Remembering the Bones Read online

  The women of the family took it for granted that they would outlive their men. It’s the way life keeps turning out. I’ve outlived Harry. Grand Dan outlived my grandfather, a doctor who was killed in the First Great War. Phil has outlived my father by more than sixty years, though she alarms people because she can faint at will. She drops to the floor when it pleases her, even at the Haven, though she’s careful how she falls. The Queen Mother outlived her husband; Victoria outlived Albert; Queen Mary outlived George V. It’s the way things have always been.

  I am from a family of ones: one mother, one father, one sister, one niece, one aunt, one uncle, one grandmother, one husband, one child, alive, Cassandra. We’ve always called her Case and, from the beginning, she loved her name.

  Harry, too, was an only—at least we thought he was. He was born in England, and came to the marriage alone.

  Grand Dan was a midwife. The last baby she officially delivered was me, on April 21, 1926. Regulations were changing; provincial laws were put in place. She delivered a few babies after me, but only when a doctor couldn’t be reached. When I came along, I knew from the time I could talk that Princess Elizabeth of York and I had entered the world on the same day. My sister Ally had already been born, two years before me. All our lives, we’ve counted on each other: Ally and George, Georgie and Al.

  There! I’ve managed to drag the bad leg behind me, but only three or four inches. Without painkillers. For all the progress I’ve made, I could have spared myself the discomfort. I won’t say the pain is unbearable, because I have no choice; I have to bear it.

  I’ve borne worse.

  Say it out, then, Georgie.

  Death. Darkness. I’ve had dark days. I try not to retreat into old shadows, but they’re there. I know they’re there.

  Life apportions, life takes away.

  I must not take on dark thoughts. If I get to the car, I might find something useful. Bandages. The first-aid kit has never been lifted out of the trunk. Even if I could reach it, what would I bandage and how, with one hand? My right arm won’t move. Good arm, bad arm. Good leg, bad leg. My knee hurts but at least it creaks and bends. I feel the extraordinary weight of myself, heavier than I know my body to be. It’s the sensation I have after a bath if I stay in the tub while the water is running out.

  It would be more of a worry, Georgie, if you couldn’t feel your body at all.

  That is the truth.

  The car doesn’t seem so far now, though it’s not easy to judge. I feel as if I’m upside down. My thoughts are scattered, like the glass leaves.

  I’ll try to remember what was in the car, front and back. My purse. Case’s gift, orange paper stuffed into the bag. I saw it drop somewhere as I flew past. My suitcase, in the trunk. Everything rearranged.

  I’m rearranged. I must order my thoughts. Right my body. If the mind can right itself, so can the body. I’ll try to imagine myself sitting, standing. But not climbing the side of the ravine. I can’t do that.

  Can’t?

  Didn’t I tell Case when she was a child, her small round face looking up at me, “Never say can’t”?

  Who said that?

  Every one of the women in my family for four generations, that’s who.

  TIBIA

  TEN

  I must keep my brain talking. Perhaps I tried the wrong prayer. The Creed was never relaxed, to my way of thinking. Not like the Lord’s Prayer.

  Prayers of my childhood. The sturdiness of Ontario stone. Our solid country church on the Wilna Creek Road. Ally took my hand as we followed Grand Dan, Phil and Mr. Holmes up the aisle every Sunday, our own small footsteps echoing theirs. We slid across the third-row pew on the right, the same in which Danforths had been accountable to God for generations. Grand Dan presided, and cast an eye back over the narrow room before she kneeled to pray. She had smacked the bare bottoms of more than half the congregation, and had forced their first intake of breath. I suppose she considered all of us her children—we who had been delivered into her long fingers, we who had been anointed with olive oil poured to a saucer by her caring midwife’s hands.

