Season of Fury and Wonder Read online

  Contents

  Publishing Information

  Dedication

  Preface

  What Else We Talk About When We Talk About Love

  Grace's Garden

  Elephants

  Soothsayer

  Pansy

  The Things That Mattered

  Guilt: A Discussion

  Sisters

  The Departed

  Downsizing

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  © Sharon Butala, 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Edited by Dave Margoshes

  Book designed by Grace Cheong

  Typeset by Susan Buck

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Butala, Sharon, 1940-, author

  Season of fury and wonder : short stories / Sharon Butala.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55050-974-8 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-55050-975-5 (PDF).--

  ISBN 978-1-55050-976-2 (EPUB).--ISBN 978-1-55050-977-9 (Kindle)

  I. Title.

  PS8553.U6967S43 2019 C813'.54 C2018-905280-5

  C2018-905281-3

  Available in Canada from:

  2517 Victoria Avenue

  Regina, Saskatchewan

  Canada S4P 0T2

  www.coteaubooks.com

  Coteau Books gratefully acknowledges the financial support of its publishing program by: the Saskatchewan Arts Board, The Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Saskatchewan through Creative Saskatchewan, the City of Regina. We further acknowledge the [financial] support of the Government of Canada. Nous reconnaissons l'appui [financier] du gouvernement du Canada.

  To the old women

  who have shaped the world

  preface

  These stories are about old women. I wanted to make them about old women’s lives now, as they live them, and not stories about their pasts as most writers have done, but I found, as I wrote, that inevitably the past interfered, popped up, refused to be batted down, and I had to accept that the past is very much an integral part of the now for all old people. If old age is a time of re-ordering the past, often of re-understanding it, of discovery, of trying to draw a clear narrative line through it, of finding, at last, recurring or steady themes, and of summing up – all of which it definitely is, at least among the wise – then reflection, musing, meditating on the past is inevitable, and very much to be desired. The now, it turns out, only makes sense in terms of the past.

  As one’s world draws in, gets smaller and smaller, the inner life grows stronger and deeper. Life becomes thought. The grave danger is letting thought become dream, illusion, delusion, hallucination. This detachment from reality happens (when, of course, it is not caused by a disease) when the old person lives alone, or sees only other, younger, adults who have no respect for the aged person as a human being.

  Around mid-September 2016, I woke with an entire short story in my head, or perhaps my ‘head’ is not where it was at all, but in some space I reach only once in a long while when I’m not-thinking about a writing project. This wasn’t a dream; I just woke up, went to my computer, and didn’t stop writing until the full story was on the page. I’d never written a short story this way before in my life, although I’d written many stories and published three collections of them, and I was, if not exactly surprised by this manifestation of creativity, quite simply in awe of it.

  Almost immediately a second short story followed, more or less by the same route. Then in the night I heard the words, “Three Sisters”, and I had a third short story that came as easily to me as the other two.

  In the fourteen years since my last collection, Real Life, I hadn’t written a single short story and didn’t believe that I would ever write one again. But in my nights when I had been sleeping and the short stories appeared inside me, an idea I had never formulated (at least, not in waking life) had come with them. The first story worked, I thought, as a response to Raymond Carver’s famous “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Immediately after finishing the story, I began looking for a title. I knew the story was about love, and thought at once that it was about another way of looking at love than in Carver's story, which I had taught not long before. And with a sense of my own audacity, I decided to call my story "What Else We Talk About When We Talk About Love."

  That triggered the thought of writing a series of stories, each one in response to, or inspired by, or a riff on, (never a copy of or an attempt to copy) one of the short stories by other, mostly earlier, writers whose work I was taught in the fifties and early sixties at the University of Saskatchewan, which were the ‘great’ stories. This device thrilled me, and a half-dozen of these stories came flooding over me so fast that I had to type each idea quickly and then temporarily abandon it in order to write the next one before I lost it. In three months and a bit, I had ten new short stories in my computer, over forty thousand words. I kept on revising and organizing and one day I sat down to write this explanation.

  One of the greatest benefits of my following this inspiration was that I had the immense pleasure of re-reading many of these ‘great’ stories: Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” (published in 1981 many years after I left university), James Joyce’s “The Dead,” Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case” (which, although still relevant, I find almost nobody remembers), John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” Alan Sillitoe’s “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” (not published until about 1990), and two that didn’t come from short stories at all, but from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, “The Raven,” and Chekhov’s play, “Three Sisters.”

