Sanctuary Line (7 page)

“He was such a shy boy, so timid.” My mother said this without naming him, as if waiting to see if I would ask her to stop. When I didn’t, she leaned back into the cushions she had arranged in her armchair and added, “As you know, every summer we went across the lake to Sadie’s farm.”

I did know this. At the end of the summers of her childhood, just before the beginning of the apple harvest, when the first crops of summer fruit had been picked and the apples were almost mature, my grandfather would leave the farm for a week in the care of hired hands. Along with my grandparents, my mother and her older brothers were expected to visit their American relatives across the lake in Erie County, Ohio. This was an attempt to maintain their connection with one of the bifurcating though solidly landloving arms of the family.

“Great-Uncle John’s farm,” I corrected, naming the true owner of the place. Sadie, as she was during that long-gone time, was to my mind just a child, passing through, really, on her way to becoming the adult woman I knew – my aunt – firmly planted on our side of the lake.

I knew the history of this particular bifurcation as well: my uncle had, of course, been the deliverer of all that
information. It concerned two very different yet equally significant reactions to the American War of Independence. In 1786, one Butler brother, Amos by name, had found after ten years of prayer and meditation that he must remain loyal to the same British monarchy that had established the Butlers – all those years ago – in Ireland. (Butler’s Court, by the way, the family seat, was much referred to by my uncle in his tales and was a place that, after much research, I discovered to be entirely fictional.) So Amos assembled his family of six and set out for the British colony of Upper Canada, which, fortunately for him, was only a two-day journey by horse and wagon and a short boat ride across Lake Erie. He had been granted land in the vicinity of Leamington in Essex County, where, after removing an unimaginable amount of hardwood forest, he planted the same variety of apple tree – the Kaziah Red, named for his wife – that had so flourished on his father’s farm in northern Ohio. Samuel, brother of Amos, after much meditating and praying (they were fierce Methodists) felt that he must be true to the New Republic of the United States of America as he, and his father, had favoured Irish emancipation from the British in spite of the fact that it was men just like him, living in houses very similar to the fictional Butler’s Court, who were making that emancipation so difficult. The American Revolution looked to him like a similar but more successful attempt at the same kind of much-desired liberation.

After this second migration, the first being from Ireland, the sons of Amos Butler began to move west along the north shore of Lake Erie, my own great-great-grandfather establishing the famous orchards our uncle spoke about, which were all cut down and burned and turned into McIntosh plantings just before my cousins and I were born. At the turn of the twentieth century, a member of the third Butler line, a bachelor lighthouse-keeper, emigrated from Ireland to America and eventually established himself as keeper of the light at the Point where I now work and over which I watch the sun rise almost every morning of my life.

The Point was a very different spit of land by the time I was born. The lighthouse was mechanized, and a provincial bird sanctuary was established there. The pier was closed down and the name of old Point Road was changed to Sanctuary Line.

“As far as I’m concerned, Sanctuary Line is still the old Point Road,” my mother said, as if following my thoughts. “When I and my brothers were driven along it and then along the Talbot Highway, five miles to Kingsville, there was never any thought that a road could have its name changed to something else. The car was ferried from there, from Kingsville – I remember all those wonderful old elm trees – first to Pelee Island, then across the lake to Sandusky, Ohio. I admire the Americans, but I greatly disapprove of their politics,” she told me, not for the first time. “But,” she added vaguely, “I suppose I wouldn’t have been thinking of
that at the time. Was it during the war?” she asked herself.

“Yes,” I answered, “but not the war you disapprove of.”

“We,” she said, meaning the family, “escaped the war at that time. Partly because everyone was either too young or had taken the agricultural exemption.” She was quiet for a moment. “Dear Mandy,” she said, as if thinking that fate had decided on her death based on an exemption chosen by the previous generation in a completely different war. I looked at my uncle’s photo again. In it he, too, was dressed in a kind of uniform, but a uniform designed for no war at all. He was a young man at the time, just a boy, really, and almost anyone would think that the harness he was wearing was one that had recently been or was about to be attached to a parachute. But I knew that it was a picker’s harness, and that there were two clasps at the front, to which a basket that would soon be filled with cherries or peaches would be attached. I say peaches or cherries because I can see phlox
(P. divaricata
species of the Polemoniaceae family) growing at the edge of the wood lot in the picture, and it would have stopped blooming by the time the apple harvest was underway.

“I remember looking at the American shoreline from the ferry; how everything there got larger and larger as we got nearer,” my mother said. “It’s the kind of thing you notice as a child.”

How serene that slow, cadenced voyage must have been; the old Loyalist houses sliding by car windows that were
rolled down for the breeze, the ferry at Kingsville, the picnic on Pelee Island, the second journey by ferry, the view from which would have included orchards and barns that were a mirror image of the orchards and barns on and around the family’s own farm. Yet I think that small family might have moved with unconscious caution through this geographical double, sensing a strangeness on that side of the looking-glass: something to do with one extra degree of orderliness, tidiness, prosperity; your own world improved so subtly that you could feel the change without being able to identify it. The waves approaching that shoreline would be moving in a direction opposite to the direction chosen by their own waves. The same moon would rise in a different part of the sky. And, somehow, though one would hardly dare admit it, almost everything would have seemed to be more certain, confident, independent, and, as my uncle always said, with irony in his voice, “The biggest and the best.” It is true, of course, that we are never entirely comfortable in the midst of places or people we admire too much.

There were three children in that other, opposite place, second cousins of approximately the same age as the three children arriving from the northern side of the lake. Tom was paired by age and gender with the boy who would become my Uncle Stanley; Rupert, who was a year older, spent his time with Harry. And then there was the already self-possessed Sadie, who someday would become my aunt but who for now took my mother, Beth, for her companion.

