Sanctuary Line (9 page)

Not long after things fell apart, Mandy decided she wanted to become a search-and-rescue specialist and enrolled in night classes at a nearby college while she was still in high school. The courses she took had names like Managing the Lost Person or Lost Person Behaviour, and young though I was, I was not unaware, all things considered, of the significance of this. I was fighting with my own loss at the time and had turned inward, having neither the
maturity nor the confidence to do anything else with my grief. Back in the city, my mother and I carried on with the routine of our lives, and now and then Mandy and her mother and brothers visited. Most of the time the boys slouched morosely near a television set with some kind of game scrabbling across its screen until it was time for bed, while Mandy and I withdrew to the room, my city bedroom, which we were to share for the night.

It was during one of those visits that Mandy told me what she intended to do in the future. “A peacekeeper,” she said, adding that it was difficult to get into military college, though more possible now for girls because of affirmative action. She looked downwards as she spoke, thinking aloud, only now and then glancing in my direction, as if she had just remembered I was there. This sort of introspection, even when she spoke, had been a part of her ever since that summer night. Mandy, the girl who in the past was so certain in her gestures, her stance, now talked quietly – if at all – and rarely made eye contact. Her posture had changed as well: she kept her head down, almost slunk through a room, and she had begun to wear large, ungainly garments that hid her hips and breasts without extinguishing either the extraordinary beauty that was her birthright or the physical strength she had acquired by swimming all summer in the lake and all winter in her high-school pool. It seems to me now that she was in the chrysalis phase, hiding behind the subtle
anger that was evident in her attitude and posture and wrapped up in those clothes.

I asked about this “affirmative action” I had never heard of, and she said it had something to do with enabling girls and women to do the things they had never been encouraged to do before. The search-and-rescue courses were just the beginning, she told me. They would look good on her application, though her academic marks would have to be very high as well. Her mother was in favour of this notion probably, Mandy conjectured, because entrance to the officer training program would place her in the midst of the well-bred, good-looking, and intelligent young men who had always filled the halls of that historic institution. But Mandy was having none of that. According to her, she intended to outrun, outmarch, and outmanoeuvre these boys at every pass. She would study harder and train longer. She reminded me that she had read more books than they could even imagine and then rolled up her sleeve to show me the small, tight muscle on her upper arm. She was surprised, she said, that I had not started to think about my own future and a bit shocked that I wasn’t familiar with the term
affirmative action
. You’re the city girl, she said, looking fully into my face for the first time. I thought, I still think, she was suggesting that that fact alone should give me some connection to a more vital and therefore more comforting life. I looked around my room. It was the place where I spent most of my time now. The city had
become a distant hum, the soft noise of the world going on without me.

All the time Mandy was talking I envisioned her in a long line of volunteers, walking through the fields of her farm, beating back thick grass, searching for and eventually rescuing her father. Then I imagined her making peace between her father and mother, though exactly how she would achieve the latter, or the former for that matter, never came fully into focus. But then her future role in the military never came into focus either, at least for me. Beyond the echo of my uncle’s own short-lived experience at Maritime Command in Halifax, there was nothing solidly military anywhere near me – or near her.

What about the poetry? I asked her. She had always kept secret notebooks in which, she had once confessed, she tried to write poetry. And then there were all those books. A volume by a man called William Carlos Williams was on the night table on her side of the bed. I remember thinking it was odd that the name Carlos, which felt Mexican to me, would be bracketed by those two Williams.

Search-and-rescue is perfect for poetry, she said with what I now see as a surprising amount of insight. Think of it as a metaphor.

I mean, at the military college I thought you wanted to do an English degree. I simply could not imagine her fully absorbed by what I believed to be the banal world of army manoeuvres. But you could do anything, everything there,
she told me. The college granted arts degrees, just like any other kind of university. She would be able to study the poets while she sought-and-rescued and kept the peace.

I was sitting on the chair in front of my desk with my back to my homework. I was about to enter dangerous territory.

“Do you really think you’re going to find your father?” It was a brutal thing to ask, but I had been carrying brutality with me for the last six months and I needed to ask it.

