Carefully lifting the old, crumpled photographs from the steel box, she recalls the various periods in which her life was marked by horrible, yet seemingly inevitable violence.
She sits at her desk, across the room from her bed. Out the window to her right, the world is sheathed under night’s thick black cover. She leans forward painstakingly, her old back bending like a tree branch. She often wonders when it will break.
The white lamp bears down on the pile of photographs. She squints, not for the brightness, but because her eyes are failing. She brings a picture close to her face, sighing at a thin man with dark eyes and a black moustache. He stands beside a short woman with light curly hair. They stand apart, rigid; behind them rests a small house with faded wooden siding. The sky is dim and the background trees are thin and barren.
She slightly bends the photograph between two fingers, knobbly as clipped twigs. The man and woman are her parents, the people who taught her to slip through life untouched by anything or anyone.
She puts down the picture, stares at the wall. Her father’s disposition had been that of a miser and was complemented by her mother’s stark bluntness.
“Nothing is an accident,” they said.“You must accept that. You must believe that. Everything you do and everything that happens is planned, and you cannot change it.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because that’s how things are.”
From her early youth they’d showed her that everything, every event and occurrence, was inevitable. Even when she spilled water on the table or dropped a vase on the floor, they told her not to cry—not with impatience, but with dry distance. Though sceptical at first, she came to live under this belief just as she lived under her parents’ roof.
Rummaging through the spread, she finds a picture of herself when she was five years old. She is in the yard, short legs bent in flight, arms open. Her parents made examples of her whenever they could, using strange and sometimes brutal events; and looking at her own bright face and spare-toothed smile, she recalls such an instance.
One day when she was working with her mother in the garden, she heard a resounding gunshot near the farmhouse across the road. A man screamed and cursed. Other men began shouting. Her mother had hustled her inside, telling her to avert her curiosity for the time being. Later that night she told her what had happened.
“One of those hunters was there,” her mother said, “on that property where he wasn’t supposed to be. He and his friend were hunting for deer, and one of them thought he saw one, but it was actually the farmer coming from the bushes.”
“And he was shot?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes grew wide.
“Is it bad?” she asked.
“That doesn’t matter,” her mother said.“What does matter is that they didn’t learn. They’re stupid men. Your father and I knew that would happen if they kept doing that. You should know that too. Things like that are bound to happen.”
“Because men like that ...”
She paused, rubbing her little fingers. She looked up at her mother, “…are stupid?”
“Yes,” her mother said, closing the subject.
The trials of life never seemed to affect her. Her parents loomed over her. When she hit puberty, she was taught never to cry during menstruation, since it was a necessary part of being female. High school fistfights were vulgar displays of ignorance. Gossip was wind. Shootings mentioned in the newspaper carried as much weight as gatherings of dead flies on the windowsill. She cultivated a frosty shell and passed dully through school into young womanhood.
Upon watching with what care and tolerance she dissected frogs, and how she stayed after school to clean the desks smattered with formaldehyde, her science teacher suggested she become a nurse. She found it a decent fit, attending nursing school in her hometown. During World War II and after two years of schooling, she was asked to go overseas to work in a military hospital.
“I don’t know,” her mother had said. “I’d rather you stay here and wait for a husband to come.”
“Well, but mother,” she said, “it’s just like you said. Things like this happen. With my training and my good reports, they were bound to pick me. Other people have gone, and now it’s my turn.”
While waiting for her mother’s response, she added, “Besides, all the good men are overseas, aren’t they?”
She angled her eyebrows, but didn’t smile. Her mother pursed her lips, then nodded her consent.
Her mother and father have been dead a long time. She is indifferent about it.
She shuffles through the photographs, all out of order. Her bladder is a heavy sloshing weight in her abdomen. She shifts in her seat, bringing her legs closer together. She does not feel like walking to the bathroom.
A bright grey square flashes in the white light — she puts her finger on it and drags it out. She sees herself standing on the boating dock in St. John’s before she left for France. She is a tall woman in her mid-twenties, her hands behind her back, her chin up, her face set. Her hair is pulled tight in a neat bun. She tells herself she was perfect for the military, then swallows when she realizes this was not a good thing.
On the boat ride to Europe, she repeated to herself what her parents had said, that war produced death on a grand and malicious scale. She knew that men would die, often brutally, in her company and that there would be very little she could do about it. During each day on the ocean she stood on the deck, gazing towards France, flexing her arms and legs against the wind.
A strong nurse and far ahead of her peers in being able to stomach the gory horrors of war, she quickly gained a reputation for efficiency, and so was sent near the battle lines at Cherbourg. She pressed herself through, wading through death and never wincing or growing faint. She was always given difficult jobs and she did them without complaint. She noticed the other nurses were either wary of her or attached to her like fish to a shark’s belly. Those that were wary sometimes called her cold. She ignored them, telling herself they hadn’t accepted death in war as unavoidable. Those who attached to her were soon discouraged by her brusqueness.
