Prologue

An orange-red curl of flame
scorches the void
emblazoned with the Dove
formed within it
by steel bands of reason
my father taught—
the furnace—
thin protection from the cosmic heat
therein the Galilean
on flowered hill
teaches three listeners . . .
those were the garden years

Alex, who was 14, had been using pot since he was 10. He slept the sleep of the drugged. His room had been a mess for years. But one day after his sister had left and probably because he was missing all the good things she represented, he fixed up his room and brought her little blue couch into it. I wanted to contribute something to his “new” room that would remind him of Jesus and my “Fiery Furnace” painting is bright and less sentimental than some Christian art. From the depths of his agnosticism, he rejected the offer.

So I hung it in the hallway just outside his room.

I

Verna had her roots in the rural setting into which we moved in ’83. Born and raised here, she was married to Jim, the tall, genial farmer with whom she raised six stalwart sons. She was a beloved teacher. The parochial school had been blessed for several decades by her endless enthusiasm for and shrewd knowledge of children, by her classroom program that accommodated the particular needs of young boys as well as of girls, by her devout piety, and by her outspoken opinions. She influenced our own children passing year by year through her class. She went to unexpected lengths to see that the children under her care got the attention their particular needs required. I also liked her because in this quiet, traditional community her frankness validated my own tendency to be outspoken.

Shortly before her retirement a crisis in the school cast Verna in a pivotal role. With tact, but with courage, she found ways of creating places of safety for some of the beleaguered children. She provided information and support for their parents while the controversy raged. In doing so, she put her own career on the line. It was then I had gotten to know her better, sharing our anger, frustration, and disillusionment in furtive meetings and on one long afternoon over her pretty china teacups. From that time, though I saw her less, I became spiritually connected to her and her family in their homestead, which I passed on every trip to the village. Once, as I drove by the house I sensed Jim’s heart damage that led to bypass surgery and then knew our prayers had been answered in the glimpses of their daily walks along the road. I felt their pride when Shawn decided to enter the priesthood—but, then, anyone could gauge the excitement by the number of cars in the front yard. One autumn, when I felt her own absence, her cancer was being diagnosed. Soon her robust body was ravaged so that I did not recognize her from the next pew in church until at the Sign of Peace she turned with her unique showering of grace to greet the little girl seated behind her. Deeper into her illness there was a crowded Mass where Jim found a place for me between them and I shared the liturgy with a sense of high honor and celebration.

My husband remarked that the stress of that drawn-out crisis at the school possibly brought on her illness, and she echoed this thought the last time I visited her. She spoke of her forgiveness for those who had hurt her, even for having brought her to this condition. As I prayed for her healing I had a vision in which she had fallen by the roadside and Jesus was lifting her up. I expected a different miracle, but a few weeks later, attended around the clock by her adoring family, she died. At the funeral home, near her casket banked in floral tributes, I met her shy sister Audrey, a florist, who remarked that Verna had said as a little girl she had wanted lots of flowers at her funeral. Hundreds attended the Mass, coming from long distances and all the surrounding towns.

I dreamed about Verna three times after she died. In the first dream she came to me in my kitchen, perplexed that her new life was not quite what she had anticipated. Shyly, I tried to assure her that I recognized her, that she certainly was experiencing something good and right, and that I felt Grace at her coming. A few weeks later, I dreamed of her again. She was no longer confused. She stood in her best black dress with white, ruffled, organdy collar and cuffs as though attending to some instruction, sustaining a purpose that I could not fathom. And then, in the third dream, I saw her in the barren front yard of her farmhouse where the trucks usually parked and the black, outdoor wood furnace stood. Sitting on an ornate garden bench, she was waiting for something. She was not contemplating her signature red geraniums before the building that she had taken such satisfaction in enlarging and facing with stone but was watching the road.

II

Ina was from Newfoundland, as my husband had learned while they chatted over the back of a church pew during an informal service of renewal and reconciliation. He had taken his folklore doctorate at Memorial University and they shared memories of the Rock. With an ironic little shrug and a sparkle in her brown eyes, she made no bones about the fact that the Church would not allow her to take Communion because she’d divorced her abusive husband and then civilly remarried. She felt she belonged in the Church and wasn’t about to take a back seat, either, despite its prohibitions. Her daughter’s work away from the village during the week left Ina in middle age with the prospect of raising her young grandson. “Well,” she said with a determined nod of her head, “you do what you have to do.” So whether at Church suppers or school fairs, parent nights or choir practice, Ina usually was to be seen with characteristic cheerfulness attending her grandson and lending a helping hand. When a farm near the village became an object of pilgrimage so that the church was filled to overflowing for the Masses, Ina took on the task of finding seats for the busloads of latecomers. “I would rather be a gatekeeper in the house of the Lord,” sang the psalmist, surely in anticipation of Ina tiptoeing like a fawn up and down the aisles every Sunday. Her husband contracted leukemia and became depressed, then rejecting, and then moved out. Her Communion privileges were reinstated.

