suit for the funeral, and he didn’t bow his head for the prayers. But he was the only grownup that I let off the hook. He was the only one I didn’t see giving consent. He couldn’t prevent anything, but he wasn’t implicated in anything, either — not like the others, saying the Lord’s Prayer in their unnaturally weighted voices, oozing religion and dishonor.
AT GLENDIVE, not far from the North Dakota border, we had a choice — either to continue on the interstate or head northeast, toward Williston, taking Route 16, then some secondary roads that would get us back to Highway 2.
We agreed that the interstate would be faster, and that it was important for us not to spend too much time — that is, money — on the road. Nevertheless we decided to cut back to Highway 2.
“I just like the idea of it better,” I said.
Andrew said, “That’s because it’s what we planned to do in the beginning.”
“We missed seeing Kalispell and Havre. And Wolf Point. I like the name.”
“We’ll see them on the way back.”
Andrew’s saying “on the way back” was a surprising pleasure to me. Of course, I had believed that we would be coming back, with our car and our lives and our family intact, having covered all that distance, having dealt somehow with those loyalties and problems, held ourselves up for inspection in such a foolhardy way. But it was a relief to hear him say it.
“What I can’t get over,” said Andrew, “is how you got the signal. It’s got to be some kind of extra sense that mothers have.”
Partly I wanted to believe that, to bask in my extra sense. Partly I wanted to warn him — to warn everybody — never to count on it.
“What I can’t understand,” I said, “is how you got over the fence.”
“Neither can I.”
So we went on, with the two in the back seat trusting us, because of no choice, and we ourselves trusting to be forgiven, in time, for everything that had first to be seen and condemned by those children: whatever was flippant, arbitrary, careless, callous — all our natural, and particular, mistakes.
FRIEND OF MY YOUTH
I USED TO DREAM about my mother, and though the details in the dream varied, the surprise in it was always the same. The dream stopped, I suppose, because it was too transparent in its hopefulness, too easy in its forgiveness.
In the dream I would be the age I really was, living the life I was really living, and I would discover that my mother was still alive. (The fact is, she died when I was in my early twenties and she in her early fifties.) Sometimes I would find myself in our old kitchen, where my mother would be rolling out piecrust on the table, or washing the dishes in the battered cream-colored dishpan with the red rim. But other times I would run into her on the street, in places where I would never have expected to see her. She might be walking through a handsome hotel lobby, or lining up in an airport. She would be looking quite well — not exactly youthful, not entirely untouched by the paralyzing disease that held her in its grip for a decade or more before her death, but so much better than I remembered that I would be astonished. Oh, I just have this little tremor in my arm, she would say, and a little stiffness up this side of my face. It is a nuisance but I get around.
I recovered then what in waking life I had lost — my mother’s liveliness of face and voice before her throat muscles stiffened and a woeful, impersonal mask fastened itself over her features. How could I have forgotten this, I would think in the dream — the casual humor she had, not ironic but merry, the lightness and impatience and confidence? I would say that I was sorry I hadn’t been to see her in such a long time — meaning not that I felt guilty but that I was sorry I had kept a bugbear in my mind, instead of this reality — and the strangest, kindest thing of all to me was her matter-of-fact reply.
Oh, well, she said, better late than never. I was sure I’d see you someday.
WHEN MY MOTHER was a young woman with a soft, mischievous face and shiny, opaque silk stockings on her plump legs (I have seen a photograph of her, with her pupils), she went to teach at a one-room school, called Grieves School, in the Ottawa Valley. The school was on a corner of the farm that belonged to the Grieves family — a very good farm for that country Well-drained fields with none of the Precambrian rock shouldering through the soil, a little willow-edged river running alongside, a sugar bush, log barns, and a large, unornamented house whose wooden walls had never been painted but had been left to weather. And when wood weathers in the Ottawa Valley, my mother said, I do not know why this is, but it never turns gray, it turns black. There must be something in the air, she said. She often spoke of the Ottawa Valley, which was her home — she had grown up about twenty miles away from Grieves School — in a dogmatic, mystified way, emphasizing things about it that distinguished it from any other place on earth. Houses turn black, maple syrup has a taste no maple syrup produced elsewhere can equal, bears amble within sight of farmhouses. Of course I was disappointed when I finally got to see this place. It was not a valley at all, if by that you mean a cleft between hills; it was a mixture of flat fields and low rocks and heavy bush and little lakes — a scrambled, disarranged sort of country with no easy harmony about it, not yielding readily to any description.
The log barns and unpainted house, common enough on poor farms, were not in the Grieveses’ case a sign of poverty but of policy. They had the money but they did not spend it. That was what people told my mother. The Grieveses worked hard and they were far from ignorant, but they were very backward. They didn’t have a car or electricity or a telephone or a tractor. Some people thought this was because they were Cameronians — they were the only people in the school district who were of that religion — but in fact their church (which they themselves always called the Reformed Presbyterian) did not forbid engines or electricity or any inventions of that sort, just cardplaying, dancing, movies, and, on Sundays, any activity at all that was not religious or unavoidable.
My mother could not say who the Cameronians were or why they were called that. Some freak religion from Scotland, she said from the perch of her obedient and lighthearted Anglicanism. The teacher always boarded with the Grieveses, and my mother was a little daunted at the thought of going to live in that black board house with its paralytic Sundays and coal-oil lamps and primitive notions. But she was engaged by that time, she wanted to work on her trousseau instead of running around the country having a good time, and she figured she could get home one Sunday out of three. (On Sundays at the Grieveses’ house, you could light a fire for heat but not for cooking, you could not even boil the kettle to make tea, and you were not supposed to write a letter or swat a fly. But it turned out that my mother was exempt from these rules. “No, no,” said Flora Grieves, laughing at her. “That doesn’t mean you. You must just go on as you’re used to doing.” And after a while my mother had made friends with Flora to such an extent that she wasn’t even going home on the Sundays when she’d planned to.)
Flora and Ellie Grieves were the two sisters left of the family. Ellie was married, to a man called Robert Deal, who lived there and worked the farm but had not changed its name to Deal’s in anyone’s mind. By the way people spoke, my mother expected the Grieves sisters and Robert Deal to be middle-aged at least, but Ellie, the younger sister, was only about thirty, and Flora seven or eight years older. Robert Deal might be in between.
The house was divided in an unexpected way. The married couple didn’t live with Flora. At the time of their marriage, she had given them the parlor and the dining room, the front bedrooms and staircase, the winter kitchen. There was no need to decide about the bathroom, because there wasn’t one. Flora had the summer kitchen, with its open rafters and uncovered brick walls, the old pantry made into a narrow dining room and sitting room, and the two back bedrooms, one of which was my mother’s. The teacher was housed with Flora, in the poorer part of the house. But my mother didn’t mind. She immediately preferred Flora, and Flora’s cheerfulness, to the silence and sickroom atmosphere of the front rooms. In Flora’s domain it was not even true that all amusements were forbidden. She had a crokinole board — she taught my mother how to play.