She always did her best to staunch the bleeding, seal the incisions, and comfort the patients. When it didn’t turn out to be enough, she merely pulled a sheet over the face of the dead, called for a messenger, and turned to whoever needed help. It wasn’t long before the enormity of war drove into her for good her parents’ teachings: that she was one small person in a vast, blistering world, and that amid the vicious magnitude she could not do much. All she could do was her job, and if it wasn’t enough she had to accept it.
From under a pile of pictures of the ruined French landscape, she pulls out another image of herself, this one taken in France just outside the army hospital. After studying it for a moment, she takes the one taken in St. John’s and lays them side by side. She blinks, perturbed. She finds no change between the two pictures. Her posture is erect and her face is straight even though she remembers gunfire rattling in the distance. She brings both pictures up to her face, then puts them down, shaking her head. When she first saw the picture of herself in France many decades ago, she was proud of herself for maintaining strength in those terrifying circumstances. As she looks at it now, she feels she has missed something, some experience or realization she should’ve taken with her. Instead of stumbling upon some glowing maxim, or treasuring her fellow nurses or swelling with national pride, she’d merely returned to Canada even more severe than before.
Her old arthritic hands tremble. She inhales shallowly and glances out the window—her faint reflection gazes back at her. Her bladder flares with urgency and she leans forward, holding in her stomach. She sniffles, then turns the two wartime pictures away and sorts through the rest.
She uncovers a whitish-grey photo, and exhales deeply. For the first time in decades, she lays eyes on her late husband, a former soldier who’d suffered from shell-shock. She studies him closely, and within a moment sees him for what he really was, a criminal who took advantage of her passive nature.
The photograph is from their wedding day. They stand together, both wearing white, her face as stony as it was in the war pictures. His hand is on her shoulder; she sees it more as a warden’s gesture than a husband’s. She scrutinizes his round face and believes he is drunk, as he had been for most of the thirteen years they were married.
Upon returning home from the war, she’d accepted him as a husband and taken a job at the hospital, inadvertently establishing a rhythm that would carry on throughout their marriage. She’d return home from work and brace herself as soon as she walked in the door, flexing her skin against his palm. He hit her hard and often and she accepted it as her parents had taught her. By probing through her day at work, she often found various reasons she deserved it, using tiny mistakes she’d made to make the slaps and punches more justified. The violence at the hospital complemented and ricocheted off the violence at home. She became even more hardened, folding even deeper into herself.
She puts the picture down and looks up at the odd crisscross pattern of lamplight on the wall. One day, a mother had come to the hospital carrying her seven-year-old son. The boy’s head had been split open from a fall. His hair and face were pasted with blood. The mother shouted for someone to help.
She had been on duty that day. The night before her husband had left welts on her arms and a stiff soreness in her cheek. The mother had approached her with the screaming child in her arms. Without a word, she’d taken the boy from his mother and placed him on a bed. She then started cleaning the wound with gauze and iodine.
She gritted her teeth as she cleaned the wound. Every time she flexed her arms, a heavy numbness echoed through them. She grunted against the pain, pressing the gauze harder against the boy’s forehead. The boy cried about how much it stung. She told him she had to clean it so the doctors could see clearly enough to apply stitches.
She continued, rubbing the gauze against the boy’s skin. At one point she pressed so hard blood oozed from the gauze, leaking onto the boy’s clothes. The boy shrieked and turned away. Her fingernail caught on the flap of open skin near his temple. The boy swung at her. She cursed him for not staying still, and that night she took her husband’s beating with his piping screams in mind.
She looks down at the picture, then down at her grey, blue-veined hands. Her husband’s open palm flashes across her mind. The boy’s cries ripple through her ears.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “My God, I’m so sorry.”
She touches the picture from her wedding day and is ashamed she did not end her marriage. Her husband did, with his death.
Shortly after their thirteenth anniversary — an occasion marked by no beatings whatsoever — he’d crashed his car into a house down the street from theirs. As vehicles then didn’t have seat belts, he’d flown through the windshield into a brick wall, dying instantly. She’d heard about it while at work.
She’d stood still for a moment, letting the news settle into her, soon imagining not being beaten when she got home that night. She’d been anticipating it ever since she’d misplaced the doctor’s notes earlier that morning.
She glanced up and down the white linoleum corridor, bottles of pills in her hands. She gritted her teeth, then sighed. Leaving her thoughts on the spot on which she stood, she nodded to herself and went back to administering medication.
She holds her head, taking her curly white hair in her fingers.
