Down in the ground, p.2
Down in the Ground, page 2
In Place
WE DON’T HAVE a lot of land. It is just enough to say we do farming when we are busy doing other things with our time. Our farm is a field and a hill. That’s all. The least interesting thing about the field behind our house is its flatness before it rises to become the hill. The top of the hill has a row of white pines along the crest, but when people come to our house and look out our back door, they look beyond the field because it gets in the way. It blocks the view. When our summer crop of romaine lettuce is gone, I go over the field with a hand-held tiller that turns over the soil and leaves corduroy furrows that will fill up with snow by the end of November. I think the rows, leading away from our house toward the hill create a nice image but no one else thinks so. The field is boring. It looks too tidy with everything in place. Green in the summer, white in the winter, and that’s all.
I hadn’t noticed a gradual hollow growing in the northwest corner of our field. It must have been growing for several years because this year it was large and deep enough to be filled with October rain, and by early November when the cold set in, it had frozen into a small pond. I pictured myself going for a skate on it. Then I procrastinated. My skates needed sharpening. I had to drive my kids to various practices and appointments. My wife was busy with her cyber commute. I kept watching the pond. I wanted it to last, but when we hit a warm spell, it melted and disappeared.
Then, a day ago, we had rain—cold, hard rain, the kind of rain that makes life miserable, hard to drive in, and leaves a damp, raw feeling in every corner of the house no matter how hard the wood stove works or the space-heaters hum like little forges in the corners of the bedrooms. When I woke this morning and stood leaning on the kitchen countertop for my ritual black coffee in the quiet of first light before anyone in the house is awake, I glanced out the window and that’s when I saw them—about twenty or more small, brown islands, creating a geography of archipelagos in our reborn pond. They were squat, short-necked, and brown as the tops of the field’s furrows, and when they turned their heads from side to side, I could see the outline of their beaks. Some were turning their heads back and forth, looking at each other as if someone in their ranks had an answer or understood their predicament. They were squawking and making a terrible sound. I could hear it through the closed kitchen window. One or two flapped their wings but not a single one was lifting off. I got dressed and went out to investigate.
As I approached the pond—I’ve been calling it a pond but it isn’t more than a foot or two deep in the lowest part of the hollow—I could see they were a flock of mallards, females, mostly, with flecks of royal blue among their mottled feathers. They must have been flying south late in the season and late at night and, looking down exhausted, seen what they thought was a watery resting place. I imagined them touching down with a splash as their bodies parted the surface and they came to a gliding stop. I could picture them in the dark, grateful to have landed like passengers after a turbulent flight, floating on the pond in the dark, tucking their heads under their wings, sitting motionless on the surface with their legs dangling beneath them.
Then the temperature dropped.
They likely didn’t realize how cold it was. Water can trick warm-blooded creatures into thinking the air is warmer above them than what’s beneath them. And there they were, frozen in place.
They studied me with suspicion, or what I took to be mistrust. After all, it was the season for duck hunting. They must have flown through at least one barrage of shot-gun blasts before arriving at our farm. I could have been there with a shotgun of my own and made easy pickings of them.
They saw me and couldn’t do anything about it. They couldn’t go anywhere. I could have been some sadist and just let them sit there and die of hunger or cold or, perhaps, snap their necks with my bare hands. But they weren’t just suspicious. I could feel their fear.
They were studying me. As I moved closer to them, sliding forward slowly on the ice so I wouldn’t fall, they quacked and honked disconsolately until the off-key sounds melded into a dirge or the discordant sound of a traffic jam in the city. Ducks quack when they are merely talking among themselves. Quacking to a duck is like conversation over dinner for us. They honk if they are troubled or terrified. I stared at them. They turned their heads in profile to me.
I had no idea what I was supposed to do other than get them out of the ice. When I drew close to the nearest one, it lengthened its neck and snapped at me with its beak. The duck was going to go down fighting if I was trouble. If I got too close with a chopper or an axe, I thought, I might injure one or worse. I’d have a duck on my conscience.
I have a soft spot in my heart for wild birds. To me, they represent the epitome of freedom. When geese pass over our farmhouse, honking in their southward V in autumn or vectoring north to show us one of the first signs of spring, I salute them as I would an aviator making a low pass. I respect them. I respect their beauty and their ability to fly.
On my way to and from the hospital and my work years ago, I’d pass a marsh and there was a heron who stood inscrutably among the shallows of the reeds where the water melted into the muddy shore. He never moved. He projected a powerful sense of permanence and solidity, though that was just me reading into him what I wanted from my own life at that point. I looked for him each day. He was a talisman. I needed him to be there because his presence expressed a steady patience I found reassuring. When I saw him, I’d say to myself: “Hello, Mr. Heron. Having a good day?” Stupid, but I needed to say that.
