Sanctuary Line Read online

  Yes, I think now, that he must have been in some way courting the anger my aunt, an hour later, would so vehemently express. Something in him wanted his wife to see exactly what he had done.

  I recall how quickly Teo and his mother vanished from the scene once they knew there would be trouble, interesting, perhaps, to realize how attuned they were to the notion that trouble was always there, waiting like an offstage understudy for an opportunity to perform.

  Maybe all the workers carried this kind of prescience with them. But if this was so, we would never know. I’m ashamed to confess that my cousins and I paid little attention to the Mexicans, with the exception of Teo, of course, who had been thrust into our midst by my uncle. Always in the orchards and the fields, clothed in various shades of cotton like a multicoloured crop, their movements were as dependable and overlooked as the dance of vegetation under the touch of an indifferent wind. What had they been thinking? What secret pleasures or sorrows did they keep close to their hearts as they bent down to the ground or reached up to the branch, over and over, filling the waiting baskets? They did this all through the long summer days, while we ran, or swam, or read, or hung our doll clothes up to dry.

  The majority of the workers, as I’ve said, were men, but there were a few women as well, mothers mostly, whose children, unlike Dolores’s Teo, had stayed in Mexico with a grandmother or an aunt. My own aunt had insisted that if there were to be women, they would have to be mothers, assuming, I suppose, that their status as such would make them less interesting to the men. (I heard her tell my mother once that in the early days of seasonal workers, there had been some goings-on that she didn’t approve of.) What variety of maternal worries those women might have had to stifle while they laboured in a foreign country for less than that country’s minimum wage was not considered. Neither was the possibility they might resent Dolores because she was able, as a result of her elevated status of foreman, to have the company of her child. But, as my aunt said, all the workers respected Dolores. “She’s worth ten of them.” I remember her saying that when my mother had questioned the appointment of a female supervisor. “And the men respect her as much, maybe even more, than the women do.”

  We would see the Mexicans on weekends in town. On Saturdays they posted letters and bought some personal items in the stores, and on Sundays they attended an early mass, performed in the basement of the Legion Hall, in Latin, the closest language to their own, by the local priest, in advance of what my mother called the real service at the town’s Catholic Church. Always moving in groups, through the park or on the streets, in the proximity of the faux-classical architecture of colonial Ontario, they seemed much more foreign than they did on the farm. We children stared in a way we never did when they were in the fields or orchards. We noted the patience with which these two dozen strangers waited their turn at the pharmacy counter on a Saturday morning or stood in line outside the glass box of a phone booth, after their own special mass. We did not think about the possibility that the special mass meant they were not made to feel welcome to join the local congregation. We also did not think about their yearning to hear a faraway voice in that phone booth, their need, perhaps, to whisper endearments to a lover or seek assurances concerning the well-being of a child.

  And then there was Teo. In the absence of their own offspring, he became every Mexican’s child, and it was obvious that he was universally adored, even the most closed faces coming to life as he walked by a field or down a line of trees. He was a small light to these people, brightening the middle of a day worn thin and meaningless by drudgery. It was his quiet courtesy, his grace, I suspect, and this indefinable light that caused my aunt to relent when my uncle wanted him to play with us.

  I was not immune to his grace either. And even though I couldn’t define the experience, I had been touched by his luminosity. And yet, never once during that last summer, did I ask him to tell me the name of the town he came from, never once, in spite of the way I was drawn to him, did I ever ask his last name. Even if it were possible for me to look for him now, I would have no idea where to begin the search. No, I never requested the simplest details of his life because, as far as I was concerned at the time, it was as if Teo was born anew each summer, like the blossoms, like the fruit, and, yes, you’re right, like the butterflies.

