The Wife Tree Read online

  October 19

  “Do you remember the apple trees in the yard?” I asked William today, though he hasn’t opened his eyes since the stroke. He remains very still beneath his white sheet, which is like a wintry landscape full of gentle hills and valleys as though already he’s entered another season.

  Did he remember, I asked, how we used to call them the Man and Wife Trees because they stood so close together, so united and loyal and enduring, their branches intertwined?

  At one time the Wife Tree lifted her arms gently, modestly into the sky, but now her branches are clipped and topped and pruned and painfully twisted and lately William’s been telling me that, because she can no longer bear fruit, she must be cut down. But I now wonder if, after all these years of hacking at her limbs, he simply can’t rest until he sees her fall to the earth.

  I noticed today that the Man Tree has shed all his coloured leaves. His skeleton stands gaunt and dark and vulnerable against the sky. But the Wife Tree seems to be giving the lie to the season and is still green as green and full and lush and refusing to die.

  Dear girls,

  …The trees are disrobing themselves and soon will stand naked and beautiful, as I was never allowed to be when I was a child, but, like a nun, took my bath under a sheet, as instructed by the priests. And now I think: If I wasn’t permitted to love my own flesh when it was young and firm, what can I feel for it but shame, now that it’s old and withered and dry?…

  October 20

  Two weeks have passed since William fell and I haven’t seen Dr. Pilgrim again. He does come in, the nurses tell me, but he’s never around when I’m visiting and I’m afraid that if he knows why William hasn’t yet awakened, he’s reluctant to tell me. After many vain attempts at questioning the nurses, I’ve begun to understand that truth is a very foolish thing to ask for in a hospital. Truth can’t be measured out in milligrams or recorded on a graph in a patient’s chart. And even with all their fancy machines, the nurses can’t seem to tell me anything more than I’m able to see with my one weak eye.

  Released from the day shift at his factory, Morris arrived in intensive care today at four o’clock.

  “Medical intervention isn’t the answer here, anyway, Mom,” he said, “no matter what Merilee or the professionals say. God will decide what happens to Dad, not the doctors.”

  “There’s more to your father than his soul, Morris.”

  “I’m making it my mission to convert Dad to our church. I’ve got my whole community praying for him right now.”

  The thought of all those Glory be to God!s and Hallelujah, Brothers! and Praise the Lord!s shooting William’s way alarmed me.

  Morris stood over his father’s bed with his bible open, his chest puffed out, as though he were more powerful than the doctors themselves. He carries the Good Book everywhere, even to work, where twice it’s cost him his job.

  “You can’t feed those boys of yours on the New Testament,” William told Morris the first time he got fired for preaching at the factory. “The Gospel according to St. John won’t put meat on their bones.”

  “I’ll find another job, Dad. I’m not worried. God will provide.”

  Until he was a man of thirty carting the Testaments around, Morris was never able to stand up to his father. The Scriptures have become his voice, which is a pity, I think, because they contain the wisdom only of men and none of women. For a slow reader like Morris, the Bible is a very thick book.

  “Why was that boy nearly illiterate until he tripped over the Scriptures?” his father has often asked me.

  “I don’t know, William.”

  “I don’t care if you want to waste your time reading the Bible,” he’s told Morris, “so long as you think and question as you go along.” But Morris, like me, is not a thinker, and so he’s swallowed the Good Book whole, chapter and verse.

  “Come to just one service, Dad,” Morris used to beg William. “That’s all I ask. Just come and see what our church is like.”

  “I’ve converted once already. I don’t need to do it again. There’s little difference from one religion to the next, anyway. You get the same hogwash everywhere.”

  “But that’s where you’re wrong, Dad. Our God is a better God than your God.”

  “I didn’t know they were running a competition.”

  Morris was once a small, skinny boy and it still surprises me to see him standing six feet tall, with thick shoulders and broad hands and a big square jaw. When he was young, I tried to fortify him with carbohydrates, at every meal placing a stack of white bread at his elbow. Dutifully, he buttered the slices one by one on the flat of his hand and ate them. Despite this, I was never successful in putting flesh on his bones. But he’s filled out in recent years and I’m not sure if it’s Olive’s cooking that’s fattened him up or the way he now feeds so greedily on Jesus, who called himself the Bread of Life.

