Mrs. Mike by Benedict Freedman
"Did you tell her?"
"She said, 'When they're little, sickness. When they're big, war.'"
I remembered the first time I'd seen Timmy. He came riding up with Constance Cameron. "He held the puppy up for me to see, and I held up Mary Aroon."
"Yes," Mike answered. "Remember that? She was bundled right up to her nose." He broke off suddenly and looked at me carefully for a long time. Then he smiled.
"Mike," I said, "it just came out. I was thinking of it and then I'd said it." He reached for my hand.
"On the way home I was thinking about the time she got her head caught in the porch railing. I wanted to talk about it, but I didn't know I was going to."
We sat together, the memories holding us silent. When words came we hardly noticed, they were so much a continuation of our thoughts.
"You used to say she was a born actress. Remember, Mike?"
"She was too. Remember the time Ralph fell off the bed, all the attention he got?"
"And a couple of hours later Mary Aroon fell off too!" We were both laughing now.
"Kathy," Mike said, "you're crying."
"No, I'm not." He held up his hand. It was wet with my tears.
"I didn't know it," I said.
We sat a long time watching the shadows of the trees stretch over the grass.
The world outside, the noisy quarreling world that sent us the wires of death, sent us a new death. Born in the dirt of European trenches, in the fall of 1918, the flu spread into the Canadian Northwest. And we died, again without doctors, serum, or help. Even the wild forest creatures died. The bear was the only red-blooded animal to escape it. But then, as Mike says, nothing affects bears.
I followed Sarah into the bedroom of the Beauclaire cabin. She closed the door and we stood in darkness, listening to the soft voice of Bishop Grouard. It came to us indistinctly from beyond the door, a low murmur, rising and falling in benediction, in prayer. His deep tones were punctuated by feeble responses, barely audible. The pauses were awful. They might mean she hadn't the strength to answer, or they might mean she was dead. I was getting used to the dark. I saw the big square shape that was a bureau; I saw the twins asleep in their bed.
Sarah's voice came out of the shadows. "Too bad. She live enough just to see her children dead." I couldn't answer her, and the darkness was thick between us.
After a while the Bishop called to us. He was pulling on his coat. In the corner by the door an Indian child stood crying.
The Bishop sighed. "I am needed in another home for the same purpose." He turned for the last time toward the bed, but Constance lay with eyes closed, unmoving, unknowing. He went out, the child following him. Death was everywhere.
Georges sat huddled by the bed. But it was many hours before Constance moved or spoke. Once she opened her eyes and said, "I know I'm dying. But, Kathy, I'm so tired I don't care." Georges jumped up and began to plead with her. But Sarah only nodded. "She does not care. I know. At the end there are only the children, and when they go . . . nothing."
I smoothed her pillow. It was made from a flour sack. I smiled when I remembered the way I had first pictured Constance. What a shame to have put her in satin skirts heavy with brocade. I realized now that there was no place for the sapphire rings in golden settings that I had wanted for her. You would not encumber hands with jewels and have them mend and wash and handle babies. Constance's hands had always fascinated me. They lay, slim and brown, against the covers. You would not think there was the strength in them to make such a life, dig it out of nothing.
Why was I thinking everything in a new way? Where was the Kathy who had longed for finery and romance? Because she had once been me, was she closer to me now than any other?
More hours. I heard my mother saying, "There are those in this world born to sorrow." Why had I always pitied Constance? I couldn't understand it now. She had had sorrow: her family, all her children—gone. But death does not stand at the end of life, it is all through it. It is the fear of losing, the knowledge of losing that makes love tender. I remembered what she had said about the little things being the important things. I felt closer to her than I ever had. So much of what she had said came back to me. I remembered how she had talked to me that first day in Grouard. I hadn't liked it then, her emphasis on the fact that she and I were white, the only white women. There were already strong ties of love and friendship between me and my Indian neighbors.