  There were a few evenings during that last summer when I would be alone in the room I shared with Mandy for part of the night. She had friends in the town two miles up Sanctuary Line and would sometimes slide into the Volvo with her brothers for a night out. I went with them once, to a dance at the Sanctuary Pavilion, but was so self-conscious in the face of teenagers who had known each other since grade school that I never wanted to go again. Out of place and out of context, I conjectured that I slipped from my cousins’ minds the minute they walked onto the dance floor, or perhaps even before that, if they had spotted someone they were interested in lounging against the wall on the opposite side of the room. This was perfectly natural, if it was in fact true, and I knew, even at the time that there was no unkindness in it. I stayed in the shadows and waited to be taken home, a mask of indifference on my face. I remember the double-screened doors of that now disappeared pavilion, and the silhouette of the one pine tree that could be seen through them, the moon on the water beyond that. And I remember the beads of moisture on the pop can I held in my hand because these were the kind of things I concentrated on while my cousins draped themselves over a boyfriend or girlfriend and appeared to stagger under the weight of physical contact.

  I remember one particular night in the dark at eleven o’clock when I was alone in the bedroom, sitting up in bed, my arms around my knees, Mandy’s books and her Mötley Crüe posters that had been on the walls since she was twelve all around me. The window beside me was open, and I could see the lit bunkhouses in the distance. It was early in the summer; we hadn’t been at the farm for more than a week, but the workers had been installed in their long, low quarters and Dolores in her trailer since mid-April, when the hard labour of tending the orchards and preparing the fields had begun. Warm yellow lights lit some of the windows and made a series of rectangles on the ground beside the planks of the outside wall of the bunkhouses. I knew which window was Teo’s because when he was late for work in the cherry orchards, he would remove the screen and climb out over the sill rather than walk down the length of the bunkhouse to the door. There was something about the awkwardness of the exit that made me smile because unlike almost every other movement he made, there was no grace in it. Late in the day I would on occasion glimpse him working in the trees, his T-shirt wrapped around his head as a sweat band, his skin gleaming. He stretched and twisted on the ladder in order to reach the fruit, then after a while unclasped a full twelve-quart basket from the harness that he wore and carried the cherries down to the ground where an empty basket waited. He was more like a performer than a labourer. The strength and fluidity of his efforts were a wonder, and sometimes I just stood and watched him, if I was certain he did not know I was doing this.

  We were less comfortable with each other than we had been during the previous summers and I still believe, even now, that neither of us knew why this was so. Gone were the long days of unstructured time we had enjoyed when we were young children, the sessions of play. We were less comfortable but in an inexplicable way more drawn to each other. Teo spoke English fairly well by then, and so instead of inventing games, we talked in a shy, hesitating way – about driving the car, which I was beginning to do, or about what the city that I lived in was like. So far, he had told me nothing of his own place or his own schooling; the distant other world where he spent the autumn and winter was so unreal to me my imagination failed in the face of it and, as I said, sadly I never questioned him. Once, hitching a ride with me partway in to town, a letter in his hand, he mentioned his grandmother and grandfather. He was sending them money, he said, because they needed it. One of them was sick, I don’t remember which. I didn’t ask him about this either,
though I recall being surprised in some way, not by the need but by the existence of further family connections. Until then in my mind, his was a family of only two: himself and his mother.

  This night, it was Dolores I saw when I looked through the window. She walked out of the dark and passed through the rectangles of light, moving along the wall until she reached Teo’s window, which she gently slapped once or twice with her hand. He raised the sash and they spoke for several moments. Then, just as I began to hear faint music coming from somewhere in the dark, Teo vanished and reappeared a few seconds later at his mother’s side. They stood entirely still, facing each other, framed by light. The tension in their bodies made me think that perhaps they were going to start to argue, that she was going to chastise Teo for something he had done, or that he was refusing to do something she wanted him to do. Then, abruptly, they began to dance in a way I had never seen anyone dance before. Dolores circled her son, her arms moving toward and around his upper torso and head, as if she were about to tie him up. She never once touched him, but it was as if she was drawing almost visible lines of energy from him as he stood motionless and appeared to control the choreography of the dance.

