Her Daughter

‘For always I will be by your side. Especially in everything we grew and cultivated as one.’

These words were the only she had spoken to him.

Mary had come back an angel, a lacy white dress and the golden hair of her head like silken ichor spun by the gods, flowing in the breeze. In gentle arms embrace she had taken ahold of him, and he'd understood without words that what she wanted was a last dance together. Just as they had before, time and again on so many beautiful occasions past; caressing barefoot in the backyard under pine and oak trees, by the banks of the St. Lawrence for their wedding, at the Legion following Conscription, then there again later, after Armistice, and triumphantly in the streets.

Once they were finished, her throat echoing those words, she began drifting away, and in parting taking all the light with her. Then, for him, beyond the resonance she bestowed it were as the storm clouds closed back in around. He watched her go, ethereal and beaming, imagining how heavy it must have felt holding him in his grief, and alas never wishing to hinder his love in all the joy and peace which now indelibly was hers.

A last thing, there also was the flowers she’d shown him, out back, an orange and yellow bouquet, which he didn’t recognize to be part of their authentic garden. Afterwards she kissed her husband ever so softly. As this final scene came undone the curtains of the dream, half dream, parted and it was over, and the widower begrudgingly woke up.

‘Lord knows I don’t have a handle on it. You were her mom.’

He knew it had been real instantly. On the last night of Vimy, a bunkmate had showed up in his head during a fever dream, smattered with blood, intent on trying to signal a particular pantleg. The next morning, he found his dear poor friend, stacked among dead bodies atop sandbags like sardines in a tin can and, as well, tucked in back pocket the same a journal, filled with sweet prose and poetry dedicated to the man's spouse. So, he prepared it with special care, along with a condolences letter, war-buddy dugout photograph and dog-tag in the parcel to be sent home.

'I'm only a father. It ought to have been me.'

The plague of Spanish flu had ripped through the provinces worse of late than initially after the ending of the Great War. Immediately after November 11th, 1918, in the days and weeks that followed when the ships had transported them home, and even amidst all they had brought back with them, for a while there had been great jubilation. For some time the cresting tide held at bay, as normalcy resumed, only soon to break due to burdens unspoken.

His own wave crashed the middle of one night, following months of tremor and nightsweat, core shaken, helpless and speechless to the depth of spirit.

'I didn't mean to. God, I didn't mean to. Christ, I didn't want to do those things. I had to. What else could I have done, Mary?'

It was the only night he'd been able to cry since, and not feel volatile when she'd comforted him, attempting to console the anguish. But what had come to a boil then had only been steam, after all. No one who hadn't experienced it would be able to understand how you could never get a grasp on things after. That the slightest disturbances incurred a nervous tizzy, in the very best of moments. How you didn't feel anything, anymore, as if the lights had gone out, and the room dark for so long now.

'Symptomatic two days after Christmas. Gone before the New Year. What the hell am I to do. What happens next without you, Mary?'

In the summer of 1919, about a year ago exactly, his wife had turned his attention to the chores that he'd promised to do, after they bought the house before he was sent overseas. This deeply irritated him, because he realized she really was trying to get his mind off things, although he knew it was fruitless and the fact she couldn't accept that only made him angrier.

Priority was the garden, which hadn't been maintained by past tenants, and had become overgrown and gnarled with weeds. Mary was in a munitions factory for at least every spring and summer during his consignment. So, they confronted it in unison on his days away from the lumbermill, and the hours when Sophie, who was five now, had been otherwise preoccupied.

They made it beautiful, in the end. He couldn't count the times that he'd considered taking the rake and laying it all to waste. Or that he stabbed viciously into the dirt with trow when she hadn't been looking. He'd decided to deal solitarily with problems gained abroad, not to bother her about the flashes showing him once again the pools of blood mired in the mudflats, sunken soldier corpses, bloody comrades strung over barb wire.

Little Sophie was already awake, and outside playing in the yard. He watched her through the parlor window, ripping blades of grass, tearing up tufts of dirt. Later on in the evening, they had a visit scheduled with the neighbours, an old school chum who, being good at handling machines had served as a handyman-field technician, and was in electric back home.

'Daddy, when is mommy coming home?'

This question he had not had to field an answer to, for a good while going now. For the child, who they conceived shortly before his unit's dispatch, it must have been akin to living with a stranger. He had received only one approval of leave during the four years of chaos, right up until dismissal, and even though he was not yet then so empty or broken, meeting Sophie had felt merely as being introduced to the newest member of your distant family. Despite all this, he was nonetheless what she had now.

'Why doesn't daddy ever come sit with us, mommy?'

'Because, darling, he hurts inside. Sometimes we need to be alone, for a time, for the sake of those we love as much as ourselves.'

He'd listened from the bedroom, window pane slid open, to his wife and daughter sitting out at a table in the backyard late one autumn evening.

'Your father has pain that we cannot see.'

'Can we help him make it go away?'

'Sweet girl, that is the only thing we cannot do. When there's a battlefield within us, it's something that we alone can nurture. Alright, darling?'

'Okay, mommy.'

Such he understood, that to get on with life he'd himself have to nourish the heart within via the same kind of love which radiated off his Mary's ghost. Somewhere inside he knew, beyond the church sermons and ministerial preaching, that which way you felt was the only thing hell or holy. Maybe, someday, he could exhume the emotions in his heart, burst it open like a cracked egg - quit the frenetic pacing, avoidance - and then finally be able to mourn his dear, sweet wife, among all else.

The front door was ajar, a gentling breeze filtering in, it getting on towards suppertime when their friends arrived. He brought whiskey, a pork roast with vegetables and she herself was extremely pregnant. Sophie ushered them in, taking a hand of each in hers. When his daughter tried to hug him or held his own hands he felt shameful, enraged by this, cause it should have been just her who needed the touch, not a full-grown man.

'How long left, anymore?'

'Oh, supposed to be a couple weeks. Doc says it might pop any day now.'

The men sat aside another in hand-me-down leathern chesterfields, sipping their whiskey out of tumblers. His friend sat straight-postured, cross-legged, and he gradually slouched into a slack stupor brought on not by drink but the hour. An age of weariness which crept in like clockwork.

An electric blue radiance lit the sky at dusk, cotton-candy clouds of pink, purple and red making it look perfect. He sat out at the table in the backyard with Sophie and the expectant mother. His friend had gone home to collect his toolkit; electrical in the kitchen and master, only two rooms in the house with wiring, fuses faulted months before.

'We're planning to go to the farmer's market tomorrow morning, little love.'

'Can I come?'

'Yes, you can.'

Sophie endearingly straddled the woman's knees, head rested back on the lump of her protruding abdomen.

'What do you think you'll get, fair child?'

'Butter tarts. And a popsicle!'

'There'll be flowers?' he gruffly asked the soon-to-be.

'Yes, some florists will be there.'

'I wanted to add something with colour to the garden, yellow and orange.'

'We could pick them up for you. Marigolds, were you thinking?'

'That'll be perfect. Anything of that colour.'

'Yellow was Mary's favourite. Marigold sort of sounds like her, too.'

At the back of the property, an old willow stood in front of the perimeter cedar fence. Fireflies twinkled before it and floated up within its tassels. It reminded him of warmer evenings, when Mary still was with them.

Sudden in the night, a veil lifted, he emerged gracelessly from delirium. Dark shadows of his mind swirled in conflicting currents. The kitchen light was on, dim, and at bottom of the stair, in his incoherence, he had a firm clutch on either Sophie's wrists, tears running down her cheeks. He could taste whiskey on his pallet, and feel its iron scourge in throat, gizzard.

He couldn't ground himself by any means in such disequilibrium, hastily he disengaged, stepped back and crouched down to her sight level. His grasp had left both forearms chaffed and red, he'd never seen such sad defeat in her bright, innocent eyes. Moments ago, he knew from somewhere inside he'd been shouting unintelligibly, rambling. Had this happened before?

In deep misery, deeper than many a grim night in the trenches, to depth, he prostrated, begged forgiveness, prior tucking her into bed, reassuringly, then locking himself away in his bedroom. He left the lights on to ensure he wouldn't be tempted to sleep. The liquor curse continued to whisper.

Soon, Mary held onto Sophie like a mother does, embracing her daughter about the waist, and whispering soothingly into an ear. She, his deceased wife, was aware of her husband's presence, although paid him no mind.

Mortar shelling, gunfire, screams of dying men swim around his head, ricocheting off both cerebral hemispheres, pinging the structures of brain. Trench becomes bedroom, its boobytraps, muck, filth; in his hand two black and white photos, one of wife and the other a little girl. He stares at these hours on end, even when he looks and no longer sees.

He spends most of the day's afternoon gardening, planting petite marigolds that their neighbours had left him on the front porch. Sophie had went into town with them in the early morning, and now she was playing on a rocking horse upstairs. They had sent the girl home with sweets, and as well fresh-baked bread, parchment-wrapped meat and raw milk.

'I have something to show you, sweetheart.'

He called on her through the kitchen window, which looked onto the backyard's garden. She came presently, and for her demeanour seemed to have totally forgotten or else forgiven him completely. Sophie stood, a hand on his shoulder, where he anchored on a knee, admiring the marigolds.

'Your mommy is always going to be beside you. Nothing can change that. She will never leave you. When you feel the most that you need her to be around, even if you can't see her, she'll be the very closest out here.'

'Promise, daddy?'

'Yes, I do, little one. Right here, you'll feel her love most.'

'How do you know?'

'Because you are everything we cultivated and grew together.'