TWO GARDENS, by Pauline Fisk

She cried across the water and her voice was haunting. These were the words spoken by the mother of a murdered girl, reported in the Canadian press. I heard about it over lunch.  Outside there was not a cloud in the sky.  We left the golf club, the three of us, and drove in silence to the cemetery where we found the gate and let ourselves in. 

The graves sloped white against the green lawn, down through woodland to the creek. Here a man who’d been a friend to everyone; there a woman who’d served her country; here a son on whom the sun went down, yet it was still day. 

What struck me, strangely, was how big the headstones were.  Ever since arriving in Canada I’d been noticing size.  Death is but a covered way which opens into life I read on a grave fashioned into a massive stone seat. But facing northwards into shadows - where was life in that?  

Below the seat we found a gravel path between graves. Here William and Johan from Scotland - he the Highlands, she Orkney. There the McDonalds, dating back to the Highland Clearances. Irish Doyles, Calhounes, Hallorans from Cork.  I scribbled down the name Parnaby, thinking I might use it one day. We surveyed Ivor’s plot and thumbs-upped its view, making his day.

As we walked away, I heard a sniff, followed by a distinct and highly unexpected sneeze. They say that death is cold, and I turned cold, because nobody but us was there. I looked around. Sparrows wallowed in the dust. A distant chipmunk did a circus circuit.  Between a screen of perfect trees, Sixteen Mile Creek flowed into Lake Ontario.  

Where that creek came from, I’d no idea, nor what became of it after hitting the lake.  But it was bright, fast and in the here and now and, looking at it, I thought of all those white bones in their graves and hoped the place they’d end up was as bright as Lake Ontario on a day like this.

We left the cemetery by the same gate.  It was good to be back on the street, kicking up dust, sun on our faces. On the way to our hire car we passed what we British call allotments, but Canadians call garden plots. The soil was dryer than back home. Even so, it yielded sunflowers in rows, pumpkins and tomatoes, growing wild, peppers, carrots, peas and beans, dots of marigolds. 

Back in our car we did a u-turn, taking in the cemetery in a single sweep. I hoped that justice would be done and the crying that haunted mother heard across the waters would one day cease. It was my birthday, my sixty-fourth – a point I share because it matters to me, though it’ll be of little significance to anybody else. On the highway, great trucks roared by.

copyright©Pauline Fisk 2014