The Age of Water Lilies (5 page)

“A doctor!” exclaimed Flora. She wondered how the son of a doctor had ended up living in the cluster of tents where the rest of the workers stayed, close to the fields.

“Yes, a surgeon in fact. You look so surprised!”

Flora realized it was rude to stare at him with disbelief writ large upon her face. She pretended to be very interested in two ducks idling in the shallows of the river.

Gus touched her arm. “Please don't tell others that I've told you this. The others in Walhachin, I mean. I'm a bit of a black sheep, you see. I left home at seventeen, much to the sorrow of my mother, and have made my own way since then. If people know about my father, they want more—the story of our unhappiness, our falling out.”

“Out of kindness, surely?”

Gus guffawed. “That is a charitable way to look at it. There is nothing new in our story, however; it's the same as any other in which the father and the son can't see eye to eye on how the son will live his life. I am quite happy for now being treated as a labourer. It gives me a kind of pleasure to pull my forelock the way the toffs expect, them not knowing where I come from, that I was educated at a good school, know Latin, and all that. I decided it wasn't important to me so I don't want other people bringing it up.”

He reached into his rucksack and took out a small silver flask. “If you don't mind drinking from the flask, I think you should have a drink. You look pale. The heat, of course, and the shock of what you've learned of Mary's child . . .”

Flora tilted the flask and drank a mouthful, gasping as the liquid burned its way down her throat. Almost immediately she felt its effect, a warmth in her limbs, the anxiety she had over Grace dissolving. She examined the flask, running her finger over the elegant monogram on its dull silver surface.

“My brother has never allowed me to drink whisky. I've just broken his rule,” she told Gus, handing him back the flask.

He laughed, and took a long swallow himself. “This is a fine malt from Islay, Miss Oakden. I suspect it's the one thing upon which my father and I might agree. Anyway, you seem of an age to be making your own rules. And breaking the ones that don't fit.”

In the quiet that followed their shared drink of whisky, Flora could hear only the river and the far-off murmur of children's voices. She began to forget why she was there, on the banks of the Deadman River, a few thin horses grazing among the cottonwood trees, the bark fraying away like rags. And then the wail from Mary's cabin, so piercing that both Flora and Gus immediately ran in its direction.

The door of the cabin was open and the wailing, not human, was coming from inside. It was Mary, but not Mary, it was a lamentation that could have come from an animal in pain. Flora stood in the doorway for a moment and then crossed the room to where Mary sat by Grace's basket. The flush was gone from the baby's face and when Flora reached down to touch her, the body felt cooler now. And she looked like she was no longer breathing. The baby's mother was wailing, then stopping to touch the small face, wailing again as the child remained as still as a stone. Another woman pushed by Flora and took up the child, putting her face very near to feel breath or a heart beating in the tiny chest, then gently replaced Grace in the basket. She kneeled beside Mary and joined her in her lamentation. A tall man, a priest, ducked as he entered the low threshold, crossing himself as he moved to mother and child.

Flora went back outside. Two women approached from another cabin and began to chant,
Nesika papa
and
kloshe kopa
, a language Flora had not heard Indian people speaking before. Gus took her arm and said quietly, “They are speaking Chinook. That's the Lord's Prayer in Chinook.”

“Chinook?” Flora asked. “But aren't they Shuswap Indians here?”

“It's a way they talk between different tribes and among traders and such. Not a language exactly—it uses words from a number of languages. English, French, various tribal ones. There was a lot of it around Victoria when I was a boy. Here, too, because the Oblate missionary Father LeJeune in Kamloops had a newspaper that used it. But you don't often hear it anymore. Those women were probably students of LeJeune, maybe at the school in Kamloops.”

“I don't think we belong here right now, Gus,” said Flora softly, and the two of them walked over to the river to wait for whatever might be required of them.

