Cedar

This, in its original and much shorter incarnation, was originally written for the same Story Club challenge as "Fan Club."
Again, two of the required elements: name a character after a place on Vancouver Island, and in some way include all the song titles (directly or indirectly) from U2's Joshua Tree album.
This effort grew into a longer, fully fleshed out story during a fiction class taken with Myriam Chancy at SFU.


*


It seemed to her that the leaves of the solitary aspen on the hillside were quivering more than usual. The faintest whiff of air would set them off. Tonight’s murmuring winds had sent them into a frenzied dance under the moonlit sky.
It didn’t feel like spring yet, Cedar thought. The air held none of the soft promise of April. The wind carried none of the damp, peaty odour of the reawakening earth as it emerged from its winter slumber.
Besides, it was just too bloody cold.
Cedar felt the chill breeze sting her cheeks and pulled the zipper of her fleece up around her chin as she settled cross-legged on the ground to wait for David. She snuggled her back against the cold stone, seeking respite from the winds in the shelter of its weathered grey solidity.
She loved the cemetery. Had ever since she’d arrived in Red Hill. This overgrown yard, with its haphazard rows of stones and crosses, had fast become her place of peace.
Here, she could immerse herself in a life beyond her own. Here, she could leave behind her cares. The leak in the trailer roof. The judder in the steering of the old VW van. The pile of bills accumulating on the table.
Here she could simply be, in a way she couldn’t with anyone.
Except for David.
He didn’t always come. He wasn’t predictable. But something about the clear sky, with its delicate, gleaming sliver of moon, gave Cedar hope that he’d come tonight.
He always found her here, at the Olsen family plot. He seemed to understand Cedar’s bond with Fanny.
Cedar knew, from the inscription on the grey stone at her back, that Fanny had lived to be eighty-four. But, in Cedar’s thoughts and conversations with the other woman, they were always the same age. Twenty-four. It was the age Fanny had been when little Benjamin was born. The age she had still been, three months later, when he died.
His tiny stone stood beside his mother’s, a tribute to her lasting love.
Beloved son.
Cedar half-turned to read the words she’d seen so often. She traced the letters with her finger, feeling the indentations of the cold stone beneath her skin. She felt her heart tug for the young mother who’d never seen her child walk. Who’d never heard him call her name or run with him on the hillside. Who’d had to grieve for a life unlived.
But at least she’d had those three months.
Cedar pushed the thought away as a barely seen movement made her turn into the night.
“Mama! Mama!”
The tiny voice made Cedar’s heart leap as she reached out to greet David, feeling a pang at the realization that he was fast becoming more boy than toddler.
His legs – were they really so long? – churned as he ran to her and grabbed playfully at her hair. Loosed from its usual braid, it fell in a cascade over her shoulders, the light brown gleaming almost silver in the moonlight.
She felt a catch in her throat at the sight of him. The large dark eyes so like his father’s. The open smile and easy laughter so like Cedar’s own.
Or like she used to be. Laughter didn’t come as easily these days. Except here, when David came.
“Don’t be sad, Mama.”
A worried frown puckered the face that gazed with earnest solemnity into her own. A small hand touched her cheek, and she smiled.
“Never, when you’re here,” she assured him.
His grin returned as quickly as it had vanished.
“Catch me, Mama!”
Cedar found herself wondering if David was coming less often than he used to. If he was a little less happy to see her. A little more eager to leave. But she pushed the thought away and gave chase, darting merrily around the gravestones in a pattern of ever-widening circles, following his clear laughter as he evaded her grasp time and again.
Until she lost sight of him altogether.
Her eyes scanned the graveyard, hoping for a sign that he was out there. Listening. Hiding. Ready to jump out from behind a stone with his silvery laugh, extending his arms for one of his fierce, clinging hugs.
Nothing stirred.
“David! David!”
She heard the fear in her own voice and knew, even as she called, that there would be no answer from the silent night.
Cedar had to will herself not to run into the darkness calling his name.
It wouldn’t bring him back. It never did.
She turned slowly from the stones and walked to the edge of the graveyard, to the hillside of red columbine that had given this once-thriving mining town its name.
It was here she came each night to gather the flowers for Fanny. Somehow, Cedar knew they had been Fanny’s favourite.
Cedar, gathering the columbine, reflected that Gran would never have expected her to end up here. She’d never really believed Cedar would leave – not even on that day when Cedar went home to tell them.
Cedar had made Sam stay behind. Not that he’d fought her all that hard, she reflected, then dismissed the thought as disloyal. It wasn’t Sam’s fault her family was – well, the way it was.
She could still see the look on the old woman’s face when Cedar had broken the news.
She faced Gran across the stiff, formal sitting room, where even the sunshine through the large bay window couldn’t lighten the dark and oppressive atmosphere.
“I suppose you expect me to pay for the wedding?” was all Gran said.
But her lips tightened into a thin line that made her disapproval clear.
Cedar tilted her chin up, the thought of Sam and their child giving her the courage to break what would, for Gran, be the worst of the news.