  This collection of short stories is a soul-felt tribute to those writers, to their immense creativity, wisdom, and art, which has enriched all our lives and helped to carry the species forward just a little. My gratitude to them is unending. The opportunity to explore what I know about being old was as exciting as learning to walk as a small child, or first moving away from my family as a young adult, must have been.

  —Sharon Butala, Calgary, May 2018

  WHAT ELSE WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE

  Inspired by Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”, 1981

  When my sister Jaimie’s husband was close to death I went to the city where they lived to see him. My three brothers and two other sisters and I had been emailing each other for some time, occasionally phoning – we are too old, the bunch of us, to text, or tweet or whatever, we find these methods of communication insulting – so when their two diagnoses of cancer finally came, none of us was surprised. A collective silence held across the provinces in our different houses, each of us looking out our windows at our own landscapes – city, ocean, forest – each of us trying desperately to think, as if thinking could solve what wasn’t even properly a problem, or that we might thereby enter a new dimension where the news would
be ordinary and reasonable, and out of which we could decide how to behave, and what attitude to take that would be natural and obvious.

  I said “collective silence,” but it isn’t quite the right description of what each of us felt. I think to express whatever it was, in our newly truncated conversations, we must have resorted to clichés like we were stunned into silence, because the real words for what we felt were not forthcoming just then, or, more sensibly, we did not yet know what we felt beyond – would it be right to say that we were simply aghast? Or is that just another cliché? And it wasn’t as if we weren’t familiar with cancer; we were all too familiar with it in its various forms, and it was true that on the day the diagnoses finally came more of our family members with cancer – aunts, cousins, our parents, a grandparent – had died than had survived. Only one survived, actually. We had to have hoped that these two who were so close to us would both survive as well, but I think that every one of us knew in our heart of hearts that they weren’t going to make it, either. Don’t ask me how we knew that. The universe at work, I suppose, the knowledge hanging in the air for the plucking, and us trying to ignore it, stubbornly refusing it.

  For a long time I had wanted to be a decent person, actually tried to figure out how one would go about achieving this goal. I suppose that sounds silly as I’m guessing that every liberal, well-educated, good-hearted person knows how to do that. But I don’t think it was ever obvious to me. My earliest contact with such an idea just came back to me now – me telling a girl famous for being the nicest person in our high school crowd that I thought being nice was too stupid for words. I was maybe seventeen and had no idea what I was trying to say, but it is clear to me now that I wanted to hurt her, because I could not figure out how anyone could stand to be ‘nice.’ I couldn’t manage it. I recall that I felt too furious when I tried, trying enraged me, and I undermined my own effort immediately by saying or doing something we would have called ‘mean.’ I think that even as a kid I thought there were more interesting and important things to be than nice (even though I had no idea what they were), and even though being nice was considered to be the most important thing anybody in our teenaged world could be.

  Now, knowing our brother-in-law was the sicker of the two and hadn’t much time left, and even though I had never liked him much, it seemed clear that decency required that I visit him. Jaimie and her husband Austen had been married for many years, had married so young that they had been married longer than I, the eldest of our seven siblings, had. They had four children and many grandchildren and even a great-grandchild, with another one on the way, even though they were only in their mid-sixties. We knew too, that, as with many long-married couples, they loved each other deeply, while at the same time hating each other, and would never in life part. In my experience, having been married and divorced twice, all the wretched drama of my marriages and divorces having ended years ago now, and yet still alternately loving and hating each of my husbands (when I think about them at all), I can only suppose these emotions were just like most long-married people’s. (But I’m getting whimsical, a growing fault of mine that my aging children, looking at me sideways, clearly connect to dementia.)

  We loved our sister, but we didn’t love her husband, and some of us, probably unfairly, outright disliked him. Most of us dealt with him by carefully maintaining an even front, while others could barely do that and instead chose to stay away. Our youngest sister’s marriage all those years ago had brought the only real breach in our family’s long agreeable relations, which, if they weren’t exactly love, consisted of mutual loyalty, based no doubt on not much more than our individual need to feel we belonged somewhere, and somewhere that we might think of as a foundation in our lives. But I find it so odd how people don’t know what other people think of them, preferring instead to think that if they aren’t quite loved, they are at least liked, and their worst faults, which they try to keep hidden even from themselves, haven’t been noticed, or have been accepted as harmless. But I am referring to my sister’s husband, who didn’t love us, didn’t even like us much, who must have blamed us for things – whatever things they were – just as we tended to blame him. And yet, I am fairly sure that for all our years together as family, Austen didn’t even register the fact that we didn’t like him.