  I have six daughters. I never wanted a boy. When I was growing up on the farm, there were enough men in the house to last me a lifetime. William, on the other hand, like a farmer looking for cheap labour, dreamed of a houseful of sons. He got only Morris. The baby I miscarried at six months and the other one that died of pneumonia after three days were both male and now I wonder if, all his life, we haven’t somehow made Morris carry the burden of those two dead boys.

  “I wish your sisters were here,” I said to Morris at the hospital, though in truth I fear my girls. They’ve grown into clever, angry, intrepid women who at this moment are producing political plays in Brazil, climbing mountains in Nepal, searching for rare plants in Indonesia, teaching English to German children.

  “Why do you need the girls?” asked Morris bitterly. “I’ve been here every second day since Dad’s stroke. Aren’t I good enough for you?”

  I blinked at him and pressed my lips together. Sighing tiredly, he closed his bible, gave my shoulder a firm squeeze. It wasn’t so much the hand of a son as that of a preacher.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “It’s all right, Morris.”

  He pulled on his coat. “I’ve got to go. I’ll be late for supper,” he said, shuffling on his feet, awkward at this moment of farewell. Why could I not rise to embrace him, this son of mine who’d driven hell-bent to be at my side after William’s stroke? As a teenager, Morris sometimes hugged me so hard he broke my ribs, which, when I was fifty, were already brittle with osteoporosis. I could feel them snapping like dry twigs, hear them popping like bottle caps. After that, the agony of a deep breath, of turning over in my sleep. Sitting now beside William’s bed, I was certain that if anyone touched me, I’d shatter into a million pieces. How, I wondered, have I become this old and crumbling woman?

  “I’ll try to come back tomorrow.”

  “You don’t have to, Morris.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “Drive carefully. Don’t fall asleep on the road.”

  “Not to worry, Mom. God is my pilot.”

  I’ve seen the stickers all over the bumpers of his car: GOD IS MY PILOT. I BELIEVE IN ANGELS. REAL MEN LOVE JESUS. MY BOSS IS A JEWISH CARPENTER. SMILE: JESUS LOVES YOU.

  Dear girls,

  …It’s a new joy to wake up these mornings, feeling not only refreshed but somehow whole and at peace with myself. And without your father shouting up the stairs, Morgan, I want my eggs! I’m able to lie in bed and watch the sun creep across the floorboards to filter through the jungle ferns on the closet curtains. As the room warms and brightens, the hours, though they lie shapeless before me, seem full of possibility. Each day is now mine to create in all its fullness.

  This morning I descended the stairs and found the house full of October light. Leaves, luminous as shards of stained glass, flew past the windows. Your father’s easy chair, catching as always the best of the day’s sunlight, invited me to sit down. And though outside the gardens are fading, the buds hardening off for winter and the tree roots growing cold in the drying earth, I felt something blossom
ing within me, unfolding like the petals of a flower. Trembling with caution, surprise, bewilderment, I walked from room to room, floating with an unfamiliar lightness of spirit…

  October 21

  Dear girls,

  …Do you remember the Wife Tree? How in the autumn her bright branches shone their extraordinary light into all the rooms of our house?…

  Dusk has fallen by the time I arrive home these days. I go about the house turning on lights and closing curtains. Then I make my habitual trip to the cellar.

  “Give us this day our daily potato. That’s how the Lord’s Prayer should read,” William, who’s eaten a potato every day of his life, used to say. “The potato is the purest of foods. Straight from the earth. Whole populations have survived, Morgan, on the potato. Out west we knew what a potato was. A good potato should be as dry as the dust bowl. But here in Ontario, they like to eat them wet. Here, they wouldn’t know a good potato if you threw it at them.”