  We stood for the Apostles’ Creed and I waited for the part where everyone bobbed heads at the same instant. Between half-closed lids, I caught rows of nods out of the corner of my eye. Grand Dan, high above me—long and thin in a plain grey coat that hung to her ankles—looked down with a different head movement, one I well understood, to let me know I was not to stare. I was expected to join in, and I did my best, speeding the lines, trying not to think of the countless bums Grand Dan had smacked and what the congregation would look like if they suddenly dropped their drawers and bared them.

  We had to kneel for the Lord’s Prayer, and we flipped the kneeling board towards us on its hinges. At the end of the service, we flipped it back. I liked the mechanics of the kneeling board, the collaboration of sharers of the pew. It was about silent co-operation, timing, eye and hand signals. The board yielded; it was out of sight. As it disappeared, I rolled my eyes skyward and whispered for my dead grandfather’s benefit, Structure determines function, thinking how pleased he must have been when he had sat in the same pew. That was the second of his principles, his three grand thoughts, the ones I found written in his handwriting on the inside cover of Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical by Henry Gray.

  During my childhood, it was my stinging regret that I did not have the opportunity to meet my grandfather, Dr. Matthias Danforth, who was born in Wilna Creek but went away to Toronto to be educated as a physician. He returned in 1900 at the start of a promising new century, and married the woman he loved, the midwife with the long black hair and the no-nonsense reputation, the woman who had waited for him while he completed his education. He began to work at the newly constructed three-storey hospital in the growing town of Wilna Creek. The roads were no longer made of planks, and cedar boardwalks were gradually being replaced. His parents were dead and he and his black-haired bride moved two country miles to the Danforth family home, which he had inherited. They were the same age when they married, twenty-five. Grand Dan—affectionately called “Danny” by my grandfather after their marriage—had one known indulgence, a love of gardening and, in particular, of yellow roses.

  Grandfather travelled back and forth to town by horse and buggy for years and finally purchased his first automobile in 1913. It was Brewster green, a Model T nicknamed “the Rooster.” At the white house in the country, he turned the Danforth library into a consulting room for patients who insisted on showing up at his back door, expected or not. He installed a leather-topped examining table and a panelled screen behind which patients could disrobe. With hospital work in town, house calls and home office in the country, he must have had dreams of being a gentleman farmer as well as a professional man. But only two years after he bought the Rooster, he opened the double doors of the sagging shed, drove the Model T inside, asked Grand Dan to give it a polish now and then and marched off to war. He was older than most of his medical colleagues, older than all of the soldiers he cared for, but determined to do his duty. Casualty lists had filtered back and he could not abide the thought of young boys of nineteen or twenty needing amputations, bleeding to death in dressing stations before there was time to carry them back behind the lines. He had the skills, and wanted them tested under conditions that were extreme.

  He left by train from Wilna Creek Station with the hospital staff waving him off. At the time of his departure in 1915, he and Grand Dan were forty years old. They had two daughters: my mother, Philomena, called Phil, and her sister, Freda, known to everyone as Fred.

  After that, there is a gap in the story between 1915 and 1916. Letters must have been exchanged during that time but I have never seen them, though I’ve longed to. Grand Dan was private and, before she died, she must have destroyed every trace of her lost love.

  This is what I was told by my mother. In France in the fall of 1916, a soldier from our little town suffered a terrible leg injury at the Somme. By chance, he was helped
to an Advance Dressing Station in which my grandfather was senior Medical Officer in charge. After being treated by my grandfather—who was well acquainted with the young man and greeted him as a father would a son—the soldier was lifted onto a stretcher. He was in pain but alert, and promised that if he made it home from Blighty, he would go to visit the doctor’s wife. Wanting to prolong the encounter, my grandfather stepped outside the Dressing Station and, just after the stretcher-bearers started back towards the rear, a shell exploded near the entrance to the hut that he was about to re-enter. The soldier lived to tell the tale and eventually returned to Canada with an artificial limb. My grandfather was blown to bits.

