Blood Secrets Page 6

  “I didn’t.”

  “But what will she think?”

  “What she already thinks. That you’re too good for me. That you need ablutions because you’re so pure and refined.”

  “But what about the blood?”

  “She’ll think I caught a live one. Good for me.”

  Before they left the farm to return to the city, they hung the washed sheets over the wintering hives to dry. Only the faintest stains remained.

  HIS MOTHER NEVER MENTIONED the sheets in all the years that followed that weekend. When they stayed at the farm, it was understood that they would sleep in the bees’ room. She always heard his mother kneading down the bread dough on the kitchen table, that warm sound in the kitchen that made her want to drag Graham back into the warm nest of the bed for another round of lovemaking. The wooden boxes were gone from the room after that first winter, and she had never seen them again, but the room still smelled like dry wings and honey to her. Just before the farm was sold and Graham’s mother moved into a nursing home, Dulcie needed to spend some private time there, placing her warm palms against the cold sloping plaster.

  She thought of this night over the years, but didn’t tell this story to anyone for a laugh. She’d been tempted once, when a friend had described how she had thrown up all over her husband on their first date and the way he had tenderly cleaned her up and delivered her to her parents’ door made her realize that she would marry him. The blood rite had been the same for her.

  WHEN THE CHILDREN WERE GROWN, she felt a need to be connected again to something physical, something to do with nurturing, so she became a volunteer at a hospice. She worked Saturday evenings.

  One night, she entered the room furthest away from the nurses’ station. A man lay on the bed, his bones supported by carefully placed pillows. His wife was standing over him, holding his face between her hands. She looked to be in her late seventies, while he seemed ageless, the skeleton that would endure underground long after he was gone from this bed. She was murmuring to him and Dulcie waited before introducing herself. She was saying his name softly. “James. Do you hear me? James, I love you.” She kissed his cracked lips and said it again. Dulcie felt like an intruder but couldn’t turn around and walk out of the room without breaking the spell between husband and wife. But she was wrong about intruding. The wife, Gwen, knew she was there and lifted her eyes, smiling with something like mischief. Dulcie took a step back, shocked, but then she reinterpreted the look she’d seen as warmth, an invitation.

  They talked easily about Gwen’s life with James and he followed along with his eyes, watching first one woman, then the other. His mind wasn’t clear enough to join the conversation.

  Gwen held her husband’s hand, telling Dulcie that she’d been spending nights in the room because her husband was afraid and wakeful between 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning. She was tired, but glad to have this time with him, alone, after all the busy years.

  Dulcie thought of how strange it was that love relationships started with that wakefulness, that full engagement with each other’s bodies in the middle of the night, then the middle-of-the-night needs of babies disrupting intimacy between husband and wife, before entering a long sleep of daily life through middle age. She hadn’t realized that the focus could flip, to the body and long nights again at the end. Almost as if a physical relationship was roused again in a different and even more intense form in old age. Even though he seemed to be emptied out, pale, bloodless. Death came on as a kind of gradual bleaching, the skin thinning and growing more dry. Just as her body was now starting to pale, her periods coming less frequently, and when they did, after an absence of months sometimes, she felt a melancholy for her lost fertility.

  Dulcie offered to give James a foot massage so Gwen could take a break, if she wanted one. After being in the room a few minutes she’d realized that James needed touch to keep him settled. Perhaps the morphine was causing agitation. Gwen stood over her husband, once again with her hands directing his gaze to her own, and said clearly and slowly, “This woman will give you a foot massage. Would you like that?” He seemed puzzled by the meaning of these words, but then smiled at his wife and nodded.

  Dulcie uncovered his beautiful white feet, so soft at the heels she could tell he had been in bed a long time, and began to rub lotion over the insteps, holding them firmly between her two hands and squeezing gently. He moaned and gave himself over to her touch. As she explored the toes and bones and gentle curves of his feet, she and Gwen talked about James’s job as a small engine mechanic, their children and grandchildren, how they met in the lineup for a movie in 1950. James broke up a skirmish between two inebriated men and prevented Gwen from being knocked over.

