Fit Month for Dying Read online

  Philomena tosses up her hands. She crosses the kitchen and pulls up a chair beside the stove and hauls her sweater tighter around her as another gust of wind rocks the house. “I’m goin’ to sit here and warm me poor feet for a few minutes,” she announces, forestalling any more discussion. “And then I’ve got to get right back up there in case he goes faster than I think fer.”

  She takes a look at the half-empty wood box beside her and closes the subject of the candle. “I swear to the Almighty we burnt a cord of wood today. I thinks the wood whips up the chimney whole, with jest a few sparks on it. I bet the roof is covered with junks of half-burnt spruce.”

  Greg goes to the stove to wrestle another piece of wood into the fire and adds a shovel full of coal from a blackened bucket beside the wood box. When he sits back down, he reopens the subject of the candle.

  “Like Danny said, Mom, Dad’s not even Catholic.” His tone is calm, appeasing. “Besides, you must know it’s not considered proper anymore to shove candles in a dying person’s hand. Surely you must know that. Everyone knows that.”

  Philomena, exhausted, wipes her hand across her forehead, wishing she could let Greg’s remarks go by unchallenged. But she can’t. “Don’t take that high and mighty tone with me, me son. Don’t tell me what I should know and shouldn’t know and what is proper and what ent proper. Yer father’s getting a blessed candle in his hand. And that’s the end of that. Me mother got one. Me father got one. Even little Bridget got one. And the three of ye’ll get one, too, if I’m still around when ye goes.” In the full awareness of his ignorance, her tone softens. “Don’t ye know, me son, it brings peace to the dying person, that’s why ’tis done. Surely ye knows that. ’Tis the last thing ye sees on this earth, a light pointing yer way to heaven. Ye must know that. You just must!”

  She reads his answer in his blank stare. “Of course ye don’t know. If it was something about a court case ye’d know. About getting some rowdy off the hook. Some Duckworth Street souse out of jail. Then ye’d have all the ins and outs at yer fingertips.”

  Greg does not respond. Paddy and I, as outsiders, carefully avoid exchanging glances. Danny butts his cigarette in his saucer. A line of smoke quickly drifts toward the leaky window casings like a jet stream streaking across the sky. Danny’s eyes follow the smoke, looking out through the window at the spruce trees in the yard heaving in the gale. After a few minutes, he says, “Light your way to heaven, eh. A hell of a lot of good a candle will do on a night like tonight. The thing would gutter out in less than a half second. A smudge pot would be more like it. Even a northeast wind couldn’t put one of those damn things out. Dad would be better off with one of them.”

  Philomena pounds her fist on her knee and barks, “That’s enough disrespect out of you, young man! Ye don’t know that much about the religion you were baptized into. Not that much!” With her right thumb she measures off a sliver of nail on her left thumb to show the skimpiness of Danny’s knowledge.

  Knowing Danny will be quick to make a smart remark about Philomena’s thumbnail, Greg gives him a cautioning look, and Danny quickly changes his tack. He lights another cigarette and cups it in his hand as he usually does, confining the smoke to the fleshy part of his thumb that is already yellow from nicotine. He goes over beside the stove and squats at Philomena’s knees.

  “’Pon my soul, Mom,” he says, crossing his heart with the hand that cups the cigarette. “I give you my word I’ll do it for you. I’ll make sure that candle will be in his hand at the last minute. Like you said, I won’t even wait until the last minute. I’ll light the bloody thing up at least ten minutes beforehand. I’ll hold it in his hand myself. With a death grip, you might say. So you go on to bed. And leave everything to me. ’Pon my soul, I won’t let you down.”

  Philomena pulls herself up in her chair, squares her shoulders as if readying for battle. “’Pon your soul! My Jesus, Mary and Holy St. Joseph, b’y. Me depend upon your soul! Your word! Where in the name of the Blessed Mother of God would that leave me? Let alone your poor father.”

  Yet the childish sincerity of his pledge upon his neglected soul reawakens some warm memory in Philomena. “Yer right, me son,” she says, abruptly getting up out of her chair. “I thinks I’ll go to bed after all. And I’ll take a pill before I goes. Tess, you’ll place the candle in Dad’s hand!” I am a conscript, not a volunteer. As an extra precaution she threatens, “Remember now, Tess, I’ll hold you accountable for Dad having a proper death. I’m putting my trust in you.”