•  •  •

Back under the shade of the cottonwoods, Flora began to weep. She was remembering the warmth of Grace's naked body as she carried her around the garden, the child's voice like rustling leaves. She remembered the sight of Grace drinking from her mother's breast and wept harder for Mary who had given birth to the infant, cared for her and her siblings, and who had carried her, damp with fever, on her horse to Flora's veranda so that she would not lose a precious day's pay. She remembered drawing the bath for Grace, small tufts of cattail clinging to her buttocks until Flora brushed at them and they drifted away in the dry air. Is that what was left of Grace now, seeds on the wind? A faint odour of urine in a soft towel?

One by one, the people of the village arrived at Mary and Agrippa's cabin. The wailing continued, the prayers in Chinook, the priest coming out of the cabin and kneeling with the others. It was no time for strangers or employers to witness a family's sorrow. After ensuring that there was nothing they could do, Flora and Gus mounted their horses and quietly rode away towards Walhachin, following the river again for the cool air occasionally drifting up from its surface. Flora wept, taking a hanky from her sleeve to wipe her eyes. To lose a child! And it was not the first taken from them, the earlier child buried within its spirit house in the cemetery bowing both to the Christian god and to the God who dwelt within the red hills, the wash of the river over sandbars, the scent of sun-struck sage.

FOUR

1962

It was best to ride a bike alone on the narrow lanes through the cemetery. Trees leaned over some of the paths to make dark tunnels and you could smell their branches, a bitter smell, like cough syrup. When the other kids came on their bikes, there was always lots of shrieking and talk of ghosts—“Look! There's one now! It's reaching for you. Aiiiii!”

Certain areas were to be avoided because of the density of growth around the stone houses that Tessa knew were called mausoleums. There were other houses, lower, which her father told her were sarcophagi; the bodies were placed within them rather than being lowered into the ground in coffins. When she was with the other kids, Tessa would shriek too and pretend to have seen a white form hanging from a tree or to have heard creepy voices calling from under the new graves.

Alone, however, she was not afraid. Of course there were ghosts! It was a cemetery after all. They were not white shapes like children wearing a sheet over their heads. That was for Halloween. But she could tell when one was around. It was . . . well, it was like being in the same room with someone else. You knew they were there even if you didn't talk to them. Sometimes she did hear talking, though, and weeping, and crying (though it might have been the wind off Ross Bay in the evergreens). Sometimes the voices drifted over the graves like a flock of small quiet birds, a murmuring, a soft rustling. But there were no birds when she heard that sound.

And she heard the hidden water under the ground. Could water be a ghost or was it only people who lingered? She imagined the water yearning for its time above the ground, when it tumbled in sunlight down to the ocean, alive with insects and tiny fish.

Tessa liked to sit on certain graves and talk to the dead children with their angel stones, their broken rosebuds (the Sehl children), and baby Campbell with his chair and booties. This was the saddest thing of all, really—to think of babies buried without ever having had a chance to do what she, Tessa, could do: ride bikes, read Nancy Drew mystery stories, toast marshmallows over a campfire while stars peppered the heavens. Sometimes she would slip between the iron bars of one of the mausoleums and sit on the stone bench inside where there might also be a little heap of scales from pine cones, the seeds long removed by squirrels. Once, she saw a rat carrying something into a hole in one corner of the inner chamber; when she poked a stick into the hole, she heard a long hiss within.

There was a tree with forty-seven trunks. It took a long time to count them, mixing her up until Tessa decided to take a spool of red thread from her mother's sewing basket and tie a piece of thread to each trunk as she counted. On a walk with her father, she asked him what kind of tree it was—he worked at the Experimental Farm out on Saanich Peninsula—and he told her it was an Atlas cedar, from the mountains of Morocco. When they returned home, they got out an atlas and he showed her where Morocco was.

“Is it the same atlas?” Tessa asked, pointing to the book. “Was the book named for the mountains or what?”