She was silent for some time, her face closed and her eyes averted. “No,” she eventually said. “A lost person must in some way or another choose rescue.” This phrase, potent under the circumstances, was one she was no doubt quoting from some course or another, but it sounded to me like my own limited idea of poetry. “He doesn’t want us to find him,” she said bitterly. “I just know it. He doesn’t even want us to look for him.” She was on the very edge of tears, but I knew she wouldn’t allow herself that comfort. She straightened her spine instead, lifted her head, and looked out my window at the grey city street. “I never want to see him again,” she said.

She was my cousin, practically my sister. She was the only person whom I had ever shared a room with. I knew her sleeping patterns, how she held a book in her hands, the order in which she put on her clothes: her socks, then underwear, a T-shirt, jeans. I had been there for her first period, her first bra. And I had been there earlier when we
were both losing our baby teeth. I knew how she wriggled into a swimsuit. I had been in and out of the lake a thousand times with her, and I knew what she looked like when she had been in the lake too long, her lips blue and her shoulders quivering. I knew her moods, her romantic and poetic side, and something else in her that was a combination of pride and stubbornness, a recipe that would later evolve into what I saw as ambition.

“Mom hates him,” she added and then after a pause, “I do too.”

I got up from the chair and walked toward the door, having neither the nerve nor the heart to carry the conversation any further. I knew her very, very well. And I knew that she was lying. But at the time, when I told her I hated him too, I still honestly believed that I was telling myself the truth.

About a month ago, driving over to the sanctuary, I saw two farmers standing like phantoms in a lane beside a pickup truck that was parked near a large, badly maintained barn. With their heads bent, their caps pulled down over their foreheads, they seemed to be absorbed in a matter of great importance to them. Perhaps they were cementing an agreement regarding an animal or a delivery of hay. Or maybe they were discussing the barn itself, arranging for its demolition, because I suddenly saw the structure for what it was: a colossal sagging monument from another era, as ancient and shaggy as an extinct beast. It was so out of place in the midst of what was developing around it – a gravel pit on one side of the road, the beginnings of a subdivision on the other – it could have been a Roman granary, a stage set based on a medieval drawing, or some kind of huge wooden freighter from earlier times that had found itself inexplicably moored near the twenty-first-century asphalt of a secondary highway.

Our family had had problems with barns long before my uncle set fire to the one whose foundations would
contain the remnants of my aunt’s rose garden. As my uncle would have it, that barn, which he never admitted to burning, was merely a replacement for a more splendid, more capacious, and more beautiful barn destroyed in the nineteenth century as a result, he said, of covetousness. The first Canadian Butler had built a log barn for his animals, quite early in the game, after migrating from the American side of the lake, even before he constructed the log house. What else could he do? my uncle used to say. The place was rotten with wilderness, trees and vines, and undergrowth. Mostly swamp, he said, animals up to their fetlocks in muskeg. Had to get something up fast or nobody, animal or human, would have survived the winter. Loyalty to the Crown so far had brought him nothing but heartache and labour and dead children. He didn’t want to lose the animals as well.

Time passed, a reasonably spacious log house had been built, and the barn made of logs began to seem too small. By then my great-great-grandfather had four strong sons to help him clear trees and plant essential crops. He also had a wagon and a horse so that he could take his grain to be ground at the nearest grist mill some ten miles away. A terrible journey, my uncle claimed, the tracks nothing but mud and boulders. A sledge on the frozen roads of winter would have made the voyage much easier, but in winter, of course, there was no grain to be ground, so the mud and boulders of the warmer seasons had to be conquered.
Many things were shipped by water on the great lake so close to my ancestor’s door, but the grist mill was deep inland, situated, as it had to be, on a fast-flowing stream. There was a lot of grain because of the hard work completed by him and his sons, and there was a vast quantity of straw, and it wasn’t long before the old man began to long for a real barn in which to store it all, a barn made of hewn beams and sawed lumber. Had he been able to afford the lumber, this would have involved another series of difficult journeys to a saw mill, also located inland on another fast-flowing stream.

