Refuge: A Novel

By Merilyn Simonds

To whom do we offer refuge — and why?

After a life that rubbed up against the century’s great events in New York City, Mexico, and Montreal, 96-year-old Cassandra MacCallum is surviving well enough, alone on her island, when a young Burmese woman contacts her, claiming to be kin. Curiosity, loneliness, and a slender filament of hope prompts the old woman to accept a visit. But Nang’s story of torture and flight provokes memories in Cass that peel back, layer by layer, the events that brought her to this moment — and forces her, against her will, to confront the tragedy she has refused for half a century. Could her son really be Nang’s grandfather? What does she owe this girl, who claims to be stateless because of her MacCallum blood? Drawn, despite herself, into Nang’s search for refuge, Cass struggles to accept the past and find a way into whatever future remains to her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Sep 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9781773052564

Book preview

Copyright

The First Day

You can’t lie to me. Oh, people have tried. All the usual prevarications, and some they make up just for me. Take a picture and there’s a chance you’ll get away with it. But even then, more often than not, I’ll feel that flutter in my gut, that shiver behind my eyelids when I spot a lie pencilled on a face, and the words will come spilling out of my mouth before I have a chance to think them: That’s not the truth.

Not that it’s ever done me much good. What’s the point of knowing every time someone is trying to put one over on you? It’s like having the gift of seeing flatulence. It shows you something you already suspect, something you don’t want to know too much about.

That’s what I’m thinking as I sit here in the verandah of my cabin, watching the girl row across the narrow moat of water that separates my small island from the farm where I was born. A grey moth with a smudge of rust on its nether parts moves slowly across the sagging screen in the opposite direction. I squint past it into the distance and wonder just what kind of lies this young woman will try on me. Because if I am sure of one thing after ninety-six years, it is that I have pretty much heard them all.

The only one who can lie to me is me.

~

Her first email caught me off guard.

From: [e-mail]

Subject: Please help

Date: 19 April 2001 22:01:28 MDT (CA)

To: [e-mail]

I am Miss Nang Aung Myaing, I am age 23. My country Burma. My grand father is A Pho Charlie O’Brien. His country Canada.

Please I have very suffered to come your country. I contact now to prove my blood.

Please you help.

I get a lot of these. Please, I am stranded in London. Please, I am a poor farmer in Nigeria. Please. So polite. I like that. And personal. That’s the trick. I always read them, sometimes more than once. It passes the time.

But this one was different. I circled the cursor around the name. His name. How could they know?

Of course they know. Nothing is held close anymore. Everybody knows everything. Or they think they do. There must be a thousand Charlie O’Briens alive in the world. More, laid in the ground.

Miss. Ha! More likely a hairy man smoking cheroots, spitting as he pecked away in some basement, setting traps for old women.

Well, let him try. I clicked the little trash can, and with a whoosh the email was sucked into oblivion.

But she didn’t give up.

From: [e-mail]

Subject: Help me please

Date: 25 April 2001 23:05:18 MDT (CA)

To: [e-mail]

You receive email I send?

I find you name on website Galería Imago. Photograph little boy is grand father. You make photograph. You mother, yes?

Urgent I visit. Go back, I die.

Please. I have present you from A Pho Charlie.

Miss Nang Aung Myaing

For the better part of a week, I argued with myself, until my need to know won out over my better judgment.

From: [e-mail]

Subject: Re: Help me please

Date: 30 April 2001 06:47:05 MDT (CA)

To: [e-mail]

What do you have?

From: [e-mail]

Subject: Re: Re: Help me please

Date: 30 April 2001 6:49:01 MDT (CA)

To: [e-mail]

I come show.

Where you stay?

Miss Nang Aung Myaing

A moment of weakness made me spell out the directions to the island. Loneliness, the old woman’s curse. Well, I may be old and weak, but I’m not entirely stupid. Not yet.

Curious. I’ll admit to that.

~

The girl looks ordinary enough. Not like a real estate agent or a social worker or a thug. That’s one good thing. Or three, depending how you count.

And she’s tidy. She’s pulling the old rowboat up on the rocks pretty much where I like it.