My own Catholicism was of a less granite variety so that when the priest crumpled emotionally and spiritually in the wake of the school scandal in ways that directly affected me and our family I withdrew to the Anglican camp. We were in the US for a year and returned home to a cascade of serious illness in the family that almost put an end to attendance at any church. Three of us had contracted chronic fatigue syndrome subsequent to the Asian flu.” One of our teenage sons developed emotional problems, sank into the local drug culture, and became intermittently psychotic. Although I lived in such isolating thickets of problems, I heard that Ina had been stricken with cancer and, some while later, that she was in remission. Just when our son was hospitalized with a second drug- and alcohol-induced psychosis the Catholic Women’s League asked me to design a banner for their conference and I found myself conferring in Ina’s living room. She was suffering the effects of chemotherapy, turbaned to hide her hair loss, and eating very little or with difficulty. Nevertheless, she was helping to organize the upcoming event with an assured sense of her place in this circle.

Hurrying through the village medical clinic on one of those stressed-out days when Dan was recovering from his third psychotic break, I almost missed Ina waiting in a chair near the door. Stepping back towards her, I noticed her grandson with her was now teenaged. She rose into my arms and I held her. Her dark eyes spoke fear and pain. She said the cancer had returned to her stomach. I told her that I had been praying for her and she melted a little. She seemed comforted just to have seen me. She understood, when I mentioned Dan, why I could not stay long to talk. As I hugged her again I promised to keep on praying.

Ina remained a constant in my heart and mind and I longed for news of her in the weeks that followed. Again our son was recovering at home and my husband and I shared the burden of supervising him 24/7 and our unhappy youngest son to the exclusion of all but paying work and the essential trips to the grocery store. Someone assured me Ina was still at Mass. In early spring, I saw her again at the grocery store and was relieved to know my worst fears had not been realized. “Ina, you look wonderful! How are you doing?”

“Well, not so bad. I’ve just finished another round of chemotherapy, you know.”

“You are so good. How do you stay so chipper?”

She gave that philosophical Newfoundlander shrug and said firmly, “Well, what else is there to be?” The look of love and appreciation we exchanged seemed to make up for the years of distance. At last, she saucily turned her hands on her hips and grinned, “Well, aren’t you going to give me my hug?” And I laughed and hugged her long. Later, from the cashier’s line, I saw her tiptoeing to greet another friend, as though the grocery store was just another aisle in her church.

She was dying and had been moved to Kingston, even further out of reach.

I kept looking for opportunities to break away from the demands at home without finding them. Easter Sunday I was at the Anglican Church. As prayers were requested for her repose I learned she was gone. I wept for the loss of her—for so many different kinds of loss.

III

My husband understood that I wanted to go to the wake Monday morning, but our disturbed son was creating chaos. Shortly before the visiting hours ended, he saw a window of opportunity and suggested I take it and also get the few needed groceries. I left immediately for the funeral home. By the curb, I saw her grandson, safe in the compass of a girl his age, and expressed my sympathy.

“She’s okay now,” he said dreamily, “now that all the pain is gone.” Seems like she didn’t pass on her brisk earthiness, I thought. Inside I met her daughter, who did not know me and was just leaving.

“Well, Ina,” I silently communicated by her coffin, “I didn’t make it to see you when it mattered, and it certainly doesn’t now.” How absurdly chic, I thought, the white wool suit shrouding her fragile bones. And, hoping no one was noticing the brevity of my visit, I signed the guest book and stepped outside.

Verna’s sister Audrey was on the sidewalk talking to Ina’s mourners and blocking my way. I waited while the knot of shared sorrowing took a minute to unravel. Though her husband had the car running, Audrey paused to take my hands and our grief flowed between us with my tears. She stood holding my hands tightly, eyes closed, silent but obviously praying for me right there in the street. How unusual for a Catholic, I thought. “You are strong,” she said. I had an almost visual awareness of Verna and Ina standing with us on the sidewalk and felt their unique forms of strength upon me.

       “Life is so hard,” I stated and suddenly became aware of the change in her. This was not the shy Audrey I had met last year beside the banks of flowers in the room behind me. “You’ve been trying to step into Verna’s shoes for the family, haven’t you?”

Audrey nodded, “Yes, and all those grandchildren!” I hugged her, thanked her, and headed for the grocery store. I was not surprised to see her again there chatting with people but under some inexplicable compulsion, I stopped again, waited, and resumed our conversation. I told her about Alex’s recent car theft and accident. I told her about Dan’s illness. She told me something I had not known: she and Verna had a schizophrenic brother. I explained how the hospital staff had taught Dan the long-outmoded Freudian notion that his psychosis was caused by some deficit in my mothering. Our family doctor had denied that charge but Dan’s trust in me had been profoundly undermined, complicating my already onerous responsibilities. Audrey was indignant, “What’s a mother to be if not protective of her child, especially if there is something wrong with him?” Her parting words restored my confidence. I felt taller as I returned home.

