The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [20]
The sight of Jean in his clothes almost broke Avery's resolve. But he remained quiet beside her.
He could smell the woodsmoke in her hair. And she, in the wool of his sweater, could smell his body, lamp oil, earth.
The lantern light, the fire, the river, the cold bed, Jean's small, strong, still hand under his sweater.
To claim the sight of her. To learn and name and hold all that he sees in her face, as he, too, becomes part of her expression, a way of listening that will soon include her knowledge of him. To learn each nuance as it reveals a new past, and all that might be possible. To know in her skin the inconsistencies of age: her child hands and wrists and ears, her young woman's upper arms and legs smooth and firm; each anatomical part of us seems to attain a different maturity and, for a long time, remains so. How is it the body ages with such inconsistency? Looking at her across the table, or looking at her now, his face next to hers, his limbs along hers, the yielding of her face as she listens, of one face into another and another, always another openness, a latent openness, so love opens into love, like the slightest change of light or air on the surface of water. Lying next to her, he imagined even his thoughts could alter her face.
After a very long time, Jean began to speak.
– My father brought me to Aultsville for the first time after my mother died. He said he was taking me to hear the ‘talking trees,’ to lift my spirits a little … I still have no word for that depth of sadness. It is almost a different kind of sight; everything beautiful, a branding. During the whole train journey he wouldn't tell me what the talking trees were … After his day of teaching we walked out to the apple grove near the station …
It was warm, pink, dusk. Shadows fell between the rows and soon it was not so easy to see the way. The path was woven with shadow. I remember holding on to his arm very tightly. He always rolled up his sleeves in the summer, above his elbows. I can feel his bare arm now. The wind shook the small silver leaves – that indescribable sound – and farther into the grove I heard the murmuring. I looked up and saw nothing, but of course in the dusk, the brown arms of the apple-pickers were hidden by the branches, were themselves like moving branches. They were women's voices, and the words were so ordinary. Sometimes a single word suddenly clearer than the rest – Saturday, dress, waiting – and it was the ordinariness of the words that was so moving, even as a girl I felt this, that such ordinariness should always sound that way, as if the wind had found its language. ‘Voices sweet as fruit,’ my father said, a phrase I'm sure he'd saved for me in his mouth the entire day. Another time, he took me with him in the middle of winter, it was after a storm and again we walked, this time in snow-white darkness. From the mill roof hung immense icicles, almost to the ground, a frozen waterfall, twelve or fifteen feet long; it made me think of a painting I'd seen, of mammoth baleen in the moonlit ocean … Always he would show me these things as if they were secrets, not just there out in the open for anyone to see. And it's true, hardly anyone ever noticed the miracles my father noticed. We took the train back to Montreal together in the dark, and I fell asleep leaning against his wool coat, or his cool short-sleeved summer arm, full of the day's beautiful secrets and the irreducible knowledge that my mother was not with us. That she would never see these things. And that is when I realized we were looking for her.
Children make vows. From the moment I saw my father sitting in the kitchen, her sweater draped across his chest, about a month after she'd died, I knew I would never leave him, I knew I would always look after him.
When I think of it now, only now, I realize we lived in a hush, as if my mother had been all the happy noise we'd ever known. After she was gone, our range of expression