Scrawny, though. Doesn’t block much of the view. She’s got her hair pulled up into a ponytail, like I used to wear in the fifties. Looks like a boy in those blue jeans. No hips, but the shirt is so tight I can see her little breasts, round and high as suction cups.

She takes nothing from the boat — no suitcase. So she doesn’t mean to stay. Another good thing.

Ah. That hump on her back is a daypack. Whatever she has for me is tucked inside.

Smaller than an iron lung. Bigger than a tin of salve. A game we used to play.

I shuffle my chair back into the shadows. The verandah is screened in and heaped with junk: oars, tripods, winter boots and coats, things I’ve been meaning to get rid of. Nowhere to sit, but that doesn’t matter as long as I can wheel myself through breaks in the debris to my favourite lookouts. One at the far end with a view of the lake. This one, by the screen door, where I can see the woods that shield the lake from the farmhouse. Where I watch for strangers coming up the path.

Halfway along, she stops, shifts the daypack to her other shoulder, and carries on.

So. Small but heavy.

Heavy as the weight of memory that holds me here.

How old did you say you are? Doctor Stevens looked up from behind half spectacles.

She pulled herself straight and squared her shoulders. Eighteen.

She was wearing May’s one good dress, a grey voile with modest pleats down the front, a woman’s dress, although it hung so loosely she felt like a little girl dressed up in her mother’s clothes. She glanced down at her thin arms, blotched from the artificial sun, and pulled them quickly behind her.

I remember the day you were born, he said.

Her breath stopped in her throat. But did he remember the year? Would he calculate the three she’d added on?

He tapped his pipe in the ashtray, a slow steady pulse. Pity about your mother, he said at last.

~

She’d pushed her head out of her mother’s body at precisely 5:33 on the morning of the 28th of June in the fifth year of the new century — the twentieth century, which was new at the time.

Her papa’s favourite story.

As if unprepared at that moment to fully enter the world, she’d paused. Her eyelids, mouth, and brow worked in spasm, twisting the smooth features of her face into a scowl, a grimace, a wide expression of surprise. Then the muscles relaxed, and the lids half closed in an air of resignation.

Hallo!

Her eyelids fluttered. Her face was wedged to one side, so that her father had to thrust his bushy head between his darling wife’s legs in order to get a proper look. Crouched over the head of this half-in, half-out child, he locked his gaze on hers, forging a connection between them that spiked the hairs on his spine, his neck, his wrists.

Then her eyes lost their focus, as if turning to deeper thoughts, and her lids drifted down.

Hallo! he shouted, louder, and once more, her eyelids flicked open, her look reluctant. Expectant. Curious. Resolute. Game. An expression her father could not fix with any certainty no matter how closely he scrutinized the furrows of her forehead, the wrinkled skin around her lips.

He glanced at the clock on the mantle. Twenty seconds. Twenty-five. Thirty. Long enough for every drop of blood in her tiny body to complete its circuit sixty times or more. For her lungs to fill and empty half as many times again. For the sound of his third Hallo! to burst out the window and skim across the summer-fallow fields and through the woods, fading to a whisper on the shore of the island, where it slipped into the water without a ripple.

Thirty seconds — her father knew because he’d read the scientific pamphlet — was how long a guillotined man remained conscious after the severing of his head. Time enough, within the infinite chambers of the mind, to live again all the abundant joys and sorrows, the betrayals, the scant, uncanny strokes of luck.

Time enough for a guillotined life to end, for a newborn’s to begin.

Her father made careful note of each stage of her birth. The head bursting forth like a blossom. The face turning aside to rotate the shoulders within the bowl of her mother’s pelvis. That heart-stopping pause. Then, in a rush: torso, arms, toes, a great gasp and a cry, and she was borne out on a swell of membrane and blood.

This was not the first human birth her papa had witnessed — he was already the father of eight daughters — but his concentration was sharpened by the knowledge that it might well be the last.

The good Doctor Stevens, arriving in a flurry, examined the child laid on the quilt.

Another girl, and a puny one, he said, giving her father a stern look as he pulled on his coat, a heifer in distress already taking her place in his list of things yet undone that day. If you value your wife, sir, you’d be wise to keep your trousers buttoned.