  In my eagerness to get her to go to bed, I almost cross my heart and say ’pon my soul, like Danny did. Instead, I say with all the assurance I can muster, “You can count on me, Mrs. Phil. I won’t leave Mr. Hube alone for a minute. I’ll be right beside him the whole night.”

  “I wants ye to remember that if Hube’s condition worsens, ye’ll rout me right away. At the slightest change for the worst, I want ye to rout me. Even if I’ve jest fallen asleep.”

  I promise her I will remember to do just that. So does Greg. So does Paddy. As she is leaving the kitchen, Danny reaffirms, “’Pon my soul, Mom, I’ll remember to call you even if the others don’t. And I’ll ride herd on Tess to get that candle underway. Trust me on this!”

  “That’s good,” she says over her shoulder as she opens the door and steps into the unheated hallway that leads to the cold upstairs. “Because I’ve got enough to account fer already without letting yer father die and not doing all in my power to get him safely to the other side.”

  Each word holds a lifetime of self-chastisement, a lifetime of unpurged guilt.

  Philomena is a stout Catholic, all the more stout because she unhitched herself at the age of twenty-eight from the Church’s centre when she mix-married Hubert, a Church of England Protestant. Even though she had gotten married in the Catholic Church — and that was no easy feat at the time — she believed then, and continues to believe, that her mixed marriage constituted a form of disloyalty. In the intervening years, as a way of making amends for her betrayal, she has always adhered strictly to form and format, rite and ritual in all things Catholic. In fact, once in the confessional a priest told her in a way that wasn’t complimentary that she was trying to be more Catholic than the Church itself. When she called him on his remark, he explained that she was being overly scrupulous and that she should ease up on herself.

  But she tossed away his advice the minute she stepped out of the confessional. As she explained to me years afterwards, she felt she had no right to ease up on herself. She had failed with both of her sons. Failed miserably. Despite all of her efforts to bring them up solid Catholics, they had thrown off the Church. One son threw it off when he was little more than a child, and he had grown to manhood without hanging on to as much as a shred of her religion. The other son shut himself off from receiving full benefits of the Church by marrying a “grass widow” — a woman whose husband was still very much above the sod.

  Philomena takes her sons’ straying from their religion as her just punishment for having watered down her religion by marrying outside it. She also takes it as her just punishment that Danny has never been able to grab life by the neck and hang on to it. She believes that because he has had no religion to ground him, he became a lackadaisy, a piece of flotsam cast adrift without direction, a man without stability, a crow on a pole ready to fly off at the sight of any shining object.

  One thing that has always amazed Philomena about her sons is that the two of them are so startling unalike. Other than that they both eschewed the religion she loves so dearly, they have little in common. For all they resemble each other, either in temperament or in physical makeup, or, for that matter, for all they resemble either herself or Hubert, they might just as well be strangers. In fact, there were times when she could easily have persuaded herself there had been some switch at birth if that had not been impossible. They were both born in her home down the bay in her big four-poste
r bed that Hubert had built out of white spruce — spruce which had warped and twisted as it dried so that the mattress never fit properly. Her mother and mother-in-law and a midwife were the only people in attendance at the births. Even Hubert had made himself scarce.

  Danny is slight of build, and he is careless about his appearance. He always looks a bit scuffed in a haphazard, unreined-in way. He saunters along as if he has all day to get wherever it is he is going, thumbs hooked over his back pockets, dragging them down. His unruly hair tosses this way and that way even if there isn’t any wind. Philomena hates his unkempt hair, and whenever he comes home, he is barely in the house before she is asking him whether the barbers in British Columbia are on strike.

  Greg is a solid man, a muscular man, and he makes sure he keeps his muscles toned by doing regular exercises and by walking several miles each day on a trail close to his house, the Rennies River Trail. Although Greg buys his clothes off the rack, he always looks tailor-made. In temperament Greg and his lawyer profession go hand in glove. He is sober minded, moderate in all things and fond of saying “the devil is in the details.”

