Sanctuary Line Read online

  My aunt removed the needle from the record, scraping it noisily across the vinyl as she did so. A dull stillness entered the late afternoon. Then, when she was certain she had our attention, she smiled brightly. My other uncle was conducting a twilight auction that evening in one of the back townships, and his wife, my other aunt, had gone with him for company on the trip, so my other cousins were staying for dinner. “Who wants spaghetti?” my Aunt Sadie called cheerfully as she turned back toward the house.

  It occurs to me now that monarchs show every appearance of being cheerful creatures. Their beauty, the fact that they dance across our summer gaze, stunningly adorned and always in the vicinity of brilliantly coloured flowers, their poise, and the apparent effortlessness of their movements give us every reason to believe they are in a state of grace. But, in fact, few insects have such a fraught existence. First, right after conception, there is a series of vigorous and possibly painful transformations: from the splitting open and shedding of larval skin to accommodate the growth of the caterpillar, to the making of the cocoon to house the pupa. This is followed two weeks later by the butterfly itself struggling in the most critical way to free itself from the prison of the chrysalis. Then there is that brief, lovely season of riding the breeze and feeding on nectar in preparation for the most lengthy and exhausting migration, and a collapse, afterwards, into a period of winter dormancy. All of this inconceivable exertion and unpredictable exposure to danger leads in the end to mating, and not too much later to death.

  My uncle stood out on the lawn for what seemed to me to be a very long time, tilting the record my aunt had scratched back and forth in the light to see how much it was damaged. I watched him through the window while I was putting knives and forks on the table. Something about the way his head was lowered as he examined the disc made it possible for me to see that during his most recent trip to the barber the back of his neck had been shaved. The thought of him sitting in the chair with his chin resting on his chest, utterly submissive and covered like a child in a large white bib, coupled with the way he carefully slid that vinyl record back into its sleeve and slowly closed the lid of the record player, made me heartsick, though I couldn’t have explained, at the time, why I might feel that way.

  I have been wondering these days about charisma, about what goes into its makeup. Is it is a sensual experience? Does visual or auditory extraordinariness, for example, determine its properties? Is it is learned, or acquired, or is it present in the configuration of an organism from the beginning? And what about butterflies? Mysterious and graceful, abundantly colourful, no one can deny that they are charismatic. But is this also true when they are larvae or pupae? In the mid-nineteenth century, a theory flourished among entomologists: if one were to possess a microscope powerful enough, one would be able to see all of the exquisite features of the butterfly trapped within the organism, even at the larval stage, but this was subsequently disproved. And other life forms, drawn to the charismatic, do they come as predators or worshippers? Perhaps prey is always worshipped to a certain extent, or maybe there is always an unconscious desire to destroy attached to all that is worshipped. We should speak about the spiritual, I suppose, and about worship. It would be interesting to talk about what form your prayers take and why I have no prayers at all.

  Because cardenolides, a poisonous chemical contained in the milkweed upon which they feed, moves through them and is broadcast to the world through their colour and markings, monarchs have few predators. It is not uncommon, therefore, to see a monarch and a starling lounging on the same branch. This gift of toxicity is so powerful that the viceroy butterfly has evolved over centuries to both look and to smell like a monarch in order to increase its own chances of survival. But all viceroys – and even a handful of monarchs – are born lacking the chemical and, though they appear to be no different than their brothers, as beautiful and charismatic and immune to harm, jays, grackles, and cardinals instinctively sense their weakness and know that they are killable and consumable.

  My uncle was like one of those few vulnerable monarchs, or perhaps more specifically like its mimic, the viceroy. Most of us sailing in his midst saw only his colour and his grace, and we assumed, therefore, his indestructibility. His enemies, if he had any, would have been impressed by his persona and respectful of his colourful territory and his accomplishments. Only someone very, very close to him would have been able to sense his defencelessness, his helplessness in the face of attack. Only someone who had slept beside him for thousands of nights could have picked up the scent of his weaknesses. There may very well have been – part of me still wants to believe this – no latent poison in him. There may have been nothing manipulative associated with his charm.

