In Winter I Get Up at Night by Jane Urquhart

Author:Jane Urquhart [Urquhart, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2024-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

When I awoke after the operation, I was again facing the wall, and the only part of my body that was able to move was my heart, which I could hear pounding in my brain and, more palpably, against the sheet under my ribs. There was no longer a map of the railways of Saskatchewan on the wall, and my mother’s one good dress had also disappeared. Perhaps Sister Philomena had scrubbed it off during one of her ongoing sessions of spiritual cleaning. But if so, what had been revealed in the wake of such sessions was a picture of the apple tree my mother had brought on the train from Ontario, and on which Danny had discovered all those dollar bills. She had planted it in front of our house-to-be even before the house itself was built. Tiny and fragile, it had withstood two bitterly cold prairie winters and had grown to shoulder height under my mother’s care. As I later discovered, it had also survived the big wind. But of course, I didn’t yet know this.

Once, when I was quite small and still in Ontario, I swallowed an apple seed. When I confessed this to my father, he jokingly said that an apple tree would now be sure to grow inside me. I was terrified at the thought of this. Each night I prodded my stomach with my fingers for evidence of twigs and sticks: sometimes, as fall approached, I even searched for the shapes of the apples themselves under my skin. In spring I was certain I could feel a malign sort of blossoming in my bones. And then quite suddenly, I was old enough to know that all this was nonsense. Now, though, the thought of my mother’s deep connection to the little tree she had nurtured in the pot and had carried with her to the northern plains suggested that I had not been entirely wrong about the beginnings of an orchard germinating inside me.

I knew the Conductor was a few rooms down the hall—perhaps conducting others—and I was on high alert because I sensed he was in the vicinity. My ribs were broken. The tree that might have been under them was on the wall instead—sometimes confused with the diagram of the parliamentary system. It was not growing the way it should, that tree; its roots had been torn from the ground, and its limbs were tangled and askew. The shape of its branches changed often, swelling on occasion, then twisting into thin wiry cages that seemed ready to inhabit my mind if the tree trunk were ever to succeed in its plan, which was to install itself in my body.

During the passage of the following few days, while my fever rose higher and higher and Doctor Angel hovered nervously near my bed, I was possessed by the tree. I began to see that the tree itself was a map, not of the railways but of the rivers of Saskatchewan. I began to believe I could paddle up the tree or float down it.

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