  No teenager I knew would have wanted to dance with a parent, particularly in such an odd location. Maybe at the daughter-and-father night at my private school, or at a wedding, but not alone and never by choice. And as far as I knew mothers and sons didn’t dance together anywhere, not even at a boys’ private school. I thought briefly about that, and then about the embarrassment I had experienced in the face of my own school’s daughter-and-father night because I was without a father. Not that I missed him – as I’ve said, I barely remembered him being in my life — but because, even though my uncle had come to the school that night, taking my father’s place, I felt that the rumour of my semi-orphaned status had been telegraphed through the crowd.

  Once Teo began to actively enter the dance, I realized that there was a repetitive pattern to what he and his mother were doing, that they knew the steps of the movements well, and I thought that they might be practising, keeping the skill honed. Once Teo began to move, his mother took two formal steps away from him, standing to one side with her head high and her face averted. Then, when he came to a sudden halt, she took over once again as if they were passing authority back and forth between them without ever relinquishing connection or control. Then, abruptly, she entered a furious solo that went on and on, as if it had no end. It was during this phase that I began to hear another noise unattached to the music, a high-pitched yelping, almost like a coyote baying at the moon or a dog announcing the arrival of a stranger. Though Dolores appeared to be ignoring the sound, I could tell by Teo’s posture that it had interrupted his concentration. I think Teo and I likely discovered the source of these cries at the same moment because, as soon as I had discerned that it was my uncle’s silhouette framed by the lake about five hundred feet away, I looked back to the scene. Teo was gone, but his mother was still dancing. My uncle made one or two more of those weird caterwauls, then put his hands in his pockets and walked back toward the house, in a casual sort of way, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. And maybe it hadn’t.

  But now I think that perhaps those slightly mocking sounds had dismissed Teo from the dance, that they had replaced him somehow, and that my watching uncle had moved into his territory, becoming a shadow partner. And was I not a partner as well: silent, unacknowledged, watching behind the glass?

  Heading north from here, away from the Point that gives it its name, Sanctuary Line crosses the Middle Road, an old Indian trail appropriated long ago by the surveyor Mahon Burwell. Ten miles farther on, it passes over the highway that connects the towns and cities of this province. I took this highway a few months ago to visit our sister sanctuary at Presqu’ile Point on Lake Ontario for the beginning of the late-spring butterfly migration and was very aware that after passing through Toronto I was once again on the Highway of Heroes. How disorienting it was to be travelling along that stretch of road, yet heading in the opposite direction. So disorienting, in fact, I almost believed that if I could only drive far enough I would be able to undo Mandy’s death and rediscover her, alive and well, at the air base, grinning on the tarmac.

  As I drove, I remembered the first overpass we saw the day that Mandy’s body was driven to Toronto; how all the local volunteer firefighters and the few sad old veterans who had fought in previous wars, along with dozens of civilians, had gathered to pay tribute. There were duplicates of this makeshift honour guard on all the overpasses we slipped beneath in the long black cars, but the first one was somehow the most consoling. Some of the people held flags, and because it was a breezy day, the colourful banners of cloth fluttered in an almost celebratory way against a clear blue sky. The veterans, their medals gleaming in the sun, the firefighters, and now and then a couple of police officers saluted. From below, in the back of the plush cars that drove us away from the air base, we noticed this gesture because the police and the firefighters stood on top of their vehicles, backlit by the afternoon light. In spite of the distance that grief had put between me and the world, I remember viewing all this with an odd sense of relief, as if in the back of my mind I had feared that this one time the spontaneous gatherings we had been told about and had seen on the national news might not take place, that Mandy’s death would not be acknowledged.

  These assemblies, as you know, are in no way official. They simply came into being once it was discovered that each fallen soldier would be driven along that stretch of the highway after the repatriation ceremony at the Trenton air base. I remember Mandy telling me she found the government decision to put up official signage renaming the highway to be faintly ridiculous, that, to her mind, there were roads in Afghanistan to which the word hero could be more aptly applied. And she wondered about the peacekeepers, why there had been no fanfare when they were brought home in coffins, as they often were. Because of her reaction, I decided at the time that I would never stand on an overpass that overlooked someone else’s misery. I could simply not allow myself to believe that it might be my own misery that would someday be briefly acknowledged from a small cement bridge.