“There isn’t going to be a wedding.”
Cedar could hear the quiver in her own voice. She had to steel herself not to give in, not to beg for forgiveness.
“We aren’t getting married,” she went on, relieved to hear her voice sounding stronger. It was the right decision. Cedar knew that.
The old woman’s eyebrows lifted a fraction, but otherwise she made no response.
“We’re going to move to Red Hill. Sam’s from there, you know.”
Cedar knew her voice was speeding up, tightening, rising in pitch as it always did when she was forced to face Gran down. But she couldn’t stop herself.
“Sam’s friend runs the pub there. He can get him a job. Bartending, you know. For now. I mean, then …”
Cedar heard her voice trail off into the silence of the two women facing her. She had expected it from Gran. But Mom – why wasn’t Mom speaking?
Cedar clasped her hands together as she turned to face her mother.
The mild brown eyes held an expression Cedar had never seen. Sadness, Cedar thought, combined with something hard. Bitter.
“Don’t do this.”
Her mother’s voice was so nearly inaudible that Cedar had to strain to hear.
“Don’t use him to get back at your family,” the soft voice went on. “Don’t throw your life away for nothing.”
“Nothing?” Cedar, trying for a firm tone, had to settle for strident instead. “It’s not nothing, Mom. It’s a baby. My baby. Mine and Sam’s.”
Her mother’s eyes didn’t change.
“And love, Cedar?” she asked in the same soft tone. “Do you love him?”
Of course I do, Cedar was about to protest hotly. But when she opened her mouth, all that came out was a strangled sound somewhere between a grunt and a gulp.
Stooping to collect some low-lying blossoms, Cedar could still hear the old woman’s tone of disdain when at last she deigned to speak again. Ignoring, as she always did, any conversation contributed by Cedar’s mother.
“Red Hill? Have you forgotten, my dear Rose, that you are a Wakefield?”
Gran always called Cedar by her middle name, refusing to vocalize the name bestowed by Cedar’s mother. Mom hadn’t fought about it. That much Cedar knew, even without Mom telling her. Cedar knew that Mom had just smiled, in her gentle way, and explained that her daughter was not a Catherine. Nor a Victoria. Nor any of the other approved names that had followed the Wakefield women through the generations. She was a Cedar. And that was that.
It had been the shy woman’s one act of rebellion against the mother-in-law who ruled her kingdom with Elizabethan certainty and Victorian imperiousness.
Cedar had loved her mother for that one silly, defiant gesture. As she had loved her for everything. Her mother’s soft smile had always saved Cedar from the worst of Gran’s stings. Gran had never allowed them to forget her magnanimity in taking in the young mother and her newborn child after the child’s father drove off one night to the grocery store and never came back.
Gran never said his name. Neither did Mom.
Even as a child, though, Cedar knew his departure was her fault. At least in the eyes of Gran, who’d never warmed to the young girl who carried the Wakefield name.
So Cedar hadn’t cared a whit when the old tyrant disapproved of Sam.
“But, my dear, he looks like a myrmidon!” Gran had said in her usual scandalized stage whisper, with the clipped elocution and overwrought vocabulary that always made Cedar giggle to herself. One clearly couldn’t be a true Wakefield, she often thought mockingly, unless one spoke as though one had consumed the entire unabridged Oxford English Dictionary for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Cedar had refused to be insulted. Instead she’d just grinned, admitting there was something of the hired ruffian about Sam. Even if Gran had been able to get past Sam’s brown skin, she’d never have accepted the unkempt appearance: the dark stubble that shaded his cheeks; the long black hair left to fall in an uncontrolled tangle.
What irked Gran even more, Cedar knew, was Sam’s refusal to be impressed by the trappings of the Wakefield name: the stately Victorian home in Oak Bay, the gleaming Waterford crystal, the Spode china passed through the generations.
Sam never cared. And he wasn’t afraid to dismiss Gran’s dinners as crap, remarking he’d rather have chicken wings and a beer than paté and champagne.
Even now, in the cold, empty graveyard, Cedar could still laugh at the expression on Gran’s face when Sam dared to question the Wakefield traditions.
But she felt the chill wind bite her cheeks again when she remembered the rest of that conversation with her mother.
Cedar had finally said, feebly, that she did love Sam. She did.
Mom’s eyes hadn’t changed.
She’d warned Cedar that Sam wouldn’t stay. That when it got tough he’d vanish as if he’d never been there at all.
Cedar had said nothing. She had pushed away her hurt and followed Sam to Red Hill, trying to capture some of his enthusiasm about the small town where he’d grown up.
“You’ll love it, Cedar,” he promised with an exuberance Cedar had seldom seen him show. “In the city, no one cares. Out there, they have time for you.”
To her own surprise, Cedar soon found life in Red Hill preferable to the faceless anonymity of the city. Sam often complained of the ceaseless din of the pub, but Cedar came to enjoy it after she took a part-time job clearing tables. She gathered glasses and wiped soft rags across the scratched wood while she listened to snatches of conversation and marvelled at the snippets of lives that would have appalled Gran.