  Philomena loves Greg for his wholeness. She loves Danny for his brokenness. She can see this brokenness is his eyes, which she says are as blue as the Virgin Mary’s gown and as sorrow-filled as the Virgin’s own eyes when she crouched at the foot of the Cross. Mother-of-Dolours eyes, Philomena calls them. Having lost a child herself, she can understand the Virgin Mary’s eyes being sorrow-filled. What she can’t understand is why Danny’s eyes should be sorrow-filled. She has noticed that even when he laughs that mischievous laugh of his, his eyes never laugh along with him.

  Danny is the cinder in her eye, the cross on her shoulders, the hitch in her heart. Countless times over the years she has wondered out loud why this child of hers, who was born on a Tuesday, born with the fair face of a Monday’s child, the woe-filled eyes of a Wednesday’s child and the blithe and bonnie spirit of a Sabbath Day child had not been given one whit of the peace and holy grace of a Tuesday’s child. And it wasn’t as if he had been born on just any Tuesday. He had been born on Shrove Tuesday. This, she feels, should have entitled him to an extra helping of grace instead of a lesser amount. But then there has always been so much about Danny she has never been able to fathom that she has given up looking for answers and has chosen instead to take comfort from aphorisms: No cross no crown. No thorn no rose. If you don’t have him to make you cry, you won’t have him to make you laugh.

  And Danny, she is convinced, can make a cat laugh. This was the main reason she wanted him home from British Columbia. She knew he would be able to bring a smile to Hubert’s pain-streaked face.

  And true to her belief, Danny’s presence did have a good effect upon Hubert. In fact, he improved so much during those first few days after Danny’s arrival that everyone began to hope the doctors had been wrong in their assessment of how much time he had left to him. He rallied enough to laugh at Danny’s bunkhouse stories. He even told a few stories of his own from his days working in the lead and zinc mines in Buchans. Sometimes he even summoned up enough strength to chastise Philomena for always needling Danny about one thing or another.

  “Philly, leave the boy alone,” he would say whenever she came into his room to minister to him in some way, shape or form. “I heard you badgering him jest now. Get off his back. He was good enough to come home.”

  Of course, what Hubert called badgering, Philomena called concern. And her concern was usually couched in rhetorical questions. Many times she asked Danny, not expecting an answer, or at least not expecting a sensible answer, “Is there any reason, me son, why ye can’t go more than a few hours without a half-empty bottle of Black Horse in yer hand?” Or “Do you always have to go around looking like an unmade bed?” Since Hubert’s sickness, her most frequent question has been about Danny’s smoking. “Me son,” she says, whisking smoke trails away as if warding off fumes from an open sewer, “must you always have a cigarette dangling from yer mouth? Yer lungs will end up looking like yer father’s. He can say all he likes that it was working in the lead dust in Buchans that did it. I sez it was that bloody pipe of his. It was that plug of tobacco that he couldn’t go without.”

  Unfortunately, Hubert’s rallying only lasted about a week. One afternoon while he was sleeping, Philomena and I tiptoed into his room to tidy it up. He sat bolt upright when we came in and shouted, “Mother! Mother!” Terrified, he reached out both arms. “Mother! Mother!” he called again and then pressed back against the pillows, as if he were being pulled against his will across a great chasm and he wanted his mother to yank him back, out of harm’s way, as she must have done many times during his childhood.

  “Oh my God!” Philomena said, hurrying out of his room and making the sign of the cross over herself as she ran down the stairs to tell Danny and Greg.

  “He saw his poor mother,” she gasped. “He must be going soon. I’ve seen the same thing happen before. Especially with men. They always calls fer their poor mothers jest before the end. He’ll be gone within the day.” She then launched into an account of the time she saw her own mother ten years after her death. It happened the day she placed a water heating coil in a tub of wash water and then reached down to pull it out without unplugging it. While she was pressed up against the wash tub, paralysed as stiff as a poker, electric currents gushing through her body, she saw, not only her dead mother but the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph as well. But Hubert’s vision was different from her own. Hers had only been a momentary thing, brought on by the electrical shock. Hubert’s was definitely a forerunner of his death, no more than a day away, maybe even within the hour.

  But Hubert made a liar out of her. It took him over a week to begin to die in earnest. In fact, it wasn’t until this very afternoon and the onset of the death rattle that everyone took his dying as imminent, and Philomena finally gave up praying for his recovery and began to make plans to help him cross over to the other side.