  Once during that week I spent at the Presqu’ile Sanctuary I found myself driving to an overpass on that highway. Another soldier had been killed, and, of course, there would be more to come. I realized as I waited that I had now become one of those who stand and wait for a glimpse of tragedy. And when the dark line of cars passed beneath, like the other civilians, I wept, though whether I was weeping for Mandy, or myself, or for the unknown young person in the long black car I can’t really say.

  A few weeks ago, after struggling for an hour or so with the poetry of Wallace Stevens, I came across a book I hadn’t seen for years, not since the people I still refer to as “the adults” — my uncle, my mother, my aunt — were in full residence here and in full control. Decorated in the Victorian manner with a gold-embossed title and twisting flowers on its bright green cover, it is a collection of poems written in the last half of the nineteenth century by the town’s Baptist minister, Reverend Thomas Sanderson, and quite probably published at his own expense. As children we loved this book. We could find poems in it about places that we felt were ours simply because we recognized them; the little park in the town with its cannons from the War of 1812, the then brand new Baptist Church, which is now an antiques store, the town itself, and the nearby lake. We recognized occasions as well: Dominion Day, Victoria Day, or the Queen’s Birthday, as the reverend called it, being a contemporary of the Queen in question. But most thrillingly, there was a poem about visits the reverend made to our very own shoreline on summer afternoons more than a century before. “We dwell in the fullness of summer,” the poem, which was entitled, simply, “Butler Farm,” began. Often his verses opened in this fashion: he was not a gifted poet. “The point and the bluff and the island,” it continues, “make aspects more pleasing each day. The lighthouse, the schooners, the freighte
rs, we see in this beautiful bay.” Nothing affirmed our place on the planet more than that one unexceptional poem.

  But when the adults read the collected poems of Reverend Sanderson, they did so with a considerable amount of merriment. On occasions when my other uncle and aunt were visiting, and drink had been taken, my uncle would often threaten to recite “Dominion Day 1878,” “Dominion Day 1879,” and “Dominion Day 188o” in sequence unless the gathering agreed to become more lively by, say, arguing about politics. “‘Our vast Dominion,’” he would begin threateningly while all around him recoiled in mock horror.

  To us, the children, however, he sometimes read the “Nellie” sequence. Nellie was the reverend’s five-year-old child who had died of one contagion or another and who, according to the reverend, slept “beside Lake Erie’s shores.” The Baptist churchyard had been thoroughly searched and not one adult had been able to discover Nellie’s grave, so the family came to assume that there must be another secret graveyard somewhere, one that was much closer to the lake. On days when we children were too much underfoot, we would be told to go outside and look for little Nellie’s grave. Until I was an adolescent, the humour implied in this was lost on me, though the boys, eager to please, would laugh dutifully before setting forth along the shore and through the fields, looking for toppled gravestones in the long grass or in nearby woodlots. All the boys, that is, except for Teo. Teo did not laugh; he simply looked confused. He and I lagged behind on these excursions, pausing often to look for puffballs or butterfly chrysalides. I was uncertain about searching for anything, afraid that, because she had no known address, we might actually discover little Nellie’s tiny bones.

  Looking back, I wonder what my uncle’s preoccupation with graveyards and dead children was all about. Everything and everyone he spoke of had vanished, in the way that all children eventually vanish into the past or vanish because they have been snatched by death in the midst of their childhood. He has his own dead child now. Do his cells, assuming they are still quick, recognize the horror of that fact? Dear beautiful Mandy. Like Nellie, you “sleep beneath your native earth, and in the land that gave you birth.” But, unlike Nellie, your death occurred in unfamiliar terrain. You felt entitled neither to the love you were giving nor the ground on which you were walking. Away from your much-changed home, disoriented in the midst of a tour of duty, blindsided over and over again by physical love: each facet of your life was an improvised explosive device leading to a final, catastrophic detonation.