Sanctuary Line (26 page)

Dark brown is the river.
Golden is the sand.
It flows along for ever,
With trees on either hand.

And Dickinson replied:

Adrift! A little boat adrift!
And night is coming down!
Will no one guide a little boat
Unto the nearest town?

Neruda was in my head then. His shipwrecked love.

When I visited The Golden Field yesterday, I took along one of the photos of the tree at the end of the lane. My mother held it in her hand for a long time before rising to search for her glasses so that she could examine it more closely. Once she had settled back into her chair and had given the picture another long look, she gazed at me with an expression of sadness. “Once, when I walked down to the end of the lane to see the butterflies, I recall the Mexican boy, Teo, standing beside that tree. He was alone and so was I. ‘From my country’ – I think that’s what he said – ‘from my country.’ It’s astonishing how well I remember that. At first I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. He was quite small then, hardly knew any English. I suddenly realized he was talking about the butterflies.” She paused. “He was Stanley’s child, you know. I suppose Stanley must have had real feelings for her …” She was silent again, for a few moments, seeming to search for Dolores’s name. “And the boy,” she added. “I am sure that he loved Teo.”

Slowly I sat down on the one antique sofa my mother had taken with her when she left the house. I noticed
that the curved piece of wood on the arm of the sofa was beginning to separate from the upholstery. That will have to be fixed, I thought. Some day, that will have to be fixed.

I hadn’t known. Mandy’s voice was a phantom in my ear.
I didn’t know, okay? I didn’t know!
Her own lack of knowledge at the time was about the beginnings of a hidden teenage love, and yet something as simple as the way I slammed a car door could bring all that hiding and all that love to her attention, even in the midst of her own distress. How could some part of me not have known about this: the shared cells, the genetic inheritance? And the way my uncle insisted that we include Teo, make him one of us. One of my cousins, I thought now. Season after season, my uncle would have carried this secret with him. All those years while he was telling his stories, another parallel story would have been developing and growing in the shape of a child he would rarely see and would eventually lose completely as a result of the same, impossible love that created that child.

“Have you always known?” I asked, though I could barely speak.

“I saw Stanley once with the boy and there was” – she was having difficulty – “there was something there I couldn’t identify. I saw him touch the child’s hair.”

“That couldn’t be all. He must have said something.”

“No. That morning I told you about, that morning beside the tree, the boy held his hands up, fingers open, as
he tried to get me to understand that it was all of the butterflies he was referring to. I had spent hours of my own childhood prying hands just like those from the rungs of ladders and the branches of trees, coaxing Stanley down.” She was looking at her own similar hands, now decades older than my uncle’s, and a half a century older than Teo’s had been. “The hands,” she said, “right down to the shape of the fingernails, were exactly the same.”

So there was the crucial observation. But hypotheses always precede both observations and conclusions. I decided not to ask about that. Hypotheses, after all, can often manifest themselves as uncomfortably dark questions. She wouldn’t want to remember her suspicions, to talk about them.

“Teo,” I said.

“No, he didn’t know. Certainly not.” She shifted in her chair. “But why talk about that?”

I knew I was not expected to answer this question.

“Even after Stanley disappeared,” my mother said, “Sadie believed that what she had discovered – the woman – could simply not have been important to him.” She paused, then added, “But she was important. I heard him once call her Mariposa, and his tone and the way he looked at her when he used that name made me understand.”

Listening to my mother, I remembered something from that wretched night, something I had caught for just a moment in my uncle’s expression before he turned away
and faced the wall. I now realized that what I had glimpsed was the remains of passion and the arrival of horror and weakness and fear. And all of this overlaid by shame. His knowledge of his own weakness, his inability to act in the presence of his son, had allowed that shame to own him. He was frozen in place as he had been on a ladder at twelve years of age with the apples and the leaves and his own father’s anger all around him.

“No, it was as it should be,” my mother was saying. “I’m sure of it. No one else knew.” She looked at me for several moments. “Except Dolores, of course,” she said, stating the obvious but, more important, naming my uncle’s lover for the first time.

Dolores likely would have been the first to hear the sounds, the first to permit the faint noise of approaching footsteps to gain precedence over the surf sound of his hands in her hair or his whisper, their heartbeats. Being of a temperament more watchful, more careful than his, she would have stiffened slightly in his embrace. Would he have noticed this? Or had he entered too fully into pleasure. And the drinking would have put him at a remove. Not from her, never from her, but from the rest of the world, which was, of course, its function. It would be the rest of the world, the rest of his life that was approaching now, sensed by her,
forgotten for the time being by him. The full brunt of this life, soon to come to the door, bringing anger and sorrow and everything he had tried to sidestep with it.

