Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

stretch of the Wawanash river, meandering in reeds. All frozen now, all ice and untracked snow. Even on stormy days the clouds might break before supper time, and then there was a fierce red sunset. Like Siberia, my grandmother said, offended, you would think we were living on the edge of the wilderness. It was all farms, of course, and tame bush, no wilderness at all, but winter buried the fence posts.
    The storm started before noon, when we were in Chemistry, and we watched its progress hopefully, looking forward to something disruptive, to blocked roads and short supplies, and bedding down in school corridors. I imagined myself liberated by a crisis-charged atmosphere, aided by a power failure and candlelight and stirring songs offered against the roar of the wind, blanketed down with Mr. Harmer, a junior teacher whose eye I often tried to catch in Assembly, comforted by his embrace at first merely warming and comradely, which might yet turn, in all the darkness and confusion—candle by this time blown out—to something more urgent and personal. Things did not get that far. But we were dismissed early, the school buses set out with their lights on in the middle of the afternoon. Usually I took the Whitechurch bus to the first corner west of town, and walked from there, three-quarters of a mile or so, to our house at the edge of the bush. This night, as two or three times a winter, I went to stay at my grandmother’s house, in town.
    The hallway of this house was all wood, polished, fragrant, smooth, cozy as the inside of a nutshell. A yellow lamp was on in the dining room. I did my homework—something I never bothered with, at home, because there was no place or time for it—on the dining room table, after Aunt Madge had spread a newspaper to protect the cloth. Aunt Madge was my great-aunt, my grandmother’s sister, they were widows.
    Aunt Madge was ironing (they ironed everything, down to underwear and potholders) and my grandmother was making a carrot pudding for supper. Lovely smells. Compare this to the scene at home. The only warm room there was the kitchen; we had a wood stove. My brother brought in wood, and left tracks of dirty snow on the linoleum; I swore at him. Dirt and chaos threatened all the time. My mother often had to lie down on the couch, and tell her grievances. I argued with her whenever possible, and she said my heart would be broken when I had children of my own. We were selling eggs at this time, and everywhere there were baskets of eggs with bits of straw and feathers and hen-dirt stuck to them, waiting to be cleaned. I believed that a smell of hencoops came into the house on boots and clothes and you could not get rid of it.
    In the dining room I could look up at two dark oil paintings. They had been done by another sister of my grandmother’s, who had died in early middle age. One showed a cottage by a stream and one a dog with a bird in its mouth. My mother had pointed out that the bird was too big, in comparison with the dog.
    “Well it was not Tina’s mistake, then,” my grandmother said. “It was copied from a calendar.”
    “She was talented but she gave it up when she got married,” said Aunt Madge approvingly.
    There was also in the room a photograph of my grandmother and Aunt Madge, with their parents, and this sister who had died, and another sister who had married a Catholic, so that it seemed almost as bad as if she died, though peace was made later on. I did not bother to look at this photograph, except in a passing way, but after my grandmother’s death and Aunt Madge’s removal to a nursing-home (where she lives yet, lives on and on, unrecognizable, unrecognizing, completely divested of herself, dried up like a little monkey, past all memory and maybe past bewilderment, free), I salvaged it, and have taken it with me wherever I go.
    The parents are seated. The mother firm and unsmiling, in a black silk dress, hair scanty and center-parted, eyes bulging and faded. The father handsome still, bearded, hand-on-knee, patriarchal. A bit of Irish acting here, a relishing of the part, which he might as well relish since he cannot now escape it? When young he was popular in taverns; even after his children were born he had the name of a drinker, a great celebrator. But he gave up those ways, he turned his back on his friends and brought his family here, to take up land in the newly opened Huron Tract. This photograph was the sign and record of his achievement: