But it all happened just when they found the first cyst. Anyway, I wanted to keep it for you. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to do another.”
She’d shed her skin and come out raw and new. She had worked very, very hard to go so deep and come back with these images. She mocked and honoured all at once. She made the ruined beautiful, the common haunting. She’d found the passion that might have driven her into years of new work. I wandered into the corner to look at her sketch pads. There were dozens of sketches with fresh ideas.
“What happened, Mom?”
She smiled and sat down on a pile of old newspaper. “I don’t know, I really don’t. I shrunk one of my own sweaters by accident one day and when I looked at it dry and misshapen I liked it. I think I was suddenly open enough to just play again.” She hesitated, then finished, “That’s why all this is so hard for me, Sophie. I’m not ready. I had more to do. Much more to live. This is not a natural death and I am not ready. I can admit that to you.”
There were no words and I went to her and we held each other in that freezing studio underneath her Sweaters. She was slowly stripping me bare with all her daily banter about dying, but that was the only time she ever spoke of death. It felt as if she’d reached inside me and pinched closed my blood flow, and as I held her she said quietly, “I know you’re pregnant. I hope your baby is as beautiful as you are. Make sure you have time to work, too. There are lots of paintings to sell to help you out. When I die they’ll be worth more. They’re in that big cupboard at the back. I’m leaving everything to you and your baby.”
I could barely hear but the words lodged inside anyway. Outside she stood a moment looking at the sky and pointed to Cassiopeia and Sirius as she always did. We started back toward the lights of the house and she complained about the cold and the deep snow and chanted with frozen lips, “Men moil and toil for midnight gold . . . I can’t goddamn breathe!”
“Well, stop talking then!”
We laboured across the back, the wind cutting through us, fresh, heavy snow drifted across the kitchen door. She laughed at me as I jerked it open and said, “Don’t let Moore out!”
I certainly hoped Moore wasn’t lurking around ready to escape because then, on top of everything else, I’d be running through a snowstorm in the dark searching for an insolent, freezing budgie. When you watch someone dying, you get into the habit of stepping outside yourself. You laugh at yourself doing absurd daily things, heave in the fresh outside air when you can. But by the sick-bed you slow down and listen carefully and try to make the little things comfortable. You even enjoy the routines, because you can’t bear too much of the other.
When Jo wasn’t there, Alecto appeared in the barn and sometimes did the mucking out for me while I sat on a bale of hay, leaned back and put up my feet. I drifted, tired, through days that seemed endless and weeks that disappeared like snowflakes on the palm of my hand. I slept lightly, listening for my mother. The adamantine chains of night pain rattled in the early mornings as the morphine wore off and she’d cry out in her sleep, please do something, and wake up. We nursed mugs of tea together waiting for that moment between night and dawn. Only then she’d say, weak and exhausted, “All right now, Soph, I’ll take my pill and then let’s get a few more hours,” as if I were sick too. With the first streaks of winter sun I fell back into my bed separated by a wall from her and slept the greedy sleep of pregnancy until ten, when it was time to get up and feed the Grays and sit with my mother and get ready for the afternoon nurse and go to the Safari.
Jo was renting three of the elephants to a Russian circus that performed through southern Ontario and upper New York State for seven weeks. He was back and forth with Lear and Gertrude. He’d given over some of the daily care of the others to me, watching Kezia and training