The Young in One Another's Arms Read online

  The tears began again.

  “You’ve been good enough.”

  He gave a bitter grunt.

  “On the island …”

  “Don’t tell me about that island.”

  “I could take care of you. I want to take care of you.”

  He was crying out of control again.

  “Hal?”

  “I don’t want to be one of your cripples. If you didn’t want me when I was good for something …” But he couldn’t go on.

  You had to be too damned good, you poor, proud bastard.

  She was holding his hand now, pity and impatience rising freshly from old guilts, old angers.

  “Tell them … to get it over with,” he said. “I’m still good for my life insurance.”

  The nurse came in to give him a shot and then gestured to Ruth to leave him. The doctor was waiting just outside the ward.

  “Have you decided?”

  “What real chance has he … either way?” Ruth asked.

  “Hard to say.”

  “He said … to get it over with, but I’m not sure he means it.”

  “And you, Mrs. Wheeler?”

  “You kill that man’s pride, and you kill the man. It’s stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”

  The doctor stood and waited.

  “Get it over with. He said, get it over with.”

  “We can do the first one tomorrow. Then, in a month, if everything goes well …”

  “And he’ll be able to walk.”

  “Yes,” the doctor said, “he should be able to.”

  Ruth walked back down the long ward, this time identified with that closed-off cubicle before which all these clownish characters fell silent. Her own mirth was also forgotten. She sat down again and took Hal’s hand.

  “Tomorrow,” she said.

  He looked out at her from behind the bars of his crib, a wavering hope in his eyes. She smiled at him.

  “Don’t you know you’re indestructible, Hal?” she said, grudging him this lie, the sort he had always wanted and she had always refused, ungenerous to his silly, mortal ego even now. “Don’t you know if anything could have killed you, I would have years ago?”

  “You’ve been a bitch of a wife, it’s true,” he said, “except in bed.” A shadow of a dimple appeared for a second, and he rested.

  Ruth sat through the night with him, listening to the changing sounds of the ward out there beyond the curtains, the moans, the cryings out, the curses, a long, long reality before the farce of the day could begin again and each bluster through his bad joke again. A nurse brought her a light meal, brusque with concern as Mavis might have been. Toward morning, Hal was restless.

  “If I don’t make it, Ruth …” he said once.

  What? she wanted to ask him. What do you want me to do? But again she wrenched the refusal of that possibility out of her grudging heart.

  Once she thought he whispered, “I’m afraid,” but it was too low for her to be sure.

  Was there nothing she could say now when this might be her last opportunity? Nothing true. What he had never wanted from her he certainly didn’t want now. Then couldn’t she, just this once, lie to him with all her heart? Accept the farce and really let him be the hero of it? His pain and his fear pleaded with her: lie to me, lie to me with all your heart, make me real, make me immortal.

  Dawn came and with it the clatter of breakfast trays. The orderlies would be there soon to prepare him.

  “Did you bring your dress?” he asked suddenly.

  “Dress?”

  “The one I bought you.”

  “Of course,” she said. “You’re taking me out to dinner tonight, aren’t you?”

  “Well, maybe not tonight, but listen, Ruth, when I get out of here, we’re going to do a little living, right?”

  “Right,” she echoed, rock-face for his hope.

  “I mean, our own life. You’ve been items in the newspaper too many times, you know, star of screen and radio and all that. When I get out of here, I want a wife, understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “A little real living …”

  The orderlies were there. She leaned down and kissed him.

  I do understand, Hal. I’m just such a bad liar. I’d give you the strength of my own heart if I could. It’s what you want, all of you, even Tom: our lives. In that impossible bargain, the tables somehow get turned and we take yours instead, over and over again, my father, old Weedman, Willard, even Tom’s son. Galiano is an island of widows. I don’t want your life, Hal. Keep it. Keep it.

  She had to take her hand away from his, but she waited for him then, walked beside him as he was wheeled along the corridor and stood fiercely smiling at him until the elevator doors shut.

  Two and a half hours later, Hal was dead. The doctor was angry about it. The hip was going to be a handsome job, and then Hal’s heart betrayed them, and he couldn’t even help carry the sense of failure.

  Spared, Ruth thought stupidly, spared, too, ever knowing that she’d lied to him not only about his life but about her dress as well.

  “He filed his funeral arrangements with us, Mrs. Wheeler,” she was told at the desk. “Memorial Society. So, if you have no objection …”

  He was to be cremated, his ashes disposed of without ceremony. When had he decided such a thing, who had always behaved as if death were irrelevant to him? After Claire was killed perhaps, in one of those urgencies of goodness to take care of things, to settle things for himself.

  “Just sign here.”

  Why not? He’d refused to cross the water while he lived. She needn’t defy him now by carting his dead body or his ashes to a place he couldn’t even build a road to.

