Sanctuary Line (19 page)

Always, after that, our ancestor spent a good deal of time browsing in the small greeting-card section of the store, paying close attention to any new secret admirer cards that appeared on the shelves. The sentiments expressed in those cards, though admittedly not as complicated or fraught as those brought to light by Byron or Shelley, were very familiar to Young Great-great, and though he couldn’t be sure which ones had been written by Alice, he began to believe that, all along, she had been able to read his thoughts and that this, in fact, was her way of communicating with him. He bought one or two of the more discrete versions. He dared not mail a card to Alice, however, for fear that the verses had not been written by her and that she might take offence at receiving a card with a poem composed by someone else, even though he had absolutely no intention of identifying himself.

Now, while he was behind the two workhorses ploughing a field, or feeding his animals, or pruning the orchard, he tried to puzzle out a method of discovering just which cards had been written by Alice. He thought of writing the Toronto card company, but likely there was more than one, and anyway he believed that taking such drastic
action would be too intrusive. And then an opportunity presented itself.

In the post office one day when he was collecting several packets of seed he had ordered from a catalogue, the postmistress handed him a parcel addressed to Alice. Oh, she had said, realizing her mistake, that one’s meant for Alice, some of her cards. She pointed across the street in the direction of Alice’s house and said, She works on them in the morning. I can see her there at her table near the window, working away.

Young Great-great knew what he had to do. He was to begin harrowing the north field that week, a job that began at dawn and ended at dusk, but he would put it off for a day or two. Instead he would go in the mornings to borrow a book. He would go every day until he could catch a glimpse of a poem she was writing at that table.

He brought home an edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets that way and a collection of Wordsworth’s verse, but it wasn’t until the third morning visit that he managed to get close enough to the table to be able to gather two lines:

My love’s a secret no one knows
Except my lonely heart

And those two lines shook him to such an extent he forgot what it was he had come to borrow, so he stood in her kitchen, hat in hand, with nothing at all to ask for. Alice
pulled a collection by Robert Burns from the shelf, though he had already borrowed the book several times in the past. He was able then to put his hat on and say goodbye, which he did, my uncle said, with the knowledge that he had missed a significant moment, one when he might have spoken to her. “‘Wee cowering, timorous beastie,’” he muttered to himself angrily all the way back to the farm.

Still he had those lines she’d written, and they seemed like a gift to him. He haunted the stationery section of the general store so often after that, reading every card, including those wishing a Happy Christmas, that the storekeeper finally asked if there was a particular kind of card that he wanted to order. Finally, in spring, he found what he was after: one with a cream-coloured background, and violets making a border around
To My Secret Love
. And inside, at last, the words he was seeking. Purchasing it, however, was a different matter. It’s meant as a joke, he eventually said, for my sister. We’ve had a quarrel.

He mailed the card, unsigned, the following day.

Perhaps, my uncle said, the sending of the card was all that Young Great-great wanted at the time, or perhaps he had hoped Alice would guess that it was he who had sent it and would send some kind of signal of her own, and when she didn’t, he felt foolish and humiliated. Either way, he stopped borrowing books after that and applied himself fully to the timbering he had begun in his woods, making a good deal of money in the process, and nothing further
happened until one year later when he heard that Alice was gravely ill. It was then, and only then, that he resolved to marry her.

He appeared at her door on an autumn evening, dressed in his only suit, with a bouquet of the last roses of the season in his hand and a diamond ring he had purchased in Toronto in his jacket pocket. A woman opened the door, looked at him questioningly, then introduced herself as Alice’s sister-in-law. She led him through the kitchen where all that poetry had been written and into the parlour where Alice sat with a rug over her lap and a shawl around her shoulders.

Neither spoke until she roused herself enough to ask if he had come to borrow a book. He handed her the roses then and looked at her drawn face, where traces of her beauty and of her intelligence remained visible in her expression. By the time he gathered the courage to produce the ring he saw that she had fallen asleep. So he left the small box on her lap and crept from the house. When he returned the following day, the sister-in-law told him that Alice was too weak to leave her bed but had left an envelope for him, an envelope that contained a card. Alone in his own kitchen, he opened the envelope and looked at this card, on the front of which, embossed in gold, were the heart-stopping words
To My Fiancé
. He could hardly bear to read the verse inside –
Our courting days are over now, We’ve found our joy at last –
or bring himself to look at her name written in a
faltering script at the bottom of the page. But on his next visit he brought the card with him, showed it to the sister-in-law, and was permitted to enter Alice’s bedchamber.

It was instantly clear to him that she was dying, my uncle told us, and that if he were going to marry her, he would have to work fast.
A wedding gown
, were the only words that she was able to say to him. Perhaps it was the beginning of a verse she was making in her head, but Young Great-great knew that he would be expected to produce this article of clothing.

Her sister-in-law gathered together the ladies of the church, who spent the next day and night working on the gown and who also provided the veil, which, in his haste, he had forgotten all about. The ladies of the church also put the minister on high alert, and his mother withdrew her own gold band from her finger so that it could be used in the upcoming ceremony. Three days later, my uncle always said at this point in the story, a middle-aged great-great finally married the middle-aged love of his life, and she died, six hours later, of tuberculosis.

In the end she had been too weak to put on the gown; this was the part of the story that Mandy and I liked the best. She had been too weak so the veil was put on the pillow behind her head and the gorgeous satin gown was laid over the blanket that covered her body.