  But he was charismatic. We all followed him, we all worshipped him. Everywhere he went we ran after him, sensing an adventure, wanting to be in his company. And yet I think the charm that emanated from him was a force that evolved as he matured, rather than something that was with him from birth. It was the bright shield he used to draw others into his orbit, to keep them in his line of vision, and to protect himself from the destruction he could always imagine. But evolution, once it is set in motion, is a natural phenomenon rather than one that is willed. As time passed, his magnetism may have become a burden to him, one he was unable to discard, even when he was absent, even when he had disappeared behind the grey veil I mentioned earlier and was not available to anyone at all.

  The first time I went to The Golden Field to visit my mother, she told me what my uncle was like as a child, his timidity and silences, and how he broke out of the vagueness and reticence of that and into something more splendid and precise, how that glittering shield was forged.

  I was looking at his picture on the table, his picture and the photos of the others she had chosen to display. Lovely Mandy in her dress uniform – with its red worsted material, white braid, back cuffs, and gold buttons, her white gloved hands resting on the hilt of a splendid sword – put my own graduation photo and those of her brothers’ in the shade. She was ablaze with purpose, with confidence, or so it seems. The photo of my uncle was not as large, and he himself appeared to be smaller and thinner than my memory of him.

  “He was such a shy boy, so timid.” My mother said this without naming him, as if waiting to see if I would ask her to stop. When I didn’t, she leaned back into the cushions she had arranged in her armchair and added, “As you know, every summer we went across the lake to Sadie’s farm.”

  I did know this. At the end of the summers of her childhood, just before the beginning of the apple harvest, when the first crops of summer fruit had been picked and the apples were almost mature, my grandfather would leave the farm for a week in the care of hired hands. Along with my grandparents, my mother and her older brothers were expected to visit their American relatives across the lake in Erie County, Ohio. This was an attempt to maintain their connection with one of the bifurcating though solidly landloving arms of the family.

  “Great-Uncle John’s farm,” I corrected, naming the true owner of the place. Sadie, as she was during that long-gone time, was to my mind just a child, passing through, really, on her way to becoming the adult woman I knew – my aunt – firmly planted on our side of the lake.

  I knew the history of this particular bifurcation as well: my uncle had, of course, been the deliverer of all that information. It concerned two very different yet equally significant reactions to the American War of Independence. In 1786, one Butler brother, Amos by name, had found after ten years of prayer and meditation that he must remain loyal to the same British monarchy that had established the Butlers – all those years ago – in Ireland. (Butler’s Court, by the way, the family seat, was much referred to by my uncle in his tales and was a place that, after much research, I discovered to be entirely fictional.) So Amos assembled his family of six and set out for the British colony of Upper Canada, which, fortunately for him, was only a two-day journey by horse and wagon and a short boat ride across Lak
e Erie. He had been granted land in the vicinity of Leamington in Essex County, where, after removing an unimaginable amount of hardwood forest, he planted the same variety of apple tree – the Kaziah Red, named for his wife – that had so flourished on his father’s farm in northern Ohio. Samuel, brother of Amos, after much meditating and praying (they were fierce Methodists) felt that he must be true to the New Republic of the United States of America as he, and his father, had favoured Irish emancipation from the British in spite of the fact that it was men just like him, living in houses very similar to the fictional Butler’s Court, who were making that emancipation so difficult. The American Revolution looked to him like a similar but more successful attempt at the same kind of much-desired liberation.

  After this second migration, the first being from Ireland, the sons of Amos Butler began to move west along the north shore of Lake Erie, my own great-great-grandfather establishing the famous orchards our uncle spoke about, which were all cut down and burned and turned into McIntosh plantings just before my cousins and I were born. At the turn of the twentieth century, a member of the third Butler line, a bachelor lighthouse-keeper, emigrated from Ireland to America and eventually established himself as keeper of the light at the Point where I now work and over which I watch the sun rise almost every morning of my life.

