A Witness to Life (Ashland, 2) Read Online Free PDF Page B
Author: Terence M. Green
the room, fixing on faces, scanning. Then I look back at her counter. The woman here now is younger. In a way that I do not understand, she is less than the woman I saw yesterday.
Above her head, I read the sign ostrich aigrettes for 75¢, good assortment of colors.
I approach, stand with fingers touching the dark wooden edge of the glass counter. When she notices me, I try to think of something to say. I ask to see the men's fur cap encased beneath my hands. The woman, younger than me, than her, very pretty, soft features, complies, passes it to me, smiles without showing her teeth. I touch it, turn it over in my hands.
"This one's astrakhan. We have them in half Persian lamb, nutria, beaver, German otter. . . They're only three dollars and fifty cents. Good value." The voice is pleasant, friendly.
"It's very nice." And it is. I let my fingers probe its exotic mystery, its suppleness. Its softness. "Thank you," I say. "Thank you for showing me." I hand it back.
She continues to smile.
I cannot buy it from her. She does not tell me that my own hat is an old one. Her mouth does not curve down at the corners.
That night, Saturday night, I meet Jock downtown and we make the rounds. We drink ale, eat sausages and eggs and pigs' feet in beverage rooms with sawdust on the floors, spend an hour with two women named Diane and Caroline, whom we meet at the Nipissing, neither of whom I can picture clearly in my mind the next day.
But it is not the same for me as it has been in the past. It is not the same. My mind is elsewhere.
Her face. I know her.
When I stumble in the door past midnight, I know that something is amiss. All the lights are on. I hear voices from an upper bedroom.
I pause at the foot of the stairs, clear my head, listen.
The priest is standing at the foot of the bed. He has just conferred the last rites on Gramma. She lies there, tiny, covered with a checkered quilt to her waist. Her feet are small hillocks beneath its weight. Someone has wrapped rosary beads about her hands. A clean blue nightgown is tied tightly at her neck.
There is blood in her stool, Ma tells me. Ma does not know what this means. They have called the priest instead of a doctor, which, somehow, does not surprise me.
On the bedside table is the bottle of Lourdes water, more than twenty years old, that I have been told Father Owen gave to Ma when Sarah died. The only other time I have seen it is when I was six years old, when Rose was sick, that winter, when Ma, her eyes fierce with fear, rubbed it on her chest, praying for her cough to disappear.
Extreme Unction. Father Owen. Miss Lecour.
The memory of St. Mary's School—of catechism lessons—back in Elora floods back, like the Grand River, wide and powerful. I stand in its midst, an obstacle to be eroded, the Tooth of Time.
Gramma's eye sockets, lips, ears, hands glisten with the holy oil, with forgiveness of sins she has never committed, could never commit.
Her eyes roll toward me, watery, fasten tightly. Her mouth opens in a small o.
No sound.
But she is alive. She is alive. Still.
Da did not receive the last rites. I saw him myself, that day, before he was washed.
He died at work, after eating the tomato sandwich that Ma always made for his lunch, beside a road excavation bed that he had just carefully lined with crushed gravel. They say that he caught his foot on the pedal of the steamroller, fell and struck his head on the metal side, hung twisted from one leg. They could not find Ma, but the men told me they knew my name and where I worked from listening to Da brag about me, so a man in a faded checkered shirt and suspenders, sad eyes, and a floppy moustache curving over a thin mouth, his broad-brimmed hat gripped in soiled hands, came to my work and told me and took me there to see him. He was lying on a grass boulevard beside the sidewalk, covered with a tarpaulin. Work had come to a halt, and the twenty-one men on his crew stood about silently,
Above her head, I read the sign ostrich aigrettes for 75¢, good assortment of colors.
I approach, stand with fingers touching the dark wooden edge of the glass counter. When she notices me, I try to think of something to say. I ask to see the men's fur cap encased beneath my hands. The woman, younger than me, than her, very pretty, soft features, complies, passes it to me, smiles without showing her teeth. I touch it, turn it over in my hands.
"This one's astrakhan. We have them in half Persian lamb, nutria, beaver, German otter. . . They're only three dollars and fifty cents. Good value." The voice is pleasant, friendly.
"It's very nice." And it is. I let my fingers probe its exotic mystery, its suppleness. Its softness. "Thank you," I say. "Thank you for showing me." I hand it back.
She continues to smile.
I cannot buy it from her. She does not tell me that my own hat is an old one. Her mouth does not curve down at the corners.
That night, Saturday night, I meet Jock downtown and we make the rounds. We drink ale, eat sausages and eggs and pigs' feet in beverage rooms with sawdust on the floors, spend an hour with two women named Diane and Caroline, whom we meet at the Nipissing, neither of whom I can picture clearly in my mind the next day.
But it is not the same for me as it has been in the past. It is not the same. My mind is elsewhere.
Her face. I know her.
When I stumble in the door past midnight, I know that something is amiss. All the lights are on. I hear voices from an upper bedroom.
I pause at the foot of the stairs, clear my head, listen.
The priest is standing at the foot of the bed. He has just conferred the last rites on Gramma. She lies there, tiny, covered with a checkered quilt to her waist. Her feet are small hillocks beneath its weight. Someone has wrapped rosary beads about her hands. A clean blue nightgown is tied tightly at her neck.
There is blood in her stool, Ma tells me. Ma does not know what this means. They have called the priest instead of a doctor, which, somehow, does not surprise me.
On the bedside table is the bottle of Lourdes water, more than twenty years old, that I have been told Father Owen gave to Ma when Sarah died. The only other time I have seen it is when I was six years old, when Rose was sick, that winter, when Ma, her eyes fierce with fear, rubbed it on her chest, praying for her cough to disappear.
Extreme Unction. Father Owen. Miss Lecour.
The memory of St. Mary's School—of catechism lessons—back in Elora floods back, like the Grand River, wide and powerful. I stand in its midst, an obstacle to be eroded, the Tooth of Time.
Gramma's eye sockets, lips, ears, hands glisten with the holy oil, with forgiveness of sins she has never committed, could never commit.
Her eyes roll toward me, watery, fasten tightly. Her mouth opens in a small o.
No sound.
But she is alive. She is alive. Still.
Da did not receive the last rites. I saw him myself, that day, before he was washed.
He died at work, after eating the tomato sandwich that Ma always made for his lunch, beside a road excavation bed that he had just carefully lined with crushed gravel. They say that he caught his foot on the pedal of the steamroller, fell and struck his head on the metal side, hung twisted from one leg. They could not find Ma, but the men told me they knew my name and where I worked from listening to Da brag about me, so a man in a faded checkered shirt and suspenders, sad eyes, and a floppy moustache curving over a thin mouth, his broad-brimmed hat gripped in soiled hands, came to my work and told me and took me there to see him. He was lying on a grass boulevard beside the sidewalk, covered with a tarpaulin. Work had come to a halt, and the twenty-one men on his crew stood about silently,
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