I had Sarah. But now I understood. It wasn't that she meant. She had tried to say, "You and I came to this country. We have known other things. The rest were born here, so they live here. But we chose it, you and I, and we are the only ones."
I bent over her. I wanted to say, "Yes, now I see. I understand you. And I can be a better friend than I ever was." But she lay so still.
We sat through the night. I felt stiff and cold. Sarah got up to prepare a fresh broth of herbs. But Constance remained motionless. Her lips were parted, and her breath came and went too gently.
I watched it grow light. Mike came to take my place, to beg me to sleep. She opened her eyes again, looked at all of us, knew us.
"Mike and Kathy, take the twins."
Georges threw himself across the bed, sobbing, clutching at her with his red hands. She patted him absently, as she would a child. She spoke. "It's cold," she said. And then, "Timmy, light the fire."
That was all. I cried against Mike's coat for one of the dearest friends I ever had.
All the while I was conscious of Sarah moving about, silently doing the things that must be done. She grieved, but who would lay out Constance's blue cotton dress, who would wash the body and prepare it, if not Sarah? So she went sorrowing from one task to another. At first I didn't try to help her. I didn't want to touch Constance. The body of a loved person is a terrible mockery. It says, "Look, I am still here," when you know she is not there. I had held those hands and kissed that mouth and combed that hair. I didn't want to do it again now.
Sarah passed me with a kettle in her hands. Her back was terribly bent, and her motions were slow. I had never before seen how old she was. But she didn't stop working. Her love for Constance wasn't wasted like mine in mourning and grief.
I shook off my numbness. I opened the door and went into the other bedroom. Two little figures stood on the bed. One had a shirt over his head which Mike was trying to pull past his ears.
"Here," I said, "you've got to unbutton another button."
"Then you'd have to take the whole thing off," he protested.
"There are times when it pays to start all over again, and this is one of them."
The child's feet started prancing, and a muffled sob came from behind the plaid shirt. I took it off and smoothed back the tousled brown curls.
"Were you scared in there?" I asked.
The boy shook his head.
"He was!" I turned from little Georges to little Connie. I was terribly startled to see the large lavender eyes of her grandmother looking out at me from that baby face. I had never realized how alike they were. Little Connie had the same delicate features, a haunting sweetness in her mouth. I wondered if I would find my Constance again in this four-year-old.
Although she was only standing in her underwear, I whispered to her that we could beat Mike and little Georges. We did, and then watched Mike struggle with her twin's coat. Every time Mike put it on, the sleeves of the baby's various shirts and sweaters were carried up into such a knot that the coat sleeve couldn't be pulled over it. Connie and I helped by putting all sleeve ends firmly in little Georges' hands. The coat went on.
We hurried them through the front room and out of the house. I went back to tell old Georges that he was to come to see the children all the time—that they needed their grandfather. I don't think he heard me. His eyes were sunken and almost closed. He seemed dazed. But maybe he was just thinking a long way back. Maybe somewhere in his mind a young man with a fifty-pound sack of flour on his back trudged barefoot
Mike had kept the children busy building a snow man. We couldn't persuade them to leave it except by promising them a new one when they got home.
That night Mike played he was a bear. And when we went to bed the house was in a litter, a wonderful exciting litter of cutouts and spilled jam and cookie crumbs. Mike caught me around the waist while I was cleaning up.
"Well, girl?"
"Oh, Mike—" I couldn't say anything else because I was crying and getting kissed all at once.
Twenty-eight
It was wonderful having children in the house again. The long hours Mike was away were suddenly filled for me. The twins played well with each other. Of course it was up to me to get them started. But once I had set out chips and blocks from the kindling, they would spend intense hours piling them in stacks. I taught them little French songs that I had heard Constance sing. And at night when they roughhoused with Mike, I worked on a blue dress for Connie to wear Sundays. I thought I would make a blouse for Georges out of what was left. I worked late over it. Long after the children were in bed, Mike and I discussed them and planned for them. Mike thought it would be nice for Georges to be a Mounty, and I thought that maybe Connie would be a nurse. We decided that Old Irish Bill would give them music when they became six. The picture of a pretty white-starched nurse faded, and I saw Connie bowing instead to an audience at Symphony Hall and seating herself at the organ for another encore.
