole county! We miss Helen, though. She sent a
blanket
of lilies.”

“There ought to be enough, goodness!” she said practically, looking at the teacups. All our good ones and kitchen ones and the ones we borrowed from the church!”

“Do like at the Poole funeral,” whispered a lady by the table. “She put away her good ones, locked them up and used the ones from the church. Said she wasn’t risking her china.”

Aunt Elspeth rolled her red-rimmed eyes in appreciation—her usual expression, just tempered by the occasion.

“The food will hold out anyway. I think there’s enough here to feed the five thousand.”

I thought so too. Everywhere I looked I saw food. A cold roast of pork, fat roast chickens, looking varnished, crusted scalloped potatoes, tomato aspic, potato salad, cucumber and beet salad, a rosy ham, muffins, baking powder biscuits, round bread, nut bread, banana-loaf fruitcake, light and dark layer cake, lemon meringue and apple and berry pies, bowls of preserved fruit, ten or twelve varieties of pickles and relishes. Watermelon-rind pickles, Uncle Craig’s favourite. He always said he would like to make a meal out of those, with just bread and butter.

“No more than enough,” said Aunt Moira, darkly. “They all bring their appetites to funerals.”

There was a stir in the hallway; Auntie Grace passing through, the men making way, she thanking them, subdued and grateful as if she had been a bride. The minister trailed behind her. He spoke to the women in the kitchen with restrained heartiness.

“Well, ladies! Ladies! It doesn’t look as if you have let time lie heavy on your hands. Work is a good offering, work is a good offering in time of grief.”

Auntie Grace bent and kissed me. There was a faint sour smell, a warning, under her eau de cologne. “Do you want to see your Uncle Craig?” she whispered, tender and sprightly as if she were promising a reward. “He’s in the front room, he looks so handsome, under the lilies Aunt Helen sent.”

So. Some ladies spoke to her, and I got away. I went through the hall again. The front room doors were still closed. At the bottom of the stairway, by the front door, my father and a man I did not know were pacing, turning, measuring discreetly with their hands.

“This’ll be the tricky place. Here.”

“Take the door off?”

“Too late for that. You don’t want to make a commotion. It might upset the ladies, seeing us take it off. If we back around like this—”

Down the side hall two old men were talking. I ducked between them.

“Not like in the winter, remember Jimmy Poole’s. The ground was like a rock. You couldn’t put a dent in it with any kind of a tool.”

“Had to wait over two months for a thaw.”

“By that time must have been three-four of them waiting. Let see.

There’d be Jimmy Poole—”

“Him all right. There’d be Mrs. Fraleigh, senior—”

“Hold on there, she died before the freeze, she’d be all right.”

I went through the door at the end of the side hall into the old part of the house. This part was called the storeroom; from outside, it looked like a little house of logs tacked on to the side of the big brick house. The windows were small and square and set slightly askew like the never-quite-convincing windows in a doll’s house. Hardly any light got in, because of the dim towering junk piled up everywhere even in front of the windows—the churn and the old washing machine that was turned by hand, wooden bedsteads taken apart, trunks, tubs, scythes, a baby carriage clumsy as a galleon, keeling drunkenly to one side. This was the room Auntie Grace refused to go into; Aunt Elspeth always had to go, if they wanted something out of it. She would stand in the doorway and sniff boldly and say, “What a place! The air in here’s just like a tomb!”

I loved the sound of that word when I first heard her say it. I did not know exactly what it was, or had got it mixed up with womb, and I saw us inside some sort of hollow marble egg, filled with blue light, that did not need to get in from outside.

Mary Agnes was sitting on the churn, not looking surprised.

“What are you coming in here for?” she said softly. “You’re going to get yourself lost.”

I didn’t answer her. Not turning my back, I wandered round the room. I had often wondered, thinking back, if there was anything in that baby carriage. Sure enough there was; a pile of old
Family Heralds
. I heard my mother’s voice calling my name. She sounded slightly anxious, unwillingly deferential. I didn’t make a sound and Mary Agnes didn’t either. What had she been doing in here? She had found a pair of old-fashioned ladies’ boots, laced up the front and trimmed with fur, and she was hanging on to them. She rubbed the fur under her chin.

“Rabbit fur.”

Now she came and stuck the boots in my face. “Rabbit fur?”

“I don’t want them.”

“Come and see Uncle Craig.”

“No.”

“You haven’t seen him yet.”

“No.”

She waited with a boot in each hand, blocking my way, then said again in such a sly, inviting voice, “Come see Uncle Craig.”

“I will not.”

She dropped the boots and put her hand on my arm, dug the fingers in. I tried to shake her off and she got me with the other hand, and pulled me towards the door. For someone so clumsy, someone who had nearly died three times from bronchitis, she had shocking strength. She worked her hand down to my wrist and with a clutch like a bear’s she got hold of my hand. Her voice was still at leisure, mild and gloating.

“You come and—
see
—Uncle Craig.”

I dropped my head and got her arm in my opened mouth, I got her solid downy arm just below the elbow, and I bit and bit and broke the skin and in pure freedom thinking I had done the worst thing that I would ever do, I tasted Mary Agnes Oliphant’s blood.