Her father thought about that for a minute or two. “I know that the name we use for this kind of book, an atlas, comes from the Greek god, Atlas, who held up the universe. Early geographers used that image as the frontispieces for collections of maps that eventually became known as atlases. I remember seeing one by a guy called Mercator, for instance—the big maps that you have in your classroom are based on his idea of how to represent the surfaces of landforms. And I bet those mountains in Morocco are named for Atlas too. Maybe they're thought to be similar to the image of him holding up the world.”

As usual, her father knew everything and told too much. But this time it was interesting. So Morocco was far away, farther than Vancouver, where Tessa had been with her family, farther than New Brunswick, where her grandparents lived. Some of the Atlas cedars were blue, her father told her, and she kept her eyes open for a vivid blue tree.

Sometimes Tessa saw Miss Oakden walking through the cem-etery, carrying a basket of flowers. She lingered in the area where the graves were that contained men who'd fought in World War One. Her father told her these were mostly men who'd fought and come home and then died because they'd been hurt too badly to get better. Most of the others who'd fought and died were buried in France and had poppies growing over their graves. This was why everyone wore the felt poppies on Remembrance Day, the ones with the pins that boys used to stab an unsuspecting girl in the arm before the teacher confiscated the poppies and gave lectures on respect. There was a tall cross in the corner near the graves, called the Cross of Sacrifice, to honour all the men who'd fought. But that wasn't the place Miss Oakden visited and put her flowers. After Miss Oakden had gone, Tessa went to see just what she had been visiting. It was by a stone, flat on the ground, with a few lines in another language, one she recognized from her father's plant books. Latin, it was called. There was a name: Augustus Alexander; she
could
read that. Tessa traced the lettering with her finger. Then the dates. She made the dates into a bit of arithmetic and realized that whoever this person was who'd been buried under the stone, he'd been dead a long time, forty-six years. Once, when Tessa said a hello to Miss Oakden as the woman sat by the stone and arranged a little cluster of flowers, Miss Oakden turned and Tessa could see she was crying. She hadn't wanted to talk. So now when the girl saw the woman walking in the cemetery, she left her alone.

There were graves that called out to Tessa as she passed them, pushing her blue bike along in front of her. The one that was stone but that looked like a stump, with a scroll hanging from a branch. Even the rope by which the scroll, also stone, hung from was carved from stone. It was the grave of someone called Hay. She liked that one because often the squirrels sat on it and she wondered whether they knew it was not a real tree, if that mattered to them. And there was the one topped by a globe with an anchor carved into it. These were all clues, she knew, to the people buried underneath, just as the mausoleums meant that rich people were buried there. And the graves that were decorated frequently with fresh flowers and that had their small plots swept regularly meant that the dead person had not been forgotten by the living. Or at least had living relations or friends who wanted to visit and pay respect. Some of these were the graves of children. No child Tessa knew had died, although there was a boy in her class at Sir James Douglas Elementary School who had leukemia and might die if the treatment that was making him fat didn't work. No matter that she didn't really like him. When he was well, he was a bully; she hadn't noticed that leukemia made him any nicer. But still, there was the matter of dying. When she asked her mother what might make so many children die, her mother asked if she remembered lining up at the church hall across the school for that shot in her arm, followed by a sugar cube soaked in something pink and sweet. She did, of course. She had to do this before she was allowed in grade one. The needle had hurt and she'd cried out and the nurse told her to stop being a baby but to think instead of all the children in the world who didn't have this chance.

“The diseases you won't get because of that shot and the sugar cube,” her mother explained, “are all things that many children died from before those vaccines were discovered. A child might come home from school with a cold that could turn into something far more serious and by morning he or she might be dead. This happened to your grandmother's sister, for instance. She was only four years old and died of whooping cough.”

Later, when she was attending school, she asked, “Why didn't Donald get a shot against leukemia then?”

But leukemia was something there wasn't a vaccine for, which was why Donald had it and was now losing his hair. You could not catch it from someone else. It grew inside your body like a plant, carried in the cells of your blood, the marrow of your bones. This was not very reassuring to Tessa, who spent most of a week imagining that every little twinge, every small bruise, might be leukemia growing in her body.