Childhood, 1916.
Barker Flett at thirty-three is stooped of shoulder and sad of expression, but women who set their eyes on him think: now here is a man who might easily be made happy.
They yearn to take a pressing cloth to that cheap worsted jacket he wears while lecturing to his students on the life cycle of the cyclamen or the prairie crocus. His shirts could be fresher too, and his collars properly attached, and those scuffed oxfords of his are crying out for a coat of polish, and so forth and so on. All Professor Flett needs is a little womanly attention. Affectionate attention, that is. Don"t laugh at him; pity him, love him.
Distracted, he arrives at the College, five or sometimes ten minutes late for his cla.s.ses, a look of dazed surprise in his eyes as he peers out at the waiting faces and rummages in his satchel for his lecture notes.
There, he"s found them. He arranges them on the lectern, fussing, frowning. His spectacles, he"s forgotten his spectacles. No, there they are, folded in his breast pocket. He removes them, hooking the wire temples around his nicely shaped ears, first the left, then the right-then, with his middle finger placed firm on the nose bridge, brings them straight. He blinks twice. Clears his throat. And begins.
His voice is beautiful. Its texture is fine-woven wool. If it had a color it would be a warm chestnut. In tone, in fluidity, in resonance, it is all that a man"s voice should be, with just that hint of Scottish burr, thinner than the skin of varnish on his oak lectern, giving necessary hardness. He rides straight up the walls of his sentences. His little pauses are sensuous gateways, without which his listeners would fall into a trance.
As it is, they keep their eyes fixed on him, focusing especially on his handsome, sorrowing, scholarly mouth, bending their heads only when it becomes necessary to write down the lists of words he unspools for them: the parts of a particular flower: pistil, stigma, style, ovary, stamen, anther, filament, petal, sepal, receptacle. Often he uses the blackboard, but today, having forgotten to bring his chalks along, he sketches these shapes in the air. His long fingers open and close around the airy forms. What a pity his shirt cuffs are in such a state, and it looks as though-yes, definitely-there is a b.u.t.ton missing from his left sleeve; but he is oblivious to its absence-which is precisely what his female students find so compelling in Professor Barker T. Flett, his fine manly gift for self-forgetfulness.
The time is autumn, 1916, and twelve out of the fourteen students enrolled in Introductory Botany are young women. The men of Wesley College, all except for Edward Wood, an epileptic, and tiny misshapen Clarence Redfield-forty-eight inches high with one foot bent out sideways-have put on the uniform of the Dominion and gone to war. Why is it that Professor Flett is not himself away fighting at the Front?
Rumors abound. It is hinted that he is perhaps a pacifist, but one who has yet to declare himself. Or that he has a weakened heart, as suggested by the near-translucence of his skin. Or else his eyesight has disqualified him; a man who wears spectacles can scarcely be expected to confront the Kaiser, and then there is the diamond-willow walking stick he carries-which might be either an affectation or a necessity. Or possibly his ongoing work on new strains of wheat has been deemed crucial to the war effort. (Back in 1905, when studying for his Master of Science degree, Barker Flett helped perfect the new improved "Marquis" hybrid, a hearty red spring wheat which he is now attempting to cross with the remarkable "Garnet" strain that can be harvested a full ten days earlier, thus avoiding damage wrought by an early frost.) Or perhaps he has been ruled ineligible for active military duty because he is the sole support of his elderly mother and a young niece, a girl of eleven years. (This last is the favored explanation and, moreover, it is true, or almost true.) How is it his students know of the elderly mother and young niece, for certainly he never mentions their existence? Because one of the students, the lively fair-haired Bessie Perfect, boards in a house on Downing Street, which is just two streets away from Simcoe Street where the three members of the Flett family reside.
Another student, Jessie Saltmeyer, attends the First Methodist Church where the Flett family worships each Sunday morning.
And then there"s the student Miss Lena Ballentyne; Lena Ballentyne"s father, a dentist, is acquainted with old Mrs. Flett, and has in fact fitted her, twice, for false teeth. And who else? Well, tiny Clarence Redfield, out for a weekend stroll, once encountered the three members of the Flett family walking on the banks of the Red River. They were carrying a picnic basket and a folded bit of carpet to spread on the ground. The feebleness of small families! But also the compensating weight of their self-sufficiency.
