Refuge Read online

  Refuge

  A Novel

  Merilyn Simonds

  For Ellen Stafford, 1910–2002

  and

  Ida Feher, 1929–2017

  Love, death, and the whole damn thing

  Contents

  The First Day

  The Second Day

  The Third Day

  The Last

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Merilyn Simonds

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The First Day

  You can’t lie to me. Oh, people have tried. All the usual prevarications, and some they make up just for me. Take a picture and there’s a chance you’ll get away with it. But even then, more often than not, I’ll feel that flutter in my gut, that shiver behind my eyelids when I spot a lie pencilled on a face, and the words will come spilling out of my mouth before I have a chance to think them: That’s not the truth.

  Not that it’s ever done me much good. What’s the point of knowing every time someone is trying to put one over on you? It’s like having the gift of seeing flatulence. It shows you something you already suspect, something you don’t want to know too much about.

  That’s what I’m thinking as I sit here in the verandah of my cabin, watching the girl row across the narrow moat of water that separates my small island from the farm where I was born. A grey moth with a smudge of rust on its nether parts moves slowly across the sagging screen in the opposite direction. I squint past it into the distance and wonder just what kind of lies this young woman will try on me. Because if I am sure of one thing after ninety-six years, it is that I have pretty much heard them all.

  The only one who can lie to me is me.

  ~

  Her first email caught me off guard.

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: Please help

  Date: 19 April 2001 22:01:28 MDT (CA)

  To: [email protected]

  I am Miss Nang Aung Myaing, I am age 23. My country Burma. My grand father is A Pho Charlie O’Brien. His country Canada.

  Please I have very suffered to come your country. I contact now to prove my blood.

  Please you help.

  I get a lot of these. Please, I am stranded in London. Please, I am a poor farmer in Nigeria. Please. So polite. I like that. And personal. That’s the trick. I always read them, sometimes more than once. It passes the time.

  But this one was different. I circled the cursor around the name. His name. How could they know?

  Of course they know. Nothing is held close anymore. Everybody knows everything. Or they think they do. There must be a thousand Charlie O’Briens alive in the world. More, laid in the ground.

  Miss. Ha! More likely a hairy man smoking cheroots, spitting as he pecked away in some basement, setting traps for old women.

  Well, let him try. I clicked the little trash can, and with a whoosh the email was sucked into oblivion.

  But she didn’t give up.

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: Help me please

  Date: 25 April 2001 23:05:18 MDT (CA)

  To: [email protected]

  You receive email I send?

  I find you name on website Galería Imago. Photograph little boy is grand father. You make photograph. You mother, yes?

  Urgent I visit. Go back, I die.

  Please. I have present you from A Pho Charlie.

  Miss Nang Aung Myaing

  For the better part of a week, I argued with myself, until my need to know won out over my better judgment.

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: Re: Help me please

  Date: 30 April 2001 06:47:05 MDT (CA)

  To: [email protected]

  What do you have?

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: Re: Re: Help me please

  Date: 30 April 2001 6:49:01 MDT (CA)

  To: [email protected]

  I come show.

  Where you stay?

  Miss Nang Aung Myaing

  A moment of weakness made me spell out the directions to the island. Loneliness, the old woman’s curse. Well, I may be old and weak, but I’m not entirely stupid. Not yet.

  Curious. I’ll admit to that.

  ~

  The girl looks ordinary enough. Not like a real estate agent or a social worker or a thug. That’s one good thing. Or three, depending how you count.

  And she’s tidy. She’s pulling the old rowboat up on the rocks pretty much where I like it.

  Scrawny, though. Doesn’t block much of the view. She’s got her hair pulled up into a ponytail, like I used to wear in the fifties. Looks like a boy in those blue jeans. No hips, but the shirt is so tight I can see her little breasts, round and high as suction cups.

  She takes nothing from the boat — no suitcase. So she doesn’t mean to stay. Another good thing.

  Ah. That hump on her back is a daypack. Whatever she has for me is tucked inside.

  Smaller than an iron lung. Bigger than a tin of salve. A game we used to play.

  I shuffle my chair back into the shadows. The verandah is screened in and heaped with junk: oars, tripods, winter boots and coats, things I’ve been meaning to get rid of. Nowhere to sit, but that doesn’t matter as long as I can wheel myself through breaks in the debris to my favourite lookouts. One at the far end with a view of the lake. This one, by the screen door, where I can see the woods that shield the lake from the farmhouse. Where I watch for strangers coming up the path.

  Halfway along, she stops, shifts the daypack to her other shoulder, and carries on.

  So. Small but heavy.

  Heavy as the weight of memory that holds me here.

  “How old did you say you are?” Doctor Stevens looked up from behind half spectacles.

  She pulled herself straight and squared her shoulders. “Eighteen.”

  She was wearing May’s one good dress, a grey voile with modest pleats down the front, a woman’s dress, although it hung so loosely she felt like a little girl dressed up in her mother’s clothes. She glanced down at her thin arms, blotched from the artificial sun, and pulled them quickly behind her.