  The instant Danny hears the thud of Philomena’s swollen bedroom door, he begins clearing the supper dishes out of the way. He scrapes the leavings of the fish chowder into a dish that he puts in the porch for the cat and then draws the kettle to the front damper of the stove so there will be plenty of hot water for washing and rinsing the dishes. He knows he can’t depend upon the small water tank behind the stove because it has to labour just to keep a couple of gallons heated. Paddy chips in, stacking the plates and bowls, helping Danny to get the job done. The sooner the dishes are out of the way, the sooner the deathwatch can begin and the sooner they can start drinking beer.

  Just before the four of us leave the kitchen to go upstairs, Paddy goes to the porch and brings in a case of Black Horse that he had stashed out there on his way in, out of Philomena’s sight. Danny goes into the pantry and comes back out lugging his own case of Black Horse. A bottle opener is stuck in his shirt pocket.

  When Hubert became bedridden, Philomena had relegated him to the guest room, the nicest but the smallest bedroom in the house. She considered this room to be the most suitable one for a sickroom, the most suitable one for doctor’s and priest’s visits, although whenever these people would come to see Hubert, a straight-backed chair had to be borrowed from the kitchen and squeezed in between Hubert’s bed, a night stand, a free-standing electric heater and a white enamel pail in case Hubert took a spell of vomiting.

  As soon as the kitchen has been put to rights, Paddy and Danny, each hugging his case of beer, and Greg and I go upstairs to begin the deathwatch. When the four of us begin to settle ourselves on the floor beside Hubert’s bed, we realize that the cramped space is far too small, especially with having to accommodate the beer. With little fanfare we break camp and move into the hall just outside Hubert’s door. I take pillows from the other bedrooms so we can squat on them and keep the linoleum floor from freezing our kidneys.

  Upstairs the storm sounds even worse than it did when we we
re in the kitchen. It seems to have gathered strength. Rain pelts hard on the flat, tarred roof, and the house sways with each raging surge of wind that rams against the clapboards. Although we all wear heavy sweaters, the damp coldness immediately penetrates our flesh. It even seeps up through the duck feather pillows. We shuffle ourselves around in an effort to block out the cold.

  A naked forty-watt bulb hangs by a long cord from the hall ceiling, and in this dim, yellow light, Greg tries to read material for an upcoming court case. Danny and Paddy smoke cigarettes and drink beer until the air around us is fog-coloured and the wall that separates the hall from Hubert’s bedroom is lined bumper to bumper with empty bottles. As fast as one cigarette burns down another is lit, and as fast as one bottle of beer is emptied, another is uncapped. The two of them take turns sharing their Black Horse, two bottles out of this case, two bottles out of that one. Knowing that neither Greg nor I smoke or drink beer, they never bother offering to share with us. In between their smoking and drinking they swap jokes, their voices growing louder and louder as the beer disappears. Over their raised voices, I keep an ear cocked towards Hubert’s bedroom, vigilant for some sound that will send me scurrying to hold the lighted candle in his hand.

  The strangling, watery noises escape from Hubert’s throat as loud as ever, so loud the raging wind can’t muffle them, sending shivers through all of us Even Danny’s raised voice as he tells Paddy still another raucous joke can’t drown them out. When Hubert emits a particularly harsh rattle, Danny shouts, “Paddy, me son! Did I ever tell you about the time I was in St. John’s, walking down Duckworth Street with Mick O’Brien?” He doesn’t wait for Paddy’s reply in case he says he has already heard this story, which will force him to dig around for another one.

  “Well sir,” he begins, “it was winter, and the wet snow was as slippery as chicken shit on damp grass. Mick had just bought a flask of cheap red wine with his last couple of dollars, and the minute he came out of the liquor store he fell down on the ground, right on his arse pocket, right where he had stuffed the flask.” He pats the back of his hip to demonstrate. “Well sir, in seconds that snow around him turned blood red, and when Mick saw the red snow he didn’t know whether he had smashed the flask to pieces or cut his arse wide open, so he grabbed up a fistful of the soaking red snow and licked it. After a few licks, a big smile spread over his face, and he said, as relieved as all hell, ‘Thanks be to God. ’Tis just blood.’”