Twenty-five
Only a full moon gave this much glow. Blue shadows striped the floor and the whole room appeared to be dipped in silver. I did not even need a candle to write by, that’s how bright it was.
I had been awake for hours with my mother-made quilt high at my chin, the squares of all my girlhood dresses turning me into a patchwork behemoth. Had I even slept at all? The night was all-encompassing and inside its long tunnel I was both comforted and disturbed, because it reminded me of the long months I was trapped in bed while my body grew. My published True Life History pamphlet lay on the counter of my booth, but I sat up and found my pencil and the stack of papers anyway. How could I characterize eleven months of chaos ravaging an exquisitely still body?
In the beginning I was a nocturnal creature. When night fell, my mind became more lucid. Not that I was churning out magnificent poetry or insight, not at all. Most nights I read, but in the darkness I could always feel some ethereal charge that alerted me to the silken threads that bound reality together. It was comforting because I was simply part of this graceful web, just one filament of many. Sometimes I’d lie in my bed, staring at the wooden ceiling, and listen to the breath of my parents above. The sound was so beautiful to me, and yet it seemed offensive that they slept through the limpid medium of night. The discovery of my new nocturnal nature was the first revelation of my convalescence. The second was that Evangeline, my beloved cat, knew something strange was happening; for the first time in her life she would not come near me, no matter how I called to her.
Even as greater and greater swaths of time were lost to pain, night was still my favorite time. It is the memories of day that are blurred and smeared together, almost entirely lost except for glimpses.
Once a week, before the morning’s chores began, my mother brewed the laudanum. Through the doorway of my room I watched her pass, first with the pot of well water, then with the wood for the fire. After a while she ground the cinnamon and then the clove, and added sherry wine and opium. As the weeks wore on, the fragrance of that brewing tea became dearer to me than anything else. She hated how I reached for it, but there was no other way, was there? The bones of my wrists grated against each other as they grew, stretching the skin so I thought I would burst. Sometimes I itched so badly I scratched myself bloody. She began brewing laudanum every three days, and watched as I drank it and drowsed, unburdened but drooling, all afternoon. Eventually I took such large quantities that old Garvey, Pictou’s only doctor, didn’t know what to do. I would scream myself awake, certain that my bones had torn through the skin, sweating, unable to focus my eyes, and she would rush in with another cupful, a blurred, warm figure with spidery hands working my clenched jaws open.
Garvey brought a doctor from Halifax, who brought his colleague from Boston. They spoke with my mother upstairs as I clutched my bed frame, where my hands had worn through the varnish. I had already grown two inches by then; I was horrified, and I wanted to die. Finally they gathered around my bed, three men in black suits, the one from Boston looking rather excited.
“They’ve brought a stronger medicine, Ana. It’s a new procedure. Would you like to try it now?”
“For God’s sake,” I whispered.
The Boston doctor opened a small wooden box and produced a lancet.
“We must pierce your skin, Ana. It may sting.”
I laughed. “Don’t mock me.”
The lancet’s brass handle was engraved with roses on a graceful vine and two doves, symmetrically stretching their wings toward each other. I stared at it as they administered the morphine. I could not look at the men, not to mention my mother, because the medicine was spreading in a ripening glow that sent tingling splinters directly to my most delicate parts. It aroused my senses so that I blushed and barely suppressed a groan as the morphine spread outward from my center in a great alleviating wave. Even now, thinking of those twining roses, those two birds arched in their languorous stretch, I blush. When I finally looked at her, my mother recoiled. I must have been smiling.
I can recall nothing but morphine for many weeks of my illness. These are not unpleasant memories, but hopeless to transcribe. Since the growth came in waves I did not always need the medicine, and during the lulls my mother tried her best to keep it from me. I wanted it, though. I still do. But I was ill for so long that the morphine, like the night and the novels I read, like my mother and each of the seasons that passed in front of my eyes, was just one of many companions. It wasn’t until several years later that morphine saved my life, for good or ill.
My father was the one who was absent. At first he tended to me constantly, thinking this was an ordinary illness, but gradually, as we realized what was happening, he withdrew his care. She said the mackerel season had come earlier, was bigger than any other year; that he’d had to hire two more boys from town to help. The cost of medicine, too, she said. It’s not cheap. He’s upset, she said. I did not blame him.
Sometimes I listened to him make his way in from the barn late in the evening. I knew he kept a bottle of whiskey out there and I could tell by his footsteps that he’d been into it. I pretended to be asleep, and when he stopped in my doorway my heart pounded so loudly I thought he must surely hear it.
The bright cold day I finally sat up and swung my huge legs off the edge of the bed, I knew I had to move or die. I was groggy from laudanum — I hadn’t needed morphine in a month — but determined. When I lurched to my feet I thought I would faint from the pain but I wobbled ahead, reaching the kitchen door in just a few steps. I staggered outside in just my too-short nightgown, the cold turning my bare bruised legs pink. Cold air hit the weeping sores on my back as I came down the few steps to the snow.
He was in the barn and I started toward it. I was so curious what he’d been doing in there every day, since the nets were long stowed and the boats out of the water. The snow numbed my feet deliciously, and gooseflesh prickled my skin. I heaved in cold air and walked through the clouds of my breath. I smelled wood fires and frost as I squinted dizzily in the sun. I ducked through the once huge doorway of the barn.
He was building a large wooden box with one side cut out. I did not recognize it as an exhibition booth until later, when she told me they’d read about a giant who made seventy dollars a week in London. We could pay off the boat, she said. Can you imagine that?
When my shadow filled the barn entrance he looked up. His eyes widened and he stumbled backward, tripping over his tools. He fell. My father.
He shouted for my mother, but she was gone to a neighbor’s house. He was trapped.
“Da,” I said. “I can walk again.” The barn spun in front of me and I clutched the wall. Explosions of light blocked my sight. “I think I might —”
“Ana!” His voice reached me from very far away as I toppled from a new, great height.