A tale patched together from her papa’s stories and the soured memory of May, scarcely five, peering in at the door.

The sun was casting off from the horizon, drifting up into a wide pool of blue. Her father picked her up in his broad, freckled hands and held her squirming to the window, a chant of birdsong seeping in through the open sash. He lifted her until her head was on a level with his, then higher, raised her to where the lake was a flash of silver through a hush of green.

Cass, her father said to the infant grown still in his hands. Cass, look.

~

Papa, having given up on fathering a son, ignored the facts before his eyes — the absence of a penis being the most obvious — and took to her as if she were a boy. Cass, he called her for the rest of his life, occasionally Cassidy but never Cassandra, the name her mother had chosen in a fit of gloom, giving in to the premonition that this baby would be the death of her, which she was, before she was weaned.

You killed our mother, her sisters hissed, none more bitterly than May.

She took no interest in the china-headed dolls they handed down to her. Instead, she played by the woodbox, arranging the split kindling in sheltering constructions. The bits of dough her aunts set in front of her, she twisted into fantastical creatures, although there was a certain familiarity in the arrangement of feet, legs, and heads.

In the farmyard she was fearless, chasing sows out of the corn before she was tall enough to see over their stippled backs, lingering close to the barn on those chill days of autumn when the slaughtering was done, poking at the steaming entrails with a willow stick. Of all her sisters, she was the one her father counted on to hold steady the head of a lamb, staring into its eyes, her hands clenched around its jaw as her father slit open the welt and pressed against the flesh, squeezing out the ball of maggots, cleaning the wound with a hot knife.

I want to see, let me see!

Papa would smile and lay the excised bits of rotting flesh, the diseased members, the crusted peelings and scrapings on the bare earth for her to examine as he examined them himself.

Always you, May said, her tone caustic. After Mother died, all he was interested in was you.

The round-robin of aunts who kept them clothed and fed forbade her father’s experiments. He restrained himself from brushing her infant eyes with a feather to determine at what age tears first appeared or rattling a box of live coals in her face to fix precisely at what moment she blinked. He kept instead to scientific observation, timing the length of her screaming-fits, scribbling notes to describe the reddening of the eye, the return of proper pallor to the region of the mouth.

It wasn’t long, though, until she reached an age when she could give her own consent, with the result that at any time of night or day her father might send her leaping into the air, frightened nearly out of her wits by a coiled rope that jerked to life, proving to them both that the startle response depended partly on the vividness of the imagination and partly on habit, but partly, too, on the condition of the nerves. When she was laid low with one or another of her childhood diseases, no matter how unexpectedly he appeared or how ingeniously he wired the clattering pots, he could not produce the wide eyes and raised eyebrows of surprise, the mouth that rounded to an exploded Oh!

Let’s do it again!

Yes, all right, but what is it we’ll be looking for now?

We’ll see how high I jump! We’ll make marks on the wall. Or stretch strings across the hallway! We’ll—

Papa would lay his hand softly on her head and run his fingers through her hair. Mark my words, Cass. You’ll be a great scientist one day.

That she took so little interest in books was a mystery to her father, who was a bookish man like his father, the Reverend Thomas MacCallum, a friend of Charles Darwin at the university in Edinburgh before he was called to a small country charge in the wilds of Canada. Still tucked between the Old and New Testaments of the MacCallum family Bible was the list of questions the great man had circulated to those of his correspondents given to close observation:

Is astonishment expressed by the eyebrows being raised?

Can a guilty or sly expression be recognized?

Does shame excite a blush?

She was at her father’s side when at last he slit open the pages of the book Darwin had sent, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, bending with him over the incomprehensible words, drawing on the blank pages as her father made notes in one thin black scribbler after another. The moment he lifted a tool she was there, climbing up on an old butter box to hand him a hook or a knife, a bit of lamb’s wool, the sharpening stone. All through the summer she was seven, she’d jolt awake while the sun was still a promise in the sky. She’d slip out of bed, past her sleeping sisters, past May clucking to her hens in the barn, and race to crouch on the shore of their small lake, tracking the throaty calls until she slapped down her net, gathering the slippery creature in the folds of grey cotton, clutching it for dear life as she ran back through the stubble field to the barn.