  She was brought his things. She took his wallet and his watch and left the rest for the hospital to dispose of, including his teeth. She’d have to contact his company to find out where his other belongings were, probably in a motel room somewhere in the interior. Or did he have a woman there? Ruth had often wondered about that. The company would know. They’d have to deal with whatever personal claims there were on him, aside from herself and Clara.

  In his wallet, there was over three hundred dollars in cash. Hal never accepted the concept of the credit card. Money, to be real, had to be in hand. Filed behind it was a fresh white envelope with her name on it in his surprisingly small, neat hand.

  Inside was a list of Hal’s assets, not only the hundred-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy but a third share in a beer parlor in Kamloops, five acres of land which would front by next spring on a new road, five thousand dollars in bonds with the safe-deposit box number, and a technical explanation of her widow’s pension. The only personal statement was at the end. “I didn’t think Mother would outlive me. Take care of her.” It was not even signed.

  When had he written it? Probably right after the doctor told him what his chances were/weren’t. Ruth looked at the writing itself, trying to find in its constricted neatness something of the angry pride he must have felt, the good son, the good husband, providing even now. She had no idea he’d invested money in a business, in land. Always such a ready spender, needing to be, and always generous with his mother, with her, too, when she let him, Ruth had imagined he spent generously on other people, too. Had he away from them lived instead simply and to himself? He must have, at least most of the time.

  She could not keep her mind on him or on what she should do next. The formalities seemed over with. It was only one o’clock. Perhaps she should go get some lunch. And come back for … for?

  But I can’t go home like this to Clara, not with nothing but his watch and wallet. I’ll get her some flowers, that’s what I’ll do, and a bottle of really good sherry. I’ve got lots of cash. I might even get her a new sweater.

  Ruth ate lunch and then wandered out into the windy April day, the city white in the sun, the mountains an eye-hurting brightness. She should go down to the beach, walk that shoreline again, a Broadway bus to Dunbar, and she could walk from th
ere, back down through her old neighborhood, see the house …

  Ruth sat down on the bench at the bus stop. She was confused. She knew that. She was tired. But it was a lovely day, and she had four hours to kill.

  Maybe she’d like a new novel, something light.

  The bus stopped, and Ruth got on it, smiling at people as she walked down the aisle to a seat.

  City people don’t smile back. I’m glad we live on an island. People smile. Most of them women, widows, lonely of course, but the children smile, too. And they know my name as well as Coon Dog’s. I wouldn’t live here again. Hal never liked it, even in the old days. Didn’t like high rises any more than I do, for himself anyway. I wonder when he lost those teeth. He never said a word about it. Such a vain man.

  Ruth smiled.

  Wait until Clara hears he had a bridge! And a third share in a beer parlor. “Hal talks a lot to keep from listening and to keep from answering questions.” It’s true, Clara, but it never would have occurred to me to ask him about his teeth.

  She got off the bus and began to walk north toward the water and the mountains, but, when she crossed Fourth Avenue, she hesitated, uncertain suddenly of where she was.

  “Excuse me,” she said to a woman coming toward her, “but where am I?”

  The woman gave her a puzzled look and then hurried by.

  This isn’t the place. This isn’t the place I ought to have come. How could I have done this?

  But she was still walking, and now she was beginning to be walled in by high construction fences, some of the plywood panels painted on: an ugly, realistic mural of the city and the mountains. It blocked her way and then forced her to look up. There above her head were giant legs of concrete growing up out of the soil that must have been her garden. The road would lift up on them and flow over the bulbs, the bones of birds, and Willard’s blood, just as she had dreamed it, just as it had happened before.

  It’s your goddamned road, and it’s broken your great big stupid heart. I didn’t kill you, but what difference does it make? You’re dead just the same.

  “Hal! Hal!” Ruth shouted, but her voice stopped at the painted mountains, and there was no one this time to take the picture of Hal’s wife, grieving like a stone, in her ordinary sorrow.

  Ruth did not go on to the beach, nor did she buy anything for Clara. She took a bus to the terminal and sat there on a bench to wait the hours until she could catch a bus to the ferry.

  When she was finally able to get on board, her seat companion was carrying a Siamese cat in a wooden cage. It called its distress rhythmically with every breath. Neither the reassuring nor the stern tones of its owner made the slightest difference. When the bus entered the Massey Tunnel, the animal howled. Ruth did not want it silenced. Instead everyone on the bus should take up that howl in protest against the speed and the echoing darkness. But the animal in them was so silenced that they were offended, cast disapproving looks at the owner, refusing to know that she was as helpless as the cat, as enclosed in this man-made cage of a bus, of a tunnel, roaring this time under the river.

  Then Ruth was walking through the terminal, up into the covered walkway which would finger people onto the deck of the ferry, loudspeakers blaring above their heads. Finally she was on deck and could stand in the last light of evening and see the double hump of the southern tip of Galiano.

  “Ruth?”

  She turned to that light, young voice, and there was Gladys with Ruthie in her arms.

