“One time when I was about fourteen I was visiting at Mrs. LaFontaine’s. She lived on a farm east of us. Had some nurse’s training before she was married. Out there in the hills she was the person you went to for help. She knew every family and all their ailments. I forget what we were talking about, but I remember she said, “That was before the baby died.” I must have looked surprised, because she glanced quickly at her husband and changed the subject. I didn’t ask for details. I don’t know why I didn’t question my mother, but I never did. Years later, I learned some more.

“In ’65 when we went to the States, I needed a birth certificate to get a visa. They didn’t issue a little plastic card with your name on it, but a full page, listing my brother’s and my sister’s names. My name was the last one. But, just before me, written in my father’s handwriting, was “baby boy.” There had been another child before me, a baby stillborn. He didn’t have a name, but he was there.

“A few years ago when your mother and I stopped at the cemetery where your great-grandparents are buried, there in the plot beside the larger graves was a small headstone of a baby. It just says, ‘baby boy.’ That’s my brother.”

Again there is silence but I feel as if I have brushed away the dust of forty years. I can clearly see a host of questions I have not stopped to ask before. Who was “baby boy?” What embarrassment or shame has kept him from being at our table? What memories did my mother and father carry but could not speak of? Surely there had been pain over such a loss, but together with the dead baby the pain remained buried, hidden away?

Then, it is as if, at the edge of the shadows beyond the table, I see the figures of a man and woman. They are youthful and strong. But the woman is crying and the man looks away. For a moment I am angry. I am about to ask them why they have said nothing all these years? Why has the shroud been firmly drawn? On many things. Why the taboo about speaking of an infant dying?

I tell myself be quiet, leave the shroud in place.

“It is over now,” I tell them, ‘the story is complete; everyone is here, everyone has a place at this table.” I raise my glass to drink.

But in the orange light something far back, beyond the shadows, has begun to stir. More questions appear. If my brother had lived would my name be on the list? Would he have completed this table? Was there some “intention” that I should live and he did not? My mind presses at the shadows trying to imagine to not be born.

The disturbance does not cease. I don’t know why my parents never spoke of my brother’s death. I have no answer, really, but rather a discomfort in my body, spreading out from the pit of my stomach, to envelop heart and groin. I am attracted by some fear that embarrasses.

A dead infant. Stillborn. From the body of my mother. Begun there by my father. Begun there some night as they lusted for one another. It is not just death that lies hidden beneath the shroud. Sex and death; a witches brew. Still birth is a return, a return to the beginning, to a warm night with half a moon, to darkness, to the dark hiddenness of a woman’s body. It is a return to pleasure, to a man’s desire and a woman’s inviting, to the smell of heated bodies. And lusting’s sounds. My father and my mother. But now all that forbidden passion, that illicit joy, is nothing more than a bit of blood and sinew, dead.

The door bell rings. I go and am met by two figures, a bride and a groom. “Trick or Treat,” they shout.

______________________
Ron Evans is a CPSP Diplomate living in Saskatchewan, Canada. Is a a published author who has frequently presented is poetry and prose at meetings of the CPSP Plenary as well as contributed articles for publication in the Pastoral Report.

The following are two of his recent book publications:

Coming Home: Saskatchewan Remembered

The Sourdough Bagel: Confessions of a Loner Who Likes Company

Below are several of his articles published on the PR:

Five Books At One End of a Shelf

A Word From the Lord

To contact Ron Evans, click here.