  Gwen held James’s hand as Dulcie held his feet and he was included in the gentle drifts of conversation, as if his body were the current holding everyone together. Dulcie was moved by how comfortable Gwen was with another woman touching her husband in this sensual way, comfortable with how much he was enjoying another woman’s touch.

  WHEN SHE GOT HOME, she told Graham about the couple in the hospice. Usually, he changed the subject, restless in the face of details he was not yet prepared to think about, but tonight he was attentive. When she was finished, he told her about a couple he sat beside on a plane as he was flying back from Calgary the week before. A couple about the same age as they were, the man staring straight ahead, unmoving, and the woman sexy, with a scoop-neck red sweater, gold chain resting on the smooth skin of her chest.

  “I get it. I get it,” she said.

  “This isn’t about her attractiveness, although she was one of those straight-backed, high-coloured women, very strong and very small. You know the type—built for multi-day canoe trips and vigorous bouts of Saturday afternoon sex.”

  “Dream on,” she told him. “So what’s the rest of the story?’

  “I thought they were estranged, the husband was so unresponsive.”

  “Ah, the rescue fantasy.”

  “No, I’m serious,” he said, a little sharply, so she let him tell his story unimpeded. He told her that the woman was obviously terrified of flying, buried her head in the stony man’s shoulder as they banked, gasping a little when the landing gear bumped up inside the airborne plane. But then he heard a murmuring from the man, a soft grunt, almost under his breath, although he didn’t turn his head towards his wife. I thought, “How cold can a guy be?”

  After a pause, which Dulcie left uninterrupted, he continued.

  “She had her arms, both of them, looped through his inert arm. It was strange.” Graham said.

  “But I had it all wrong. Once the meal came, she calmed down, and started to feed him, bite by bite, one spoonful for him, then a spoonful for her, then him. I noticed the braces on his hands and knew he had some horrible thing like Lou Gerhig’s disease.”

  “You don’t live long once you’re that sick. A year at most.”

  “I know. The strange thing is that they were able to communicate without words, Without his being able to do anything at all, he could comfort her. And for a minute, I found myself feeling a little jealous.”

  “Jealous. Why? Do you think I couldn’t do that for you?”

  If they had been younger, this would have been a cue for them to head to bed and reassert their claim on each other. Instead, they sat quietly, side by side. She wondered if he was thinking the same thing.

  She reached out and took his hand and although he didn’t answer, she felt the warm pressure of his fingers responding to her, as if by instinct and habit. He was preoccupied with his own thoughts. Maybe he hadn’t heard her at all.

  “My father never had that. Neither did my mother.”

  “Had what?” she asked.

  “The chance to face it together, to falter and fade and be kind to each other in different ways. She was folding laundry as he lay on the bed after morning chores. They were talking, about nothing in particular, nothing important. He stopped answering and she turned around
to see why, and he was dead.”

  “That’s awful. I used to think that was a good way to go, but now I’m not so sure. Your mom always talked about him as though she’d see him coming through the door tomorrow.”

  “Right to the end, she was sure she’d see him again. Ring wouldn’t let the undertakers take his body out the back door. She went crazy, so they had to back up and take him out the front way. We never used that door and the glass cracked trying to get it to open.”

  “I remember the cracked glass. I remember seeing it that first weekend.”

  She saw the glass in her mind’s eye, a fractured prism in the brilliant sunlight that cleared away the freezing rain of the night before. A luminous web, and it made her remember the smell of sleeping bees and damp cotton spread out over wintering hives, the secret blood fading in the sun that was strengthening by the day.

  Stone Deaf

  THE FLIGHT WAS UNSETTLING. Pressure changes worked their mischief in his ears, deadening sound. He swallowed hard. He had every reason to feel apprehension when sound suddenly dimmed, like tunnel vision of the ear. Both his parents had been deaf: his mother from birth, his father from a bout of meningitis at 18 months. Although he knew their deafness wasn’t something he would instantly manifest at the age of 44, he felt marked for silence all of his life.

  But it was more than that. The flight was unusually quiet. No one around him was speaking. He wondered if he had missed some cue of danger that others had picked up. He looked beyond the husband and wife sitting between him and the window and saw nothing strange through the small oblong window. The plane had lifted above the thin layer of vapour, gentle white hands hovering just above the warm layer of thick atmosphere. They were flying level now, in constant calm sunlight just above the hands. The jagged mountains, sediments thrust into the sky, were retreating in a line away from Calgary, all sparkling and new in the morning sun. In a few minutes they would leave even that connection with earth behind. He could barely see the perfect squares of prairie far below, scraped bare by glaciers from the last ice age and pocked with lines of ground water. He didn’t want to lean further towards the man beside him to see more. He could never be sure of the appropriateness of his physical closeness to strangers. His parents had been very physical in their communication with him, and even now he wondered if he had properly learned the non-verbal cues of the hearing.

  He rose and turned after the seat belt sign was turned off. The silence suddenly made sense. Half the plane was occupied by a group of deaf travelling together. Some were kneeling backwards on their seats, signing to the people behind them. Hands were flying, faces mobile with sudden smiles, raised eyebrows. The hearing people all around them were conspicuously still, faces buried in books, but he could tell by how some of them leaned slightly away that they were uncomfortable with the gesticulating going on around them, as though it was somehow infantile or unseemly.

  As he walked towards the washroom, he could catch snippets of what they were talking about. They had made arrangements to take the elevator up the Peace Tower in Ottawa at noon, when the carillon bells ring the full twelve peals out over the city.

  “You’ll be the only ones without hands over your ears,” he signed to a middle-aged woman kneeling on the seat.

  She reached out and grasped his shoulders, laughing, and asked him with her hands if he was going to the conference too and if he was from Calgary, why hadn’t she ever met him before.

  “I’m hearing,” he said. “But I grew up in Ottawa and know the Peace Tower well. My mother took me up to feel the bells many times when I was a child. It was one of her favourite places.”

  The woman put her hand over her heart at the mention of his mother. “Your mother was part of the deaf community?” she asked.

  “And my father.”

  “That’s why you’re so fluent,” she signed.

  “Yes, but it’s been a while since I’ve signed.” They looked at him expectantly, bracing themselves to hear that she was dead, this extraordinary woman who brought him, a hearing little boy, to feel the most spectacular bells in Canada. And they were right in a way. His mother was extraordinary, both his parents were, especially for the Sixties. His father managed every work day to negotiate the world.

  His mother was unabashed about taking him out into the world. She would defiantly stand beside him in stores, her steel-grey eyes glittering, as he interpreted her sign language to shopkeepers. And once the large department stores and supermarkets opened in their neighbourhood, she took to them because then she wouldn’t have to ask anyone for anything, ignoring the stares of people around them as she surrounded him in a flurry of signed conversation.

  “She lives in Cape Breton now. She’s not well. I’m on my way there.” He was given a hug and heard a murmuring around him, a kind of toneless murmuring. It was comforting. He felt exiled from this old world of touch. Over the head of the woman who was embracing him, he saw one of her travelling companions—a sullen stocky man in his early thirties who glared and turned his head away. It was a polarized community. Some thrived, as his parents seemed to, and some grew alienated, dulling their loneliness with alcohol, as his mother came to finally. Living in silence, as his mother was now.

  Over the past few years he started to suspect she drank from her strange syntax over the telecommunicator, which was their main means of keeping in touch. The mechanical voice that translated her typing was nothing like her, and he was slightly disoriented when they spoke on the phone, keeping their conversations brief. When he was younger, he would have had good instincts about her, would have known she was all right. But as an adult, he was never sure. She made it difficult in her old age by resisting change, never having taken to email, even though he bought her a computer. Sending her words off into space, she called it, but he wondered now if it was a sign of a larger rejection. Her retreat to Glace Bay might have signaled something ominous.

