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Authors: Carol Shields
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into her pram and wandered off to the stretch of waste ground by the railway yards, leaving Dot alone with her distressed mother-in-law. Dot offered more tea, but it was waved away. She produced a hot-water bottle and a blanket to fold over her mother-in-law’s trunky knees. Mum Weller rocked back and forth a few times, then groaned suddenly, and fell forward with a crash on to the hearth rug, her head missing by an inch the metal fender. Dot ran to her side, kneeling on the rug. Mother Weller’s head was twisted grotesquely to one side, and her face held a look of throttled purple. Dot remembers crying out, but doesn’t know what she said. (Probably help, help, but who was there to help?) And then she passed her hand back and forth before the dead woman’s eyes.
She was indeed dead. The young Dot had never seen a dead person, but she knew this bulky presence on her floor had passed to the other side, as folks said back then. There she lay, face down on the ash-strewn carpet, a heavy woman, stiffly corseted, and padded with layer upon layer of woolen clothes, her checked skirt immense across her buttocks and her knitted jumper rucked up. Her hips and calves were bunched clumsy and lifeless as meat beneath her, and the pink edge of her knickers obscenely revealed. A queerish smell of rubbish rose from the body. It can’t be, it can’t be, Dot remembers thinking as she tugged at the inert figure, its solid, unmovable heft. Then a thought occurred to her: heart attack. The words formed in her head, bringing a rush of relief - so this is what happened! - and, even in the midst of her comprehension, she experienced a whiff, no more, of shameful self-congratulations, for she had recognized and named the phantom before her. She had been witness, moreover, to one of the body’s great dramas.
But it wasn’t a heart attack that brought on her mother-in-law’s cataclysmic end. Oh, if only it had been, if only! Mum Weller’s death - as was revealed later through laboratory testing - was caused by severe type C botulism. The source of the botulism was Dot’s stewed runner beans, inadequately sealed, insufficiently heated - the same beans that had been standing in their pretty glass jar for the last two months, as purely green and sweet as innocence itself.
Dot Weller is fifty-six now, and her husband Stu fifty-eight. Stu’s parents died in their mid-fifties, his mother from the botulism, and his father, two years later, from rage - though the death notice specified a massive stroke. His rage, closer to biblical wrath, had bloomed into existence on that terrible Sunday when his wife fell dead on the hearth rug, poisoned by her stupid imbecile of a daughter-in-law. Murder was the word Dad Weller used. Even, deliberate murder. He said as much to the reporter from the Manchester Evening News who sent a photographer to take a picture of the Wellers’ garden, catching in one corner the dark row of beans that had been the agent of evil. There was no reasoning with him, although he’d been all his life a reasonable man. His world had been cleft in two by calamity, and he refused to put down the finger of blame.
In the end that blaming finger drove Stu straight to the immigration office in Stockport, and soon after he brought his pregnant wife and child to Canada where, in fact, thousands of other English workers headed in the late forties. There were factory jobs to be had in Winnipeg. It was possible to aspire to a house and garden of one’s own, to buy a car in time, a washing machine, a refrigerator, to make a better life for the kids. And to escape the sourness of ugly scenes and family angers. When news came that the old man had died of a stroke, Stu didn’t trouble himself to go home for the funeral.
Larry knows the poison episode in all its tragic rhythms and reverberations. This is what it’s like to grow up with a bad chapter of someone else’s story, in the toxic glow of someone else’s guilt, a guilt that
She was indeed dead. The young Dot had never seen a dead person, but she knew this bulky presence on her floor had passed to the other side, as folks said back then. There she lay, face down on the ash-strewn carpet, a heavy woman, stiffly corseted, and padded with layer upon layer of woolen clothes, her checked skirt immense across her buttocks and her knitted jumper rucked up. Her hips and calves were bunched clumsy and lifeless as meat beneath her, and the pink edge of her knickers obscenely revealed. A queerish smell of rubbish rose from the body. It can’t be, it can’t be, Dot remembers thinking as she tugged at the inert figure, its solid, unmovable heft. Then a thought occurred to her: heart attack. The words formed in her head, bringing a rush of relief - so this is what happened! - and, even in the midst of her comprehension, she experienced a whiff, no more, of shameful self-congratulations, for she had recognized and named the phantom before her. She had been witness, moreover, to one of the body’s great dramas.
But it wasn’t a heart attack that brought on her mother-in-law’s cataclysmic end. Oh, if only it had been, if only! Mum Weller’s death - as was revealed later through laboratory testing - was caused by severe type C botulism. The source of the botulism was Dot’s stewed runner beans, inadequately sealed, insufficiently heated - the same beans that had been standing in their pretty glass jar for the last two months, as purely green and sweet as innocence itself.
Dot Weller is fifty-six now, and her husband Stu fifty-eight. Stu’s parents died in their mid-fifties, his mother from the botulism, and his father, two years later, from rage - though the death notice specified a massive stroke. His rage, closer to biblical wrath, had bloomed into existence on that terrible Sunday when his wife fell dead on the hearth rug, poisoned by her stupid imbecile of a daughter-in-law. Murder was the word Dad Weller used. Even, deliberate murder. He said as much to the reporter from the Manchester Evening News who sent a photographer to take a picture of the Wellers’ garden, catching in one corner the dark row of beans that had been the agent of evil. There was no reasoning with him, although he’d been all his life a reasonable man. His world had been cleft in two by calamity, and he refused to put down the finger of blame.
In the end that blaming finger drove Stu straight to the immigration office in Stockport, and soon after he brought his pregnant wife and child to Canada where, in fact, thousands of other English workers headed in the late forties. There were factory jobs to be had in Winnipeg. It was possible to aspire to a house and garden of one’s own, to buy a car in time, a washing machine, a refrigerator, to make a better life for the kids. And to escape the sourness of ugly scenes and family angers. When news came that the old man had died of a stroke, Stu didn’t trouble himself to go home for the funeral.
Larry knows the poison episode in all its tragic rhythms and reverberations. This is what it’s like to grow up with a bad chapter of someone else’s story, in the toxic glow of someone else’s guilt, a guilt that
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