A Witness to Life (Ashland, 2) by Terence M. Green Page A

blind, turn to me. Her lips are cracked, dry.
    "It's me. Martin. I'm here." Then I say it the old way: "Mártain." I hold her hand. "I am fine."
    Then her mouth makes the o, feebly, one last time, and I smile while I feel her fingers tighten on mine as I hoped they would, as she hears her husband's name, her son's name. As I try to give her this.
     
    The priest comes later that afternoon and anoints her with the holy oils, as he has done so many times before. After death is better than not at all, he tells us, bending to his task, to the administration of the sacrament: her eyes, her mouth, her ears, her hands. He weaves the rosary beads through her still, thin fingers as he talks: I am not too late, he says. God will accept her.
    I look at Ma. Her face is a mask, pulled tight. I put my arm around her shoulder, feel her go rigid, think to myself what I have often thought since that first time I helped her with Gramma, helped Ma lift her back into her bed, that I am touching her, that I want to touch her before she too is gone.
     
     

 
     
    TWELVE
     
    January 1920
     
     
    RADEY—At her late residence, 38 Brookfield Street, on January 19, 1920, Ann, widow of the late John Radey, in her 75th year.
    Funeral Wednesday at 8:30 a.m., to St. Francis Church. Interment St. Michael's Cemetery.
    The Toronto Daily Star
    Tuesday, January 20, 1920
     
    * * *
     
    The priest takes the crucifix from the top of the casket and hands it to Mary, who, white faced, clutches it in both hands. Elizabeth and Kate are holding one another, crying.
    Ma is lowered into the ground. With Da. It seems impossible. They are still alive in my head, always. I will talk to them forever. The sky is gray, the wind biting. The two of them, I think. Born across the ocean and buried so far away, in this frozen, snowy ground, sixteen seeds scattered.
    I will be forty in June. At the grave's edge, my parents in the earth, I now understand what it means to be the youngest in a family of older parents: I will experience all the death around me sooner than my siblings did, everyone will likely go before me, this will happen to me more often than it will to the others, this standing at a grave's edge. I am in a different place. My life will be different.
    And I am an orphan.
    My brother, my sisters. We are all orphans.
    Loy, I think, is the Irish for shovel.
    A flock of starlings rises up against the bleak winter sky, heads east.
     
    We are back at Mary's, at number 38. The women are in the kitchen. They are slicing egg salad sandwiches, tuna sandwiches, baloney sandwiches, tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches, all into small triangles, arranging them on plates. The men are in the living room smoking cigarettes, cigars, drinking coffee, tea, or beer, which has been supplied mysteriously by my friend Jock, who is here. Margaret and the older children are with the youngest ones in the bedrooms upstairs, keeping them quiet. Erector sets, snakes and ladders, checkers, the Street Car game. Maggie has given them a copy of both The American Boys Handy Book and The American Girls Handy Book, and when all else fails they will use them for instructions to tie knots of every kind, make a boomerang, fold a daisy fan from paper, make an armed war kite.
    Jock, Mike, John Manion, John Dickinson, Neil Kernaghan, Oliver Johnson, and I sip Jock's beer and discuss the prohibition laws, which were passed only last week in the United States, making the entire country as dry as we've been here in Ontario for four years now. We tell Jock that he is our savior, offer a toast to him, listen to his tale of buying Pabst Near Beer and mixing it with alcoholic malt tonic from the drugstore, and, chuckling, shake our heads in amazement that we didn't think of it.
    Jim Bedford, Peter Curtis, Michael Rossiter, Jim McKenna, Charles Trader—all tell us it is too early, that they cannot face a drink before noon, and we wonder what is wrong with them, tease them.
    We are all here, as we should be, and I