In the halls of Wesley College these sc.r.a.ps of information are pooled and savored. It is pointed out by Miss Saltmeyer, almost as an afterthought, that Professor Flett"s mother is not all that elderly after all, and that during the spring and summer season she raises a good-sized crop of flowers on the vacant land next to the Simcoe Street house and purveys them to the various flower merchants who have opened shop around the city. Someone else contributes the information that the "niece" is not a true blood relation, but only the daughter of a family acquaintance whose wife died in childbirth. All this lore is fascinating to the students of Introductory Botany, but chief among the fascinations is the fact that Barker Flett is an unmarried man. This curious and wonderful anomaly offers them hope for their own lives: a handsome thirty-three-year-old man who has yet to find his life"s companion.
They can"t help wondering if there might not be a tragic broken engagement in his past-and this possibility has been so often discussed by succeeding waves of students that it has acquired by now the hard sheen of authenticity. It exists in several versions: a sweetheart s.n.a.t.c.hed from life by summer fever, a fiancee judged unsuitable because of high church leanings, because of tainted character, because of madness in the family, because the salary of a professor at Wesley College would never stretch to meet her material needs.
In fact, there is no broken engagement in Barker Flett"s past, no severed union of spirit and body. Professor Flett, who is perfectly aware of the legends that romance around him, smiles at the thought. His smile, like his voice, is beautiful, but it is a smile hatched from a frustrated asceticism, and the suspicion that love is no more than a diminutive for self-injury. His own society is what he favors. A quiet winter room, a chair, a book opened under a circle of lamp light, a comfortable austerity. Or else a solitary hike in a summer meadow, botanizing all the day long with just his pocket knife and specimen bag and a sandwich or two for company. True, he has three times in his adult life visited the rooms of prost.i.tutes on Higgens Avenue, but these he thinks of as educational episodes which touched nothing in him that might be termed authentic. It may be that he is one of those men who feel toward women both a delicate sensibility and a deep hostility. He is not, in any case, in mourning for a lost love, as his students want to believe; he mourns only a simplicity of life that was briefly his, and now is lost.
Never was happiness more firmly in his grasp as in the summer of 1905, his twenty-second year, living alone in two back rooms at the top of a Simcoe Street boarding establishment, bent over his small student desk and completing his dissertation on the western lady"s-slipper, genus Cypripedium.
He loved this flower. (The "lady," of course, was Venus.) He could have drawn its sensuous shape even in his dreams. Dorsal sepal, column, lateral sepal, sheath, sheathing bract, eye, and root. A common plant, yes, but belonging to the exotic orchid family. This delicate, frilled blossom was his. He had worked on it (her) for months, and now he possessed the whole of its folded silken parts and the pure, cla.s.sic regenerative mechanics that lift it out of the humble midcontinental clay and open its full beauty to the eye of mankind-and to his eye in particular. (He believed this without vanity.) The intensity of his gaze on this single living thing awakened in him other complex longings. He ached anew for release from his body-those ladies of Higgens Avenue-and the obliteration of all he had found brutal in his life thus far, beginning with the dumb, blunted angers of his parents and brothers, a family from whom the supports of education, culture, and even language had been withdrawn. He longed to separate himself from the mean unpaved streets of Tyndall, Manitoba, where he spent his boyhood, and from the crude groping for salvation and s.e.x he apprehended everywhere around him. Bliss lay in the structure of this simple flower he was attempting to reproduce on a sheet of white rag paper: a petalled organism, complete in itself, obedient to its own rhythms and laws and to none other. Years later, looking back, he remembers how tenderly he held the watercolor brush in his hand, how the sun falling through the windowpane struck the top of his wrist and the edge of the water gla.s.s, and how the whole of his existence lightened correspondingly.
His euphoria was to be short-lived. Princ.i.p.al MacIntosh at the College asked him to redirect his research toward the development of hardier grains, reminding him that Methodism was a social, as well as spiritual, religion and thus concerned with the quality of human life-and here the old man underlined his words with fervor-human life on this earth. For the enlightenment of young, impressionable Barker Flett, he quoted the words of Jonathan Swift: "Whoever could make two ears of corn grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together."