It was the end of summer. The butterflies were gathering. The cicadas had lifted up their nocturnal tambourines, had been heard, identified, and commented on, and then absorbed into a thrumming darkness that could be ignored and slept through. There were other sounds, of course, a breeze in the pines, a freight train in the distance, the soft beat of the waves against the shore. There was the sound of their limbs moving on the sheets as well, so subtle it was like a finger moving over paper. And there would have been the occasional random illumination, a quick glance of radiance from the lighthouse on the point, the moon between two banks of clouds. A single lamp might have been burning in the bunkhouse where someone who could not sleep was writing a letter destined to be read in a kitchen in a faraway country.

This grief, this anger had been pacing the paths of the farm for years, moving from room to room, field to field, looking for a spot to settle, something to name; somewhere to stop and take root and become a monstrous dark flower. And even as this blossom was seeded, would my uncle have been murmuring the secret name
Mariposa
he sometimes called her, this woman who was now alert in his arms? Would she have been able to receive the endearment? It is one of the things I now think about: whether she was
able to salvage one memory of tenderness, or whether what happened next removed all tenderness and even its memory from her life.

She would have known for some time that she had nothing more to give him – but she would have continued to give anyway while he gradually withdrew further and further into desperate garrulousness and eager social engagement with everyone else who was around him. During those last years, he might have half-committed to a meeting and then not appeared, and not have told her that he wouldn’t be appearing. She would be left alone then, in the trailer beside the bunkhouse with the ghost of him and a bottle of wine, brushing her dark hair, because she knew he loved it.

On those nights she must have come to know herself as one who has been made solitary by longing. A person absent from both ongoing parties, the one that unfolded so naturally among her own people and the other enacted in the house she had no access to. Once or twice, from the trailer windows, she must have seen him walk out to the garden, talking softly to one woman or another, their cigarettes glowing in the dark, heard their quiet, relaxed laughter. And if he visited her after, she would have feared that he was bringing that woman with him to her bed.

Sometimes she would have wanted to break with him but would find herself unable to tear the love and compassion out of her heart. And then there would have been the
warmth of him, for he was a caring man, the gentleness of his touch, the way their bodies had come over the years to know each other so that they would drift in and out of a kind of sleep even while fully aroused and in the midst of love.

Her brother, also a fruit picker, would not have understood the summer change in her and would likely tell her so. She would use the absence of her sisters, worry about their elderly father, anything at all to explain her sudden bouts of silent preoccupation. She was never going to betray him, her seasonal lover. Whether her son noticed, I will never come to know, but she must have wondered if he would some day sense the submission that was born in her each summer, her willingness to leave herself unprotected.
“Amor,”
she had said that night. “Love,” my mother said yesterday afternoon, remembering Teo.

When I thought of Teo and Mandy as I walked the stream today, and later when I stood near the lake where Mandy loved to swim, we were all still children and there was no darkness attached to us. Nothing had been ruined in any of us – not even in my uncle, my aunt. Then I thought of you, Vahil, how at the same time you would have been alone in your Ottawa childhood, your otherness made clear to you daily, how you would take the journey to the Middle
East only to have your otherness made clear to you there as well. Those hopeful, informal sessions of prayers that you held, and still hold, and the comfort you receive from them. I thought of all this.

All the tough evolutions, the shedding of various skins, followed by those difficult migrations, over great stretches of open water, and across vast tracts of land, to and from Mexico, or America, or Kandahar. That longing we have to bring it all together into one well-organized cellular structure, and then the heartbreaking suspicion that, with the best of intentions, we never really can. Remember, unlike that of their predecessors, who live only six weeks, mating and dying en route to the north, the fourth generation of monarchs is the strongest, lasting a full nine months so that they can return to the place where they started, overwinter, and mate, and begin the whole process again.

The games of summer are over. Soon it will be time for the routine of winter to enter life in the manner of such things, the way it always does. Time for schools and jobs. Time for adulthood and responsibilities. The field and the lab. The finches at my mother’s winter feeder. Migrations to softer or harder places. Tours of duty.

Standing on those limestone platforms with the bright expanse of an inland sea my only horizon, I watched three lost children, one of them me, fold their paper boats one last time while the poets spoke in my mind: the dark arguing with the bright palette, neither of them wrong. It
was Mandy who filled the atmosphere in the end, her recitation so clear, it was almost as if she were standing beside me at the water’s edge.