The Age of Water Lilies
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Authors: Theresa Kishkan
The Age of Water Lilies
Theresa Kishkan
Contents
For my parents, the Fairfield years
~
To remember Walhachin is to set a place
at the table for the absent . . .Â
âStephen Hume
PART ONE
Grace
ONE
April 1962
Begin with rain
, the soft water splashing down from broad new leaves and needles onto the pavement, the call of crows unearthly over the graves. Primroses show yellow blooms, daisies dust the ground like snow, daffodils emerge in the wide clearances of grass, while the voices of children ring out from the breakwater where a seal has washed ashore, half its belly eaten. A girl is on her stomach, oblivious to rain, her ear against the earth, listening.
Begin with that girl, age seven, riding a bike along the verdant narrow lanes of the Ross Bay Cemetery, past the blind angels, the obelisks, past the exotic trees planted on the slope of land overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the lights of Port Angeles twinkling in the distance as dusk settles on the neighbourhood. A girl who has played under the floor joists of Stewart Monumental Works in sand ground down from slabs of granite and marble shaped into tombstones, hoardings used for cement, to anchor the stones of memory. She has breathed in the dust of both the dead and their markers in air stung with salt, broken by gulls. This girl has gone to sit in a kitchen near the corner of May Street and Memorial Crescent where an elderly lady poured tea into cups of thin china mottled with roses and offered biscuits from a tin crowned with dour Queen Victoria. There were also squares of oatcake filled with sweet dates.
“If you lie on the ground by the Spencers, you can hear the buried stream,” the girl told the woman. “You can hear it in the park by our house too, gurgling under the far corner, almost where your fence is. But it's loudest by Mr. Spencer's obelisk. Did you know his family still runs his store downtown? It's where we go to shop for clothes for going back to school. There, and sometimes Tang's Pagoda.”
“A good store,” agreed the woman, who had shopped at Spencer's Store for nearly fifty years. She liked to enter the cool premises, to move between the tables stacked with sturdy sweaters that sailors might wear, and then up one step to where the Ladies' Apparel hung neatly on railings with curtained fitting rooms kept swept and waiting. It was an entirely serviceable store. “And why do you like to listen to water?”
“It seems wrong somehow for a creek to travel underground. You can see where one comes out at the sea if you stand on the breakwater. Why would anyone bury a stream?”
The woman smiled. “My dear, more is buried in a cemetery than you could imagine. Think of its secrets. I often do. Notes tucked into burial suits, two stones placed at a woman's feet, unspoken names on the lips of the people who have just died. And the living think of the dead as their anchors, keeping them close and steady. One day I will tell you about one of the graves, speaking of secrets. But you will be older, I think, and might not be so interested. And perhaps I should not talk to you about such things so I will pass you this plate and you may help yourself to another matrimonial square.”
The girl could not imagine a day when she would be uninterested in the cemetery and its secrets. It was her favourite place to play. There, and the shelter under the monumental works office, where tall posts supported the back part of the buildingâit was built on a hillâwhere bins of sand waited for children to bury themselves like the dead. The girl and her brothers played there, the fine sand, pink and grey and bone white, lingering afterwards in their socks and shoes, the cuffs of their trousers where they were rolled up to last over a growth spurt. Brushing the children's clothing off on the veranda before allowing them into the house, their mother would sigh and make them remove their shoes. She shook the sand into beds of peonies and azaleas planted against the foundation. The girl remembered the weight of sand on her chest when her brothers buried her the last time, new creamy sand, fresh and clean, untouched yet by cats. In the yard of the monumental works, the men laboured on a stone and called hello as the children darted under the joists.
In the pink house with its gracious windows looking out to the cemetery, the girl gazed around her as she drank her tea, milky and lukewarm. There were paintings everywhere, and drawings framed by thin wood. Some of the drawings showed a girl, some showed rows of trees and a big sky stretched over top. One was a village with stone walls, soft colour washed over ink. Somehow there was sunlight in it. One showed two horses in stomach-high grass, a shed off to one side.
“Were the horses yours?” the girl asked.
The woman, who was Miss Oakden, looked for a long time at that drawing. “No,” she said finally. “No, they belonged to someone else. They were special horses. The one with his head down is the one I rode. His name was Agate and he really was that colour, like caramel. The other one was Flight and she could run. Oh, my, she could run! The Indians had races on the flats by the river, and Flight would put all the other horses to shame, even the quick Indian ponies.”
The girl, who was Tessa, wondered about that for a moment. And then, “Which Indians do you mean?” The only Indians she could think of were the ones on television, with war paint and bonnets made of feathers. There were some out at Tsawout, near where her family sometimes went for picnics at Island View Beach. Tessa had watched a girl and her mother dig clams where the public beach ended and the Reserve began. But she had never seen horses there.