That evening Alex asked me for candles to add to the atmosphere of his room and because I knew he was very careful I gave him three from my desk. Before I went to bed, I asked him through his closed door if he had put them out. He said he was putting them out as we spoke and I could hear that he was.

I had stopped taking a bit of Melatonin to sleep, but since Alex’s car accident and encounter with the police three days before I felt I needed it again. That evening I prayed, “Lord, I am so tired. Please waken me if there is any need during the night.” About 3 am I did waken. I was so tempted to roll over and go back to sleep but Audrey’s words were in my head: “What’s a mother to be . . . ” and, in that instant, I felt as though Verna and Ina and Audrey were inside of me and focused my resolve. “If they can do it, so can I,” drew me out of bed and into the hall. But Dan’s door was closed. No one was on the stairs. Then, as if I could see through his door, too bright a light in Alex’s room spurred me in a blurred second down the hall and against his door, breaking the closure. My mind braced for what I might find, while I screamed his name. The flames in the middle of the room reached almost to the ceiling and he was still asleep, not on his futon beside the fire but on Beth’s couch beyond the glass coffee table.

My husband was behind me. Alex woke to his father’s cries and we three beat at the flames with pillows and blue-jeans and blankets. Funny how all the stuff Dad had taught me about fires when I was a child came clearly to mind. I remembered when I was five and a friend’s Christmas tree caught fire and I ran to get a neighbor to call the fire department. She hadn’t believed me and I had to tell her again and again before she phoned. I sent Alex to waken Dan, get him dressed, and outside. We were defeating the fire, but what about smoke? The window was wide open. Despite his father’s protests, I did not discourage Alex’s love of fresh air. That widely raised sash must have kept the draught towards the outdoors and prevented smoke heavy with minute plastic particles from building up in the room and asphyxiating him as he slept. As we fought the blaze it was helping to remove the oppressive smog from burned plastic. My husband called the firefighters.

As I tugged at the area rug I’d laid not two weeks before, I discovered that my mother’s antique pitcher that had been sitting full of water on the glass tabletop must have fallen as the glass shattered in the heat, soaking the carpet and preventing the fire from engaging the soft pine floor or spreading quickly towards the couch. My grandfather’s wooden chest next to the couch was what had been blazing most furiously, but on the side away from sleeping Alex. Most of the lidded, plastic clothes hamper, where he had left the third candle stub burning, had melted into the carpet. Dick and Dan arrived with jugs of water. The firefighters arrived to confirm that we’d quenched the blaze. They removed the smoldering couch and grotesquely decorated carpet to the front yard. Later, we found a blob of black plastic—the white telephone—in the remains of the charred clothing. It must have caught fire as the candle melted the lid, then ignited the basket, the clothing, then the wooden box. The fire must have been simmering for hours, perhaps leaping up only when his comforter had been cast aside. Alex had only a small burn on his knee.

By the time the insurance people came and went the next morning, I had missed Ina’s funeral but I went round the back of the church to search for Audrey at the reception in the downstairs hall. A short distance away in the cemetery two men with shovels were ladling earth over Ina’s coffin while chatting with a young woman at the graveside. Life in death and death in life; Ina’s spunky realism and Rock-solid faith. Earthiness to earth and thank You for her, I thought. Audrey was not in the church, but I told the miracle to a friend or two before returning home to thank her in a letter.

Epilogue

In April, I noticed one of Verna’s daughters-in-law planting the slope between her house and the road. Then a white trellis appeared over the front walk as Shawn’s ordination drew near. In early summer when the flowers began to bloom I remembered my third dream. All around the spot where the dream bench stood, a real garden had grown up—an explosion of fiery colors. Verna’s rosy petunias and trademark scarlet geraniums had multiplied by the dozen in enlarged or new beds with great clumps of miniature sunflowers and crimson and yellow gaillardia, wine and mustard marigolds, yellow veronica, creamy shasta daisies, golden brown-eyed Susans, orange daylilies, and spotted-coral tiger lilies. Red maple trees had been planted, blue clematis climbed the trellis, even the sheds boasted window boxes of purple and hot pink petunias. The black furnace was indiscernible behind the flaming colors. All summer long, the glory blazed for every passer-by. I expected to see Jill, the gardener, but there was no chance meeting. Late in autumn, as I passed the house I actually prayed for an encounter. I should not have been surprised, a moment later, to see her speeding towards me on a four-wheeler with her daughter. I made a U-turn to follow her into the yard. I tried to tell her about my dreams. I don’t know that they made sense to her, but she admitted she had a knack for flowers. Yes, she had done it for Shawn’s ordination, of course, but didn’t I know Jim had remarried this June before moving closer to the village? So she and Dave had bought the homestead. She had named one of the newly planted trees “Jim,” the other “Verna.” I thanked her for creating such splendor and smiled as I drove home that I now understood the three dreams and why Verna had waited.