Road Ends (26 page)

“Can’t he?” Emily asked vaguely, doing up buttons.

“No, he cannot,” I said, unable to keep the annoyance out of my voice. She’d switched off—it was perfectly evident—and I can’t believe it isn’t deliberate; she simply prefers not to think about anything difficult or unpleasant. “He’s wasting his life and it’s time he pulled himself together. I’ve been trying to think what we could do or say to help him and I wondered if you had any thoughts on the subject.”

“Me?”

“You are his mother, Emily. What do you think we ought to do?”

She looked at me and just for a moment it was as if a fog had lifted and she’d actually heard me and taken in what I’d said. Then it was gone. She turned back to the baby and gathered him up, cupping his small bald head in her hand. “I don’t know what to do about anything,” she said to him. “Except you. I always know what to do about you.”

This morning I phoned Ralph Robertson at the high school. I explained that Emily was fully occupied with a new baby and I was very busy and asked if we could have our chat about Peter and Corey over the phone instead of my going to see him. He said he’d rather I came in, which is irritating. We’ve fixed a date for next week.

On the plus side, a letter has arrived from Megan. She wrote and posted it more than three months ago, so it predates several we’ve had since then. God knows where it’s been in the interim. Anyway, it seems that a mere three years after arriving in England
Megan has finally paid a visit to the National Gallery. If I were a drinking man I’d have a drink in celebration. She describes it as “really amazing.” High praise. She enclosed a postcard of
The Execution of Lady Jane Grey
by Paul Delaroche, of whom I’d never heard. A strange choice of picture on Megan’s part, I would have thought, but Delaroche is clearly very good, I will have to look him up. Lady Jane Grey I have heard of. I believe she was a pawn in the games of powerful men around the time of Henry VIII and ended up having her head cut off. I’ll look her up too.

I took the letter up to Emily and found her drifting around the room in her nightgown with the baby over her shoulder—it made me wonder if she’s been dressed at all today. When I said there was a letter from Megan she gave me an angelic smile and continued drifting. I put the letter on the bed for her to read when she comes back to earth. I didn’t give her the card. I thought the subject might disturb her.

She was looking quite beautiful. That is the one thing about Emily that has not declined over the years; if anything, I’d say she is more beautiful now than she was when I first met her. Not that beauty matters, but for some reason when you’re young you think it does. Though possibly when you’re young you just don’t think.

Emily’s father became the principal at our high school during my final year—the family moved up from Hamilton in order for him to take the job. From my point of view the timing was good because by then things had become very bad between me and my father, and Emily was a welcome diversion, you might say.

In addition to being the best-looking girl I’d ever seen, I thought she was the cleverest, though it turned out I was wrong about that. Coming from an educated family she spoke well, and I mistook that for intelligence. I’m not saying Emily is stupid, just that she isn’t as smart as she sounds.

Even so she was the only one of my classmates I was ever
able to talk to. I don’t recall now what we talked about but travel and art certainly came into it. She let on she shared my dreams of seeing the world and I was innocent enough to believe her.

That isn’t fair. It suggests she was like a spider, spinning a trap, and I don’t suppose she consciously did that. No doubt she imagined herself in love with me and was trying to be interested in my interests. I imagined myself in love with her too. It has always struck me as a mistake on Mother Nature’s part that we make the most important decisions of our lives when we’re too young to have any idea of the consequences.

I’ve returned to Mother’s diaries—the final section. I’ve been putting it off, but having started this venture I feel I owe it to her to finish it. Then I will know her story, as much as it can be known.

I would have been in my teens when she wrote the last of the entries that survived the fire, and by then we had been on the farm for some years. Our lives were incomparably easier there than they had been in the early days, so it is ironic that this was when the deterioration in her writing began.

The farm was a gift from my mother’s parents. I didn’t realize that until today and it explains a lot, but it puzzled me considerably when I read it. For eight years she had refused to see or accept help of any kind from her family and then all of a sudden she capitulated and accepted a farm. That was quite a climb-down. There was nothing in the diaries to account for it and it wasn’t until I was working out how old we children were when we moved to the farm that it suddenly made sense.

I was seven and Alan and Harry were eight. School age. Out of loyalty to my father my mother had been prepared to sacrifice almost anything, but she couldn’t bring herself to sacrifice our schooling. She’d been teaching us herself for several years but she would have been aware of her own limitations. The only solution
was for us to stop traipsing around the North and settle down near a town with a school, and her parents offered her the only means of making that happen.

She must have agonized over that decision. She would have known how my father would take it, the message it would send to him. But she’d also have known there was no other choice. He’d been prospecting for the better part of a decade by then, promising the earth and delivering nothing, and had walked out of or been fired from every job he’d ever had.

