The Stone Angel (10 page)

His banner over me was only his own skin, and now I no longer know why it should have shamed me. People thought of things differently in those days. Perhaps some people didn’t. I wouldn’t know. I never spoke of it to anyone.

It was not so very long after we wed, when first I felt my blood and vitals rise to meet his. He never knew. I never let him know. I never spoke aloud, and I made certain that the trembling was all inner. He had an innocence about him, I guess, or he’d have known. How could he not have known? Didn’t I betray myself in rising sap, like a heedless and compelled maple after a winter? But no. He never expected any such a thing, and so he never perceived it. I prided myself upon keeping my pride intact, like some maidenhead.

Now there is no one to speak to. It is late, late in the night. Carefully, I put out the cigarette. Doris has the room littered with ash trays. I rise, turn off the light, grope for my sheets.

My bed is cold as winter, and now it seems to me that I am lying as the children used to do, on fields of snow, and they would spread their arms and sweep them down to their sides, and when they rose, there would be the outline of an angel with spread wings. The icy whiteness covers me, drifts over me, and I could drift to sleep in it, like someone caught in a blizzard, and freeze.

THE WALLS
in Doctor Corby’s waiting-room certainly are bare. A pallid gray, they are, and he only has two pictures. They are large, but still and all, two isn’t very many. One is a lake and thin poplar trees, the blues and greens merging and blending so the sky and water and leaves all appear to be parts of one another. It reminds me of the spring around home, everything wearing a washed and water-color look, and the first leaves opening sometimes before the ice was quite gone from the river.

I stand up and look closer. Whoever painted that picture knew what he was about. The other’s one of those weird ones, the kind Tina professes to like, all red and black triangles and blobs that make no sort of sense.

The Shipley place didn’t have a single solitary picture when I went there. I could never get hold of many, but over the years I managed to put up a few, for the children’s sake, especially John, who was so impressionable. I thought it was a bad thing to grow up in a house with never a framed picture to tame the walls. I recall a steel engraving, entitled
The Death of General Wolfe
. Another was a colored print of a Holman Hunt I’d brought from the East. I did admire so much the knight and lady’s swooning adoration, until one day I saw the coyness of
the pair, playing at passion, and in a fury I dropped the picture, gilt frame and all, into the slough, feeling it had betrayed me. I have kept Rosa Bonheur’s
The Horse Fair
, for John was fond of it as a child, and still in my room the great-flanked horses strut eternally. Bram never cared for that picture.

“You never gave a damn for living horses, Hagar,” he said once. “But when you seen them put onto paper where they couldn’t drop manure, then it’s dandy, eh? Well, keep your bloody paper horses. I’d as soon have nothing on my walls.”

I have to laugh now, although I was livid then. He was quite right that I never cared for horses. I was frightened of them, so high and heavy they seemed, so muscular, so much their own masters—I never felt I could handle them. I didn’t let Bram see I was afraid, preferring to let him think I merely objected to them because they were smelly. Bram was crazy about horses. A few years after we married, all the farms around Manawaka had bumper wheat crops, even ours, the Red Fife growing so well in the Wachakwa valley. Bram planned to put every cent into horses, intending to switch over into raising them, and do less farming.

“You’re off your head,” I told him. “Now’s the time to cash in on wheat. Any fool could see that.”

“Let somebody else cash in,” Bram said easily. “I got enough to buy what I want. I never had no interest to speak of in work horses. It’s saddle horses I got in mind. I seen that gray stallion of Henry Pearl’s the other day, and I asked Henry about it—he’s not keen to sell, but I think he might. That’s the one I’m going after first.”

“I thought you told me once your place would be worth looking at someday.”

“So it will,” he said. “There’s more than one way. What do you know of it, anyway?”

“I know sufficient to know exactly what it would be like. You’d not want to part with a single one of them, once you had them, and here we’d be with the pastures chock-full of horses and not a cent to bless ourselves with. Well, it’s your money. I can’t stop you.”

In those days I still hoped he’d do well, not for its own sake, for I never cared about making a show with furniture and bric-à-brac, the way Lottie did, but only so that people in Manawaka, whether they liked him or not, would at least be forced to respect him.

“I’d make a living,” he said sullenly, “and live as I wanted.”

I was wild at that. “How do you want to live, for pity’s sake? Like this, all your life? An un painted house with not a blessed thing except linoleum on the floor of the front room?”

I don’t know why I chose that to remark on. He always sat in the kitchen, anyway, and I never had a soul in, except sometimes Aunt Dolly, so the front room might just as well not have been there.

“All right, all right,” he said furiously. “You can buy your goddamn carpets with the money. There—does that suit you?”

“I wouldn’t touch a nickel of it,” I retorted, stung by his anger and his interpretation, for it was not really the carpets that concerned me at all. “Go ahead and buy your horses. Buy up every horse in the province, for all I care.”

“I won’t buy a Christly thing,” he said. “Bugger the money.”

“You’ve no call to talk like that.”

“I’ll talk any way I feel like. If you don’t care for it, you can—”

Wrangle, wrangle. It ended that night with Bram lying heavy and hard on top of me, and stroking my forehead with his hand while his manhood moved in me, and saying in the low voice he used only at such times, “Hagar, please—” I wanted to say “There, there, it’s all right,” but I did not say that. My mouth said, “What is it?” But he did not answer.

He bought that gray stallion from Henry Pearl, after all, and a few mares, but the venture never came to much. We had colts around the place in spring, but when it came to selling them, Bram never got a good price. He wasn’t much of a man for bargaining. It didn’t seem to worry him, though. When I brought up the subject, he’d only shrug and say what was the use of bothering unless you were going to raise horses seriously, and he’d rather see the few he sold going to men he knew would look after them well. This rankled with me, for clearly he meant it as a reproach, but it seemed to me just an excuse for the fact that he never did have any head for business.