Ed and Harry, in their matching baseball caps, who came in without fail for their lunchtime pints and talked about the women who had left them years ago. Ed was bitter. Harry wasn’t. Some days, he was downright cheerful about it, figuring he’d probably have been fighting with Helen every day anyway so, this way, he could get straight to the drinking and not worry about the nagging afterwards.
Kenna, the waitress with the ever-changing hair colour and a series of two-sizes-too-small T-shirts, with plunging necklines that she claimed doubled her tips. It helped her save for her son’s college fund, she’d confided once, since that bastard of a father of his was nowhere to be found to chip in.
James, the shy teenager who hauled boxes and ran errands. He wanted out of town, Cedar knew. He was going to Victoria to university if he could save enough money. He was sure as heck getting out of Red Hill, anyway. No reason to stay there any longer than he had to. He wanted a life.
Cedar said little. Just watched and listened and came to absorb them all as part of the background tapestry of her life as she tried to make the trailer homey for when the baby arrived.
And she was happy. For awhile. As long as she didn’t think about what it meant those nights Sam came home drunk. Upset. Swearing and vowing to get out of this godforsaken town if it was the last thing he did. She’d tease him, make him smile, dance with him around the tiny living area and show off her newfound cooking skills. She had mastered only spaghetti and hamburger helper, but Sam never complained.
Cedar often told herself that life was good. Mostly.
Even that terrible day when the dragging pain came and the bleeding started, Cedar never let go. Even when the doctors told her what she already knew, that her body had betrayed its promise of new life, she clung to the world she’d created with Sam.
She never told Sam how she felt. How empty her body became that day. How bleak the future seemed without the hope of that new life: the warmth of those tiny, perfect hands she was already holding in her mind, the velvet softness of the infant skin she could already feel in her arms.
He never knew about the guilt. The blame. The endless series of what-ifs that raced without stop through Cedar’s mind even while she wiped tables and cooked suppers.
She couldn’t tell him, fearing that to do so might be to tip him over the edge of the precipice on which he seemed to live.
The drinking grew worse. The swearing more frequent. Even his favourite spaghetti and meatballs wasn’t enough to make him smile anymore. There was never any dancing.
“We’ve gotta get out of here,” he’d say nearly every night when he got home from the late shift. “I can’t take it. Why the hell are we staying here? Your family would help if we went back.”
She always tried to calm him. Point out to him that, here, they had a life. Friends. Jobs. Even without the baby, they could make it work.
“We could,” he agreed with her one night in a voice that was dangerously calm. “But what’s the fucking point?”
She never let him see the hurt she felt.
They loved each other. They did. It would get better. It would.
It wasn’t until Sam came home early one night and caught her crying that she changed her mind. It was the night he spoke the unforgivable words – “come on, Cedar, snap out of it, we didn’t want a kid anyway” – that she told him to go.
She stayed.
She knew Sam didn’t understand why. But then he’d never understood any of it.
He’d never understood her insistence on naming their son. He hadn’t stopped her. He hadn’t said a word when Cedar told him she wanted to name their son after her own absent father. He just let her do it and never spoke the name.
Cedar never told him the rest. She knew he wouldn’t have accepted her need to bury the pile of barely formed tissue.
There was no headstone for David. There was no place in the yard for those who had never been born.
But Cedar was undeterred.
At night, she crept out to the hillside of red columbine and made David a home among the blossoms, a pile of reddish stone collected into a small cairn above his resting place. She made sure it was in view of the Olsen family plot, so Fanny could keep watch over both their sons.
While she waited for David each night, she talked to Fanny.
Fanny understood what Cedar had never been able to say to Sam. She felt the grief. The loss. The emptiness of a mother’s arms and the bleak desolation of an unused cradle.
Fanny understood the guilt. The shame. The why-me, why-now, why-this, that kept Cedar up and made her toss restlessly at night.
And Fanny understood the rest, too.
The leap of joy inside when the little feet came running. The tug of her heart when his small arms reached up for a hug. The bubble of warmth that started when she heard his clear silver laughter, a warmth that began deep inside and slowly enveloped her entire body.
Fanny would never tell her it wasn’t real. That it wasn’t happening. That David wasn’t there, couldn’t be there, never had been there.
Fanny knew that wasn’t so.
Because Fanny was a mother, too.
Cedar felt herself shivering, the fleece no longer enough to protect her from the chill, and realized her arms were full of the flowers she’d gathered.
She shook off her memories and paused to cast one long, last look over the graveyard.
The quaking aspen was still in the quiet of the night.
But the hillside of red columbine waved gently as Cedar turned to walk back to the weathered grey marker.
She knelt next to Fanny’s stone, as she always did, and prayed. A wordless prayer for the young mother and her lost son. For their eternal love.
For their salvation.
“Good-night, Fanny,” Cedar said softly.
And she laid the armful of red blossoms gently on the ground next to the cold stone.