There was also a butterfly tree on that farm so that some summers my mother and her brothers saw that burning bush on the north side of the lake and other summers witnessed the same miracle to the south. My mother told me that until she was about fourteen she believed that every farm had such a tree and experienced such an event.

“One summer,” my mother said, “when we pulled up the American farm lane we could hardly believe what we were seeing.” They had driven, you understand, into the immediate aftermath of misfortune. When they stepped out of the car the air still held the taste and smell of ash, and charred timbers latticed the stone foundation of what had, just days before, held up the barn. Tom, normally a clumsily energetic boy, did not run out of the house as he had each summer to greet them. Playing with matches, two days earlier, he had accidentally set the barn on fire and it had burned out of control for twelve hours.

Farming being what it was, and childhood being what it is, this would have been considered to be a spectacular tragedy, though being primarily an orchard farm, the animals, only five – two cows, a pony, and two workhorses – had been saved. The pony belonged to Tom, and his father had made a heroic effort to release it from the burning barn and was relieved, he said, to have been able to do so because he was concerned about Tom, about the guilt, perhaps even the anguish, the boy might feel about the accident. The concern was real; the guilt was as well.

But as the days went by, a theatrical element entered the way that Tom was attended to, or at least this is what I’ve gathered from what my mother told me, and how I like to imagine it now. There would have been a kind of celebrity attached to the event and to the boy who had unintentionally caused it to happen.

“Tom was treated with great tenderness by his parents,” my mother said, “almost as if he were an invalid.” The other children were not permitted to be rough with him or to taunt him in any way, even if the taunts had nothing at all to do with the barn. His father encouraged Tom to come along with him if he had errands in town, something that would likely never have occurred to the man in the past, and his mother would stop talking or working as the boy walked by, brush the hair back from his forehead, and ask him what he would like to do with the morning, the afternoon, or if there was anything special he wanted for supper. He became, in essence, a sacred child. There would have been a peculiar radiance about him: he was completely unlike the boisterous boy my mother remembered from previous summer visits. He had evolved into a miniature adult, wanted less to run with his sister and his cousins than to work in the fields with his father or help him mend a fence or paint a door.

They were harrowing during that period, breaking up a fallow field because my American great-uncle had decided that he wanted to begin to grow strawberries as well as
apples the following year. Tom was encouraged to participate, was even permitted to drive the team that pulled the heavy rack of iron teeth across the earth, and Stanley, my future uncle, would have desperately wanted to be included. “But, in all likelihood, he was not asked,” my mother said. “And he would have not dared to make the suggestion. Children – in those times – did not initiate anything, really, did only what they were told to do.”

And yet, there was his American cousin, his mirror image, his doppelganger welcomed into what until that time would have looked to him like an impenetrable adult world, and welcomed, furthermore, as a blessed recruit whose frailties and hesitancies were pandered to rather than scoffed at.

The fond pandering would not have been lost on the child my future uncle was then for, if I am to believe my mother, people like their own father, my grandfather, and my grandmother too to a certain degree, were not comfortable with a show of feelings. And yet surprisingly my grandparents were able to engage in long, earnest discussions concerning Tom’s predicament, discussions during which they allowed that the boy’s suffering had to be taken into account. This kind of focus on the boy’s feelings must have been quite foreign to them, and would have been absolutely absent from their own Methodist upbringing, which insisted, above all, on not calling attention to oneself or one’s own troubles. Stanley, overhearing some of these
conversations, would have felt the sweetness of how the talk circled, in a gentle way, around and around one particular boy’s inner life, and how that boy himself was the instigator of something magnificent: a night of heat and colour, an occurrence impossible to ignore, and then, in its wake, a whole season of solicitousness and care.

My mother and Sadie spent those two weeks making clothes for their dolls from scraps Sadie’s mother gave them. Then, with the help of Rupert and Harry’s carpentry skills, they devised an elaborate dollhouse out of wooden crates they’d found in the barn. The only interaction with her brother Stanley took place during the daily swim. And even then all the children effectively overlooked him, my mother and Sadie being intimately involved in shared imaginary worlds the way girl children sometimes are, and Harry and Rupert being enough older that they swam in deeper waters and dove from more alarmingly high rocks. So, mostly Stan, the child my uncle was then, was at loose ends, watching from a respectful distance as Tom talked with a clutch of adult men loitering at the edge of an orchard about the development and subtleties of varieties of apples. It must have seemed to Stanley as if the burning of the barn had been an adolescent rite of passage for Tom, after which he’d been invited, without hesitation, to join in the mysteries and ceremonies of adulthood.

Both my mother and her brother were frightened of their own taciturn father, though they always tried to please
him because they loved him and courted his good opinion. There were various chores, for example, that Stanley in particular would be required to perform, and my mother said that he would throw himself into any task with enthusiasm, only to be told by his father that there were worms in the bushel of apples he had picked or that the wood he had stacked made an uneven and therefore dangerous pile. With the exception of reading and composition, he did not excel in school (though my mother did) and this, too, rankled. At harvest time, he tired quickly and often froze on the upper rungs of a ladder. My mother remembered him clutching a branch and weeping while their father baited him, in full earshot of the workers, from his own safe position on the ground. “You’re twelve years old,” he would shout, “and you’re behaving like a six-year-old girl.” My grandfather would turn away then, in feigned disgust, leaving Stanley with apples and leaves and in full terror of what my mother claimed was hardly a life-threatening distance between him and the earth. It was she who crept out to the orchard at dusk after the other pickers had left in order to coax him down, rung by rung. There was always something in her that made her want to protect her brother, to actively defend him if necessary. She would continue to coax him down from dangerous heights many years later when he had begun to embrace, rather than avoid the fear, the vertigo.