One neat stroke of the knife and the frog’s head was off. Then her father arranged the body on his laboratory bench in a posture so natural she felt sure he had made it whole again.

Just a drop. There, Papa would say, pointing to the anterior surface of the frog’s right thigh.

She’d widen her fingers slowly on the rubber stopper until a single tear of acid stained the mottled skin. Immediately the leg would leap into action, rubbing at the burn. Her father grabbed the foot and cut it off. The mutilated stump paused, then lifted, straining to reach the spot where the acid still burned. Eventually the frog gave up, it always did. It shifted on the bench. When the foot of the unharmed leg began to twitch, she’d lean in close, her father, too, the two of them scarcely breathing until at last the headless creature would raise its one good leg and reach across to paw at the wound.

Papa’s eyebrows would shoot up.

Well done! he shouted. Well done!

He’d clap his hand on her shoulder, as if they hadn’t produced this result a dozen times or more, generations of frogs sacrificed to this one experiment of Darwin’s, laid out in that book, her father’s faith in what he witnessed waning steadily until he’d send her back to the lake with her net.

See that? A voluntary action — from a body without a brain. Explain that, Cass. Explain that, if you can!

In the stillness of the morning, the frogs call their dire warnings, their hoarse seductions.

I shake myself from my reverie and study the girl as she struggles with her load up the rocky slope.

How weak she looks. How flimsy a product of her time.

But I am not fooled. She has come to invade my island, plunder my privacy.

I thought I would be safe here, this place that is almost as much a backwater as it was when my grandfather came to minister to the settlers of Newbliss, a village tucked in the back of beyond, an hour’s walk from the farm where I grew up. The lake — my father’s enticement to buy the farm — is hidden out of sight behind the old stone house, across a rough pasture and the thin strip of woodland my father left wild along the shore to shade the cows when they came to drink. The lake itself is almost perfectly round, an indentation in the limestone made by a meteor, a star-stone fallen from the sky, as my father liked to say. On one side, a rocky promontory, and off the tip, as if in exclamation, this narrow mound of rock and trees where I live in my small cabin.

Almost invisible. Hard to reach.

And I, silly old woman, have invited this girl in.

I wheel about as if to retreat inside, but what’s the use? There’s nowhere, anymore, to hide.

Papa, come look.

She’d pull on the sleeve of his old plaid coat and he’d laugh, put down his tools, and row with her to the island.

The summer she turned ten, she built a hut there, using boards from a collapsed blind where her father used to crouch for hours, observing the nesting behaviour of a pair of American wigeons. She nailed the cracked and splitting boards to a stand of five spindly cedars, stripping the bottom branches to use as thatch for a roof to keep out the worst of the weather. The weight of winter would break through her construction, and every spring, she’d remake the hut, sweeping out the drifts of leaves and the rotting nests, carpeting the earth with fresh boughs, adding boards to widen the walls and raise the roof as she grew.

This is where she brought her lame and wounded: the blue jay with the broken wing, the nest of mouse pups abandoned by their mother, the barn cat that was half blind. She attached wire cages to the outside of the hut, carved splints and knotted slings. Every morning, she rowed herself across the strait with a muslin bag at her feet, bulging with table scraps, worms and crickets, various seeds. At the end of the day, she could scarcely pull herself away from the frail and broken creatures she’d rescued. She was convinced she could hear them calling to her in the night, their voices faint through the windows that May slammed shut against the dark.

She barely knew her letters, but she understood the articulation of bones in their sockets, the cavities that cradle viscera, the placement of lungs and kidneys and heart, the organs of sight, digestion, reproduction, and thought. She watched her father peel the skin from the head of a slaughtered steer and work the jawbone, noting the movement of the various muscles of its face, tracing each strand from its origin to its final attachment, probing with instruments he fashioned from bits of metal that fell off his machines, peering into the light that poured down from six oil lamps hung from a contraption he’d rigged from a rust-pitted harvesting rake.

