Requiem

Bourgault carving of a man in a green toque, from Saint-Jean-Port-Joli on the St. Lawrence. I had settled on a large rock behind the auberge in that place and was watching the tide push back the great river. It was a summer night, and a yellow band of light floated above the waterline. The evening was so layered, so exquisite, I sank into it and couldn’t leave. By the time complete darkness rolled up the river valley, all that remained visible was a band of woolly cloud joining west to east. A grove of trees to my right had blackened in silhouette, and Lena stepped out of that blur of darkness and made her way down the slope. She was shaking her head. Did you forget you were to meet me in the dining room? I might have known. But she came to sit with me, in the dark.

Here, too, is my tiny clay seaman, his left leg snapped below the knee. Created to sit on the edge of a shelf or sill, he is ruddy and elegant, even with a peg leg. Lena and Greg chose him in a pottery shop in Cornwall while I was sketching outcrops on the lower banks of the Helford Estuary. It was a working holiday for me. We had sailed, embarking in New York and docking in Southampton, where we rented a car. We were almost five days at sea before reaching England, and Greg—who was eight at the time—spent much of the voyage asking about ocean tremors, canyons, earthquakes. He was fascinated, but full of worry, too. Are we crossing an ocean ridge right now, an ocean trench? Will our ship be lost at sea? I gave him a compact sketchbook of his own, a blue Hilroy, and he drew pictures of wrecks all the way across the Atlantic. In pencil and ink he created ships with flags, primitive lifeboats, our cabin porthole, spray and blue froth, sailors and pirates, undersea creatures, shark and octopus, giant fish eating smaller fish, a narrow trill of waves inked and glued separately beneath a ship as if in afterthought—or maybe a carefully planned collage. All part of his vision. He also drew a spewing ocean volcano in menacing black and red crayon. Two ships bobbed on rocky waves to the right of the picture. An explanation accompanied: The big ship is helping the little ship to get by safely. Someone was often lending a helping hand in Greg’s drawings.

Later, the same afternoon I’d been sketching in Cornwall, we drove the car to Helston and sat on a stone wall at the top of the hill and ate Cornish pasties purchased from a street vendor. That was when Lena and Greg presented me with the clay seaman. But shortly after we returned to Canada, my sleeve brushed the cap of the tiny man as I reached towards the window, and I knocked him to the floor.

Bin, protector of fractured and broken goods. Lena laughed at my collection of smalls, even when she herself was fractured and broken. Though neither of us knew how broken she was. Nor did we know that the stroke that took her life had already announced its arrival, in the weeks preceding her death.

CHAPTER 3

I haul things out to the station wagon: Thermos, cooler with the green lid, road map on the passenger seat, camera, a bottle of Scotch in its sturdy cylinder, Beethoven tapes and some of Lena’s Benny Goodmans. Books to read in motels along the way, placed on the floor, passenger side: Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World, which Greg has been urging me to read for a few years; essays by Heinrich Boll; Beethoven’s letters. I’ll be lucky to finish any one book completely, but at least I’ll have choice. I give silent thanks to Okuma-san and wonder, as I often have, if without him in my life I’d have come to music, literature, even my own painting, in the same way.

Basil, now certain of an upset in routine, is executing tight circles in the front hall. There’s a blur of shades on his haunches as he hurls himself at the door every time I go outside with a load.

“Hang on, Basil, hang on,” I call out, but he continues to half-whine, half-bark until he hears the words Get in the car, Basil, at which he bolts off the steps, stands panting beside the car until the trunk is open and launches himself from a standing start, up and into the back.

Because of his odd body shape, it always seems that he won’t get off the ground, but he ends up inside first try. Low and heavy, three feet long, nose to tail, is my hound with the grand name and the heavy paws. He’ll continue to turn circles in the confined space of the car and won’t stop until we’re past the turnoff to the kennels, a road the two of us know well.