  In the cellar tonight, I bent over and plunged my hand into a burlap sack, groping among the russets. My hand grew slippery with fine, dry earth, my nostrils flaring with the sweet, pungent smell of soil and sacking. Half an hour later, the potato baking in the oven, the heat from the glass door warming my backside, I picked up a tulip bulb from the kitchen table.

  “Don’t touch those,” I remembered William barking the day of the stroke. I stood beside him that afternoon, watching him shift groups of flower bulbs around on the table, as though he were deploying model armies. Tulips. Narcissi. Daffodils. Hyacinths. Allium. Some large as a baby’s fist, others tiny as pearl onions.

  “They’re delicate,” he warned me. “You’ll knock the skins off ’em.”

  And indeed, their brittle, papery, toast-coloured skins were shedding everywhere, leaving the swelling curves of the tubers naked and gleaming. How could he tell me they were fragile, I wondered, when he was about to bury them in the dry, acid, ruthless ground and those vulnerable skins would be letting go of the flesh even before he pressed the earth down on them?

  I watched him make a drawing on a piece of paper, trying to map out his planting for the best effect, considering the length of the stems, the colour, size and shape of the blossoms, the moment of blooming — early, mid- or late spring. The bulbs stood about in fleshy clusters, dense and meaty as organs, as colonies of miniature inverted hearts.

  Later, looking over his shoulder at five o’clock, I saw that he’d made no progress with his diagram, but was tracing the same lines over and over, the velvety lead now so heavy that it smeared like prairie crude across the heel of his hand. I grew impatient.

  “When are you going to stop fussing with them? Why don’t you just put them in the earth? It can’t be that complicated. We’ve been living with them for a week.”

  “Three days,” he corrected me. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Morgan. I can’t seem to come up with a plan. I can’t form a decision.”

  “Well, I wish you’d get on with it. We’ll be eating supper soon. Where are we going to put down our plates? I’m sick to death of the sight of these bulbs. I’d sooner sweep them into the trash than look at them another day.”

  “That goes to show what your values are. That tells me what you’re worth. You’ve never made a decent garden. You know nothing about creativity and the time it takes.”

  “I’ve been creative in my life,” I said, injured. “I gave you seven children, didn’t I? And another two that died? Carried all but one of them to full term? I call that time.”

  Dear girls,

  …Lately I’ve begun to think that Morris has brainwashed me, because I find myself wondering if he may be right. Perhaps despite all their contraptions and charts and blood thinners and fancy tests, their dopplers and ECHOs, the doctors can’t put a finger on the centre of your father’s malady. Like stonemasons, carpenters, plasterers repairing cracked walls and foundations, when it’s the soul of the house that’s crying out for help…

  October 22

  I’ve begun to draw a map of Simplicity in my head, each day digressing a little further from my original route, getting to know the streets because, before this, it was always William who knew everything. With my one good eye, I’m able to read the street signs and am committing them to memory. And I can’t help feeling it was a different Morgan who arrived at the hospital in the screaming ambulance only two weeks ago, shaking with the thought that in no time I’d get lost wandering its vast and complex corridors.

  “You may go up now to the intensive care unit,” the Emergency nurses told me the night of the stroke. “It’s on the sixth floor. Take the elevator at the end of the hall and then just follow the signs,” and I could imagine the children laughing at that and saying, “You must be joking! Mother could never follow signs !” Because it is true that I once was deposited by car before our very own house, with William in full view through the front window sitting in his La-Z-Boy, the newspaper hiding his face, and I turned in confusion and walked away. Running after me, the children laughed, pointed me homeward. “Oh, Mother!” they cried. “You’ve got no sense of direction!”

  With my heart pounding, I set off the night of the stroke on a lengthy journey through many heavy swinging doors, taking me into a part of the hospital where the quantity of life seemed to diminish. Gradually the halls became emptier and more silent until I entered a round windowless theatre with a nurses’ station on a raised platform in the centre. Fanned out below it were a dozen transparent cells, where patients lay like insects under glass, so far removed from sunlight and the sound of the wind that I was afraid they’d forget these forces were calling them and never wake up again. I couldn’t help feeling that this unit was like a church, with the nurses and their technology on a high altar and the patients’ rooms like radiating chapels below. We, the supplicating visitors, passed like pilgrims in an ambulatory and entered the chapels, where we prayed silently over the sick, who lay immobile as stone effigies sleeping atop their marble caskets.