  In 1917, exactly one year after the date of his injury, on the anniversary of my grandfather’s death, the limping soldier arrived at the house to tell Grand Dan about her husband’s last moments and the three sentences he had uttered before the fatal shellburst. “If I don’t make it back, tell my Danny she’ll always be the love of my life. Tell her I had no choice. I had to do what I could.”

  Grand Dan stood at the door and listened intently to the words the soldier had committed to memory and kept inside him for a full year. “The doctor must have had a premonition,” he added sadly. “It happened over there, all the time.”

  Grand Dan received the message with dignity, committed the words to her own memory and brought the soldier into the house to offer him a cup of tea and a slice of War cake, which she had made earlier that morning. Having no oil for cooking, she had stirred bacon grease into the cake, hoping that ginger and cloves would overpower the taste of bacon. She did not cry. She had already been silenced the previous year, the day the news of her husband’s death was delivered by telegram.

  That story, about the telegram of the year before, 1916, is the one that accounts for Grand Dan wrapping her legs. And wrap them she did, every day until she died. Aunt Fred passed the story on to me, when I was a child.

  When the telegram came, Aunt Fred was eleven years old and in school, as was my then thirteen-year-old mother. No one was at the house except Grand Dan herself, and the deliverer of the telegram, Brainy Knapp.

  Aunt Fred, who had hay fever all her life, told the story in her stuffed-up, nasal voice. She had managed to marry a man also called Fred, so the two were known to Ally and me as Aunt and Uncle Fred. My uncle used to say, “My Freddie has enough twang to make a fortune as a country-and-western singer,” and this infuriated my aunt. Still, I thought it could be true. Aunt and Uncle Fred fought throughout their entire marriage, but they were passionately in love. They argued over whether the window sash should be up or down, who left scum on the bar of Lifebuoy soap and whether the cream that popped out of the top of the milk bottle in winter should be spooned off or stirred. “We’re sticking it out for the long haul,” Aunt Fred said, as if to ward off family criticism. But no one criticized, and I, for one, did not doubt their love.

  This is how Aunt Fred told the story. Brainy Knapp, whom Grand Dan had tugged into the world feet first from between his mother’s thighs, rode his bicycle out from town, turned into the lane and found the doctor’s ‘wife close to the stoop in the backyard, splitting kindling with an axe. When she saw him dismount his bicycle and head towards her, she foresaw the news before he had a chance to hand over the telegram. Because she was distracted, she swung the blade of the axe hard against her own right leg and chopped the skin over the bone, the tibia, for which I always had a melancholy fondness after hearing the story.

  Grand Dan did not scream when she axed her tibia. It was Brainy who filled the air with blood-curdling shrieks. Grand Dan ordered Brainy into the house to fetch a long linen towel from the kitchen roller. He dropped the telegram, which she picked up off the ground when he ran to the house. The paper was soaked in blood before she unfolded it. Because her daughters were at school, there was no one to help but Brainy. By the time he pulled the towel off the roller and ran outside again, Grand Dan had dragged herself from the stoop to the kitchen door, leaving a trail of flattened grass and spurted blood. She wrapped her own leg to stop the bleeding, and commanded Brainy to tuck his head between his knees and take deep breaths so he wouldn’t pass out. He was inconsolable over the impact of the doctor’s death, combined with my grandmother’s accident, which he believed he had caused by being the bearer of bad news. The telegram was carried inside.

  Grand Dan bore no ill will towards the messenger, but from that day forward she remained silent about my grandfather’s death. The tibia was another matter. It was slow to heal because chronic osteomyelitis had set in, and she applied herbal compresses for months before she was able to stop the wound from oozing. She did not go to town to have her injury looked after by her husband’s colleagues. Instead, when the oozing ceased, she wrapped not one but both legs with rolls of bandage, which she made by tearing strips of white cotton, two and a half inches wide. She called the bandages her “cottons,” and wrapped them around her legs every day of her life.