The blue dress was done. Connie hopped up and down impatiently while I buttoned it on. Then she stood back for me to see. I looked at her and burst into tears.
"Come here, Connie. I've got to take it off you."
Now it was her turn to cry. I promised her another dress, much prettier, any color she liked, only not blue. In blue she became her grandmother, her eyes became the same strange lavender. It broke my heart. I traded in the blue material for red, and that night started a new dress. While I worked, Mike read me the poems of Bobby Burns that we had borrowed again from the McTavishes. I loved to hear him declaim, "A man's a man."
It was one of these evenings when Jonathan Forquet walked into the room, holding in his arms a solemn-eyed baby.
"I come to my friends." He said it half-defiantly.
Jonathan was Jonathan. It had been eight years, but he had the same proud way about him.
"Is it your baby?" I asked, coming toward him. "Is Oh-Be-Joyful with you?"
He looked at me and answered slowly. "Can you not see that she is dead?"
Then I did see it. I saw it in the black eyes that looked hopelessly into my own. The lids were heavy . . . Jonathan had cried.
"The sickness?" I asked him. "The flu?"
"The sickness, it took her, Mamanowatum." He lifted the baby toward me, and before I knew it I had her in my arms. Jonathan watched me as I held her.
"From ten sleeps away I bring you. Mamanowatum, she call her Kathy. She want this winter come show you girl-child, come show you happiness. Now she no come ever. Only I come, say, 'Keep baby.' No want Mission for keep her. They not like me. They not like my father."
Mike came over to me. "We'll keep her, won't we, Kathy?"
"Yes," I said. "Of course."
Jonathan nodded "You are my friends. I knew. I come, bring furs once, twice, in the year. You sell. Feed, make clothes for girl-child." He hesitated. I knew there was something else.
He spoke in Cree: "Mamanowatum . . . many winters we are together, always the canoe sings in the river and the paths we walk are of happiness. You will say that to the girl-child? You will tell her of the joyful heart of Mamanowatum!"
Mike patted him roughly on the shoulder. We stood in the doorway and watched him walk into the night. He was alone, as he had been before he knew the gentleness and the love of Oh-Be-Joyful. The baby reached out after him, but the little fist closed on emptiness.
I turned to Mike. Oh-Be-Joyful, the girl with black stockings sitting primly in punishment row ... I saw her laughing, scrubbing a pot with the same intensity with which she had clung to that pile of pelts, Jonathan's present. I heard again the story of Fleet Foot, heard her chattering to Mary Aroon in Cree.
Mike crouched on his heels and looked earnestly at the round copper face of the baby. "She's a cute little mite." He ran a finger lightly under her chin, and she dimpled all over. Mike grinned back, "Hello, Kathy." He winked at me, "We can't have two Ka-thies. Let's call her Kate."
Kate. This brown Indian baby had my name, perhaps part of my destiny. "My more-than-sister," Oh-Be-Joyful had called me. And her child was closer to me than my own sister's. I murmured the name, "Kate." I pictured Oh-Be-Joyful saying it, bending over her child, thinking of me, whispering my name. She lived in the wild world of brilliant summer colors, she walked through the clean pine woods of the North, among the cries, the calls, the flapping of wings, the swaying of bush, surrounded by life, part of it, free in it; at the height of her happiness, her child in her arms, she had thought of me.
"Mike," I said, "it's very strange . . . and I want to understand. What does it all mean?"
"Well, there's a pattern," Mike said. "The baby is Kate and you are Katherine, and it's right that you should have her."
"A pattern?"
"Yes. I don't mean the names exactly. But Oh-Be-Joyful was part of the pattern of your life, and things like that don't just stop. Things from her life will come into yours, into ours, as long as we live."
