Jude suddenly regretted that they'd switched to voice mail a few years ago; if they'd kept their old answering machine, at least she could have held on to the tape. She had a few letters from her mother, and photographs of her, though not many—camera-shy, Rachel had the knack of evading the lens—but no video footage, no trace of her voice, even. Maybe when her mother had reached the age of eighty, it would have occurred to Jude to get around to recording her. Textual evidence poor, artifacts sparse. Like the traces of some obscure ancestor's life, thought Jude, for once wishing she were more modern.
She hadn't read more than a page of anything in weeks. She hadn't picked up her guitar in so long, her calluses were going soft. She hadn't made so much as a loaf of bread.
In the crammed, orderly shed that acted as the museum's archive-cum-office, Jude put herself to work removing rusty staples from a bundle of 1930s letters between Mrs. Gertrude Pleider of Ireland, Ontario—dead of complications after a fall from her motorized scooter outside the turkey factory at ninety-two, that was twenty-six more years than Rachel had got, stop it Jude just stop it— and her cousin Miss Jane Vorden of Wetaskiwin, Alberta. Jude was usually grateful for donations, especially of manuscripts rather than crack-backed rocking chairs or moldy snowshoes, but rusty staples got on her nerves.
She printed out this week's "From the Archives" page, slipped it into a plastic cover, and pulled her boots on to go pin it up on the notice board outside.
Some Destitute Orphan Immigrants
Arrived 6 May 1891 NOBLE, Thomas Age: 16 Sex: M indoor farm servant on SS Norwegian from Liverpool to Quebec
Arrived 4 June 1891 WEINER Adolph Age: 10 Sex: M scholar
Arrived 4 June 1891 WEINER Pauline Age: 10 Sex: F scholar
Arrived 4 June 1891 WEINER Maggie Age: 11 Sex F scholar, all on SS Parisian from Liverpool to Quebec
Glad Soontiens, a textile artist and Jude's best ally on the board, paused to read over Jude's shoulder. She let out a smoker's laugh. "All those little Weiners. What does 'scholar' mean?"
"Kid who'd been to school, I guess."
"Bet they got split up quick and turned into cow-herders."
"Adoption's a slim possibility," Jude told the older woman.
"By the way. Did Rachel ever finish that Stars and Stairs quilt of hers?"
"All but," said Jude, concentrating on pressing in another thumbtack. "It still needs batting, I think."
"Drop it over, I'll fix it up for this year's show."
Jude's eyes were a blur. By the time she managed to turn away from the notice board, Glad was halfway down the street.
After the CBC radio news there was an item about Pakistan, which reminded her in a roundabout way of Síle O'Shaughnessy. Jude thought of the flight attendant sitting with her sheer-stockinged legs crossed, sipping only the best Italian coffee, gazing out windows at bright squares or rainy streets, looking glamorous, anticipatory.
The beige computer was half-hidden behind a crate of microforms; Jude mostly used it to look up databases such as the "Ontario Register of Births and Deaths." It occurred to her now that none of the volunteers knew her password, which was PASSWORD.
Oh go on if you're going to, she told herself.
Sender:
[email protected] To: sí
[email protected] Date: 22 February 11:22
Re: Greetings
Dear Síle (apologies for not knowing how to add the accent over the i in your name!)
You should take it as a compliment that this is the first non-work e-mail I've ever sent. I just wanted to say hi and that I owe you a breakfast. If you happen to fly into Toronto sometime I could jump on the highway, if you've got a break between flights and want to "eat like a beast."
Jude was aiming for a breezy tone here, so she wouldn't sound like some hick from the boonies desperate for a date. The truth was she never jumped on the clogged highway to Toronto; she only went if she had to use research libraries or catch some major exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum.
Today I'm supposed to be indexing some letters, and a complete run of an anti-Confederation newspaper from the early 1860s. (Confederation was when Canada decided to be a country, in case you're interested.)
Unlikely, Jude groaned to herself, and backspaced over the sentence.