“Stanley says he will not work for fools,”
she has scribbled on a scrap of newsprint not much bigger than my thumb, “
and that they are all fools
.”

Quite.

The farm was certainly a generous gift but probably not as extravagant as it sounds. It was 1929 when we moved there. The price of silver was falling and the mines were closing. Towns that had grown up around them were dwindling away until in some places nothing was left of them but the giant corrugated iron head frames that towered over the landscape. Some of the head frames are still there. They are magnificent in their way. Like giant rusted dinosaurs.

With the miners gone, the surrounding farms had no one to sell their produce to. Eventually many of the farmers just upped and left—walked out of their farmhouses with nothing but what they could carry on their backs and headed south, looking for work. Their loss was our gain; my mother’s father would have picked up the farm for a fraction of what it was worth. It was thirty miles from his own farm. I’m sure he and my grandmother would have preferred it to be closer, but my mother would have drawn the line at that.

To anyone accustomed to a halfway normal existence the farm would have looked alarmingly primitive but from my mother’s point of view it must have been luxury. It was just three miles
from the lumber town of Jonesville, which is a ghost town now, but back then it boasted a church, a post office and a general store as well as the all-important school. After the isolation of the mining camps it must have seemed like a metropolis.

The farmhouse itself was only a log cabin but it was large and well-built, with three good bedrooms and a big living room/kitchen with a fireplace at one end and a range at the other. We children thought it was a palace and after so long in the bush I imagine my mother did too. I remember her standing in the centre of the living room on the day we arrived, very slowly turning full circle to take it all in—the rounded, well-chinked logs, the solid floor and neat, tightly fitted windows—her expression a curious mixture of disapproval and delight: disapproval because an easier life for herself had not been her goal; delight because she was a woman, after all, and a home meant a great deal to her. She was probably trying not to love it. Trying but failing. I remember when she’d completed her circle she walked over to the range and bent down and kissed one of the stove lids, then straightened up and turned to face us, laughing, her mouth and nose all black from the stove, her face luminous with relief and joy.

It is hard to overstate the difference it must have made to her life. Up until then we had moved so often there had never been time to get a vegetable garden established or enough land cleared to raise a single cow. It was a hand-to-mouth existence in those early mining camps, and that is desperate enough if you have only yourself to feed. The farm, by contrast, although small—just fifty acres—came complete with four cows, half a dozen chickens and a large kitchen garden. It was far enough from town that there was game around and from the first snowfall each year we would put out a couple of handfuls of hay every day to attract the deer and whenever we needed meat we’d shoot one. There were ducks and geese in season, there were eggs from the chickens and milk, cheese and butter from the cows. In the summer
there were wild blueberries and strawberries, which Mother bottled and sold in the town along with any surplus from the garden.

I’m making it sound idyllic. It was subsistence farming and grindingly hard work, but now at least there was always something to put on the table at suppertime. You had to grow it or catch it or shoot it and you had to know where to look for it and you had to know how to preserve it, but having come from a pioneering background my mother knew all of those things.

My father did not.

She was right, it was a foolish thing to say.

I wonder if he knew, deep down, that he was not very smart and had no talents and no skills and nothing special to offer the world. I’ve always assumed the opposite—that he had a ludicrously high opinion of himself—but maybe that wasn’t so. Maybe in the darkest hours of the night a cold chill of self-knowledge stole in and he saw that by his own definition he was a nobody. A failure. Maybe that was at the heart of his anger.

In which case when my mother, breaking her promise to him, accepted the farm from her parents, he would have seen it as proof that she saw him for what he really was.

Is that enough to explain the change in my mother’s writing and the bruises we hid under our clothes? I think it could be. Back then a man who couldn’t support his family was not a man. The farm would have reminded him of that every day.

Why didn’t he leave us? God knows I for one fervently wished that he would. But he wasn’t one to let anything go, my father. My mother was his and so the farm was his, no matter that he despised it. It gave him free bed and board, and if my mother managed to sell some of the produce from the kitchen garden, well, the money was his too. It kept him in drink.

I have found something—it caught my eye because of the name on it. My mother wrote it on the back of a brown paper bag, the sort that flour and sugar used to come in.

Mr. Sabatini was my geography teacher. A remarkable man; Italian, as his name suggests. He had a flair for languages and had been everywhere, not as a tourist but living and working in each country for a year or more, generally as a teacher. I don’t know how he ended up so far north. Perhaps he was running from something, or perhaps someone told him that the essence of this country is not to be found in its cities but in its wilderness. Either way, I was fortunate that he did.