  “I remember the day you were born,” he said.

  Her breath stopped in her throat. But did he remember the year? Would he calculate the three she’d added on?

  He tapped his pipe in the ashtray, a slow steady pulse. “Pity about your mother,” he said at last.

  ~

  She’d pushed her head out of her mother’s body at precisely 5:33 on the morning of the 28th of June in the fifth year of the new century — the twentieth century, which was new at the time.

  Her papa’s favourite story.

  As if unprepared at that moment to fully enter the world, she’d paused. Her eyelids, mouth, and brow worked in spasm, twisting the smooth features of her face into a scowl, a grimace, a wide expression of surprise. Then the muscles relaxed, and the lids half closed in an air of resignation.

  “Hallo!”

  Her eyelids fluttered. Her face was wedged to one side, so that her father had to thrust his bushy head between his darling wife’s legs in order to get a proper look. Crouched over the head of this half-in, half-out child, he locked his gaze on hers, forging a connection between them that spiked the hairs on his spine, his neck, his wrists.

  Then her eyes lost their focus, as if turning to deeper thoughts, and her lids drifted down.

  “Hallo!” he shouted, louder, and once more, her eyelids flicked open, her look reluctant. Expectant. Curious. Resolute. Game. An expression her father could not fix with any certainty no matter how closely
he scrutinized the furrows of her forehead, the wrinkled skin around her lips.

  He glanced at the clock on the mantle. Twenty seconds. Twenty-five. Thirty. Long enough for every drop of blood in her tiny body to complete its circuit sixty times or more. For her lungs to fill and empty half as many times again. For the sound of his third “Hallo!” to burst out the window and skim across the summer-fallow fields and through the woods, fading to a whisper on the shore of the island, where it slipped into the water without a ripple.

  Thirty seconds — her father knew because he’d read the scientific pamphlet — was how long a guillotined man remained conscious after the severing of his head. Time enough, within the infinite chambers of the mind, to live again all the abundant joys and sorrows, the betrayals, the scant, uncanny strokes of luck.

  Time enough for a guillotined life to end, for a newborn’s to begin.

  Her father made careful note of each stage of her birth. The head bursting forth like a blossom. The face turning aside to rotate the shoulders within the bowl of her mother’s pelvis. That heart-stopping pause. Then, in a rush: torso, arms, toes, a great gasp and a cry, and she was borne out on a swell of membrane and blood.

  This was not the first human birth her papa had witnessed — he was already the father of eight daughters — but his concentration was sharpened by the knowledge that it might well be the last.

  The good Doctor Stevens, arriving in a flurry, examined the child laid on the quilt.

  “Another girl, and a puny one,” he said, giving her father a stern look as he pulled on his coat, a heifer in distress already taking her place in his list of things yet undone that day. “If you value your wife, sir, you’d be wise to keep your trousers buttoned.”

  A tale patched together from her papa’s stories and the soured memory of May, scarcely five, peering in at the door.

  The sun was casting off from the horizon, drifting up into a wide pool of blue. Her father picked her up in his broad, freckled hands and held her squirming to the window, a chant of birdsong seeping in through the open sash. He lifted her until her head was on a level with his, then higher, raised her to where the lake was a flash of silver through a hush of green.

  “Cass,” her father said to the infant grown still in his hands. “Cass, look.”

  ~

  Papa, having given up on fathering a son, ignored the facts before his eyes — the absence of a penis being the most obvious — and took to her as if she were a boy. Cass, he called her for the rest of his life, occasionally Cassidy but never Cassandra, the name her mother had chosen in a fit of gloom, giving in to the premonition that this baby would be the death of her, which she was, before she was weaned.

  “You killed our mother,” her sisters hissed, none more bitterly than May.

  She took no interest in the china-headed dolls they handed down to her. Instead, she played by the woodbox, arranging the split kindling in sheltering constructions. The bits of dough her aunts set in front of her, she twisted into fantastical creatures, although there was a certain familiarity in the arrangement of feet, legs, and heads.

  In the farmyard she was fearless, chasing sows out of the corn before she was tall enough to see over their stippled backs, lingering close to the barn on those chill days of autumn when the slaughtering was done, poking at the steaming entrails with a willow stick. Of all her sisters, she was the one her father counted on to hold steady the head of a lamb, staring into its eyes, her hands clenched around its jaw as her father slit open the welt and pressed against the flesh, squeezing out the ball of maggots, cleaning the wound with a hot knife.

  “I want to see, let me see!”

  Papa would smile and lay the excised bits of rotting flesh, the diseased members, the crusted peelings and scrapings on the bare earth for her to examine as he examined them himself.

  “Always you,” May said, her tone caustic. “After Mother died, all he was interested in was you.”

  The round-robin of aunts who kept them clothed and fed forbade her father’s experiments. He restrained himself from brushing her infant eyes with a feather to determine at what age tears first appeared or rattling a box of live coals in her face to fix precisely at what moment she blinked. He kept instead to scientific observation, timing the length of her screaming-fits, scribbling notes to describe the reddening of the eye, the return of proper pallor to the region of the mouth.