  If the pathos of this new situation didn’t escape any of us, it also didn’t escape the doctors or the nurses, or anyone else who came in contact with Jaimie and Austen during the long period of their dying. So there was much kindness from strangers, whether medical or not, and a dearth of talk among the rest of us because this situation was too unfathomably diabolical to find words for. Not even we – well-educated, well-read, sympathetic white liberals with the requisite good hearts, and proper attitudes – could speak about it beyond platitudes and what medical jargon we were privy to and sometimes puzzled over with each other.

  I longed to see my sister, and to hold her as our mother would have done had she been alive (our mother’s was the first cancer death – no, sorry, it was the second), but Jaimie was surrounded by her own family to whom she was wife, mother, grandmother, and they were a private, closed bunch who didn’t want to allow a sister any right to be intimately involved in her dying. My sister’s family and my siblings all knew that I wouldn’t attempt intimacy in the dying of her husband, so that was never an issue; in fact, nobody paid any attention to my visit where he was concerned, and this even though I had come to see him, to say what I had no doubt would be good-bye forever. You might wonder why I would bother.

  But what could I say to a dying man I didn’t love, mostly didn’t even like, who had been a part of my life, albeit at a distance, all my adulthood, who was related to me, whose children had my blood in their veins, and who, in a hugely complicated ball of feelings was hated but mostly loved by my sister who was herself dying? How could I be fully honest, genuine in my sympathy? Or should I be thinking of empathy? Or, heaven forgive me, their lofty relation, compassion? (Let’s just say I took it for granted he didn’t like me, although he didn’t actively dislike me, but frankly, I’m sure he couldn’t care less if I lived or died.) I could truly say, as I sat crowded into the centre seat on the plane, that I wanted to be fully touched by his dying, that I wanted to understand at the deepest level that his life had not been an easy one, that bad things had happened to him, as they happen to all of us, which had helped to make him who he was; that I knew he had some very good qualities, and that I knew I had to recognize that he deserved every bit of sympathy, empathy, or compassion that I could muster. That, finally, in the end – and this was the end – whether I liked him or not or he me just plain didn’t matter anymore.

  And, of course, I had to consider my sister. To hurt him in this situation would deal a blow to her that she might be unable to bear. So I knew, absolutely, that I had to find a way to be with him that would hurt no one and yet would feel genuine to me. And also knowing all the while that if I tried to tell anyone what I was feeling and thinking about this visit, they would simply decide that I’d lost my mind, or that, as usual, I was being a selfish pig who thought only of myself. This point is where I always lose the sense of the worthwhileness of thinking about one’s responsibility or one’s guilt – that it is worth the effort. It isn’t worth the effort, there is no end, there is no bloody end to it, just the infamous rabbit hole that you, I, everyone, ends up disappearing down. So, should I fake it? Just what would that consist of? Pretending that I cared? But I wouldn’t be pretending; I did care. Just not the way a person who loved him would care.

  The truth is, I am not a person who is any good at loving. Although I try, I am famously cold. I don’t hug people when I meet them or say good-bye to them, not even people I like very much. I don’t watch movies about love – shudder at the very thought – or sing any of those appalling love songs, or admire lovesickness or think it is cute or touching. I don’t ever talk about love, I don’t even fully believe that there is such a thing as love. (I exclude
from that belief parent-child love. I do believe in that. And I guess that I have to admit that apparently I believe siblings can love each other, at least now and then, for a while.)

  My strange inability to love may have begun when I was a small child in catechism class, where I was taught it was a terrible sin not to love God, and I knew I was condemned to hell forever because I couldn’t love God, who seemed to me – not that I ever dared at the time to even think it – a monster of the most terrifying, indeed, unimaginable proportions. No, it was more the result of finally, as a young woman, admitting that I alone of my brothers and sisters was not loved by my mother. But I will not bore you with that; nowadays, having thought it through, it bores me to death, too. I’m trying, as an old woman, to shift my sympathy, empathy, compassion, from me to her, who had her own difficulties that had warped her and who, I see now, was suffering terribly while we were living through our childhoods.

  No one met me at the airport, which was a relief to me (I am also something of a loner), and I went straight to my hotel, having refused all offers from family members of a bed because I knew their households were crowded enough as they were, and that they were also full of pity, confusion, and concern, without having to deal with me, too. It didn’t surprise me either that no one protested my decision, or protested it only in a strictly pro forma way. That was a relief too.

  Anyway, as I kept telling myself, I’ve been through so much worse than this situation in my life (I refused to enumerate what these ‘worse’ situations might be), and if I am ever to figure out what this elusive ‘being nice, being decent’ thing really is, I have got to do this. I have got to do this right.