Perfection of the Morning (4 page)

It was an overwhelming experience which afterward I could hardly find words to describe adequately to my friends and family. My mother must have been alarmed, although she was careful not to say so. Her memories of her hard years in the bush must have been strong, and I think she wanted to advise me to give up the idea of marrying Peter because of the hardship she was sure I would have to endure. On the other hand, if the Butalas were far from rich, having succeeded in wilderness where we had failed, it was clear they had at least a considerably more financially secure life than we had had when we were enduring those years of privation in the bush country, and this would make my life much easier than hers had been. And she must have seen in Peter the same qualities I saw: his strength of character and physical strength, his stability, his integrity and his quiet competence.

The draw was powerful and it was not mitigated by the obvious physical danger of such a life; it may even have been enhanced by it. I saw nobody in my city life doing anything more physically dangerous than walking to work, and in Saskatoon that wasn’t much of a risk. I’d had enough of my windowless office at the university and the endless maneuvering for advantage, not to mention the incredibly hard work people of my lowly rank had to do for distressingly low pay; I’d had enough of the men I was meeting, each one of whom seemed to be more insecure, convoluted and uncertain than the last one; I couldn’t wait to put it all behind me. The winter cattle drive had been more than memorable—it had been invigorating, simple, firmly tied to a physical reality that I had been missing and, without even realizing it, longing for.

I put my faith in Peter. I was in love. If I was giving up what had turned out to be a fantasy of a closetful of satin ballgowns and the life to go with them, if I was giving up men with doctorates and fancy cars, it was for a second chance at a meaningful life and for a man who clearly was what he appeared to be. I saw myself merely as escaping into a simpler, more pure and more ethical life, a life that made clear sense as the one I was living had ceased to do. Despite the powerful feelings surfacing in me, it really didn’t occur to me that when I married I was going into a life in Nature. Nature entered into my picture of my future merely as an unavoidable background, desirable chiefly because of its—oh, unexamined cliché!—peacefulness and beauty.

Peter and I were married in late May, and since there was no new house on either the hay farm or the ranch—where there were only two settlers’ shacks pulled together around 1934 and sided over to form one house—for the first two and a half years we moved back and forth between the two places with the cattle and the seasons. It was awkward and sometimes confusing, but I didn’t care. There was something freeing about having two “camps,” as Peter often called them, instead of one home. And I loved both places despite the fact that both houses were too small, dilapidated and lacking in amenities that for years I’d been able to take for granted. On the hay farm we lived in a log house that had been built there before 1912, though we don’t know exactly when or by whom. We had electricity and running water in both places, but no bathrooms, especially no indoor toilets of any kind. Often I had to get up in the middle of the night to go outside to the toilet, something I had done until I was thirteen years old.

In my first year of living that way, rising in the night to go outside, wending my way down a footpath under the stars, sometimes being
startled by the distant drumming of horses’ hooves growing louder as they approached and by the rush of wind as they swept by me in the darkness, hearing, but not seeing them, I had a dream.

I dreamt it was night and I had stepped outside the door of our log house into the deepest winter. There were mountains of untouched snow everywhere, great high drifts of it banked up around the house to its roof and there were thick, long stalactites of ice hanging from the eaves. I was wearing a nightgown—strangely, the one I wore on my wedding night of my first marriage in 1961, white with white lace trim on the bodice—but I wasn’t at all cold.

A white coyote appeared from out of the darkness on my left. It trotted slowly past me only three or four feet away, and as it passed it turned its head to stare straight at me into my eyes. It limped on three paws, holding up its right front paw to its chest as if it had been wounded. Even then, knowing nothing of these things, I knew by the silver-white color of its thick coat that it was a spirit animal. It was clear I was out of the realm of everyday life; I was in an archetypal realm, a limitless, timeless world of pure wilderness.

I cherished the dream and told Peter about it, but what did it mean? I puzzled over it for days without making any progress in its interpretation. I knew nothing about the whole study of dreams, and any significant dreams I’d had before had always involved people and were clearly about problems in my daily life. I knew that this dream was a product of this perfectly unnameable
thing
I felt stirring inside me from the time of that first weekend I’d spent in what became my new home; I recognized the intense, rich mystery and beauty of the dream. I was fascinated and at first could think of little else, but as the months passed, I thought less and less about it, believing that one day its meaning would come to me and in the meantime it was useless to keep puzzling over it.