  The Point was a very different spit of land by the time I was born. The lighthouse was mechanized, and a provincial bird sanctuary was established there. The pier was closed down and the name of old Point Road was changed to Sanctuary Line.

  “As far as I’m concerned, Sanctuary Line is still the old Point Road,” my mother said, as if following my thoughts. “When I and my brothers were driven along it and then along the Talbot Highway, five miles to Kingsville, there was never any thought that a road could have its name changed to something else. The car was ferried from there, from Kingsville – I remember all those wonderful old elm trees – first to Pelee Island, then across the lake to Sandusky, Ohio. I admire the Americans, but I greatly disapprove of their politics,” she told me, not for the first time. “But,” she added vaguely, “I suppose I wouldn’t have been thinking of that at the time. Was it during the war?” she asked herself.

  “Yes,” I answered, “but not the war you disapprove of.”

  “We,” she said, meaning the family, “escaped the war at that time. Partly because everyone was either too young or had taken the agricultural exemption.” She was quiet for a moment. “Dear Mandy,” she said, as if thinking that fate had decided on her death based on an exemption chosen by the previous generation in a completely different war. I looked at my uncle’s photo again. In it he, too, was dressed in a kind of uniform, but a uniform designed for no war at all. He was a young man at the time, just a boy, really, and almost anyone would think that the harness he was wearing was one that had recently been or was about to be attached to a parachute. But I knew that it was a picker’s harness, and that there were two clasps at the front, to which a basket that would soon be filled with cherries or peaches would be attached. I say peaches or cherries because I can see phlox (P. divaricata species of the Polemoniaceae family) growing at the edge of the wood lot in the picture, and it would have stopped blooming by the time the apple harvest was underway.

  “I remember looking at the American shoreline from the ferry; how everything there got larger and larger as we got nearer,” my mother said. “It’s the kind of thing you notice as a child.”

  How serene that slow, cadenced voyage must have been; the old Loyalist houses sliding by car windows that were rolled down for the breeze, the ferry at Kingsville, the picnic on Pelee Island, the second journey by ferry, the view from which would have included orchards and barns that were a mirror image of the orchards and barns on and around the family’s own farm. Yet I think that small family might have moved with unconscious caution through this geographical double, sensing a strangeness on that side of the looking-glass: something to do with one extra degree of orderliness, tidiness, prosperity; your own world improved so subtly that you could feel the change without being able to identify it. The waves approaching that shoreline would be moving in a direction opposite to the direction chosen by their own waves. The same moon would rise in a different part of the sky. And, somehow, though one would hardly dare admit it, almost everything would have seemed to be more certain, confident, independent, and, as my uncle always said, with irony in his voice, “The biggest and the best.” It is true, of course, that we are never entirely comfortable in the midst of places or people we admire too much.

  There were three children in that other, opposite place, second cousins of approximately the same age as the three children arriving from the northern side of the lake. Tom was paired by age and gender with the boy who would become my Uncle Stanley; Rupert, who was a year older, spent his time with Harry. And then there was the already self-possessed Sadie, who someday would become my aunt but who for now took my mother, Beth, for her companion.

  There was also a butterfly tree on that farm so that some summers my mother and her brothers saw that burning bush on the north side of the lake and other summers witnessed the same miracle to the south. My mother told me that until she was about fourteen she believed that every farm had such a tree and experienced such an event.

  “One summer,” my mother said, “when we pulled up the American farm lane we could hardly believe what we were seeing.” They had driven, you understand, into the immediate aftermath of misfortune. When they stepped out of the car the air still held the taste and smell of ash, and charred timbers latticed the stone foundation of what had, just days before, held up the barn. Tom, normally a clumsily energetic boy, did not run out of the house as he had each summer to greet them. Playing with matches, two days earlier, he had accidentally set the barn on fire and it had burned out of control for twelve hours.

  Farming being what it was, and childhood being what it is, this would have been considered to be a spectacular tragedy, though being primarily an orchard farm, the animals, only five – two cows, a pony, and two workhorses – had been saved. The pony belonged to Tom, and his father had made a heroic effort to release it from the burning barn and was relieved, he said, to have been able to do so because he was concerned about Tom, about the guilt, perhaps even the anguish, the boy might feel about the accident. The concern was real; the guilt was as well.

  But as the days went by, a theatrical element entered the way that Tom was attended to, or at least this is what I’ve gathered from what my mother told me, and how I like to imagine it now. There would have been a kind of celebrity attached to the event and to the boy who had unintentionally caused it to happen.

  “Tom was treated with great tenderness by his parents,” my mother said, “almost as if he were an invalid.” The other children were not permitted to be rough with him or to taunt him in any way, even if the taunts had nothing at all to do with the barn. His father encouraged Tom to come along with him if he had errands in town, something that would likely never have occurred to the man in the past, and his mother would stop talking or working as the boy walked by, brush the hair back from his forehead, and ask him what he would like to do with the morning, the afternoon, or if there was anything special he wanted for supper. He became, in essence, a sacred child. There would have been a peculiar radiance about him: he was completely unlike the boisterous boy my mother remembered from previous summer visits. He had evolved into a miniature adult, wanted less to run with his sister and his cousins than to work in the fields with his father or help him mend a fence or paint a door.

  They were harrowing during that period, breaking up a fallow field because my American great-uncle had decided that he wanted to begin to grow strawberries as well as apples the following year. Tom was encouraged to participate, was even permitted to drive the team that pulled the heavy rack of iron teeth across the earth, and Stanley, my future uncle, would have desperately wanted to be included. “But, in all likelihood, he was not asked,” my mother s
aid. “And he would have not dared to make the suggestion. Children – in those times – did not initiate anything, really, did only what they were told to do.”

  And yet, there was his American cousin, his mirror image, his doppelganger welcomed into what until that time would have looked to him like an impenetrable adult world, and welcomed, furthermore, as a blessed recruit whose frailties and hesitancies were pandered to rather than scoffed at.

  The fond pandering would not have been lost on the child my future uncle was then for, if I am to believe my mother, people like their own father, my grandfather, and my grandmother too to a certain degree, were not comfortable with a show of feelings. And yet surprisingly my grandparents were able to engage in long, earnest discussions concerning Tom’s predicament, discussions during which they allowed that the boy’s suffering had to be taken into account. This kind of focus on the boy’s feelings must have been quite foreign to them, and would have been absolutely absent from their own Methodist upbringing, which insisted, above all, on not calling attention to oneself or one’s own troubles. Stanley, overhearing some of these conversations, would have felt the sweetness of how the talk circled, in a gentle way, around and around one particular boy’s inner life, and how that boy himself was the instigator of something magnificent: a night of heat and colour, an occurrence impossible to ignore, and then, in its wake, a whole season of solicitousness and care.

  My mother and Sadie spent those two weeks making clothes for their dolls from scraps Sadie’s mother gave them. Then, with the help of Rupert and Harry’s carpentry skills, they devised an elaborate dollhouse out of wooden crates they’d found in the barn. The only interaction with her brother Stanley took place during the daily swim. And even then all the children effectively overlooked him, my mother and Sadie being intimately involved in shared imaginary worlds the way girl children sometimes are, and Harry and Rupert being enough older that they swam in deeper waters and dove from more alarmingly high rocks. So, mostly Stan, the child my uncle was then, was at loose ends, watching from a respectful distance as Tom talked with a clutch of adult men loitering at the edge of an orchard about the development and subtleties of varieties of apples. It must have seemed to Stanley as if the burning of the barn had been an adolescent rite of passage for Tom, after which he’d been invited, without hesitation, to join in the mysteries and ceremonies of adulthood.