She was never squeamish, not in the least. She had seen blood flow thin as water from a wound, seen it thicken to scarlet mercury, setting like chokecherry jelly as it cooled, darkening until it was black and sticky as tar, another substance altogether. Whatever shiver of discomfort she felt at the sight of blood was provoked only by the wrongness of it outside the body, when it should be coursing through its subcutaneous watershed, streams and rivulets of bright red that she would draw rippling down the outline of an arm or a leg, flowing up through the heart into the brain.

The teachers at the school in the village sent home notes, occasionally venturing to the house themselves, clucking their ponies up the long, weed-choked lane, taking one aunt or another to task, urging them to intervene. And for a while the aunts, a series of strong-minded and agreeable women dressed in plain white blouses and dark, sturdy skirts, saw to it that she was washed and combed in the mornings, then force-marched down the dirt road with her sisters, dust rising in a wedge behind them. But the minute their attention was drawn to the lessons chalked on the board, she would slip out the door and run back the way she’d come.

In the end, the teachers, the aunts, and even May gave up. The barn, with its makeshift laboratory and its rows of heaving animals with cracked teats and fevered udders, calves struggling to be born, chicks gasping their last breaths, horses with overgrown hooves and scabby eyes, became her nursery, her primary school.

She was left to spend the daylight hours with her father, the experiments they performed causing such a shimmer of electricity between them that when they were compelled by one aunt or another to abandon the laboratory for the parlour, their brains would stay behind as if severed cleanly, still weighing and measuring and observing at such a pitch that their bodies quivered with imperceptible motion, a vibration and a pulsing that set the teacups on the mahogany table to tapping, the ferns in their wicker stands to trembling, the dust motes to dancing. Every object in the room would fidget with the force of their mental exertions although their faces remained smooth, nothing to reveal what was passing between them except for a certain distracted look in Papa’s silver-blue eyes, matched precisely by her own.

Her father had nailed two wide hemlock boards across the manger in a back stall. That was where he performed his dissections and trials, analyzed the crops and intestines of the hens the aunts roasted for his Sunday dinners. He fed the birds greens or corn or crickets an hour, two hours, six hours before their demise, gauging how long it took the nourishment to move through the digestive tract, what effect each food had on the consistency and colour of the gastric juices. Inspired by his experiments, she designed trials of her own, keeping careful measure of the feed she offered to her furred and feathered patients, what was taken, how often and how much.

Papa would bend over her mice and birds, inspecting the marks she’d scratched on a strip of birch bark.

But what have you learned, Cass? he’d say. It is not enough to observe, to know the facts. What do they mean?

She sensed there was an answer, although she could never think what it might be.

I don’t know, she’d say, and he’d smile, That’s a start.

Alone on the island, she fell into the habit of singing. Crooning it was, nothing as organized as song. A low sound to soothe the wounded and the dying, the slowly healing. Wordless, trailing melodies without end except for that imposed by a shout from a sister on the shore or her own realization that the sun had all but set. Singing took the place of talking, or at least eliminated the need for it, a melody rising from her lips no matter where she was, on the island or in the barn, at the supper table, tucked in the bed she shared with May, filling the empty spaces with meaningless sound.

Being the youngest of the MacCallums was both her torment and her saving grace. Rarely noticed, she was seldom missed. She accumulated small comforts on the island: a blanket, a plate, a cup, a candle stub. She took to keeping an apple or two, a heel of bread, a rind of cheese tied in a cloth that hung from a branch inside her hut. No one seemed to care how long she stayed away.

Except once, late in August, when the sky darkened without warning and a wind rose up, whipping Papa’s voice to ragged snatches through the trees.

Stay. Where. You. Are, he yelled when she came to the water’s edge. He stood tall as a prophet in his flapping greatcoat, his fist raised in the air, silhouetted in a sudden flash of white against the towering, swaying spruce.

They stood rooted to their opposite shores, peering at the water that heaved between them, the clouds surging above, swallows tumbling through the air. Then the storm bore down in earnest and he waved her back into the trees. For hours, she crouched in her hut, wrapped in a ragged quilt, thunder growling all around, erupting now and then in outrage, the gaps in the boards pulsing with wild light, then snapping back to blackness.

Eventually she slept, dreaming strange and restless dreams of faces she