But the dream caused something else to happen: the memory of a childhood experience came flooding back to me—something that happened when I was eight years old and making my First Communion. We had been told in catechism that, after having been purified by confession and penance, when we received the Host for the first time in our lives, the Holy Spirit, conceived of by the artist in our catechism materials as a shining white dove, would enter us.

I had—sometimes I think I was born with—a powerful sense of myself as a sinner, as unworthy, as always guilty, which a Catholic upbringing presumably did nothing to alleviate, and the source of which, though I have some glimmerings of it, will remain untold on these pages. But I was, in the way of children, especially those kept close to their mothers, an innocent. I believed what I was told; I believed it with all my heart, wholly, without question.

In my new white dress, white stockings, shoes and veil, I knelt at the altar of that small wooden church on the edge of the town, surrounded by wild grass and beyond that by wheatfields. The priest approached and, murmuring a prayer in Latin, put the Host on my tongue. I rose with the other children and began the walk back to the pew where my parents and sisters waited. And then I felt it: something, though this was all so many years ago I barely remember, but something I perceived as a cloud of white light lit inside my chest, swelling till it filled it.

But those words fail to give the miraculous sense of it. It was
not myself,
it was both within me and bigger than me; it was, when I tried to tell my mother after as we waited in the car for our father to come from his chat with the priest and drive us home to Sunday dinner, as if the Holy Ghost had come as was foretold and filled me with its whiteness and purity. I had no idea beyond that white dove, what the Holy Spirit the priest talked about was. If I was merely incarnating
the priest’s description through the power of his suggestion, I had forgotten the rushing of wings, the cooing, the wind.

My mother was an unwilling Catholic, having converted from Anglicanism to marry our father. “You’re only lightheaded from fasting,” she snapped angrily, wanting, I suppose, nothing to do with pagan Catholicism, and detesting seeing it in her own child. Or, given her background, perhaps it merely struck her as unutterably vulgar.

Yet both of these, the dream and the numinous experience of my First Communion, served to remind me of another puzzling yet profoundly moving dream—if indeed it was a dream; vision better describes it—I had had at another significant moment in my life, this one three months after the birth of my only child.

In the early evening I had gone into the bedroom to try to catch up on my sleep. I lay down, closed my eyes, and then I was transported into the same realm that all these years later I had visited in my dream of the white coyote. There was my infant son asleep in his carriage where I put him each day, in the backyard of the house where we lived in the small town where I had taken a job teaching school. The carriage was sitting on the grass. Beside it a narrow cement sidewalk ran from the gate into the yard to the kitchen door. Everything was as it was in real life, including the tall old poplar trees that formed a border around the small yard. In the dream nothing happened, nothing moved or changed. The child slept on, motionless, lost in his infant world.

What was extraordinary was that I saw clearly, indisputably, finally, that the child, the grass, the trees, the sky above were all woven of the same material, were all part of the same fabric, which was the fabric of which the universe is made, and that this fabric
lived.
As pointed contrast, the cement sidewalk lay ugly and dead,
a scar in the picture; except for it, the whole scene was transcendent with beauty, the colors had an intensity, a purity not present in real life, and the dream was imbued with a feeling of the perfect peace and benevolence of the universe.

I came to myself and the darkened bedroom, the furniture bulky shadows along the walls, an arrow of light below the door into the next room. Bewildered, I called my husband and asked him how long I’d been asleep. “A half hour or so,” he said. “Why?” I told him about my dream. “If it was a dream,” I said. Then, “I don’t think it was a dream.”

I had to understand what had happened to me. My husband thought he knew, having read about just such experiences. He found a book—at least, I think this was what happened—by an important East Indian philosopher—Radakrishnan? Krishnamurti? Or was it someone else? I no longer remember—which described this very experience, calling it “Universal Oneness,” and endeavored to explain what it meant. I looked further and found that experiences having just the characteristics of mine had been recorded over and over again in cultures around the world. It seemed that in Eastern philosophies/religions, at least, it was the basic vision of the universe, the deepest and most meaningful spiritual experience one might have.

Even though all these descriptions in books validated it intellectually and gave me interpretations to mull over with awe, what little I understood of the vision was the ambience that permeated it. Meaning had not been given to me in words and the words I was reading seemed trivial and disconnected in the face of the magnitude and beauty of the vision itself. All I really knew was that I had been given an insight of profound importance, but read about it as I did, it was one I couldn’t make sense of in a personal way.
Although I was sure it should, I couldn’t figure out how it was supposed to affect my life.