Young Flett was obliged to give up his dabbling in lady"sslippers and to concentrate on hybrid grains. Moreover, as if that were not sacrifice enough, he was to be burdened with the teaching of introductory chemistry and physics as well as botany, and one year later, after poor Blaser was discharged (having been found to be a "user of alcohol"), he was a.s.signed to teach the elementary zoology course as well. Overnight, it seemed, the singleness of his concentration had been shattered.
Worse, he returned to his rooms on Simcoe Street one evening in late September to find his mother installed. On her lap lay a tiny infant, arms thrashing, legs kicking, stomach arching, its lungs inflated, howling out against the injustice of the world.
Have I said that Clarentine Flett deserted her husband Magnus in the year 1905? Have I mentioned that she took with her the small infant who was in her charge, the young child of Mercy Goodwill, her neighbor who had died while giving birth?
The month of Mrs. Flett"s departure was September; a series of night frosts had turned the air chilly, and the infant-a little girl of placid disposition-was clothed in a tucked nainsook day-slip topped by a plain flannel barrowcoat, which in turn was topped by a b.u.t.toned vest in fine white wool, and all these many layers were wrapped and securely pinned inside a commodious knitted shawl.
It was a sparkling morning, 9:07 by the clock when Mrs. Flett stepped aboard the Imperial Limited at the Tyndall station, certain that her life was ruined, but managing, through an effort of will, to hold herself erect and to affect an air of preoccupation and liveliness. Those who saw her purchase her ticket for Winnipeg-with a dollar bill taken the night before from her husband"s collar-box-failed utterly to mark the fact that she paid for one-way accommodation only. These witnesses may, if they were standing close by, have sniffed about her person a sharp but not unpleasant scent, which emanated from the wad of cotton wool she had soaked in oil-of-cloves and packed tight against her throbbing molar. Her hat was not worth a second glance, trimmed as it was with ordinary mercerized satin and j.a.panese braid, but it was pinned nevertheless at a becoming angle on her small, stern head, giving her the jaunty look of a much younger woman; in fact, she was forty-five.
The great armful of fall flowers she carried would have seemed to onlookers a mere womanly fancy, and anyone peeking inside her small valise would have found only a folded woolen coat for herself, a dozen napkinettes in fine canton flannel for the infant, and a baby"s feeding bottle with three black rubber teats. An awkward armload, to be sure-bag, bouquet, and baby-but she took her seat by the window with an air of a.s.surance.
The journey was short, a mere fifty-three minutes over flat stubbled fields and through a series of sunlit villages-Garson, East Selkirk, Gonor, Birds Hill, Whittier Junction-and during that time, with the infant asleep on her breast, Clarentine Flett began making plans for her survival. Her breakfast of oatmeal porridge lay heavy in her stomach, but her imagination soared. She saw that her old life was behind her, as cleanly cut off as though she had taken a knife to it (that note for her husband tucked under her handkerchief press, a single scratched word, goodbye). Ahead waited chance and opportunity of her own making. She would step from the train into the busy street in front of the Canadian Pacific Station in Winnipeg and offer her flowers to pa.s.sers-by; city folks were fools for fresh flowers, even flowers as common as these that grew wild in every wasteland of the region, though you had to know where to look; she would make four separate sprays of them-these deep blue asters, or Michaelmas daisies as they were frequently called-then add a few thin leathery leaves and tie them prettily with some ribbon she"d brought along and sell each one for ten cents, earning enough to hire a cab to take her and the child to the rooming house on Simcoe Street where her son, Barker, lived.
Once there, she would ascend the half-dozen wooden steps, knock on his door, and gain admittance. After that she would wait, watchful and alert, to see what came her way.
"My dear Mr. Goodwill," Clarentine Flett wrote in her large, loopy, uneducated hand, "I thank you for your message, and I am writing at once to a.s.sure you that Daisy, as I have taken to calling her, is well looked after and in excellent health. I am happy that you are in agreement with me that such a small infant will thrive more readily under female care, at least for the time being, and I am only sorry that my distracted state of mind last Tuesday morning prevented me from leaving you a note of explanation. You need have no worry about your dear child, since our situation in my son"s household is very comfortable and hygienic. Your present state of bereavement touches me deeply, for, as you know, I loved your dear wife Mercy with all my heart. I have enclosed with this letter a lock of the child"s hair which I trust will bring you some measure of comfort. It is, I fear, a very small lock, only a half-dozen hairs in plain truth, for she has as yet little to spare."
Barker Flett, that tall, gaunt, badly clothed student of botany, sat hunched over his cluttered desk, the angle of his bent head signaling misery. Sighing with vexation, he picked up a steel-nibbed pen, dipped it in the inkwell, and scratched: "My dear Father, I thank you for your letter, though it grieves me to learn of your unwillingness to write to my Mother directly, since I can"t help believing that an appeal on your part, if sincerely expressed and softly worded, might encourage her to reflect on her situation and eventually return home." (Here he paused for a moment, staring out at the rain which was rattling against the window.) "In the meantime, I beg you to find it in your heart to make her some small allowance, perhaps one or two dollars a week. As you know, I have had to engage an additional room to accommodate her and the child, and my scholarship income from the College scarcely covers these new and totally unforeseen expenses. There have been a number of doctor"s bills also, as Mother has suffered from severe infection following the extraction of her teeth, and the infant has been troubled day and night with what Dr. Sterling calls a tight chest. Perhaps you are aware that your neighbor, Mr. Goodwill, has agreed to provide the sum of eight dollars a month for the child"s maintenance. Generous as this is, it barely suffices. I send you, and to my dear brothers as well, my affectionate regards. Barker Flett"
My dear Mr. Goodwill, Your monthly letter is always welcome, and I thank you most warmly for your Express Money Order, which is much appreciated.
I am pleased to write that Daisy continues plump and happy, and her legs are grown strong indeed. My son and I are of the opinion that she will be walking before the month is out. I enclose the photograph you requested. (And again I thank you for sending the necessary money.) You will be able to see for yourself that the photographer has captured the exceptional curliness of her hair, which is of a very pretty color that I have heard described as "strawberry." I am anxious to a.s.sure you that, contrary to what you may have heard, the air in Winnipeg is fresh and healthful. In addition, we are fortunate in having a fine big garden next to our house where little Daisy will be able to run about when the summer weather arrives.
With kind regards, Clarentine Flett My dear Father, I have spoken to my Mother as you requested, but I am afraid she is firm in her refusal to return to Tyndall, despite your generous offer to accept her back into the household, even forbearing mention of her sudden leave-taking and long absence from home.
As to your other question, I must regretfully answer in the negative, for I think it would only excite her nerves to receive you here.
Her state of mind is relatively tranquil at the moment, and she is much occupied with the garden and with running after young Daisy.
We must not, however, give up hope of a future reconciliation.
I regret, also, your decision in the matter of money, which has become, for me, a never-ending source of distress.
Your son, Barker My dear Mr. Goodwill, You will scarcely believe that Daisy is to start her first level at school in a mere ten days. Already she has her alphabet by heart, also Our Lord"s Prayer, the Twenty-third Psalm, and a number of simple hymns. She is, moreover, able to recite the common names of all the flower varieties in our garden, of which there are some twenty-five. I am happy to say that these two months of fine weather have improved her chest, as has the regular application of a mullein-leaf poultice at bedtime. As for myself, I keep very well.
Yours faithfully, Clarentine Flett Dear Mr. Goodwill, I thank you for yours of the 28th, and a.s.sure you that Daisy is in excellent health. Her school recitation, "A Sailor"s Lament," was given with the greatest feeling and enthusiasm.
We were most interested to read of you and your famous tower in last week"s Tribune. My son, Professor Flett, regarding the tower"s rather blurred likeness on the page, grew most curious to see it as it really is, but as you know he never travels anymore to Tyndall since his brothers have gone West.
Yours most sincerely, Clarentine Flett My dear Father, It gives me pain that I must once again apply to you for money. I do beseech you to search your conscience and give a thought to the many years in which you and my Mother lived in harmony, during which time she served most dutifully and lovingly with never any thought of compensation. Our day-to-day situation here is exceptionally insecure at the moment, and I now fear that my decision to purchase the Simcoe Street house, as well as the land that adjoins it, was premature, particularly with the city moving southward, and now talk of war. My actions, I a.s.sure you, proceeded from the wish to provide Daisy, who is growing into a fine young girl, with a reliable and respectable home of which she need never feel ashamed. It is true that my Mother does earn some income from the sale of plants and herbs, but the cost of constructing a greenhouse has been considerable. It is also true, as you say, that my own earnings have been augmented by the licensing of the "Marquis" wheat hybrid, but fully three-quarters of these earnings remain the property of the College. I look forward, with hope, to your favorable reply.