“I should’ve been happy then,” she says. “Dear God, why couldn’t I be happy about that? I was free. I was free of him.”
Despite everything, she had gone to his funeral, wearing a black veil and praying for his soul, all the while keeping a hard face.
“Jesus God,” she says.
She continued to work at the hospital until retirement, at which time she moved to a smaller city. There she made friends with her neighbour, a small, bountiful woman. She finds a picture of the two of them standing together in the garden she’d started when she’d first arrived. The photograph is in colour, taken in the 1980s. She holds the picture up to the light. She has on a pair of sunglasses that also shade her face. Her mouth is a curt line, a strong contrast against her neighbour’s broad smile. Both hands are tight at her sides while her neighbour holds up a glass of wine.
She sighs, tenderly leaning back in her chair. Her neighbour had been good to her. They’d gotten along well, taking outings and discussing gardening and current events. She never spoke much about her past with the exception of having a husband at one time and having been a nurse. By then her terseness had deepened to the point where she glossed over her life and saw all events and circumstances as variations of one idea, the inevitable. It never exuded much conversation.
The photograph gleams in the lamplight. The shadows under her sunglasses and across her face have deepened with time, while her neighbour’s figure has gained a strange kind of glow. She affectionately moves her thumb up and down the picture.
“I never talked much,” she says. “I never thought I needed to. I was so stupid. Even at that age, I was so stupid. A stupid fool. I just slid on by, never letting anything in.”
She exhales. Ten years ago her neighbour, whose name was Irene Chelsea Brown, had been killed by a burglar.
They were supposed to go to a rodeo that night. She’d knocked on Irene’s door, then gone inside. She found her on the floor of the ransacked living room, splayed out and facedown, blood trickling from the back of her head.
She’d gasped. For a moment she seized and turned away, breathing hard and gripping the upholstery from the chair. She whispered to herself, “Oh God, oh my God,” beginning to grow faint. But then, just as the bitterness of vinegar clouds over the taste of salt, she slowly started to gather herself. She released her hold on the chair, and reached back into her childhood, into the casual horrors of the war, into her husband’s beatings, into the everyday atrocities of the hospital. Drawing breath and standing up straight, she walked over to the couch, took off the designer blanket, and laid it over Irene’s body. She then walked calmly to the kitchen and called emergency.
“Dear God,” she says, letting the picture fall from her hand. “I was so cold, so...so inhuman. All my life.”
She bends forward, scanning all the pictures spread across the desk, each one carrying more weight than she’d ever known before. She is eighty-seven years old and living in a seniors’ lodge. She’s been here seven years, gradually sinking into the brutal landscape of her past. Her hands knot together. Since she was young she’d always thought herself strong. But recently she’d begun questioning it, and after examining her photographs, studying the events and eras of her life, she realizes she’d committed an awful crime by mistaking apathy for strength.
Her breath leaves her. She takes a long time collecting it back in, shaking her head in both bewilderment and shame.
“How could I’ve been so stupid,” she says. “I was so, so stupid.”
She groans and slumps in her seat, letting the white lamplight fill and dull her eyes. Several moments pass before she realizes it’s late and that she must sleep. But she hesitates rising to walk to her bed. She breathes deep, almost suffocated by the good life she lost and the futility of her parents’ words and how she treated people and how weak she really was. She gasps, suddenly cold. Bending forward, she holds her face in her hands and cries.
A short while later, after wiping her eyes, she reaches out and gathers the pictures together. She carefully places them in the steel box, pulls the top closed, and stands up. She lifts the box and turns from the desk. At once her bladder itches.
“Oh. Oh no.”
She takes a deep breath, as though inhaling will hold her bladder steady. Instead she releases. She gasps as warm urine slides down her legs and patters on the hardwood floor.
“Oh no,” she says, “no, no.”
She hunches over, bringing her legs together to try and stop it. As she hunches further, the corner of the steel box nudges her ribcage and falls from her hands. The box hits the floor. The top flaps open and the photographs spill out.
“Oh, Jesus!”
“Lucille?” says a woman’s voice from the hall. There’s a knock on the door.
“This is it,” she says, her hands shuddering.
“You all right, Lucille?” the woman asks.
“This is it. I'm weak. Oh, God.”
Lucille pants, swallows. She holds out her hands, looking from the puddle of urine to the spilled box of pictures.
“This is it.”
“Lucille?”
The door opens. A young nurse steps into the room. Lucille stares at her. She groans. Tears flare up and she begins to sob.
“You see this?” she says.
“It’s okay,” the nurse says, approaching.
“No it’s not okay,” Lucille says, putting up her hands. “It’s not okay. I’m weak, I’ve always been weak, and there’s nothing ... Oh God, I’m so sorry for what I did.”
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