Nothing bothered him. Even when I slowed the car on the gravel shoulder, he simply stared at me. He wasn’t afraid of anything. I was at a point in my life when I was afraid. Terrified, in fact. My wife was in hospital. It was touch and go. Our youngest had come too early. The doctors said my wife might need a liver transplant. They pack travelling organs in ice to convey them from the donor to the recipient. I pictured the dreadful panic of a hasty goodbye as a helicopter landed on the hospital roof and they’d be rushing my wife into surgery. Would it be the last time I held her hand? Day after day I had to wait. I had to stand up to my knees in my own fears and be patient.
There wasn’t much that gave me hope as I drove those back roads. I wondered if my eldest two were going to lose their mother. Sometimes, when my eyes were full of tears and I couldn’t drive any more, I’d pull over and just sit there beside Mr. Heron and we’d stare at each other. He didn’t have any answers, but he was there and that was reassuring. A person looks for things like herons in a marsh when there isn’t much to hold on to.
Then a cold snap came early in October and I couldn’t see the heron’s head, the long, thin, yellow beak, and eclipselike eyes above the reeds even as they turned pale brown and their catkins broke and the wind carried away their cotton. And by the time the snows fell that year, hard, heavy snow, the kind that buries everything and lays a silence on the landscape and a metallic smelling crispness fills the air, I was certain the heron had simply caught wind of the changing season and given up his personal marsh and flown south. My wife’s situation improved, though her recovery was invisible. She got better. Livers grow back even if it takes time. I felt as if everything had taken a turn for the better. But when a January thaw broke the surface of the marsh, I saw the heron. His body had floated out past the reeds and was drifting wherever the wind pushed him on the water.
So this morning, when I looked at the mallards, my heart sank because I knew I had to face up to my fears and if need be do battle with something beyond my control. Those ducks needed me. They weren’t going to starve to death or die trying to free themselves from the grasp of ice. I had to liberate them from certain death.
I went back to the house. My wife had gotten up and watched me heading off from the shed with our ice chopper in one hand and a broken, pointy hockey stick in the other. She called and asked if I was going to drive the kids to school. I nodded but I don’t think she saw it. She could see the ducks. She knew what I was going to do, and shouted: “Be careful!” As I stood at the lip of the pond, surveying the situation and formulating my strategy, I heard the car start and the voices of my kids at the side of the house.
Then I stepped onto the ice. That was my D-Day moment. I felt as if I was on the road to victory but it would be a hard slog until the last duck was free. As I drew near the birds, the flock set up that cacophony of terrible sounds. They cried as if they thought I was coming to murder them, not just stand by and stare at them as I had a few minutes earlier. The awful sound made me feel as if they thought they were going to die of fear before I could set them free. I wanted to tell them not to be afraid, that all they need fear is fear itself. The dreadful song of mortality in their throats was a prayer of the helpless looking for answers.
The first one I approached simply stared at me. It wanted to offer defiance. It reminded me of Edith Piaf singing “Non, je ne regrette rien.” I started humming that tune softly under my breath, hoping that would quiet the flock, but they were inconsolable.
So, I began chopping.
The ice cracked but the first duck held fast. Then I began jumping up and down and the fissure I’d created opened. The duck flapped its wings and tried to fly, but its foot was held fast behind it and I was afraid it would break its leg or, worse, leave it behind like a captured starfish that doesn’t want to die in a child’s hand as a seaside prize.
I reached out to the bird, hoping to grab it by the body and gently ease the leg free, but the ice snapped beneath me, and I fell through with a splash. The bird flew up into the air, its wings beating against the emptiness and fighting to be clear of what had held it in place. The other birds saw what had happened and began to flap their wings madly, sending a veil of small feathers in a cloud around them that were caught on the wind and carried upwards. “Free me now!” each one was saying. “Me first!” They saw the possibility of freedom and they wanted it.
The freed bird circled and then struck me from behind as I attempted to step back onto the ice. Water that had gone down my boot top shocked me with a soaker. I hadn’t realized ducks defend each other.
Geese, yes. But ducks?
They cared for one another. Maybe each one had a unique personality. Maybe they had names and told each other jokes.
“How many ducks does it take to get stuck in a pond?”
“I dunno. How many?”
“First you gotta get them in a row and count them. Quack. Quack.”
I began chopping with the scraper. I realized I wouldn’t be skating any time soon, that when the pond refroze the floats of ice would leave a jagged surface. But I just wanted to get them and me out of the water and wanted more than anything to tell them that I cared for them, too, that my whole purpose for being there and getting soaked and cold first thing in the morning was their freedom.
I fell forward and my elbows snapped off another piece of ice, and the more I fought to get out of the frigid pond, the more I broke the ice. The one free bird kept attacking the back of my toque. Maybe I should have brought along some bird seed and scattered it on the ice as a peace offering before trying to do my work, but that, too, would have been meaningless.
I raised the hockey stick above my head and the attack duck got the message and flew to the far edge of the hollow. Then, I set the stick on the ice to distribute my weight and was able to stand up again. I chopped and chopped and fell in several more times until all the birds were free. They gathered with the first freed bird and waited on the far side of the pond until the last among them was clear of the ice.