You may be interested to know that "Goodwill Tower," as it is known in the city, is much talked of these days, and I am told it draws visitors from all over the region, and even from the United States.
Your son, Barker Dear Mr. Goodwill, This little note will, I hope, bring you the a.s.surance that Daisy is now fully recovered from the attack of measles. It has been a most distressing time, and very tiresome indeed for her to remain so many weeks in a darkened room, particularly as she is by nature an active and healthy child. She was much cheered, however, to discover a photograph of you in the pages of last week"s Family Herald, standing in front of your tower. "Is that truly my father?" she demanded of me, and I a.s.sured her that indeed it was. She became most anxious to pay you a visit, and would talk of nothing else for days, but we believe, Professor Flett as much as myself, that such a visit would cause too much excitation in one so recently recovered from a serious illness.
We remain grateful for your monthly contribution to our household. We manage the best we can on a limited purse, and happily my little garden enterprise is beginning to thrive. It is as if all the world has discovered the happiness that simple flowers can bring to an otherwise dreary wartime existence.
Yours, Clarentine Flett Dear Mr. Goodwill, I thank you most sincerely for your prayers and for your words of condolence. I can tell you truthfully that my dear Mother did not suffer in her final days, having entered into a state of unconsciousness the moment the dreadful accident occurred. Those friends and acquaintances who kept vigil at her bedside found in her repose a source of strength and inspiration. She was laid to rest, finally, amid friends and family, both my brothers arriving from the West in time to pay their respects. Our Father, as you know, remained hardened in his heart to the end, and it is for him we must now direct our prayers. Regarding the young cyclist who struck my Mother down, he has been fined the sum of twenty-five dollars, and I am told the poor fellow is fairly ill with remorse.
I have been thinking much these last days about the question of Daisy, whom my Mother has loved as dearly all these years as if she were her own child-doted on her, in fact. You will agree, I am sure, that it is not in any way desirable for a young girl of eleven years to share a household with a man of my circ.u.mstances who has neither a wife nor the means to engage a person who would look after her needs. In any case, it seems I must leave Winnipeg very soon in order to pursue my work with the Dominion Cerealist and his committee in Ottawa. Will you be kind enough to write me the full expression of your thoughts on the subject of Daisy and what we can arrange between us to ensure her future accommodation and happiness.
Yours faithfully, Barker Flett Having known rapture, my father, Cuyler Goodwill, could not live without it.
Once awakened, he was susceptible. It might have been poetry he embraced after the untimely death of his wife-or whisky or the bodies of other women-but instead, like many young working men of his time, he found G.o.d. In his case, G.o.d was waiting in the form of a rainbow east of the Quarry Road, not far from the plot where my mother lay buried.
This event occurred in the month of October, an early morning following a night of heavy rain.
In a cloth sack slung over his shoulder he carries an octagonalshaped piece of limestone (about the size, say, of a cantaloupe) which he intends to place on his dead wife"s grave. He climbs the fence at Taylor"s Corners, taking a shortcut through a field of stubble, over the soaked uneven ground, when suddenly the sun bursts through, weakly yellow at first, but quickly strengthening so that the heat reaches through the fibers of his gray cotton shirt. He looks up, and there it is: the rainbow.
Of course he has seen rainbows before in his life, always stopping, in the way of country people, to admire the show of watery iridescence. Rainbows, after all, do not occur so frequently in southern Manitoba that they go unremarked. "Look at that," someone or other is always sure to exclaim, pointing skyward, and then a wishful thought might rise up, a vague notion of impending good fortune or at least an alteration of mood.
At this time in his life Cuyler Goodwill had not yet begun his long immersion in Bible study, and could not have quoted, had you asked him, G.o.d"s post-flood declaration to Noah: "I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a Covenant between me and the earth."
At the same time, he is not by any means an ignorant or superst.i.tious man (though limited in formal schooling), and he understands the general principles of rainbows, that the prismatic effect is caused by the refraction, reflection, and dispersion of light through droplets of water. He understands, too, the evanescence of the phenomenon, its insubstantiality-he is, after all, a man who works with stone, with hard edges and verifiable volume. The arc of a rainbow cannot be touched; its dimensions are not measurable, and its colors fade even as they are apprehended. There is a belief, for that matter, widely subscribed to by simple people, that a rainbow cannot be photographed, that its fugitive and transitory composition resists the piercing lens and the final proof of chemically treated paper.