For days nothing in the real world looked the same. Every fork on the table, every bar of sunlight slanting across a room, the eyebrows and lashes of my baby seemed more beautiful and more puzzling, and yet more real than I had dreamt or imagined. All this
meant
something, it seemed, something I had never guessed, had never conceived of myself or been told of by priests or teachers or had read in books. The world was deeper and more baffling than I knew, but how I should fit this vision into my life, I had no idea.

For long periods of time after that I didn’t think of it at all, but every once in a while in the many intervening years between its occurrence and my marriage to Peter, it would come back to me and I would once again puzzle over it. I had relegated it to the realm of never-to-be-solved and seldom-remembered mysteries, when the dream of the spirit coyote brought it back to me with something of its long-lost, original force. So many years had passed, fourteen or so, and I still didn’t understand. Yet, in pondering these dream-visions—the white cloud, the spirit coyote, the dream of universal oneness—I saw that in the latter two I had returned to my archetypal world, the world of my first introduction to this star-ridden, green and scented universe, to the world children inhabit—innocent even in its danger, edenlike in its dark, rich beauty. Puzzling over them, surrounded as I was by miles of prairie still in the state it had been in since the glaciers had melted back ten thousand years before, with mirages hovering in the distance, the nights filled with the distant wail of coyotes, and with the canopy of stars, and the wind a constant, whispering companion, I began to have the first intimations that there was in Nature, much more than met the eye, something that existed in back of it. I did not know what
that something was, I didn’t even expect ever to know, but nevertheless I strained every day to catch a glimpse of it. I thought if I could just see it, maybe I would understand it and that understanding would show me how to live.

I was so overwhelmed by the dream of the spirit coyote that more than a dozen years later, when I had become a writer, I gave it to Amy Sparrow, the heroine of my novel
The Fourth Archangel.
I was trying to express something; I am still trying to say it, which means to understand it. This book is my response to that emissary of Nature, the dream coyote, and to what I think was his message to me, for through understanding his message I might also come to know what the larger vision I had had as a young mother meant.

Often at the ranch Peter would get up at dawn, catch one of the saddle horses in the corral, groom it, give it hay, and come in for breakfast while his horse fed. Then he’d saddle it and ride off into the fields for a day of looking for calves which had lost their mothers or vice versa, for mix-ups of various kinds, for illness or accidents, and inspecting fences and waterholes and the state of the grass in each field. It was not unusual, during those summer days of seemingly endless light, for me not to see him again till darkness had crept up the hillsides, turning them black against the luminous night sky. His father and mother had told me, each in their own way, not to worry when he didn’t return: his father sagaciously, “This is the way of cattlemen, of cowboys,” said his mother wryly. “They always come back eventually, none the worse for wear.”

When the other women of the community were visiting each other, I knew nobody; while they were raising children, I had no young children left at home; while they were growing gardens and preserving food, I had few people to cook for, no garden yet, and the tiniest of houses which took no time to look after; while they were sometimes driving to part-time jobs, there was no real need
for me to get a job and we lived so far from the nearest town that any full-time work was impracticable; while they were driving tractors and farm trucks and occasionally running to town for parts, Peter, used to doing everything himself or with hired help, didn’t ask me to help, at least partly because I didn’t know how. At the advanced age of thirty-six I was just learning to ride a horse.

I began to go for walks. Sometimes I would carry a lunch out to where I knew I would find Peter and the hired man fencing, or I would walk the fenceline to where the herd of horses were grazing and spend half an hour talking to them across the fence till they grew bored with my company and wandered away. I would walk to the places I had seen from the truck where the view was especially distant or beautiful and sit on the stiff, dry, prairie grass and try to assimilate the stunning, bare sweep of land.

East of the house about a mile was one of the highest hills on the ranch—you can see its silhouette blue against the horizon from miles away—and in those early days before I dared to venture too far from the house and yard I sometimes chose it for my destination. More than once from the crown of that hill I’d spotted Peter on horseback, a black stroke against the yellow grass a mile or two away, moving slowly among the cattle, disappearing almost at once between hills. If I felt lonely I’d sometimes walk out and climb that hill in hopes of catching a reassuring glimpse of him.

On a hot summer afternoon, having been alone since dawn and bored with the pursuits I’d been toying with for the last few hours, I wandered out to that hilltop, my head down, thinking. In those early days, as my old life began to waver and dissolve and the new one still had no firm shape, I was always deep in thought.

