oatmeal: a festive brunch for achieving Motherhood. You came home from school that night and she was dead. Diarrhea. Pooped herself to death.
Thatâs when you lost what little faith you had.
You lay the washcloth against the pad of Skipperâs foot. Okay, Skip. Skip! Shake a paw! Skipper flaps his paw, whining delight, and licks your hands, grateful once more.
Let me take you out for dinner tonight. You feel you owe her something, but no. Maggie doesnât want to step into that world. So you make Pan. She sets the table while you fry two slices of bread, turn them over, break an egg on each and scramble, careful to keep the runny mixture safe atop each slice. Maggie slices tomatoes. You salt and pepper the eggs. The refrigerator motor cuts in.
Maggieâs silence.
I long to race out, start the car, drive to the hospital, kidnap my baby, escape on a healing pilgrimage to Lake Manitou. Brodie pours himself some milk, me water. My head bobs in the seaweed slap of Lake Manitouâs waves. Manitou. Saskatchewanâs saltwater lake. Saltier than the Dead Sea. A lake with magical powers. Manitou, which means intelligent, mysterious, invisible, and whole. The lightning storms that lit the lake, a hundred disparate zigzags, beckoning, signalling one another, me a child, crowded with my sisters at our summer cabin door, sweaters peeled off, shivering skin inviting the moist chill air, clutching each other at every thunder clap. Needles of rain stabbing the bent plants.
Rainâs a miracle, our father said.
Ask anything in My name .
When I was a child people came from across the province, even from the United States, to immerse themselves in Lake Manitouâs healing waters, cure their skin sores, arthritis, aching muscles, warts. Summer Bible Camp at Manitou Beach. Each morning we herded up the camp house steps, lustily belting, Onward Christian so-old-iers, marching as to war ⦠We coloured pictures of Jesus gathered with his disciples at the seashore, pasted pictures of Jesus healing the sick into our Bible school booklets, the glue rolling into terrific balls that begged to be chucked against walls, stuck in one anotherâs hair. Afternoons, we swam in the lakeâs cold waves, wrapped in green seaweed, eyes stinging, buoyed up to the surface by supernatural salt. When we read the story of Jesus walking on the water, Dougie Staganofski, at church camp to get out of doing dishes, said, Iâll bet Jesus walked on salt water. Thatâs all. Right then and there I stroked him off my potential-husband list. Trust a Catholic. Relying on works. No faith.
But Brodie is another story. Heâs a lapsed United Churcher. This is worse. Lapsed United Churchers donât count on faith or works to get them into Godâs good graces. United Churchers count on themselves; they count on order in the world; they count on natural science.
Brodie scrapes back his chair, disappears into the kitchen, and brings out my momâs home-canned pears. I spoon fruit into the cut glass fruit dish. The wind in the branches tonight sounds like an Aeolian harp. My father had one. Who knows where it is. Gone with the wind, my father said of things that disappeared. An instrument sounded by natural wind. David in the Bible had an Aeolian harp, sounded by the breath of God.
Brodie rises to make tea.
Samuel Coleridge said the harp was a tragic sounding of the experience of mankind. Dad quoted Coleridge: It pours such sweet upbraiding ⦠Such a soft floating witchery of sound ⦠A light in sound, A sound-like power in light .
What confounded me as a child was that the harp would sing its soft hum only when it chose, as if it had a mind. My fatherâs harp wouldnât, for instance, show off on demand when my friends came to play. He laughed as my girlfriends and I gathered, breathless, in the open window.
Nothing tragicâs happened, my father would say. No story to sing today.
One winter morning, I
Thatâs when you lost what little faith you had.
You lay the washcloth against the pad of Skipperâs foot. Okay, Skip. Skip! Shake a paw! Skipper flaps his paw, whining delight, and licks your hands, grateful once more.
Let me take you out for dinner tonight. You feel you owe her something, but no. Maggie doesnât want to step into that world. So you make Pan. She sets the table while you fry two slices of bread, turn them over, break an egg on each and scramble, careful to keep the runny mixture safe atop each slice. Maggie slices tomatoes. You salt and pepper the eggs. The refrigerator motor cuts in.
Maggieâs silence.
I long to race out, start the car, drive to the hospital, kidnap my baby, escape on a healing pilgrimage to Lake Manitou. Brodie pours himself some milk, me water. My head bobs in the seaweed slap of Lake Manitouâs waves. Manitou. Saskatchewanâs saltwater lake. Saltier than the Dead Sea. A lake with magical powers. Manitou, which means intelligent, mysterious, invisible, and whole. The lightning storms that lit the lake, a hundred disparate zigzags, beckoning, signalling one another, me a child, crowded with my sisters at our summer cabin door, sweaters peeled off, shivering skin inviting the moist chill air, clutching each other at every thunder clap. Needles of rain stabbing the bent plants.
Rainâs a miracle, our father said.
Ask anything in My name .
When I was a child people came from across the province, even from the United States, to immerse themselves in Lake Manitouâs healing waters, cure their skin sores, arthritis, aching muscles, warts. Summer Bible Camp at Manitou Beach. Each morning we herded up the camp house steps, lustily belting, Onward Christian so-old-iers, marching as to war ⦠We coloured pictures of Jesus gathered with his disciples at the seashore, pasted pictures of Jesus healing the sick into our Bible school booklets, the glue rolling into terrific balls that begged to be chucked against walls, stuck in one anotherâs hair. Afternoons, we swam in the lakeâs cold waves, wrapped in green seaweed, eyes stinging, buoyed up to the surface by supernatural salt. When we read the story of Jesus walking on the water, Dougie Staganofski, at church camp to get out of doing dishes, said, Iâll bet Jesus walked on salt water. Thatâs all. Right then and there I stroked him off my potential-husband list. Trust a Catholic. Relying on works. No faith.
But Brodie is another story. Heâs a lapsed United Churcher. This is worse. Lapsed United Churchers donât count on faith or works to get them into Godâs good graces. United Churchers count on themselves; they count on order in the world; they count on natural science.
Brodie scrapes back his chair, disappears into the kitchen, and brings out my momâs home-canned pears. I spoon fruit into the cut glass fruit dish. The wind in the branches tonight sounds like an Aeolian harp. My father had one. Who knows where it is. Gone with the wind, my father said of things that disappeared. An instrument sounded by natural wind. David in the Bible had an Aeolian harp, sounded by the breath of God.
Brodie rises to make tea.
Samuel Coleridge said the harp was a tragic sounding of the experience of mankind. Dad quoted Coleridge: It pours such sweet upbraiding ⦠Such a soft floating witchery of sound ⦠A light in sound, A sound-like power in light .
What confounded me as a child was that the harp would sing its soft hum only when it chose, as if it had a mind. My fatherâs harp wouldnât, for instance, show off on demand when my friends came to play. He laughed as my girlfriends and I gathered, breathless, in the open window.
Nothing tragicâs happened, my father would say. No story to sing today.
One winter morning, I
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