The back has been flattened to give him plenty of room. I’ve thrown in a worn piece of mat, a couple of ragged towels, a bag of dog food, pouches of meat, leash, hide chews, his Kong, a sealed container of water. Most of this is stacked on the floor behind the front seats. There’s more baggage for Basil than there is for me.

I slide into the car and take a last look at the house. And there is Lena at the front door, her face expressionless. One hand rests against the edge of the door as if she can’t wait to push it shut, the other is at her waist. I know the stance; we were married twenty-six years. Didn’t she say, somewhat mysteriously, that the trip had been put off long enough? When? When did she say that? The trip was postponed so many times. But postponements didn’t stop the subject from coming up. It was clear all along that Lena wanted me to go back. Back meaning farther than Alberta, farther than the homes of my sister and brother in Edmonton, where we have always come to a full stop. Back meaning all the way back, through the Rockies and as far as the inland camp on the Fraser River. Or maybe farther still, to the West Coast and the Pacific, where my own journey began.

None of this was surprising, given Lena’s penchant for gathering history. She taught the subject at the University of Ottawa and, in her spare time, filled an entire upstairs closet with the genealogical history of her own family—photos and documents of generations that preceded her. Maybe, if asked, Greg will deal with those covered containers someday. But not now. What twenty-year-old is interested in his parents’ family history? All in good time, Lena used to say. Greg might even decide to turn the task over to Lena’s sister and brother. Let them sort it out.

Of course, it is not Lena at the front door. How could she have had a stroke at the age of forty-nine? It’s difficult not to keep asking the question. How could anyone who is not yet fifty have a stroke? What didn’t we know? Why didn’t she tell me what was going on?

The front door is firmly closed and locked, the spare key given to Miss Carrie, who, with her diminutive frame, now emerges from her own house next door and stands at the top of her veranda step. She offers a regal wave in farewell. She has thrown some sort of greatcoat over her back, and its weight tips her forward more than usual. She has one hand on her walker and tilts her eyes upwards as if to acknowledge a neck too fragile to support her head and its thickness of white hair. She has declared, in the past, that she is the same age as the stone house she lives in, though she’s never divulged how many years that is. Ninety-something, no further details. The house was inherited from her late father, a General of the Great War, whom she looked after in his old age. Although he’s been dead for decades, his presence fills the house and she still refers to him as “Daddy.” “Mommy” died ten years before “Daddy.” All of this happened before we moved into the neighbourhood. Miss Carrie doesn’t seem to have much ready income apart from her pension, but she is surrounded by ancient furniture and memorabilia. During the seventies, when we bought our house, she adopted us as family and later became an honorary, close-at-hand grandma to Greg when he was born. Now she’s the only “grandmother” he has. When I phoned last night to tell her I was heading west on a sudden trip, she offered to bring in the mail and keep an eye on things, as she usually does.

“I’m nearly blind,” she’s been saying for two decades. “Blind as an underground mole.” But there isn’t much Miss Carrie doesn’t see. And she insists that she’s capable of checking my house, casting out junk mail, watering indoor plants. She’ll do that with love and care, in the same way she goes outside with a small wooden bucket on summer evenings to water a scraggly maple, which, against odds, has pushed up through cement on city property in front of her house. “Poor tree,” she mutters while she pours water to its roots. “Someone has to help you stay alive.”

I wave to her now and start to back out of the driveway, feeling that I’m the one who has the eyesight of an underground mole. And it’s impossible not to hear Lena beside me, steering me along.

“What do you want?” I ask the air inside the car. I even turn my head to the right. Somehow, Basil knows I’m not addressing him. It wouldn’t be the first time the hound reads the human mind.

What do you? the silence replies.

Once on the street, my foot drops heavily to the pedal, though it’s not my intention to depart in a roar. Too late. Miss Carrie has seen my lips move before I pull away. She’s caught me talking to myself. Not that she doesn’t do the same. She speaks her thoughts aloud, laughs as she does, makes no apologies.

She’ll think I’m talking to Basil. Still, I’m distracted. By the belief, momentary as it was, that Lena really was