He always used to ride that stallion, never any of the others. He called it Soldier, such an unimaginative name. He groomed it so carefully, you’d have thought it was a prize race horse.

The time I’m thinking of, I was two months pregnant with Marvin, and feeling constantly ill, and it was winter and cheerless, and I was trying on the particular evening to get the ironing finished up even though I was dog-tired, so when Bram came in and said that Soldier wasn’t in the barn, I can’t honestly say I took much notice. He went on and on, all about how he shouldn’t have left the barn door open, but he thought he’d be away only
a minute and he thought the black mare was securely tied, for she had a wandering streak and he always took care with her, but when he came back she’d somehow got out. She must have been witless, that mare, to want to go anywhere in forty-below weather, but she had, and the stallion must have gone after her. Soldier was rarely tethered, and never put in a latched stall, for Bram had once seen horses burn in a barn fire, and although God knows he never seemed to be a worrying man, that was one thought that always troubled him. He’d hurried with the milking as much as he could, and when he was nearly through, he’d heard hooves on the crusted snow and thought Soldier had brought the mare back. But the mare had returned by herself and Soldier was nowhere in sight.

“Well, you can’t go after him in this weather,” I said. “It’s starting to snow again, and the wind’s rising. Besides, it’s almost dark.”

But Bram took down the storm lantern, and lit it, and went out. He was away so long I was frantic with worry, both for him and for myself, wondering what I’d do if I were left alone here. The snowfall thickened, the flakes like gobbets of soap froth, blown crazily by the wind, and piling in thin drifts halfway up the windowpanes. It didn’t matter how well a person knew his way—he could easily mistake it, with everything white and unrecognizable, and the darkening air so filled with the falling snow that you could hardly see your hand before your face. I used to like snowstorms in town, when I was a girl, the feeling of being under siege but safe within a stronghold. Out in the country it was a different matter, with so few light as landmarks, and the snow lying in ribbed dunes for miles that seemed endless. Here I felt cut
off from any help, severed from all communication, for there were times when we couldn’t have got out to the highway and into town to save our immortal souls, whatever the need.

The wind grew worse until it was so loud that all the reassuring domestic sounds of clocks and hissing green poplar in the stove were lost entirely, and I could hear only the growl and shriek of air outside the house, and the jarring of the frames in our storm windows. I’d almost given Bram up, when he came back, opening the door suddenly and letting in a gust of night and snow-filled wind. His face was frozen, and both hands. He took his coat and boots off and sat down, rubbing his hands gingerly to work the frostbite out.

“Did you find him?” I asked.

“No,” he replied brusquely.

Seeing Bram’s hunched shoulders, and the look on his face, all at once I walked over to him without pausing to ponder whether I should or not, or what to say.

“Never mind. Maybe hell come back by himself, as the mare did.”

“He won’t,” Bram said. “It’s blowing up for an all-night blizzard. If I’d gone any further, I’d never have found my way back.”

He put his palms to his eyes and sat without moving.

“I guess you think I’m daft, eh?” he said finally.

“No, I don’t think that,” I said. Then, awkwardly, “I’m sorry about it, Bram. I know you were fond of him.”

Bram looked up at me with such a look of surprise that it pains me still, in recalling.

“That’s just it,” he said.

When we went to bed that night, he started to turn to me, and I felt so gently inclined that I think I might
have opened to him openly. But he changed his mind. He patted me lightly on the shoulder.

“You go to sleep now,” he said.

He thought, of course, it was the greatest favor he could do me.

Bram found Soldier in spring, when the snow melted. The horse had caught a leg in a barbed wire fence, and couldn’t have lived long that night, before the cold claimed him. Bram buried him in the pasture, and I’m certain he put a boulder on the place, like a gravestone. But later that summer, after the grass and weeds had grown back, when I mentioned the rock curiously and asked how it got there, Bram only looked at me narrowly and said it had been there always. After that night in winter, we had gone on much the same as before—that was the thing. Nothing is ever changed at a single stroke, I know that full well, although a person sometimes wishes it could be otherwise.

    “Come and sit down, Mother.” It’s Doris’s voice, hissing at me, and I see now that I am in the doctor’s waiting-room, standing here gawking at a picture of a river in spring. Have I been mumbling aloud? I can’t for the life of me say. The room is full of curious eyes. Nervously, I plunge back to the chair.

“I only wanted to have a look. Just two pictures he’s got—fancy that. You’d think a man in his position could afford to do a little better, wouldn’t you?”

“Sh—sh—” Doris looks embarrassed, and I wonder if my voice has been louder than I realized. “This is
the way he wants it, Mother. Both those pictures cost plenty, you can bank on that. People don’t hang up dozens any more.”

She thinks she knows everything there is to know, that woman.

“Did I say dozens? Did I? I only said two wasn’t many, that’s all.”

“Okay, okay,” she whispers. “People are listening, Mother.”

People are always listening. I think it would be best if one paid no heed But I can’t blame Doris. I’ve said the very same thing to Bram.
Hush. Hush. Don’t you know everyone can hear?

The Reverend Dougall MacCulloch passed away quite suddenly with a heart attack, and the Manawaka Presbyterian Church had to get a new minister. The young man’s first sermon was long and involved, mainly directed at proving scripturally the ephemeral nature of earthly joys and the abiding nature of the heavenly variety, to be guaranteed by toil, prudence, fortitude, and temperance. Bram, beside me, restless and sweating, whispered in a gruff voice that must have carried at least as far as three pews ahead and three behind: