Sanctuary Line (10 page)

One of the horses in the barn had been killed outright. The other, however, was found the next morning calmly grazing in a neighbour’s pasture, five fields away, with no gates open between him and the place where he was last known to be. And the only fragment of the barn that remained in Old Great-great’s custody was the one board that had crashed through his kitchen window and that had his own initials freshly carved into its surface. The board was kept in the family attic; Great-great’s descendants must have been superstitious about discarding it. My uncle hauled it down from there one evening after telling the story, hauled it down and nailed it up above the fireplace. He did this in spite of my aunt’s protestations – even she did not have the power to stop him once an idea of this nature had firmly lodged itself in his mind. He wanted, I now think, to change the status of the old board to that of a holy relic. But you could feel the will draining out of him as he searched for nails and for the struts in the wall in which to pound them. In the end the whole act became faintly ridiculous, embarrassing those of us who had been ordered to stay in place until the ceremony was over. It took too long and was too fraught with ordinary difficulty to qualify as a mythic gesture. The ancestral initials were all but invisible to the naked eye, and my aunt’s disapproval was palpable in the air. When he had finished, my uncle looked at his audience as if he were going to say something we would all be required to remember. Then
he turned back to the fireplace and removed the flakes of plaster his hammering had scattered all over the mantel, pushing them, quite carefully, with one hand into the cup of the other. “I’ve made a mess,” he said, maybe to himself, maybe to my aunt. Then he closed his fist around the fragments and left the room.

“He wanted to be called an orchardist,” my mother once said. “As the years passed, your uncle was never entirely comfortable with the term ‘farmer,’ at least in relation to himself.”

The view from her windows at The Golden Field, as I’ve said, was one of strip malls and row housing, neither fields nor orchards in sight in either direction. On this winter day, however, it was difficult to determine the shape of the landscape at all because the wind had come up and the atmosphere was thick with blowing snow.

“Sadie, you see, was always trying to get him to understand that what he was doing had more to do with science than with ordinary labour.”

Yes, I thought, he had consistently described his activities in a botanical, chemical, or sometimes even an aesthetic manner: soil chemistry, blossom-to-fruit ratio, the transfer of cells after grafting, the sinuous line of branch growth after pruning. It was up to my aunt to take care of the practical, and the financial details, tasks she undertook with
enthusiasm and ultimate success. She was herself ambitious: also not fond of the word
farmer
and all that it implied. But neither of them was able to come up with a substitute for the word
farm
and used it, unconsciously, all the time, unless one or the other was fed up with something or engaged in an argument, at which point the farm became “this place” or sometimes “this godforsaken place.” Years later Mandy would hear this phrase in a country thousands of miles away. What kind of inner echo would that have caused in her, on that hot, dusty military base? Would she connect her parents, this farm, to the man who spoke the words?

The farm, of course, ground to a halt and faster than you might think as soon as my uncle was gone. The decade immediately following his disappearance was perhaps the oddest of the past twenty years, though none of those years seemed to have any kind of structure regardless of the way life insisted that regular maintenance take place, that new clothes and cosmetics and toothbrushes be purchased, and that various repairs be made to windows, faucets, roofs, cars. As I’ve said, sections of the waterfront property were sold off as estate lots. Large, ungainly houses were built by people neither my aunt nor my mother – nor I for that matter – ever came to know. I can see none of these houses from my windows as the farmhouse is situated midpoint on the shoreline of a small bay and the homes in question are located on the other side of what we, as children, called the Old Wharf. Sometimes this pleases me, as I like the isolation
of the spot, that sense – entirely an illusion now – that I am alone on the shores of the great lake. At other moments, though, when I feel myself being absorbed into the past, I wish I had the ability to become part of a neighbourhood, as my mother hoped I would; had the knowledge of how one leans over a back fence to discuss the goings-on in a village or township, or even to participate with some interest and enthusiasm in the art of gossip.

Sometimes I feel the past will eat me alive, will devour me in the same way that the now abundantly overgrown cedar bush is devouring the pioneer rail fences on which, as children, we used to stand in order to watch the Mexicans work. I fear I will become one of those women you sometimes see buying groceries in town, unkempt, vaguely mad, barely present, and talking quietly to herself as she pushes the cart in a bewildered fashion toward the vegetable section, a woman not unlike the woman my aunt was in her last years.

“I wonder why he insisted on the term ‘orchardist,’” my mother continued, still thinking about my uncle. “He wasn’t really a snob, you understand. Everyone he knew was a farmer. Everyone had a farm of some kind or another.” She glanced at the clock on the wall. It was nearing lunchtime. “Either that or they did something on the lake. The trout was wonderful, you know, when we could still eat it. And then there was the shipping.”

If you look at our small bay, you will see that its eastern arm is made up of boulders and mature willow trees. One
of the old great-greats had a sizeable wharf built there so that he might ship his own apples across the lake to the markets in Cleveland, or Akron. But I doubt that any of my unseen neighbours, looking at it from the opposite side, think of it as anything other than a natural phenomenon, like the western arm, a series of limestone slabs pushing out into the lake, which we called Little Point.

When we were children, Teo and I constructed our paper boats on Little Point and set them afloat in the shallow water. I can recall the feel of the cool water on my ankles and the smooth stone beneath my feet, Teo’s laughter, him teaching me the words
barco –
boat – and
naufragio
.

“Do you remember Teo and me playing with boats at Little Point?” I asked my mother now. “He used the word
naufragio
whenever one of our paper boats capsized.”

She was still looking at the clock on the wall. She said nothing.

Strangely, that was the word my uncle had used.
Naufragio
, he had whispered, his voice broken. And though it had been several years since Teo and I had stood at Little Point folding my other uncle’s auction posters into ephemeral water-craft, and though I had heard no one, neither my uncle nor Teo, utter the word since, I knew it was, at that moment, the only thing that anyone could or should say. The word
naufragio
uttered inside a temporary room, a half-finished bottle of wine resting on the kitchen table.

Since I have begun to read some of Mandy’s poetry
books, I have come across a translation of the Chilean poet Neruda’s poem “La Canción Desesperada” In it the noun
naufragio
is used in such an angry, sorrowful way it becomes almost a verb. The poem itself is so full of blazing lighthouses and wharfs, islands and shorelines, departures and abandonment, it defines both our family and the geography of that night for me so precisely, that it tore into me and remained inside me, fully memorized almost the first time that I read it in English. I know, also, the dark, inevitability of that truthful line:
“Todo en ti fue naufragio”
In the book on Mandy’s shelf it is translated as “In you everything sank.” But I prefer my own translation: “In you everything shipwrecked.”

Our uncle told us stories of shipwrecks and other nautical miracles and disasters; tales of drowned sailors, men turning into seals, and mermaids emerging from the sea. He told these stories over and over on this farm until we half believed that all of these tragedies and transformations had taken place at the end of the lawn in the great lake water that shone there. The landscape of childhood is so limited and, in our case, was so beautiful we could think of no better combination of water and land where these tales should unfold. He told us stories of howling gales during which the courageous Butler keepers would successfully light the thousands of candles in the huge glass jewel-like lamp on the top of their towers. He told us about treasures coming in with the tide after such gales: diamonds and
dubloons, leg irons minus the legs, a complete guillotine, intact, ballgowns without the dancers, canisters filled with tea, the leaves still dry, a cat and her kittens (alive!), and barrels of rum, whiskey, sherry, absinthe, port, Madeira, red, white, and rosé wine. After these sessions we would scramble down to the beach, returning later with pails of lake-worn glass, so colourful, but, like his stories, in the end so useless. Yet we instinctively knew, I suspect, that they were all that remained, years later, after an event where everything shatters: harmless, softened shards of cargo smashed and then smoothed by storms, they were forgotten evidence of a spectacular series of wrecks.

But there was one seminal Butler story, which was dark and seldom told and all the more fascinating to us. My uncle was adamant in his refusal to tell the tale on demand, yet could not be dissuaded from insisting that we all listen when he felt the moment was right for the telling, that moment almost always occurring at a Butler funeral after which he had consumed a fair quantity of alcohol. The older Butler relatives, you see, were scattered like wildflowers all over the fields on both sides of the lake, living out their declining years in frame houses that, like the elders themselves, were in various states of dignified decay. After their funerals, all of the Butlers would gather either at this farm or at its double across the water, depending on the citizenship of the deceased. I don’t remember hearing the tale on the American farm, however, so it must
have only occurred to my uncle in the wake of Canadian Butler deaths.

It was the kind of story that moved steadily toward its conclusion, then paused and circled back to begin again in the manner of certain gloomy sonatas. And it was a story that, because of its references to steep rocks and ancient history and magnificent weather and strange architecture, we were unable to place in our own calm landscape. It seemed therefore quite reasonable to us that the setting for the narrative should be Ireland, the country the Butlers had abandoned. Also, it involved the death of children. Not one of us believed that a young life could be violently severed in a place as safe and settled as ours. Though our graveyards were filled with nineteenth-century girls and boys, we in the twentieth were, or at least we thought we were, exempt from catastrophic surprises. The Butlers we were familiar with aged quietly along with their houses, then died sedately and politely just before harvest.

“Do you remember the story of the Irish children at the lighthouse?”

My mother eagerly answered this question. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Indeed I do. It was Stanley’s favourite, I think, though he would only tell it when he was good and ready to.”

The first in the litany of lighthouses, or at least the first according to my not always accurate uncle, was situated on one of the two Skellig Islands that rise like temples from
the sea off the most western tip of the south of Ireland. Everything about this lighthouse was improbable and exaggerated: its elevated position, the constant rain, the near impossibility of its construction, or of even landing boats filled with building materials on the island, the tortuous climb up the cliffs carrying cut stone, wrought iron, and glass. And then there was the monstrous wind that would pluck workers, as if they were insects, from the rising tower and throw them either onto the rocks below or into the sea from which their bodies were never recovered.

But there had been a precedent for this astounding feat of engineering. During the sixth century, on the highest peak of the landward side of the island, a small group of self-punishing monks had set up a colony. Surely, my uncle had said, the first generation of these holy men would have been entirely worn out and used up in the task of carving the steps for the three separate staircases, one of six hundred steps, out of the steep rockface that led to their monastic enclosure: a gathering of a half-dozen corbelled, beehive-shaped huts, a small medieval priory, an oratory, two wells, and some stone basins dug out of the same rockface to collect rainwater. There was also, of course, a graveyard, consisting of a half-dozen rough stone crosses.

My uncle took great pleasure at the thought of his forebear, Tim Butler, the one he named the dog after, making tea from the water he collected from the monks’ stone basins. No mention at all was made, however, of his wife,
who was undoubtedly washing clothes, bathing babies, cooking or cleaning with the water he called “the heavenly gift.” To this day, when I think of the man the people of Kerry called Butler the Keeper, I imagine a family subsisting on tea while unimaginable winds roared around them. The supply boat from Port Magee would rarely, if ever, be able to land, and the ghosts of the first generation of monks would undoubtedly be blowing around the tower, sackcloths flapping and bones rattling in the gale.

Every second year, a mainland keeper would offer to take up the post so that Keeper Butler and his family could get back to Butler’s Court for Christmas, and each time the second year came around, the weather would cancel that possibility with winds of increasing velocity. And Keeper Butler would have wanted to get back, I would think, hoping to stake out at least a bit of symbolic territory in that quite possibly fictional place because, as my uncle said, only one son could inherit the land and Keeper Butler was not that son. He was the bifurcating one.