  It wasn’t long, though, until she reached an age when she could give her own consent, with the result that at any time of night or day her father might send her leaping into the air, frightened nearly out of her wits by a coiled rope that jerked to life, proving to them both that the startle response depended partly on the vividness of the imagination and partly on habit, but partly, too, on the condition of the nerves. When she was laid low with one or another of her childhood diseases, no matter how unexpectedly he appeared or how ingeniously he wired the clattering pots, he could not produce the wide eyes and raised eyebrows of surprise, the mouth that rounded to an exploded “Oh!”

  “Let’s do it again!”

  “Yes, all right, but what is it we’ll be looking for now?”

  “We’ll see how high I jump! We’ll make marks on the wall. Or stretch strings across the hallway! We’ll—”

  Papa would lay his hand softly on her head and run his fingers through her hair. “Mark my words, Cass. You’ll be a great scientist one day.”

  That she took so little interest in books was a mystery to her father, who was a bookish man like his father, the Reverend Thomas MacCallum, a friend of Charles Darwin at the university in Edinburgh before he was called to a small country charge in the wilds of Canada. Still tucked between the Old and New Testaments of the MacCallum family Bible was the list of questions the great man had circulated to those of his correspondents given to close observation:

  Is astonishment expressed by the eyebrows being raised?

  Can a guilty or sly expression be recognized?

  Does shame excite a blush?

  She was at her father’s side when at last he slit open the pages of the book Darwin had sent, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, bending with him over the incomprehensible words, drawing on the blank pages as her father made notes in one thin black scribbler after another. The moment he lifted a tool she was there, climbing up on an old butter box to hand him a hook or a knife, a bit of lamb’s wool, the sharpening stone. All through the summer she was seven, she’d jolt awake while the sun was still a promise in the sky. She’d slip out of bed, past her sleeping sisters, past May clucking to her hens in the barn, and race to crouch on the shore of their small lake, tracking the throaty calls until she slapped down her net, gathering the slippery creature in the folds of grey cotton, clutching it for dear life as she ran back through the stubble field to the barn.

  One neat stroke of the knife and the frog’s head was off. Then her father arranged the body on his laboratory bench in a posture so natural she felt sure he had made it whole again.

  “Just a drop. There,” Papa would say, pointing to the anterior surface of the frog’s right thigh.

  She’d widen her fingers slowly on the rubber stopper until a single tear of acid stained the mottled skin. Immediately the leg would leap into action, rubbing at the burn. Her father grabbed the foot and cut it off. The mutilated stump paused, then lifted, straining to reach the spot where the acid still burned. Eventually the frog gave up, it always did. It shifted on the bench. When the foot of the unharmed leg began to twitch, she’d lean in close, her father, too, the two of them scarcely breathing until at last the headless creature would raise its one good leg and reach across to paw at the wound.

  Papa’s eyebrows would shoot up.

  “Well done!” he shouted. “Well done!”

  He’d clap his hand on her shoulder, as if they hadn’t produced this result a dozen times or more, generations of frogs sacrif
iced to this one experiment of Darwin’s, laid out in that book, her father’s faith in what he witnessed waning steadily until he’d send her back to the lake with her net.

  “See that? A voluntary action — from a body without a brain. Explain that, Cass. Explain that, if you can!”

  In the stillness of the morning, the frogs call their dire warnings, their hoarse seductions.

  I shake myself from my reverie and study the girl as she struggles with her load up the rocky slope.

  How weak she looks. How flimsy a product of her time.

  But I am not fooled. She has come to invade my island, plunder my privacy.

  I thought I would be safe here, this place that is almost as much a backwater as it was when my grandfather came to minister to the settlers of Newbliss, a village tucked in the back of beyond, an hour’s walk from the farm where I grew up. The lake — my father’s enticement to buy the farm — is hidden out of sight behind the old stone house, across a rough pasture and the thin strip of woodland my father left wild along the shore to shade the cows when they came to drink. The lake itself is almost perfectly round, an indentation in the limestone made by a meteor, a star-stone fallen from the sky, as my father liked to say. On one side, a rocky promontory, and off the tip, as if in exclamation, this narrow mound of rock and trees where I live in my small cabin.

  Almost invisible. Hard to reach.

  And I, silly old woman, have invited this girl in.

  I wheel about as if to retreat inside, but what’s the use? There’s nowhere, anymore, to hide.

  “Papa, come look.”

  She’d pull on the sleeve of his old plaid coat and he’d laugh, put down his tools, and row with her to the island.

  The summer she turned ten, she built a hut there, using boards from a collapsed blind where her father used to crouch for hours, observing the nesting behaviour of a pair of American wigeons. She nailed the cracked and splitting boards to a stand of five spindly cedars, stripping the bottom branches to use as thatch for a roof to keep out the worst of the weather. The weight of winter would break through her construction, and every spring, she’d remake the hut, sweeping out the drifts of leaves and the rotting nests, carpeting the earth with fresh boughs, adding boards to widen the walls and raise the roof as she grew.