A Cruel Farewell

 “How are you, Belinda?” asked the doctor who knew her for thirty years. “Fine, Dr. McIntosh”, she lied. “Are those bruises you got from falling out of the apple tree going away?”, he prodded. “Let me take a look at their progress”. She stood as he searched for new signs of bruising, skin abrasions, lesions and outward signs of physical beatings, punches, and backhands. ‘No new signs’, he sighed to himself, knowing full well that a bank of broken bones lies in a deep, silent grave in her emotional sanctuary.

Dr. McIntosh knew her whole family and went out to their Innisfil farm often for corn roasts, banquets, and pig-on-a-spit dinners. He knew her family as a fun-loving solid group of people who worked hard on the land and carried their Irish spirit to Canada, for the betterment of all who graced their land. They had more humour than land, more grace than kernels of corn and more kindness than was imaginable. Everyone from Orangeville to Orillia loved the McGowan family and Belinda was at the centre. Her step-dancing, fiddle-playing entertainment had prefaced her marriage to Josie.

After they got married it all seemed to fade away. ‘He squelched her’ was the Innisfil gossip. ‘Josie took her away from us and destroyed her’. Lots of rumours and tittle-tattle made the rounds but no one could interfere. All you could do was hope he didn’t cause serious damage.

Her husband of twenty-five years was a sly person, slippery as wet moss on a shoreline rock. He had a history of violence. Slimy as oil and as toxic as poison, he continued exuding around the house and planning his cruel exodus.

She had been to the hospital many times: for each of her seven children plus check-ups and other times with the children. Getting there to the Barrie hospital had its easy times and impossible times, because she lived in Angus, a good thirty minutes’ drive away if the traffic to and from Base Bordon was light and much longer at heavy times. The long convoys of military trucks formed a strange faded green caterpillar-like line.

Dr. McIntosh finished up his examination and gave Belinda a prescription for her headaches which Belinda said were like pounding drums that were so loud that she wanted to tear out her hair. “Those pills should ease the pain. I have two you can take right now and pick up the rest from the apothecary.” the doctor told her as she put on her coat to leave his tiny office in the clinic. “Josie OK?” he added as an awkward postscript. Belinda just nodded because she did not want to burst out crying. If she started crying now, she might never stop, so deep was her galaxy of tears. There was not enough time on this earth to cry out the vast depths to empty her tears. If she started to write about her pain, it would take hundreds of tomes to contain the agony. The thought of crying in a safe place with someone who understood with kindness and care made her weak at the knees. At that thought, she could almost faint. She needed a safe place like this doctor’s office, but he had patients waiting and she did not want to bother him with her trifle.

Belinda put on a brave face as she got into the car with Josie. She forced a smile while he badgered, “What took you so long”? Silence. They drove home in brittle silence. Belinda sensed the tension keenly. Her intuition told her there was danger ahead. Her headache was almost gone, but then, she had never known a time in her marriage when her head was not throbbing. This time there was something else. There was a knot in her stomach, and she could feel the hair on the back of her neck standing up.

Fear. She knew this impending fear. She had experienced this before, many times. When Josie was diagnosed with tuberculosis, she knew severe danger several days before he went to the doctor about his persistent coughing and sometimes coughing up blood. The first night that he spent coughing almost all night, she had a tight knot in her stomach and her head started to pound. The knot dissipated when Josie came back from the doctor with the life-altering news.

That was decades ago before the seven children were born. Throughout the decades she tended the small farm by herself, nursed Josie back to health with daily and nightly care working her fingers to the bone to stave off starvation and keep the children healthy. After Josie departed by train for Muskoka with his consumptive disease, Belinda would visit him once a year and then would be pregnant with another child to raise alone under increasingly desperate circumstances.

Belinda and the children learned to survive on their wits and a government grant called Mother’s Allowance. Daily life on the farm was desperate despite the optimism which Belinda had. Notwithstanding polio suffered by Dolly, the firstborn, Belinda would play games during some of their evening meals of porridge. “This spoonful is carrots. The next spoonful will be strawberries” was how she started the youthful game. Dolly’s younger brothers would chime in with their contributions. Such optimistic games showed a deeper spirit of hope: the spirit of daydreams, expectancy, assumptions, and endurance. This spirit was what kept Belinda alive when all seemed lost, doom was upon everyone, rock bottom has been reached, and things couldn’t get any worse. Some people believed that things just had to get better. Dolly believed life could not go along at rock bottom for an entire lifetime. Belinda believed people have buoyancy with hope.

He was sent home from Muskoka to die after the birth of their seventh child. The pressure on Belinda became unbearable and the challenge seemed insurmountable. Her situation looked dire: Starvation-level income, seven children, one of them disabled with polio, a dying husband to tend to, farm to care for, a household that carried the pariah of the community and only the death of her husband to look forward to. Bleak did not even begin to describe her feelings or condition. Belinda cosseted her children and held them emotionally close.

Josie eventually got better and found work although he lied to her continuously. From his mouth came secretions of evil like an oil spill, contaminating everything his words contacted. She relied on her intuition daily and used it to sense when someone was lying, or something was wrong. She knew her body sensed danger long before she saw it. Her intuition gave her the only sense of power she had. She had a gift that others around her never exercised and she used it. It was a matter of survival.

Before Josie turned off the county road to the snakelike farm laneway, she knew she was going to get beat up, punched, or slapped around. She just knew it. It was like breathing in and breathing out: first the knots in her stomach, then the pounding headache then the hairs would raise on the back of her neck. She was never wrong. She never second-guessed herself. She had total self-reliance on this matter. She braced for the evil ahead.

As Josie into the farmyard entrance, the house seemed smaller somehow. She checked her glasses and wiped them on her apron. She looked again at the house as the car pulled to a stop. It was full size again.

Something terrible is wrong, she thought as she opened the car door and sat in the front seat.

“Belinda, I need to tell you something”.

“Go ahead”

“I’m being transferred to Tobermory”

“How long have you known”.

The knots were still there.

“About a week or so. I’ll be going by myself. We won’t be moving.”

“Will you be gone for a week or so?” she asked, glancing at him.

“No. I won’t be back”, he shot back. He glowered at her.

The sting in her eyes was blinding as cobra spit: instant, accurate and deadly.

She got out of the car to tend the farm.

He drove away.