Requiem

controlling. Everything was kept private. When her hand let go of the coffee mug at the cabin door in October, I thought it was because the mug was slippery. We swept up the glass and mopped the coffee and I filled another mug.

Lena was about to celebrate her fiftieth birthday. Child bride, she used to call herself, jokingly, being in her twenties when we married—while I was in my thirties.

Three and a half weeks after the scalding coffee splashed at her feet, three and a half weeks after Thanksgiving weekend, she had the final stroke that killed her. A cerebral vascular accident, the doctor called it. CVA. That happened in hospital, after I called the ambulance, after her speech began to slur and both of us stopped believing that this was about overwork and fatigue.

So here I am. One more person in my life has disappeared. And I’m heading back to family, first family, and at their bidding.

But not quite yet.

The terrain is changing. Big open spaces have begun. Basil, behind me, is making horse sounds again and I can tell that he’s enjoying this outlet for his energy. I stop the car and let him out at the side of the road. I keep him on a leash because there’s a bit of traffic—not much—and I look around while I receive the generosity of sky from every direction. While I’m pulled over, a freight train moves along the bottom edge of sky into my line of vision, far off, south of the highway. Prairie train, long trail of flatcar, boxcar, train that seems not to move but must be moving out there, along that never-ending space.

Basil does his business beside the road and leaps into the car again. Once he’s settled, I decide to keep on, get through Winnipeg and out the other side, branch north a bit, aim for Saskatoon and then north and west again. I want to drive and drive. I want to pass ranch and wheat farm and watery slough. I want to be numbed by the early flatness of prairie before I reach rolling hills. I’ll stop when I have to, when I can no longer go on, when I feel myself falling into the dark.

When Lena and Greg used to tell stories in the car, sometimes they started with a chant:

In a dark dark wood, there was a dark dark house
And in the dark dark house, there was a dark dark room
And in the dark dark room, there was a dark dark space
And in the dark dark space, there was…

They took turns filling the dark space. I didn’t need to. I had enough dark spaces of my own to fill. Or so Lena reminded me, when I disappeared into gloom.

“Where do you learn these things?” I said to Lena.

“Childhood. I make up the endings. We both do, don’t we, Greg?”

Stare stare like a bear
Wearing Grampa’s underwear

Greg was giggling in the back seat.

“What about your childhood?” Lena said. “Tell us the stories you learned.”

“Not Goldilocks. Not Hansel and Gretel. More like The Spider Weaver and Kachi-Kachi Yama.”

“Tell us,” they both said at once. “Tell us! Please!”

The train is still there, to the south, and gives the impression of being miles long, travelling a path parallel to mine and at the same pace. It’s a cardboard silhouette, pushed by some force that comprehends enormity, patience, space. At one point, the distance between road and track narrows and I can make out the image of a moon on the side of each boxcar, each moon missing a chunk, as if it’s been bitten out. And then, as my car surges ahead, I hear a long, slow whistle from the train. A greeting in this limitless land. I am here and you are here and I salute you.

Beyond the western edge of Winnipeg, it begins to snow. A quick, harsh blizzard that takes me by surprise. I drive through it and half an hour later I’m under afternoon sun, wondering if the storm happened at all. But here’s the proof: horizontal chunks of snow, trapped and unmelted at the base of the windshield. The air as cool and fresh as it was in Ontario, but the landscape so vastly different.

Weather can be visualized in all directions here. Sun ahead, cloud behind, blue above. There it is, the primary colour between green and indigo, background for migrating geese to stroke a wide-stretched vee across an otherwise unbroken sky. One puffball cloud appears to have been catapulted from an earthbound slingshot. The scene keeps changing. A visible rope of rain stretches taut in the northeast, tethering cloud to earth. Spindly baby calves huddle close to their mothers in a muddy field close to the road.

I switch on the radio and listen to an American talk show from across the border for a while. The topic is aging and how old people are treated in today’s world. “If I’m in the way, put me on a piece of ice and push me out to sea,” says one old man who phones in. “There isn’t any sea around here,” says the host. “Then take me out to the back forty and shoot me,” says the man.

I switch to CBC and hear the tail end of an interview with a British mystery writer who talks as if she has a rag in her mouth. Finally, I turn the radio off. And think of Greg, young; I can’t remember exactly how old. Maybe eight, nine. He had heard the word cremation somewhere and brought it to me, asking for explanation. I did my best, tried to describe without alarming him. He took in the information, gave a little chuckle and said, in a deep, low voice and with immense bravado, “Well, they can just lay me down on a sailing ship and set fire to the sails and let me drift out over the ocean.” And then he laughed as if this was the funniest image he’d ever conjured. In fact, the two of us roared with laughter, tears running down our cheeks.

Since Lena died, I’ve sometimes found myself praying when I think of Greg. “Please, God, let him be safe. Let him grow and thrive and have a life. Let him be happy. Please.” Praying when I’ve never prayed before. Praying that things will be all right for my son.

I look to the sky ahead and suddenly wish for a canvas. A flexible surface, responsive to the pressures of the brush. It’s been weeks, months since I’ve painted. I have only paper with me now. Still, the urge is there, or was, fleetingly. A good sign. Hopeful.

I fumble with tapes and push in Symphony No. 3, Eroica, and still my thoughts as the music begins. The first movement does that to me: it says, Listen. It’s the second movement that makes me believe Beethoven heard many voices crying in his head. Well, it’s the funeral march, after all. But the entire symphony keeps breaking expectations. There is a grandness to its fragmentation, its emphasis, its yearning. As I turn up the volume and settle back to listen, the one long curve in the road—the only curve on this part of the prairie—makes me understand that I am on the extreme edge of a rim of orb called Earth.

THE FATHERS

Water spilt from a tray never returns to the tray.