They watched me from their huddle. I knew they were cold and hungry. So was I. “Are you satisfied now?” I shouted at them.
They flapped their wings ferociously and the flock lifted off into the sky.
I watched as they arranged themselves into an ordered flight. Some of them must have been older and weaker for they took positions inside the group. The stronger ones took up the front of the flight.
As I watched them, my heart sank.
They would head south. Hunters would be waiting for them. The unlucky ones would draw a bead for a direct hit or catch a spray of grapeshot biting them from the earth below or fail to rejoin the flock because they were too sick or exhausted to go on and would not live to find the rest they sought.
A duck’s life is about labouring to survive—fighting the odds, struggling with the world and what the world does to them, randomly, like a sudden phone call from the hospital or a north wind across a furrowed field dusted in a light snow that appeared safe in the darkness and, yet, tricked them, deceived them with its shallow resting place, its mask of safety. To live is to live by instinct, and maybe luck, or grace, or what cannot be understood or explained and only endured. A duck’s life. And a heron’s, too.
For the next month, maybe longer, they would press on through the sky, fighting the winds and weather, beating their wings against the invisible force that releases them from the earth, and leaves them to nature and their determination to reach a destination in a warm place—a marsh where the trees might be draped in exotic southern moss or a salt pond where they shelter in the reeds, wary of alligators, ready to send up an alarm to the others in the flock, one eye always open and on watch for a fox or a coyote, as they wait out the winter rains falling on their backs, their heads tucked under their wings when they feel that sliver of fragile certainty as they rest. And if they dream, and who’s to say they don’t, would they remember the night they came to rest in a field and could not escape the terrors of a human with weapons in his hands when they were trapped in a nightmare from which they woke in the nick of time?
Restoration
THE FIRST TIME I saw Louise she was pedalling her wheel-chair backwards down the long hallway in the care home. She was wearing only a nightie that she had drawn up to her arm pits, and I paused to look at her because her naked body was an encyclopaedia of skin ailments. I watched as the orderlies pushed her back to her room, much against her wishes. As the night doctor—a privilege for which the patients were charged an extra fee in the pay-as-you-go care home—I had access to her chart. She was suffering from everything from heart ailments to cirrhosis of the liver, but what was killing her slowly was time. She was one hundred and five.
No one wants to live forever, but in Louise’s case she was running out of places to live. The care home only kept patients for three months. After that? Louise had no relatives. She was alone with only time to keep her company. It was anyone’s guess what would become of her. I asked that she be brought down to the small office I had been given—a refitted supply cupboard—and I sat and stared at her.
I knew she couldn’t hear me. The chart said she had been deaf for over twenty years. She had once worn glasses, but a previous doctor indicated that the spectacles were useless now. But she knew I was there. She knew I was trying to communicate with her. As I spoke I saw something in her eyes. She was still in there in her failing body, and as long as a patient is fighting to stay alive, as long as they tell me that they are feeling alive in whatever form that may be, I feel obligated to try and reach them. And though I was a shadowy blur I could see she was studying me with her brown eyes.
As a young man, I had furnished my apartment by finding pieces of furniture people had kicked to the curb—half a dining room table I bolted to the kitchen wall, a chair frame that required regluing, a brass bedstead that merely needed some polish. I would spend my free nights putting the chairs, tables, and other artefacts of other times and other lives back together again. Many had fine wood beneath their layers of abuse. Others, it turned out, were museum pieces waiting to be reborn. I sat studying Louise. It may have been ghoulish or wrong, but I decided to risk malpractice to restore her.
First, I began by treating her skin ailments. A person has to live inside their skin, even if they are ready to cast it off. The body is a house for the soul, but the soul, I am certain, lives on even when the body can no longer contain it. Whether our spirits seek out the bardo or the proverbial tunnel of light to the far reaches of the universe, I know there is something in us that builds up a lifetime of knowledge and experience and will not resign itself to oblivion.
A simple sugar test of her blood with a diabetic meter told me she was Type 2 and highly treatable. I ordered an oral insulin though I did not record it on her chart as I should have done. The presiding day physician would not have permitted it. I could tell from his notes that he was an adherent to the length-of-life principle, and that any means of extending or, perhaps renewing, life was not to be tolerated.
After several days of medicine, anti-oxidants and diabetic medication, Louise’s eyesight returned. She could see me, though not very well. I found an old pair of glasses an elderly aunt had left behind, and they worked well enough for our late night meetings. I didn’t feel I was cheating Louise of sleep. She had stopped sleeping entirely and had spent most of her nights hollering for help. The nurses ignored her pleas. She was a nuisance, they said.
Each night I gave her protein supplements on top of what she was receiving from her meals which she never ate because she had no way of knowing the food was in front of her. The home was short staffed, and Louise was gradually being starved to death. Maybe the daily attendants thought they were doing her a favour.
