Frances Itani - Requiem

Basil, coiled with energy as always, raced ahead, circled back, checked to see that I was still on the path, raced ahead again. I tried to clear my mind but I kept thinking: I have to phone Kay to let her know where I am. I have to call. She’ll want an arrival date and I can’t give her one, but I have to call .

Now I’m in the car again, arguing with myself, hating the feeling of having to report. Kay knows I want to be alone but she also wants me to stop over and stay at her place when I reach Edmonton. She doesn’t believe I can do this—withdraw. She’s suspicious of anyone who does, because she can’t, herself. Although, to give her credit, she does stay in touch. She’s the one who makes the effort in the family. And she does make an effort.

I pull over and park beside a roadside restaurant. There’s a phone booth inside the entrance and I drop in a few coins, thinking I’ll invent the conversation after Kay picks up at her end. The coins clatter out again and there is no connection.

“Is the phone broken?” I ask the girl behind the counter.

“Nope,” she says. “But most of the time it doesn’t work.”

Fate decrees I will not speak with Kay today, so I go back outside, where Basil is bellowing like the hound he is. Not only is he howling, but his huge paws are bouncing off the window while he lets the world know he’s been abandoned. Two men are standing beside my car, trying to soothe him by talking through the crack where I left the window down.

“Your dog doesn’t like to be left on his own,” says one of the men, accusingly. His expression of scorn matches that of the second man, his twin, maybe. The two have matted hair, long, drooping faces, skin the colour of cold porridge.

“We don’t do things like that here, Chinaman,” says the other. “How long you bin over, anyway?”

There’s no answer to that. I’ve heard it all before. To them, I could be the heathen stepping out of “Gunga Din.” This is my own, my native land , I tell myself, and unlock the car.

I have to clear the inside windshield, it’s so steamed up. Basil aims a sharp bark at the lingering twins and their self-righteous stares, and settles down again to gnaw at his Kong.

“Thanks a lot,” I tell him as I start the car. “I did leave your window down, you know. You have air, you have food, you have water, you have my company twenty-four hours a day. And if you behave like this again, I’ll marry you off to Kay’s little scrapper, Diva. Would you like that? Would you? They marry frogs in Bangladesh to stave off drought. Don’t think I can’t arrange your marriage to Diva to stave off petulance.”

He raises his head, pulls another sound from his repertoire and yips like a fox. He stares at me with innocence and continues to chew.

As I drive, I’m seeing the faces of indignation left behind. I don’t care to think about what the two men were trying to protect. They probably don’t know themselves. Is it about being better? Is it about owning the right to belong?

I can’t pretend I haven’t wondered about Greg since he left home. The unposed questions about belonging. It was Lena, not I, who marched right into his classroom when he was in grade four and had been called slant eyes by a boy at his school. Maybe the protest did some good, maybe not. An assembly was held the next day by the teacher, no mention of the name-calling, no finger-pointing. Instead, a discussion on uniqueness and celebrating differences, which Greg told us about when he came home. Who knows if the discussion changed anyone’s behaviour?

That was when Greg was a child. And what about now? If he has learned anything from my behaviour, he has learned to keep the insults buried. Maybe I’ve let him down in that department, but there aren’t any rules.

I see a gas station and restaurant ahead and decide to try phoning Kay again. If I get through to her, she’ll know enough not to press. But she’ll be wondering about my whereabouts. She and Hugh will be having conversations, trying to figure out exactly where I am. They’ll have a map laid out on the dining-room table; they’ll be making guesses. They’ll be discussing Lena, too. And First Father. I don’t even want to imagine what they’re saying. I don’t want their concern or their pity. Go and see him , Kay will say. Why won’t you ever forgive? He has to see you. How much time can he have left? He’s eighty-four. It’s easy to find the place. It’s on the way into Kamloops, on the outskirts of the city. A small house on a dusty road off the main highway. Mother always took good care of it. He used his redress money for the down payment after the Apology. It’s a shame Mother didn’t live to own the house she’d rented for years, but they never had the money. Of course, when he made the move to purchase, we helped him out .

Of course.

I don’t want their interference. Not that they’re interfering right now. How much more alone could I be than in a car travelling a straight line across the country? If there’s something to work out, it’s called grief. It’s close and it’s sorrowful and it’s something I haven’t put a name to. Anger, maybe. At everything. At Lena. She shouldn’t have died of a stroke. She had warnings and didn’t pay attention. She didn’t tell anyone. She didn’t tell me and she didn’t tell Greg. And now we’ve both lost her. Was she frightened? Did she have a foreboding? Did she not understand the danger, or did she understand it all too well?

The worst part to think about is that if she had paid more attention—or if I had—she’d be with me now. There was medication in her purse, untaken. I didn’t know she’d seen the doctor, didn’t know she’d been advised to control her blood pressure. I didn’t know her blood pressure was high enough to need controlling. Everything was kept private. When her hand let go of the coffee mug at the cabin door in October, I thought it was because the mug was slippery. We swept up the glass and mopped the coffee and I filled another mug.

Lena was about to celebrate her fiftieth birthday. Child bride, she used to call herself, jokingly, being in her twenties when we married—while I was in my thirties.

Three and a half weeks after the scalding coffee splashed at her feet, three and a half weeks after Thanksgiving weekend, she had the final stroke that killed her. A cerebral vascular accident, the doctor called it. CVA. That happened in hospital, after I called the ambulance, after her speech began to slur and both of us stopped believing that this was about overwork and fatigue.

So here I am. One more person in my life has disappeared. And I’m heading back to family, first family, and at their bidding.

But not quite yet.

The terrain is changing. Big open spaces have begun. Basil, behind me, is making horse sounds again and I can tell that he’s enjoying this outlet for his energy. I stop the car and let him out at the side of the road. I keep him on a leash because there’s a bit of traffic—not much—and I look around while I receive the generosity of sky from every direction. While I’m pulled over, a freight train moves along the bottom edge of sky into my line of vision, far off, south of the highway. Prairie train, long trail of flatcar, boxcar, train that seems not to move but must be moving out there, along that never-ending space.

Basil does his business beside the road and leaps into the car again. Once he’s settled, I decide to keep on, get through Winnipeg and out the other side, branch north a bit, aim for Saskatoon and then north and west again. I want to drive and drive. I want to pass ranch and wheat farm and watery slough. I want to be numbed by the early flatness of prairie before I reach rolling hills. I’ll stop when I have to, when I can no longer go on, when I feel myself falling into the dark.