His neighbour was the son of an original Upper Canadian settler; the family had been in the vicinity for two generations. Their crops were healthier, their house was bigger, and they had what my uncle called a “real beaut” of a barn built on a foundation made up of a quantity of fieldstones that had been removed from the acreage over the past thirty years. Great-great used to look across the two fields that separated them, at the neighbour’s barn, and wonder if he would live long enough to have one of his own, concluding, sadly, that this wasn’t likely going to be the case. On certain days, when he was able to take a small vacation from the endless work that filled his waking hours, he would walk across the two fields to talk to his neighbour about the building of barns and the acquiring of sawn lumber, and during one of those visits the neighbour announced that he was selling out and opening a harness
shop in the village that was beginning to grow, albeit in a ragged fashion, two miles to the north.

Great-great bought the barn, my uncle told us, by trading the two fine workhorses he had raised from colts, angering his sons because they knew they would now have to manage with only the two elder parents of these young beasts. And there was another problem: my ancestor had not bought the land the building stood on, intending, as he announced, to move the barn to a foundation he would build with the fieldstones so prevalent on his own property.

More laborious effort ensued. A sledgelike vehicle, something called a stone boat, was used, I think. And when the foundation was ready, the wooden structure of the barn had to be moved across the fields on log rollers by the animals with the aid of something called a capstan. A kind of architectural drunkenness took place as the structure swayed precariously in the dips and hollows of the meadow or stood, obstinately refusing to be moved, when it rolled into a rut. Things could have been worse: the project had been undertaken in late August so the ground was as dry as it was ever going to be, and eventually the barn reached its destination. Then, of course, winches had to be devised and used to lift the structure onto its new foundation, and mortar had to be mixed and applied to cement it into place, all this going on while the women of the house hauled tables and chairs and buckets of food outside to
feed the men once the job was completed. My uncle was a little vague on the details of the winching, but he gave a precise picture of the menu of the feast: roast turkeys and chickens and ducks, turnips and potatoes and cabbages, twenty-four loaves of fresh-baked bread, thirty apple pies, and thirty jugs of cider – one for each man – made from the farm’s first apples. Much chanting of Protestant prayers, and much singing of Protestant hymns, and general good fellowship occurred at this banquet. The barn, firmly situated and looming over the celebrants, looked as if it had always been there, “as if it had grown there,” my uncle was fond of saying.

The next day, Old Great-great and his sons filled the barn with grain and straw and led the two aged horses into the stalls. “When your barn is well filled, all safe and secure. Be thankful to God and remember the poor,” my uncle always recited at this point with a knowing irony in his voice. The men hung harnesses on wall hooks and carved their initials on the rafters. The younger sons leapt from various heights into the straw of the hay mow, and cats from the house were coaxed into taking up residence in the barn to discourage mice. The few iron implements they owned, a couple of spades and a plough, which until that moment had been rusting either out of doors or in the damp of the log barn, were brought into shelter. In spite of extreme Protestantism, a barn dance was planned by the older sons and sanctioned by their father, who was anxious
for these sons to court and marry and, most important, to mate in order to produce more young males.

Now weather enters the story, as it always seems to do whenever a story involves the great-greats. There followed two days of excruciating heat and “crippling” humidity and a lot of talk about how fortunate it was that this heat and humidity had not been part of the barn’s relocation. And on the evening of the fourth day, just before sundown, a magenta cloud – unlike anything anyone had ever seen – crawled over the eastern horizon, trailing a powerful windstorm in its wake. Old Great-great enjoyed only a few moments of gratitude for the barn’s shelter before the building exploded and then vanished as if it had never been there. No one in the vicinity knew much about tornados, but almost everyone had heard rumours concerning the wrath of God. They went through the list of sins in their minds and eventually concluded that it was the sin of covetousness that had brought this wrath down upon the family. To the end of his days, however, the old man himself believed that it was the sanctioning of the barn dance that had brought about the building’s destruction, and, consequently, none of the subsequent Butlers were permitted to attend even the most innocent of dances. Not until my mother and uncle’s generation was the ban lifted. Old Great-great never again allowed the word
dance
to be spoken in his presence. And, just to be safe, he never again coveted anything, as far as anyone could tell.