I knew what he meant by this pattern. It wasn't something you could put into words, but you could sense it behind everything. If you tried to talk about it, all you could say was something trite, like water is always watery, and leaves are like leaves. But it did have a meaning. You could see that events were like the people they happened to. Oh-Be-Joyful's life had always had that intense emotion and pathetic grasping after happiness that my mother said was characteristic of those "who are not long for this world." Perhaps on another day I would laugh at this and consider it superstition, but this day, watching Oh-Be-Joyful's baby in Mike's arms, I saw the pattern too.
Stretched on the loom was the huge white cloth of the North. We were the threads. Short and long, our ways stretched across it, bright and dull: Oh-Be-Joyful, born here, loving it because it was her home; Constance, coming because she hadn't a better place, because she must make a new life for herself; and I—I had come thinking I was different, that I could choose my own place in the world; but I was woven in as firmly as the others. There was a time when I had tried to run away. Everything up here had suddenly become too big for me. The great sweeps: winter, cold and white, the coldest and the whitest; summer, the northern lights hanging terrifyingly in the air. I had tried to escape, like Mrs. Neilson, who had gone back to New York, or Mrs. Marlin, who had gone insane.
But when I left Mike, I left myself, I left the Katherine Mary the North had made. I was part of Grouard. Sarah had nursed me; I had nursed Randy. Constance had mended my clothes; I had mended James McTavish's plaid. Oh-Be-Joyful had cared for and loved my children, and now it was I who was to care for and love hers. Mike was right: the pattern of a life isn't a straight line; it crosses and recrosses, drawing in and tying together other lives, as I do when I gather in the ends of my thread to make a knot.
"It's strange," I said, "but love for a place has to grow in you, the same as any other kind of love."
"Do you really love it, Kathy?" Mike said in a low voice, playing absently with the Indian baby. "You've had a hard time up here, and perhaps not a very happy one, and I can't promise that it'll be any different."
"I don't want it any different if it can be with you." I didn't move. I felt too much in love to touch him or even look at him.
"Mike, I feel almost like when I was a kid and ate all the Easter candy before my sisters got up. Look at me. I have everything. And then think of Jonathan with only emptiness in his life."
"He had what he wanted, and still h
"But for such a little while."
"They had it, and that's what's important!"
Mike reached up and pulled me down on the floor beside himself and little Kate. He rocked us each in a big arm.
"I'm thinking back a way, Kathy. Not very far, when you and I were alone too."
I began to see. The pattern of things half-formed itself against the jumble of incidents before I lost it again.
There was great excitement the next morning when the twins found out they had a baby sister. We told them they could celebrate any way they wanted. It wasn't hard for them to decide. They'd been after Mike for days to take them out in the snow.
Mike laughed. "Okay, Kathy, dress 'em up. I'll meet you on the porch." And he went off on some errand of his own.
When the last fur mitten was on the last twin, I sent them out to wait while I bundled up the baby and dressed myself.
It was a wonderful winter's day, clear and cold and dry, with the sun shining. I came up close to see what Mike was working over. It was our old sled. I thought he had burned it or hacked it to pieces, but evidently it had only been hidden, probably under the wood pile. He was oiling the runners and rubbing off seven years of rust. The twins were busy rubbing too. Mike looked at me over the heads of the children. "I just came across it the other day, and I thought they'd have a lot of fun with it." I smiled at him, and he smiled back, relieved.
"All aboard. Everybody in!" There was a wild scramble, and more arms and legs than I thought we possessed even collectively.
Mike swung into the wind. It was good to watch him striding through unbroken snow, but I was content—back here in the sled, keeping the children from falling out the hole.
It was a magic cutter. We sailed across a frozen sea. Georges was captain and yelled orders to Connie, who yelled them at the trees and drifts and clouds.
"Warm enough?" Mike asked when we were at the top of the hill.
"Yes."
The twins were pulling at him, demanding a snow fight, but he still looked at me, unsatisfied.