  In one of these cells I found William with his eyes closed and looking very pasty, like a figure in unfired clay. I sat on a chair and watched the steady rise and fall of his chest, thickened in his youth from pitching hay and swinging a sledgehammer and still powerful though he’s a man of seventy-three. I saw his heart tracing an alpine journey across a television monitor. From a suspended sac, a life-sustaining fluid dripped slowly into him. I imagined it carried like clear spring water through all the tributaries of his body until he floated in miraculous liquids, as on a pure mountain lake. In the dark windows, I saw my form and William’s reflected like two old actors on a bright stage, waiting for their forgotten lines to be whispered to them.

  Around three a.m. a nurse came along. She strapped a blood-pressure band around William’s lifeless arm.

  “Is he improving at all?” I asked. “Is he getting better? Is he going to die?”

  “Let’s not upset ourselves with questions like that, Mrs. Hazzard,” she answered so quietly that I was afraid William, with his eyes closed, might think he was indeed in church and refuse to wake up because he’s so angry with the pope, fat man in a white beany, smiling and getting fatter while the world starves. The nurse’s calmness alarmed me. Panic rose in my chest and I had the urge to shout, to run from room to room smashing with my purse at all the spotless glass.

  “Time,” said the nurse kindly. “Time is a great healer, for both patient and family. You must let time work for you as well, Mrs. Hazzard.”

  After the nurse disappeared, the thought of all the shapeless time ahead of us made me very tired. I decided to lie down for a moment beside William, feeling for the first time in decades that it was quite safe to do so, just as I’d believed on our wedding night that it was safe, because of course William was young then and confused and had not yet realized that he should be angry about life. His air force uniform hung neatly on a chair beside the bed, his train ticket to Halifax floating in the breast pocket. He’d meet up with his
buddies at the station the next morning, travel to Nova Scotia, head off to war. After he’d entered me and gasped with pleasure and finally grown limp with satisfaction, he said, a touch of scorn in his voice, “You weren’t expecting that, were you, Morgan? You didn’t know what sex was all about. And you a nurse.”

  “Oh, you mustn’t do that, Mrs. Hazzard,” said a second nurse, alarmed when, arriving around six a.m. to replenish the intravenous, she discovered me prone beside William. “You’ll disturb the tubes and wires. We don’t want to unplug your husband, do we?”

  Dear girls,

  … I dare say your father feels even lonelier than I because there has been no sign in his room of visitors, other than Morris and me. Though he’s a public sort of person, it makes me wonder if he’s been missed at all on the mall benches of the nation. But one day when I walked into his little glass chamber, I found a bouquet of red roses on his bedside table. It was a tremendous shock to see them there, contrasting in their depth of colour with the wintriness of the room. They gave me a start because at first, with my dim eyes, I thought they were a splash of blood against the white wall. Finally, I felt a pang of shame that I hadn’t thought of bringing flowers myself, considering your father’s love of them. He might have been revived by their perfume. I could find no card among the roses, so when a nurse appeared I asked, Where did the flowers come from?

  A woman brought them in and arranged them herself, said the nurse, and sat down for a while with your husband.

  Do you have any idea who it was? I asked.

  No, I’m sorry. She didn’t leave her name…

  Dear girls,

  …Did you ever reflect on the fact that you’ve given me no grandchildren, not a one? As far as I can tell, you’ve joined the ranks of those modern wombless women throwing away their bras and sexlessly baring their chests to the public, like the brazen Amazon women your father once told me about, who burned off their right breasts so that they might more efficiently draw the bow. And for all I know, you’ve spurned men altogether and are lying at this very moment in the arms of other women, which, I’ve heard it said, may be the purest kind of love on earth…