Looking at the "Historic Bridges of southwestern Ontario" calendar on the office wall, I see it's been seven and a half weeks since Heathrow (well, since I was there; you've probably been back twenty times). The reason I didn't get in touch till now is that my mother turned out to have a brain tumor and has been dying. I mean, she died on Jan. 22.
As it's taken me about ten minutes to compose the last two sentences I think I better call it a day before I make it a habit of weeping all over you.
Weird grammar, needy tone; Jude backspaced as far as "call it a day."
If you've got a minute in between zigzagging all over the known world, you could let me know if you got this.
Bye,
Jude (Turner)
She was about to hit SEND when something occurred to her, and she edged around the paper-stacked desk to the reference bookcase.
P.S. I just looked you up that bit about the Rechabites. It's Jeremiah 35:7:
Neither shall ye build house, nor sow seed, nor plant vineyard, nor have any: but all your days ye shall dwell in tents: that ye may live many days in the land where ye be strangers.
The funny thing is, I'd remembered the Rechabites' tent-dwelling as a bad habit, or maybe a punishment.
But rereading the passage, I think they're actually being advised to stay mobile, so as not to be vulnerable to siege warfare! Does that metaphor work for you, Síle? Do you see yourself as an elusive road warrior who'll never get walled up in one place and have to barbecue rats like us settled folk? Anyway. Bye again.
She almost thought better of it and erased the whole paragraph, but actually it read livelier than what came before it, and ending on a biblical tangent was better than with the announcement of her mother's death.
Sending Message: "Greetings. "Out Basket Empty. As if the words were a flock of swallows tossed from a cage, chasing each other across the midwinter sky.
A thump on the storm door made her jump. Rizla's big brown face against the glass, eyes rolled back, tongue lolling.
"Sorry if you're desperate for some heritage, but the museum's closed on Mondays," she said, moving forward to hug him, but she mistimed it; he'd already stepped back to kick some snow off his boots.
"Can't stay, I've got the wheels off some piece-of-shit Pontiac. Doing okay?" Rizla asked.
Jude's throat locked again. "God, I'm tired of all this sympathy," she breathed out. "Did I ever tell you, Bub knocked on my door after the funeral and offered to shovel my drive for the rest of the winter?"
"Bub your mute neighbour?"
"Turns out he's got plenty to say, once he gets started. Very eloquent on death having all of us in its sights, and how my mother was the genuine article; she baked him a blueberry crisp the day he moved in. He's doing a distance learning module on electricity, and his real name's Llewellyn."
Rizla let out a hiccup of laughter. "Yep, I guess that wouldn't fly at the turkey factory." He took out a can of ginger ale and popped it with one finger. "Dropping by later for the roast beef special?" He was the sole mechanic at the Garage, the town's gas station-cum-café.
Jude shook her head. "I've got squash to reheat. Gwen's coming over this evening after I watch her snowpitch tournament, you want to join us?" She asked it without much hope.
"Would that be for leftover squash, or a real dinner?"
"If you need a burger that much—"
"Just messing with you," he told her, his grin showing his uneven teeth. He put his can down on some brown files.
Jude snatched it up. "Those are the Krebniz family letters; I only have them on loan."
"They're kinda smeary already," he said, flicking through them.
"Those are tear stains," she told hi
m, seizing the files. "None of the three brothers ever saw each other again."
"History! What a downer," he observed, swigging his ginger ale.
"So tonight, maybe you could come by after, for a beer?"
"Nah, I think I can live without another lecture about my 'redneck attitudes.'"
"Aren't you ever going to let that drop?"
Rizla curled his lip. "Your friend may change old farts' diapers for a living, but she reckons she's pretty upscale."
"Just because Gwen didn't appreciate your Holocaust joke—"
"Hey, if anyone's entitled, First Nations are," he said with a smirk, "we got genocided too. Besides, what about that time in the diner?"
Jude sighed. "So she asked the waitress to wipe the table."
"It was the way she did it," Rizla reminisced, "kinda snitty. I figure, any gal that kicks up a stinkola about a dab of ketchup, she'll be the same way later on."
"Later on, when?"
He glared at his crotch. "You think her ladyship would ever sleep in the wet spot?"