  Fifteen years after the telegram—by this time Ally and I had been born and our family had moved to Grand Dan’s house in the country—I finally saw her legs without the cottons. Grand Dan and I were first up every morning, and she tolerated my stares as I watched her do the encircling wraps before the rest of the family came down for breakfast. One leg at a time, she anchored the bandage around the sole of her foot, twined it about the ankle and circled it upwards until it reached the knee. Over the bandages, she pulled tan-coloured lisle stockings. She slid her wedding garters, one at a time, up over her thighs, and rolled the tops of the stockings back down over the garters, which disappeared under her dress.

  I was the one who saw the mottled patches of brown that had begun to cover both legs, which were exposed to light only momentarily at the beginning of each day. One morning, I was brave enough to look her in the eye and say, “May I touch your telegram scar, Grand Dan?” She gave me a long look and then leaned back and said, “You may.” I ran two fingers over the hardened scar left by the axe, and it did not disappoint. It was as if a twisted vein had slipped out of her leg and calcified, and fastened itself lengthwise to the outside of her shin. No diagram in my grandfather’s medical books could match it. I did not mention being allowed to touch the scar to my sister, though it did occur to me that Ally might not be jealous, since she had interests of her own.

  Once the stockings were in place, the surface of Grand Dan’s legs was smooth and disguised. There wasn’t a wrinkle or fold between one layer of bandage and the next. Nor could an inch of skin be seen between the hem of her dress and her feet, which disappeared into black lace-up shoes. Every second day, she washed her cottons with Fels-Naptha, creating suds with the wire soap-saver that was tied by a string to the backboard behind the sink. She hung the strips on the line to dry and, when I came home from school, it was my job to go outside to fetch them. In winter they froze on the line and, after I unpegged them, I carried them over my shoulder like swords and brought them in and propped their stiff forms against the wall. At a single moment, they thawed, crinkled and collapsed to the floor without warning.

  Grand Dan wound her hair into a bun every morning, and kept it there with the longest hairpins she could buy. She wore a fringed, black shawl around her shoulders, even in summer. It was left to me in her will and though I still have it, it is worn to tatters. I can’t bring myself to throw it away, or cut it up for dusters.

  I could use Grand Dan’s shawl right now. I’ve begun to get a chill from the ground beneath me. My coat helps; my cardigan helps—it’s made of tightly knit boiled wool. I bought it in the Austrian Tyrol when Harry and I were on our trip. The only problem is, it’s green, like my coat, which means I don’t have much hope of being detected. Especially with the branches above me straining to burst into leaf. The landscape could wrap itself around me and I’d never be seen.

  And now, a blast of sun warms my cheek. A blessing from Sol. As Aunt Fred used to say, “It’s enough to make you weep.”

  But you won�
��t weep, Georgie. What good would that do? Do something to save yourself. Keep moving. Get into the open. Suck the buttons on the cardigan.

  I read somewhere that sucking buttons creates saliva. If you have no water, if you are in dire straits.

  You are in dire straits. Look around you. See where you are.

  I’m thirsty. My mouth is dry. The cardigan has silver buttons with an imprint of a crown. Buttons of royalty. Lilibet might have such a sweater. I can reach the top three, maybe four, with my left hand, pull them up to my chin. Bottom ones, too, though it makes no difference; it isn’t as if buttons have flavours. I haven’t thought about food; it’s water I want. The tiniest bit could save me. A bit of saliva might fool the thirst.

  Structure determines function. Suck the buttons. You’ll be saved. Don’t get yourself worked up.

  I’m not getting worked up. What good would that do? But I’m restless. Clots might be forming in my veins. Clots can kill. I need to raise my leg, the good one. The other is a burning poker. If only I could see what damage lies beneath my pant leg. If Ally were with me, we’d laugh. One recess, while we played outside our one-room school, we were told by an older boy that his parents had a book called “Lifter Leg and Poker.” “Ha Ha,” the children around us shouted, “Ha Ha.” We thought this hilarious, but didn’t know what it meant. We giggled insanely until we said it aloud in Grand Dan’s kitchen, and were promptly sent to our room.