Frances Itani - Requiem

The second letter arrived soon afterwards:

The Reverend from Lill’s church announced that he was coming to visit, and I pondered what to wear. Fortunate that I climbed to Mommy’s cedar closet in the attic before departure and dropped a 1936 dress into the hellhole, where my open luggage awaited. It’s a good dress, hand-sewn, turquoise and gloriously fashionable again, with large sleeves. I wore it with great success. The Reverend made it clear that he’d be staying awhile, so Lill brought out her game of Scrabble. I had never played, though the game has been around for years. The three of us sat at a small table in the living room. Lill can’t see enough to play well but I did not bring this to her attention. The Reverend spelled O-V-A-R-Y. I could scarcely believe my eyes. Nothing was said. Lill peered at the tiles but did not seem to notice ovary. We carried on .

After the Reverend left, we talked about friends who have died during the past year. Then we talked about a talent party I once hosted when we were young. Everyone who attended was required to perform. A trifle party, too, in the same year. I chose a handsome young man to serve the wine. He arranged green and red cherries across the trifle, moments before it was served. The world was young and gay then. Now Lill and I are the only two left. The handsome young man disappeared into the next war. Most of the other young men we knew died in the first .

At night I lie in bed in the guest room with my eyes wide and think of the people I’ve known, dead and alive. My head fills with ghosts. The furnace clicks on and off as if it were January. I can feel gusts of air in the room around me. Lill keeps the house far too warm. Occasionally, the old aunt snorts, down below .

And the third:

The church we attended—Anglican—was hung in scarlet, for St. Simon and St. Jude. I took Lill’s arm to prevent her from falling up the steps. The Reverend recited the longest prayer he could concoct and Lill nodded off. She said she enjoyed the outing nonetheless .

On Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays, a young maid arrives to clean and prepare dinner. When she is not here, we fend for ourselves. I sew and read the newspapers aloud to Lill. At the moment, I am relining a nice old dressing gown she found in a back closet—1920s or earlier .

Every morning I prepare breakfast, my chore and my pleasure. Lill manages tea. I made cookies one day when the coast was clear. And ironed scarves. I am Busy, capital B. Blind and partially blind people require attention, though Lill will not admit to either condition. Who are we if we aren’t here to help one another in life? And, I suppose, in death .

Weather is holding and I am due to depart in ten days. I shall be flattened by the time I am home and will not be lunatic enough to travel again. One trip every quarter century is enough .

Lill has employed a boy to cut the grass for the last time before winter. I see him from the window, making careful rows. The aunt grinds on behind the curtain. When we enter the dining room, Lill calls out, throwing words ahead of her so as not to startle .

Now I stop. Said grass cutter will mail this as he departs .

P.S. There is art on the walls here. Good art that Bin would want to see .

The final letter of the trip arrived the same day Miss Carrie returned home. We met her at the airport.

Lill invited a friend to tea, a retired officer of some regiment or other, old and ill and sorry for himself. I had already met him, when he was a dozen years younger. He was better company then as retired officer than he is now in the role of dying man. He was once attractive and interesting; now he is bent on dying .

Fortunately, Lill’s young niece had also been invited, and this provided diversion for everyone. She brought her young man, to whom she is engaged. He was on display, but he was awkward and has not yet learned to be charming. He has a mother, like everyone else, but has not been instructed. He wore a three-piece suit, has a beard—urban, not prospector. He did not look like a provider. SHE carried the tray into the dining room, but he plunked down on the first chair he could see. The dying officer looked on, amused at last. I wrote a note to the niece this morning: “A young man is at a definite disadvantage if he is seated when a lady enters a room for her tea.” I sent it off by the afternoon post .

“This is how I want to get old,” said Lena. “With spirit like Miss Carrie’s. Connected. Engaged. With people of every age. Even the ones who are dead.”

We loved receiving Miss Carrie’s letters, and she had more stories to tell on her return.

And Lena and I had something of our own to tell: Lena was pregnant, due the following summer, 1976. Our first and only child, conceived the night of the barbecue. Our beautiful son, our beloved little worrier, Greg. Born old, in a daze of humidity and heat.

Auntie Aya’s baby was born in the early summer. It was a boy, and she and Uncle Aki named him Taro. He was delivered a few weeks before his due date, and he had black hair, a squarish sort of birthmark on his neck and dark eyes like Auntie Aya’s, eyes that stared up into mine when I went over to meet him. He was small, and his toes and fingertips were cold and dusky blue, but Uncle Aki held him up proudly in the doorway so he could be seen by callers who stood outside to congratulate the parents.

Ba was the one who assisted with deliveries because, for many years, she had helped the midwife in the Vancouver area where she’d lived during the time she and Ji had owned their store. She was the only one in camp with that kind of experience, and as there was no doctor among us, she was kept busy the three and a half years she was in that place. She called for my mother to help with Auntie Aya’s delivery, and when Mother came home that night we heard her whispering to Father, behind the dividing sheet in the bedroom. Ba was worried, Mother said, when the afterbirth came, because she knew there would be difficulty ahead.

The birth was cause for celebration because Taro was a first son. Our father opened the small red book and read aloud the fate of a baby born in the year of the monkey. After I saw Taro, I drew a picture of a horse as a gift, and Uncle Aki tacked the picture to the wall in their bedroom and told me he would give it to the baby when he grew older. It was somewhat of a stick figure, but I was pleased with the drawing nonetheless, because the slope of the neck was better than my earlier attempts.

But Ba’s prediction bore out, and Auntie Aya began to bleed heavily within twenty-four hours of the delivery. She had to stay in her bed and did not seem to be getting better. Some said it was because of the extreme cold she had endured during the early months of the past winter. Others said she had breathed the terrible choking fumes from lime that had been dumped into the holes of the outhouses during the first hot spell. That was the problem, they said. It was not a good thing for a woman expecting a child to breathe such fumes. All of this we children overheard, even though the conversations were whispered.

Auntie Aya became more and more ill. The bleeding turned to haemorrhage. Mother came home one afternoon after helping Ba, and she sat on a chair and looked at the floor and we could see that she was crying. She told us that our aunt was weak and had lost a lot of blood. She had been lying on her back in bed and had told Uncle Aki that she was slipping away; she could feel herself leaving.

Uncle Aki began to run frantically from shack to shack, but everyone knew that there was nothing more to be done. Father decided to send one of the teachers with a message across the bridge, to let the doctor in town know that a woman on the east side of the river was dying. After many hours, someone drove up in a small, dusty truck that had a running board. The driver was not the local doctor but a veterinarian. He went into Auntie Aya’s home and spoke with her and gave her an injection, and that gradually stopped the bleeding. She was weak for a long time because she had lost so much blood, but eventually she recovered.