The side I was approaching the hill from slopes gradually up to the crest; on the other side it drops off abruptly a hundred or so
feet to the prairie below where the spring run-off sometimes pools to form a shallow slough. By this time of the year, July, the water had long since evaporated, but it had left behind a stand of grass richer than the surrounding prairie, where there were always a few animals to be found.

On that day, on the far side of the hill in that slough-bottom, twenty or so cows stood grazing or lay with their calves beside them peacefully chewing their cuds. In their midst Peter’s saddle horse, reins dragging, browsed lazily too. And far off at the edge of the cluster of cattle, a couple of antelope stood, noses down in the grass. All of them were oblivious to my presence and paying no attention to each other, as if they were all members of the same contented tribe on that still, hot afternoon, under that magnificent dome of sky, and in the midst of those thousands of acres of short, pale grass. About a hundred feet out from the foot of the hill, in the midst of his animals, lying facedown in the grass, head on one bent arm, hat shielding his eyes, Peter lay sound asleep.

I stopped dead in my tracks, overcome with an emotion I couldn’t identify: that I had caught him in a moment so private I felt I had no right to be there; that something was happening here that was beyond my experience and my understanding, but that meant something—something significant; I could feel it in my heart and in my gut—which my brain couldn’t grasp, couldn’t name or classify.

I backed away quickly before I was seen; I hurried down the long slope of the hill and full of silent wonder walked back across the fields to the house. I never breathed a word of what I had seen to anyone.

On her deathbed our mother had dreamt, she told us, that she was back on the farm in Manitoba and the five of us were little girls again. We were in the summer kitchen, she said, and outside it was
raining. A tent was pitched in the yard and a family of children were in it. The five of us were begging her to let them into the house with us, but she wouldn’t because, she said, they’d track in mud and she had just washed the floor. “I should have let them in,” she said, terribly upset, as if it had really happened and wasn’t just a dream. “I should have let them in. I shouldn’t have worried about the mud.”

I knew at once it was a dream about how she had watched us too closely, how she had held firm in her determination to protect us from a world she was herself afraid of, and how she now saw she had been wrong. I grew up timid and afraid of the world as a result of this watchfulness, and any need I had for adventure I had always stifled or fulfilled vicariously. Now, in my only act of real daring, I had turned away from the world I’d been raised for and understood, had thrown away everything I had worked for, in favor of a world about which I knew nothing and for the promise of which I couldn’t even read.

If I had had stirrings of memories powerful enough to draw me back into the natural world in which I had spent my first years, I was mistaken if I thought I knew anything factual about how to make a living in it, or even how to live in it as my husband did. Whatever it was or would be, I had not imagined beforehand, and even though I was now living in it, it was an uneasy kind of living, laden with a sense of waiting, of discovery and possibility, but without any firm shape or structure. In the back of my mind I must have thought that only the form and the daily activities would be different than my old life, that the mental and emotional texture, the fabric of it, would be just the same. Not having any experience as an adult of any other way of apprehending and of being in life, how could I imagine it in advance? Or expect it? Or prepare for it?

In the city I had had an identity, or rather several identities: divorcée, single parent, career woman, graduate student, future academic. If the day-to-day living of it was hard, and it was sometimes terribly so, as any single working mother will tell you, it had had its rewards, chiefly that, having gone from the daughter of a rather strict and formidable mother (at least I found her so although my sisters, I think, would describe her otherwise) to the wife of a man I had somehow wound up trying to please but never could, I had had for the first time in my life a degree of personal autonomy. I earned my own money and could do with it as I chose; I could paint the walls of my house any color I liked; I could cook food I wanted to eat; I could invite over whomever I chose.

At first after my divorce I realized that I had been so demoralized over the years that I didn’t even know what color I might want for my walls, or what I liked best to eat, or whom I wanted for friends, or even what kind of a person I was. But as I slowly recovered from the wounds of my marriage and the trauma of its end, these matters gradually began to fall into place. I had begun to remember the person I’d once been, or was becoming, since I was only twenty-one the day I married. I had begun to remember myself as competent, with certain gifts: I had been a visual artist, a good student, a woman who loved to dance. I had been someone who was capable and who had certain dreams of her own of what her life might one day become.