Drifting in and out of consciousness, she was just able to nod her consent when asked the pertinent questions by the
minister. Young Great-great slipped the gold band on her finger and held her hand, the only time they had touched. It was said that her youthful beauty returned once she was dead and the women were able to fully dress her in the wedding gown she wore in her open coffin. He went on to build sawmills all over the county and became tremendously rich. He wore a black armband, however, for the rest of his life, and never again read poetry after he found one of her cards with what he considered to be the perfect verse for her tombstone.

She lies beneath her native earth
And in the land that gave her birth
A multitude of flowers wave
In sadness o’re her early grave.

The only time I remember Mandy speaking about her disappeared father was in reference to this story. She said she couldn’t believe that he had put all the romantic nonsense into our heads when … But she didn’t finish the sentence, adding instead, Well, it wasn’t like that for him, was it? I think my mother may have ruled him after all, or tried to. And his job, as it turns out, was to find ways to escape her custody. It was almost a decade ago in early spring when she said this. She was making one of her rare visits
from Petawawa, and I had come down from the city to see her. Outside the house, melted snow had created a water meadow in the orchard. Through the window I could see that the few remaining trees were reflecting exact doubles of themselves in sheets of silver liquid.

Nothing romantic about an escape from perceived imprisonment, Mandy said.

I agreed, trying to keep the bitter edge out of my voice, nothing romantic about any person trying to control another by any means. I was thinking about the command-and-control theory Mandy told me she studied during her officer training program.

For Mandy herself, of course, romance would have had nothing to do with command-and-control theory. Instead it would have been the mystifying poetry she sometimes read to me pushed up against discipline, uniforms, physical training, and military strategy while she was still at college and talking about the honour of serving her country. Her college days were followed by postings to less than glamorous Canadian locations, and then eventually a journey into the chaos of a desert war so debatable in its intentions that even Mandy, who, like her colleagues, was fully committed to duty, once said if you look at history, it could be said that one man’s terrorist is often another man’s freedom fighter.

And then those hotel rooms. How much poetry could she have possibly brought with her into such spaces? How much of this farm, the lake, her father’s stories, and the
terrible way her father tore himself out of all that? She was – I was certain of this – both imprisoned and displaced. Where was the fight for freedom in all that?

Just last month, when we decided it was time to choose what to engrave on the stone we chose for Mandy, her brothers and I immediately thought of poor Alice, of Alice and of our own Young Great-great, who, because of her, had come to love the sophisticated poetry she loaned to him and the banal commercial poetry she wrote. We wanted there to be two headstones with that unsophisticated verse concerning emplacement incised on their surfaces in the little country graveyard. But in the end we changed our minds when we discovered the military had already prepared the standard headstone for Mandy’s grave. A maple leaf surrounded by a circle, her name and birth and death dates.

My mother and I spent brief periods of time around Christmas and Thanksgiving at the farm as well, all through my childhood and adolescence. During the long days of summer when I awoke each morning to the sound of the Mexican workers making their way to the orchards and the unfurling of waves over the pebbles on the shore, it was possible to believe that the orchards and the lake were the beginning and the end of the world, my relatives and their workers its only inhabitants. Not so the autumn and winter holiday: then the visit was more like an interruption of city life with its regulated hours of school and after-school lessons. Still, it was at those laden tables decorated with gourds or mistletoe that my uncle shone in the presence of his wife, his sister, his brother, and his brother’s wife. Lengthy, articulate speeches flowed out of him. The ghosts of the great-greats were evoked and toasted, and the old worn book that contained the collected works of the Reverend Patrick Sanderson was pulled from the shelf and read aloud for the amusement of all.

The reverend had not only written about civic holidays, summer afternoons, and his own dead child but had penned as well tributes to the curling, lawn bowling, and literary clubs of Kingsville. These latter poems were considered to be howlingly funny by the adults, but I couldn’t see much difference between them and the Robert Louis Stevenson poems that had thrilled Mandy so much she had committed many of them to memory as a child.

When I was young and by the sea
A wooden spade they gave to me
To dig the sandy shore.

My holes were empty like a cup
In every hole the sea came up
Til it could come no more.

Mandy’s interest in lines such as these bewildered me, though I am beginning to understand their wisdom now.

Consumption of large amounts of alcohol was fully sanctioned for the adults during the winter holidays, while the children were both overindulged and blissfully ignored. I remember my aunt’s cashmere sweaters – she always expected my uncle to provide her with a new one at Christmas. I also remember her competence in the
kitchen, and how tastefully she had decorated the house. She insisted on real holly bought from a florist, rather than what she called “dusty plastic,” and boughs of fir cut from the wood lot, the tree with its red and silver bulbs and tiny white lights.

My mother always felt she had to find the perfect piece of pressed glass to present to her sister-in-law, and was visibly nervous when the time came for the opening of gifts because she was never entirely certain that what she had chosen was not a reproduction. Unlike my aunt, she often could not work out how to tell the difference, and there were plenty of dealers who were happy to prey on that weakness. Not long ago she told me that my aunt would show no signs of disappointment if the goblet or compote turned out to be a fake, but that once or twice during the subsequent summer she would notice that the Christmas present was not evident on the shelves where my aunt kept her collection. A sad, little attempt to please, followed by a small cruelty.