  “It’s April Fools’ Day, did you know that?” Gladys asked, laughing in their crowded embrace. “I thought it was the right day to come home.”

  “Do they know you’re coming? Did you tell them?”

  “No. I’ve been enough nuisance, and anyway I wanted to surprise everyone. Oh, I’ve missed you so. It’s so good to see you.”

  “She looks more like Tom than ever.”

  “She’s begun to crawl. I don’t think it’s going to be very long before she walks. She’s so strong, Ruth.”

  “So how did her granny like her?”

  Gladys frowned. “We stayed long enough for them to get used to her. But they’re still upset, ashamed somehow because the other one died. Mother kept talking about what strong and healthy ancestors we have, and she kept asking me what I knew about Tom’s family. It took her a long time to see Ruthie as a person, you know, instead of something I’d half done. It shook me a little. A lot of things did.”

  Ruthie had gone to Ruth and was settled now on her lap in the lounge of the ferry.

  “But I saw Boy,” Gladys said, her face clearing.

  “Boy?”

  “Yes, he just phoned Mother one day to say he was a friend passing through, and she told him I was there; so he came out. His name is Luther Baldwin this time, and he said he’d write when he’d found a place. He said there must be other people like us somewhere in the Ontario bush.”

  “Will he ever be able to come back?”

  “Someday, he said. Someday he would, and he told me to, for love’s sake, go home while I could. Ruth, what’s the matter?”

  “Hal died this morning. Clara doesn’t know yet.”

  “Oh, Ruth …”

  “I should have telephoned. There won’t be anyone to meet the ferry.”

  “I just wanted to walk to Jonah’s anyway. How did he die?”

  “An accident … on the road, his heart. He didn’t make it through the operation.”

  “Will it be very hard for Clara?”

  “For a while, but not as hard now that you and Ruthie are home.”

  A tall black man, as elegant as Boy had been outlandish, sitting right across from them, took a guitar out of its case and began to play. Ruthie’s attention led Gladys and Ruth to listen. Then he began to sing in a voice at the same time powerful and sweet. Ruth didn’t try to follow the words, wanted instead to be carried along with the melody, but fragments of statement kept lodging in her mind.

  “Don’t want to be brave,

  Still don’t want to be no slave …

  These chains, they are rusted and worn,

  It takes all this dying to be born.

  There’s a light on the mountain for me …”

  The deep voice lifted out of its register into a high treble, taking that refrain far off, until it faded from hearing.

  “Most people don’t understand,” Gladys said.

  Ruth gave her a questioning look.

  “I don’t think I did either until I was back there in the old way. I never wanted that: marriage, babies. I tried to tell my sisters about the politics of survival, about trying to be all right where you are …”

  So Boy’s and Tom’s rhetoric had become Gladys’ own.

  “It’s no easy thing,” Ruth said, the words still there in her head. “It takes all this dying …”

  The boat sounded for landing.

  “We’re home, Ruthie,” Gladys said, taking her from Ruth. “We’re nearly there.”

  They hurried off the boat and left their suitcases in the waiting room on the dock before they started up the road.

  “Go along ahead,” Ruth said. “I need a minute to myself.”

  She watched Gladys hurry along with Ruthie up the dark road toward the lights of Jonah’s.

  “Every time I make it back, I’ll know I’m about the Lord’s business,” she heard Boy say. It was not her vocabulary any more than it was Clara’s. The world was in no one’s hands. The baggage of death she was carrying could not even be put down in the little graveyard. It had to be taken home and spent, like all loss, like all death. “It takes all this dying …” She would buy the house they lived in, and they could begin the spring ritual Clara had taught her, the digging up of the soil to plant the seed. One day, even nearer the end of the world, the road would inevitably lift and flow over the water, flow over them all, but, as she had known from childhood, anyone left would go right on planting, in the April Fool day.

  “’Scuse me, lady.”

  The singer
from the ferry stood at her side.

  “Luther Baldwin, he said …”

  “Come along,” Ruth said. Until I die, until I die.

  About the Author

  Jane Rule (1931–2007) was the author of several novels and essay collections, including the groundbreaking lesbian love story Desert of the Heart (1964), which was made into the feature film Desert Hearts. She was inducted into the Order of Canada in 2007. Born in New Jersey, Rule moved to Canada in 1956, and lived on Galiano Island, British Columbia, until her death at the age of seventy-six.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The song “Light on the Mountain” by Fred Booker is quoted by permission of Rulebook Records.

  “The Young in One Another’s Arms” form the poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” which appears in Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats. Copyright 1928 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed © 1956 by Georgie Yeats. Reprinted by permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., and A. P. Watt & Son Ltd.

  Copyright © 1977 by Jane Rule

  Cover design by Mauricio Díaz

  ISBN: 978-1-4804-7920-3

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  180 Maiden Lane

  New York, NY 10038

  www.openroadmedia.com

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