  WHEN HE ARRIVED in Sydney, he rented a car and drove to his mother’s small house in Glace Bay to drop off his baggage before going to the hospital. It had been a mining house, quickly erected in the 1920s, half of a shingled building a block from the crumbling cliffs. Its roofline was shaped like a mountain, peaked in the middle, a strange place to divide two self-contained living areas. Her side was painted a bright lilac, clashing with the emerald green of the other half. He remembered his mother asking him when he was a boy of eight or nine: “Can you hear the colour of that lilac bush?’ Because she had never heard, she never really understood the limits of sound.

  “It’s whistling, like a kettle,” he said to her then. He remembered how happy she seemed with his answer. He could see that it felt right to her.

  He had never understood why she had moved back to her childhood town after his father died. She had left Glace Bay when she was seven or eight to go to a special school for the deaf in Halifax, so she had no friends there. Older family members were dead or suffering from dementia, and distant relatives had never learned to sign. All of his cousins had moved away. As far as he could tell from their phone calls she was quite alone there. The telecommunicator had a built-in delay as her words were converted, so he couldn’t read her tone.

  “Are you sure you’re not too lonely?” he had asked.

  “I have my mother and father.”

  “But they’re dead,” he said.

  There was a pause.

  “At a certain point, there’s no difference. Your Dad is dead too, but I talk to him every day.”

  He wondered now why he didn’t ask her more about what she hoped for and what she needed at this stage in her life. The pause enforced by their telephone conversations only made tangible the barriers that had slowly grown up between them, as he was increasingly pulled into the hearing world. Because he and Valerie had not had children, there had been no pressing reason to fly across the country to visit, so they had seen her for brief weekend visits, flying in and out of the Sydney airport, three or four times a year since his father had d
ied.

  It wasn’t enough. At times, he felt an acute longing for her, remembering how she could recognize a fifth on the piano by placing her hand on the wooden cabinet. He practiced like that, with one of her hands on the piano and one on the back of his neck, as though she was the conduit for the music coming out of his fingertips. And he would feel proud of her when she sat on the floor at the foot of the bleachers, so supple and young with her long brown hair. He played basketball in high school, and she came to all his important games while his father was at work, her girlish feet bare so she could feel the excitement of the audience and the quickness of the play through her soles.

  But then there was loneliness for him too, as he grew older. When he walked out the door in the morning, he had to adjust for how everything around him was suddenly muted, as though he was the one who was deaf. People never looked one another in the eye. The flickering light of moving hands in his household, vivid as sunlight on poplar leaves, was almost entirely absent. As he entered the awkward stage of adolescence, he could go for days unrecognized, unacknowledged. Rarely did anyone look at him in the open, direct way he was used to at home, straight on, their eyes and mouths and hands moving in an animation of what they were trying to communicate. In time, he learned that dulled-down language too. His signing at home slipped down to his waist, confined, as though his hands were locked in a tackle box.

  “Speak up,” his mother would sign, jutting her hands up and widening them level with her chest, fingertips near her chin. But he would shrug and walk away.

  And she let him go. He only realized how far at his father’s funeral. Even there, back in Ottawa, the wake was segregated, hearing from deaf. His parents’ deaf friends staked out the area around the open casket, their flying hands touching each other’s shoulders and faces, ready hugs and tears accentuating his father’s stillness. Many of them verbalized as they spoke, gruff or wavering explosions of sound. His father’s hearing friends and colleagues from the government, where he had been an editor for thirty years, kept back and spoke softly, without gestures, to one another. His mother had entrusted him with the task of moving between the two groups and he was surprised at how tiring he found it. After years of living in western Canada, he wasn’t used to moving from one culture to another, from muted voices and neutral facial expressions to unabashed tears and gripped shoulders.