Jude's guffaw surprised her.
At lunchtime, she walked the two blocks home through driving snow, feeling as hollow as a reed. Her right hand, holding her cigarette, was numb despite the glove. One of these days she'd have to grow up and give up smoking.
Despite the mailbox's NO JUNK PLEASE, SAVE THE TREES sign, it was stuffed with flyers as usual; she felt unaccountably annoyed. She kicked the clumped snow off her boots and unlaced them in the hall. There was one voice mail, a guy in Mitchell responding to her classified about the 1994 Honda Civic. Jude flinched at the thought of her mother's car disappearing from out front, then reminded herself that she could do with the money; without Rachel's pension, the gas bills were hitting a lot harder.
When she threw the flyers into the recycling, a wet-edged envelope slid out of the bundle. It had a blurred postmark that said Baile Atha Cliath, which was gibberish to Jude, but the stamp showed a carved Celtic cross and her heart started to boom. She sat on the bottom stair in the dim hall, and took her penknife off her belt to slit the envelope, her hands shaking as if she'd had too much coffee.
17 Stoneybatter Place
Stoneybatter
Dublin 2
Republic of Ireland
14 February
Well hello there Jude the Obscure. I hope you can make head or tail of my writing? because ironically enough for a techie like me (who can boast of having watched the first live birth on the Net in '98) my printer's just expired in a cloud of black smoke so I'm having to copy out this letter from my screen BY HAND. Only the fact that the shuttle picking me up for a flight to Boston is running half an hour late justifies such a waste of energy. I cant believe what a primitive business this is, making squiggles on paper with black drops from a tube...
I did wait six weeks to see would you give in and contact me first, but clearly you're the Strong Silent Stubborn Type with whom a girl should never get into a battle of wills. Or of course more prosaicly? [my spellcheck's never heard of this word] you may have lost my card, since things are always going astray in transit; over the years I've lost most of my favourite earrings down hotel drains. (In my spare time I'm happy to wear odd earrings but on the job we have to be tediously well groomed.)
Our friend Mr. George L. Jackson was Pentecostal, it turns out: seventy-five, divorced with four grown children. (The inquiry was ghastly, but I didn't actually lose my job.) Do you think about him much? I do, especially on night flights, when the lights are low and lots of passengers are asleep. He ran his own small plastics company, and he was flying to England for a trade show. No previous history of heart disease, but that's what did for him. The airline flew his eldest daughter over to collect his body and paid for the embalming. So now you know as much as I do.
My hand is tired already, I'm going to have to stop before I've actually said much. I wonder how long this will take to get to you by mule, elk, or whatever the Mounties are using these days? I'm trying to picture your little hamlet of Ireland, Ontario, and I realize the images in my head are all out of Northern Exposure, which is actually Alaska, isn't it? Small-town life has always given me the creeps—no cinemas (I'm such a film slut I'd see two a day if I had the time) or music venues or juice bars when you need a strawberry-pear smoothie—the hideous homogeneity—how can you bear it?
Shut up, Síle, you're being very rude ... Maybe it's just me, cities turn me on. I need to feel free as a kite—I happen to be based in Dublin but it could be anywhere really (well, anywhere with a population of more than a million!), life being a moveable feast, to use the old Catholic phrase. Kathleen (my girlfriend) disagrees, she says emigrants are always a bit pathetic.
Outside the window on my street of skinny terraced houses I can see some valiant purple crocuses pushing up. (I don't know how to grow anything myself but my neighbour Deirdre and I have an MBA, she uses my windowsill as an overflow for her pots.) Clearly spring—my favourite season—is round the corner.
Hmm, handwriting's kind of like Morse code, slow and serious. It's so much more tactile than print, I'll grant you that. Here's a smear for instance of the remains of my raspberry tart:
Síle.
P.S. Happy Valentine's Day.
Struggling to decipher the crazy handwriting, Jude's first impression of this letter was that it was indeed written to kill half an hour. And was that "Kathleen (my girlfriend)" as in friend or as in ... On the second reading, she paid more attention to the bits about waiting six weeks and a struggle of wills, and the pointed reference to Valentine's Day. It must have taken quite a while to copy by hand. She licked her finger and touched it to the brown smear at the bottom of the page, tasted it. Raspberry reawakened in her mouth, and she thought, What a flirt!