“It was such a long time ago, Tessa. Another world, really. One day I will tell you. But now I think I want to have a rest. Take some squares home to your brothers, my dear. Here, I will wrap them up for you.”
TWO
AprilâMay 1913
A small girl dozes on a blanket under an apple tree in an orchard of flowering trees, her body warm in the layers of dress and pinafore, stockings, bloomers, undervest. She is almost asleep and doesn't hear her name for the first few calls.
Flora, Flora
. The voice comes closer.
Flora,
come and see what I've found.
And she is awake, rubbing her eyes, rising, calling,
Where are you, George?
And, unseen, he is directing her to find her way through a gap in the hedge, a small passage that only a child as young as five could fit through, and into the pasture, the one sloping down to the water meadows by the river.
She runs in the direction of her brother's voice. She sees him coming across the pasture, something over his shoulders.
Is it, is it . . . ?
She doesn't know what it is. She runs closer.
Flora, look what I found in the swamp. Do you remember old Dobbin?
And she sees he is carrying a rocking horse on his back, the head looking over his shoulders. Mud falls from the burden, long weeds drip from its body. For a moment she doesn't know what to think.
Why would . . . ?
But then she recognizes the horse. It is a moment heavy with memory and recognition.
Dobbin. How could she have forgotten Dobbin?
He had been her favourite plaything, a horse to ride by the nursery window where she watched the hunt gathering on the cobbles of the front drive, her father seeing her in the window and waving his crop, handsome in his scarlet coat and bowler, the hounds taut on their leads as the Master waited for the moment when they could be released to take the hunt far over the fields in pursuit of the fox. She would make Dobbin gallop as she watched and waved. When she was three, she asked her brother to move Dobbin out to the wide stone terrace, so she could ride him in air pungent with horses. Her mother would not allow her down off the half-moon of stone, fearful of what might happen in the excitement of dogs and mounts. A few of the horses danced sideways as their riders drank a stirrup-cup of mulled wine before heading out onto the field.
Dobbin had been forgotten overnight on the terrace. The next morning, he was nowhere to be found. Later, when Flora's father, Henry Oakden, tried to work out what might have happened, the cook remembered that gypsies had come with a cart to sharpen knives and it was assumed they had taken the horse, though when their camp was approached, the patriarch questioned, any knowledge of a child's plaything was denied. Henry and his groom were invited to look inside the caravans themselves, if they liked.
And Flora had forgotten about her rocking horse. Two years later, she was the owner of a fat grey Welsh pony, her own riding habit, pretty boots. And she had been dozing in the orchard after a picnic lunch, her mother having left her in the safety of grass to deadhead the roses while the nanny took the basket back to the house. Now this: Dobbin returning over the pasture, a gift of sorts from her older adored brother, who was saying that he didn't suppose the rocking horse could be cleaned of its long residence in the slough but that he would give it to their gardener, Higgins, to see what might be done.
Flora, Flora
. She could still hear her brother calling but realized she was not at Watermeadows at all. She was lying on ground among the apple trees at Walhachin. You could not yet call it a mature orchard, although the settlers were optimistic about the future. Rows of thin trees, a few blossoms opening to the sun, some of the rows in between the trees planted with potatoes and onions, some with tobacco. Grass and sage grew also, and plants with burrs or sticky pods or prickles. Nothing was lush or verdant. Flora had been warned to watch at all times for rattlesnakes although they were found more commonly among the rocks leading down to the river.
Flora rose from the warm ground and oriented herself to the voice, smoothing her dress, checking for twigs in her hair. Sometimes it seemed to her that George had such expectations of her that she was nervous she could never meet them. She had imagined that there would be more freedom in this new country, spacious and open to match its skies, the wide expanses of earth undulating in the heat, hills shimmering in the distance like mirages. And for some, perhaps there was freedom, or moments of it. She admired the women hanging out sheets on sunny mornings, their bare arms, ruddy and freckled, rising to the lines. Sometimes she'd see them drinking tea on a laundry stoop afterwards, in damp aprons, tendrils of hair escaping from pins. Or walking with children and dogs, bare-headed, laughing, their feet stockingless in sandals. George and Flora had driven to a farm near Ashcroft to take possession of a box of young birds from Norah Careless, who raised chickens and geese and beautiful vegetables and greeted them wearing sturdy trousers and a work shirt such as the labourers wore. There was nothing deferential about her manner. In fact, she corrected almost everything George said until finally he paid her quickly and put the box of young pullets in the boot of the car. He expostulated noisily half the way home.