Collected Stories. Carol Shields
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longer crying. She had, in fact, been shopping and had bought a new pale yellow cardigan with white flowers around the neck, very fresh and springlike. I was touched to see that she had removed her earrings. On her ear lobes there was nothing but a faint dimple, the tiny holes made, she once told me, by her own mother when she was fourteen years old.
There seemed little to talk about, but she had bought a Herald Tribune, something she normally refuses to do. She scorns the Herald Tribune, its thinness and its effete news coverage. And it’s her belief that when you are in another country you should make an attempt to speak and read the language of that country. The last time she allowed herself to buy a Herald Tribune was in 1968, the week of Trudeau’s first election.
The young man with the broken legs was moaning in his sleep. “I hope he doesn’t go on like this all night,” she said. “You won’t get any sleep at this rate.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’ll be fine tomorrow.”
“Do you think we should still plan to go over to Aigues Mortes?” she asked, naming the place we try to visit every summer. Aigues Mortes is, as many people have discovered, an extraordinary medieval port with a twelfth-century wall in near-perfect condition. It has become a habit with my wife and me to go there each year and walk around this wall briskly, a distance of a mile. After that we take a tour through the Tower of Constance with an ancient and eccentric guide, and then we finish off the afternoon with a glass of white wine in the town square.
“It wouldn’t feel like a holiday if we didn’t do our usual run to Aigues Mortes,” my wife said in a rather loud cheerful voice, the sort of voice visitors often acquire when they come to cheer the sick.
The man with the broken legs began to moan loudly and, after a minute, to sob. My wife went over to him and asked if she could do anything for him. His eyes were still closed, and she leaned over and spoke into his ear.
“Am I dead?” he asked her in English. “Did you say I was dead?”
“Of course you aren’t dead,” she said, and smiled over her shoulder at me. “You’re just coming out of the anesthetic and you’re not dead at all.”
“You said I was dead,” he said to her in clear carrying British tones. “In French.”
Then she understood. “No, we were talking about Aigues Mortes. It’s the name of a little town near here.”
He seemed to need a moment to think about this.
“It means dead waters,” my wife told him. “Though it’s far from dead.”
This seemed to satisfy him, and he drifted off to sleep again.
“Well,” my wife said, “I’d better be off. You’ll be wanting to get to sleep yourself.”
“Yes,” I said. “That damned anesthetic, it’s really knocked me for a loop.”
“Shall I leave you the Herald Tribune?” she asked. “Or are you too tired to read tonight?”
“You take it,” I told her. “Unless there’s any Canadian news in it.”
That’s another thing we don’t like about the Herald Tribune. There’s hardly ever any news from home, or if there is, it’s condensed and buried on a back page.
She sat down again on the visitor’s chair and drew her cardigan close around her. In the last year she’s aged, and I’m grieved that I’m unable to help her fight against the puckering of her mouth and the withering away of the skin on her upper arms. She went through the paper page by page, scanning the headlines with a brisk professional eye. “Hmmm,” she said to herself in her scornful voice.
“Nothing?” I asked.
“Well, here’s something.” She folded back the page and began to read. “Gilles Villeneuve is dead.”
“Who?”
“Gilles Villeneuve. You know, the racing driver.”
“Oh?”
“Let’s see. It says ‘Canadian racing driver, killed in practice run.’ Et cetera. Always claimed racing was dangerous and so on, said a year ago that he’d die on the track.” She stopped. “Do you want to hear all this?”
“No, that’s enough.” I felt the news about Gilles Villeneuve calmly, but I hope not callously. I’ve never really approved of violent sports, and it seems to me that people foolish enough to enter boxing rings or car races are asking for their own deaths.
“It’s sad to die so young,” my wife said, as if required to fill the silence I’d left.
The young man in the next bed began to sputter and cough, and once again my wife went over to see if she could do anything.
“You mustn’t cry,” she said to him. She reached in her bag for a clean tissue. “Here, let me wipe those tears away.”
“I don’t want to die.” He was blubbering quite noisily, and I think we both felt this might weaken the shell of plaster that enclosed him.
My wife—I forgot to mention that she is still a very beautiful woman—placed her hand on his forehead to comfort him.
“There, there, it’s just your legs. You’ve been sleeping, and you’re only a little bit confused. Where do you come from?”
He murmured something.
“What did you say?”
“Sheffield. In England.”
“Maybe I can telephone someone for you. Has the hospital sent a message to your people?”
It was an odd expression for her to use—your people. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her use that particular phrase before.
“It’s all right,” he said. He had stopped crying, but my wife kept her hand on his forehead for another moment or two until he had dropped off to sleep.
I must have dropped off to sleep as well because when I opened my eyes she had gone. And after that it was morning and a nurse was opening the shutters and twittering something at me in French. The bed next to mine was empty, and she began to strip off the sheets.
“Where is he?” I asked her in my old, formal schoolboy French. “Where’s my comrade with the broken legs?”
“Il est mort,” she said in the same twittering singsong.
“But he can’t be dead. His legs were broken, that’s all.”
“The spinal cord was damaged. And there were other injuries. Inside.”
A minute later the doctor came in and had a look under my dressing. “You perhaps will have a little scar,” he said. “For a woman this is terrible, of course. But for a man …” He smiled and revealed pink gums. “For a man it is not so bad.”
“I understand that he’s died,” I said, nodding at the stripped bed.
“Ah yes. Multiple injuries, there was no hope, from the moment he was brought in here yesterday.”
“Just a young man,” I said.
He was pressing the bandage back into place. “Les accidents de vacances. Every year the same. What can one do? One should stay home, sit in the garden, be tranquil.”
When my wife comes for me in half an hour or so, I will have prepared what I’ll say to her. I know, of course, that the first thing she’ll ask me is: How is the young man from Sheffield? She will ask this before she inquires about whether I’ve had a good night or whether I’m suffering pain. I plan my words with precision.
This, luckily, is my métier, the precise handling of words. Mine is a profession that is close to being unique; at least I know of no one else who does the same sort of work on a full-time basis.
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