I had, too, a community I knew well and a place in it. I had lived altogether seventeen years in Saskatoon and I knew its corners, its ins and outs thoroughly. Everywhere I looked I saw familiar faces, people I saw on the street every day, even when I had no names for them. I had spent a total of nine years on the university campus and could remember when it had had only two thousand students and
half the buildings it had when I left. I was a member of a large family, with cousins in the city, and nieces and nephews, and not far away aunts and uncles on both my mother’s and father’s sides, and until their deaths, grandparents too. I had never been without that sense of being part of a family, not even when I’d lived in other provinces; it was not something I’d ever given a thought to.

It’s true, though, that I often found the day-to-day living of this life of freedom in many ways terribly hard. I had been raised expecting to be supported by a man and had been trained to be a good wife and mother. Although I’d always worked, I’d never before felt the real burden to succeed in order to support my family in quite the way men do, as a burden they are raised to shoulder, even do with some pride and eagerness. In my career I had to learn all the skills men are so good at, like taking full responsibility, standing up for myself, expecting without thought to take care of myself and my child.

Still, the benefits seemed to me to outweigh the problems, and the most wonderful benefit of all was my women friends. I’d been one of a group, some of whom I’d known for twenty years and others whom I’d just met, who were companions, confidantes, intellectual peers, colleagues, people to go to parties with and plays, concerts, movies and for walks in the park, to eat lunch with, to have over for dinner and who had me to their houses, women to whom I could go, and they to me, when we had to talk to someone, with whom we would trust our deepest secrets. My dearest friends from those days are still my dearest friends, even though they are scattered across the country now, and I see each of them perhaps once a year. Together we were inventing a new world, and that resulted in ties so deep to each other that they’ll never be broken in this life.

We were part of the ferment of the new wave of feminism that had risen in the sixties and peaked in the seventies. We were meeting in
consciousness-raising groups, whether formally constituted as such or not; we were speaking to each other, for most of us for the first time, as sisters, even though we were not blood relatives and often not even intimate friends. We were breaking down some of the barriers that had existed between individual women as far back as we could remember or had heard about from our mothers, and were seeing that we were a race, a tribe, a nation of people, when we had thought each of us belonged to our mothers and to men.

We were exploring womanhood too, well beyond the stereotypes we’d been raised in: what it is to be female, to be wives and mothers, to approach the world as female beings. We were searching for and finding our power through deliberately trying to tear down the walls of fear society, we had believed, had forced us to erect between us.

So our friendships were wider, deeper, and there were more of them than most of us, at least of my age, had had since we’d graduated from high school and left childhood behind. They also held a more important place in the lives of each one of us. We supported each other at work and in our private lives; it sometimes seems to me that we lived in a sense collectively. It was, I see now, a wonderful time to be a woman, even though what united us primarily, beyond our femaleness, were our common struggles and suffering in a time when, on the one hand, we were being told and telling each other that women could do and be anything we wanted, and on the other, nobody was admitting how very hard that was turning out to be.

But we were also having a lot of fun; it seemed every weekend one of us gave a party where we danced and talked and ate and danced some more, not going home till the sun was rising. We were nearly all divorced, separated or otherwise unmarried, many of us
products of the fifties with our overdeveloped superegos, and in our newfound feminism we were experiencing for the first time in our lives a sense that there were endless possibilities to our own lives, not just the single, precise picture we’d been raised to believe was the only possibility: a husband, several children, a house, a car, a lawn to mow, rugs to vacuum, dishes to wash. Although men were also present, it was understood that their presence was great but not necessary, and that we were a gang, not a group of couples, for we were realizing that—oh, most amazing fact of all—we could have fun with each other and as a group, we didn’t have to wait around till an individual man invited us. And that realization alone gave us back some of the power we’d lost.

All of this is to say that my women friends had become so firmly woven into the fabric of my life that they were as vital to me as breathing, that I knew I would miss them as much as I would miss the blood sisters I was leaving behind. It also meant that I took it for granted that in time I’d find a new set of women friends with whom I could share my life in the same way I had with my friends in the city, and so I approached the women I was meeting in my new community blithely, eagerly, wholly unaware that things worked differently in the country.

One of the things which I am constantly having to correct people about is the urban perception that rural life is the same whether it’s small-town life, or farm or ranch life. Farm life is very different from ranch life although there are similarities, especially for people who do mixed farming. But on a true ranch the primary business is the care and feeding of cattle, big herds of them, who lead a semi-wild life out on the range and whose care necessitates for the ranchers a life lived out in the wilderness in all kinds of weather, and it is true,
the worse the weather, the more the cattle need you. Farming means growing grain and that is a spring-to-fall job with a free winter, and it takes place on land that, by definition, is no longer wilderness.