She reread the letter twice more; she was too excited to eat lunch. She sat down at the kitchen table with her fountain pen and a not-too-yellowed page of Ireland Museum notepaper.
22 February
Dear Sile,
Got your letter just after I e-mailed—snap! Very good to hear from you.
I know, snail mail takes a while, but just think: If our ancestors hadn't communicated with each other on something as lasting as paper, over the last thousand years or so, there wouldn't be much trace of them left.
Jude was aiming for thoughtful, but it was coming out preachy. Time to switch topics.
Yeah, I think about George L. Jackson, mostly when I cant get to sleep. Thanks for letting me know about him. Not that a handful of facts tell you much about who someone really was.
Rachel Turner, née Dorridge, born Chichester, April 3, 1938. Arrived Toronto September 1957. Worked Ladies Apparel Department, Eaton's. Married—
Stop it, Jude.
I keep having to consult my dictionary. It explains "moveable feast," but when you say you and your neighbour have an MBA, I presume you're not talking about a shared Master's in Business Administration?
If spring's around the corner in Big Ireland, you're clearly not just five hours ahead of me, but a whole season. Here in Ontario it's a shiny winter afternoon, and the sidewalks are covered in thigh-high jagged mounds of beige snow, so I prefer to walk on the street, which squeaks underfoot. Some houses still have their Christmas lights hung along the eaves. I'm particularly proud of the icicle outside my bedroom window, which is almost as long as I am.
Oh god, this was like some schoolgirl's essay on "A Winter Day."
My mother's house is on Main Street, just two blocks from the crossroads. I keep trying to saying "my house," but it feels like one more tiny way of letting Mom disappear.
Well, what was the point of writing to this stranger at all if Jude couldn't say what was on her mind? She pressed on.
The museum is only another block away; how's that for a low-stress commute? Last summer when I busted up my knee playing street hockey with some ten-year-olds, I was able to hop to work. You know, this crossroads community (officialspeak for a one-horse town) really isn't so "hideously homogeneou
s." We've got flower-arrangers and fundamentalists, yeah—and last year someone did chalk RUG MUNCHER (i.e., me) on the door of the museum—but also a gay-run guesthouse, two Web-site designers, a day trader and a Buddhist. When you live in people's pockets you learn how out there some of them are. There's a guy in a rotting mansion just north of town who sets his Labrador on fallow deer and is rumoured to have an unnatural relationship with her. His wife left him a long time ago, or some say she's buried in the woods ... Uh-oh, on reflection that's going to confirm all your prejudices about rural creepiness, isn't it?
It's true that if I want a strawberry-pear smoothie I've got to use my mother's Moulinex. Try again: MY Moulinex. No, cut that; it'll always feel like my mother's Moulinex. Síle, it just occurred to me that I envy you for losing your mother when you were too young to really know what was happening.
Oh lord. This was more real, but—
Sorry, that sounds cruel, and dumb. Of course it's better to have a mother when you're growing up—but right now I miss mine so much that all my bones hurt.
The letter was taking a rapid nosedive.
This letter is taking a rapid nosedive, but I guess there's no use pretending I'm fully compos mentis these days. That's another thing about handwritten letters, they're more honest. If I'd tried to scribble over the above, you'd have seen it, whereas e-mails let people edit their feelings.
Maybe she should e-mail a revised version of this after all. She pulled viciously on one ear lobe. How hard could it be to answer a letter? Not too gushy, not too cool; not too ninety-year-old, not too seven. Somewhere in between "Dear Valued Customer" and "Dear Woman of My Dreams."
That phrase stopped Jude short. She laid down the pen. She'd forgotten the dream till now; she couldn't even remember if she'd had it last night or a few nights ago. It was simple, and mortifying. Síle O'Shaughnessy reclining on a cloud, nude and brown as a figure by Gauguin, looking straight out, unashamed.