But the rainbow that appears before my father on that October morning in 1905, a mere three months after his wife"s demise, is different, its colors more vibrantly distinct, its shape as insistent as a child"s crayon drawing. This rainbow seems made of gla.s.s or a kind of translucent marble, material that is hard, purposeful, pressing, and directed. Directed at him, for him. He has not observed the bands of color taking shape; he knows only that it is suddenly there, solid and perfect, and through its clean gateway shines a radiant slice of paradise.
At the moment the rainbow makes its appearance he is standing, and the next moment kneeling, by the grave of his wife, Mercy.
He, a stonecutter by trade, has set her gravestone himself, a mottled wedge split thin and polished, with her name and dates deeply incised on its center.
Mercy Stone Goodwill 18751905 Greatly Beloved & Deeply Mourned The work of engraving had distracted him in the first terrible days, but almost immediately he perceived that the monument was pitifully inadequate, too meagre and insubstantial for the creature who had been his sweetheart, his wife, his treasure. Now, each day, he carries one or two small stones from the quarry, caching them carefully behind a clump of willow at Taylor"s Corners, not far from the turning at Pike"s Road. He chooses the stones carefully, for he has formed an odd resolution, which is that he will set them without mortar. Gravity alone must hold them in place, gravity and balance, each stone receptive to the shape of those it rests against and in keeping with the abstraction that has lately filled his head like a waking reverie, a dream structure made up of sorrow mingled with bewilderment. Again and again he hears a voice, the same voice, asking the same question: why had his wife not told him a child was expected? The work of engraving had distracted him in the first terrible days, but almost immediately he perceived that the monument was pitifully inadequate, too meagre and insubstantial for the creature who had been his sweetheart, his wife, his treasure. Now, each day, he carries one or two small stones from the quarry, caching them carefully behind a clump of willow at Taylor"s Corners, not far from the turning at Pike"s Road. He chooses the stones carefully, for he has formed an odd resolution, which is that he will set them without mortar. Gravity alone must hold them in place, gravity and balance, each stone receptive to the shape of those it rests against and in keeping with the abstraction that has lately filled his head like a waking reverie, a dream structure made up of sorrow mingled with bewilderment. Again and again he hears a voice, the same voice, asking the same question: why had his wife not told him a child was expected?
Already the walls of the tower have risen to shoulder-height.
Some of the stones he sets are no bigger than his thumb or his fist, some measure eight or ten inches across or more. This morning, in the rainbow"s garish light, their surfaces seem to dance in rhythm with the cl.u.s.ters of goldenrod that had opened up everywhere in recent days. Sun and rain, cloud and light, flower and stone-they are each so closely bound together, so almost prophetically joined, that he experiences a spasm of joy to find himself at the heart of such a holy convergence. His chest fills up with his own noisy relief, a cry of ecstasy, a wild howl of joy.
He had thought himself alone in the world, but in fact he is a child of this solid staring rainbow, and of the persevering forms of light and shadow, of substance and ephemera. A child of the earth.
Only later, walking home across the rutted fields, does he recall and give honor to the author of his happiness, uttering G.o.d"s blameless name aloud.
For days at a time he is able to forget that he is the father of a child, a little girl named Daisy, and then something will jangle a bell to remind him. He might glance at the calendar on the kitchen wall and observe that the fourth Tuesday of the month is fast approaching, the day he sends off a money order to Mrs. Clarentine Flett in Winnipeg. Or he will observe, when the weather turns warm, how young children from the village bring lunches to their fathers at the quarry, lingering there to play for an hour or two with polly-wogs or with chips of waste stone, and always this sight will set him wondering what manner of child his daughter might be.
Or Mrs. Flett might send a photograph of the girl along with a letter describing her steady growth, her genial disposition, or her cleverness at school. Daisy in her pictures appears an obedient child, careful of her dress, and possessed of a spare, neat body-and for this he supposes he should feel grateful. Her smile is neither forward nor timid, but something in between. (For some reason he is unable to determine whether or not she is pretty.
Probably she is not.) The most recent photograph includes Mrs.
Flett and Professor Barker Flett as well, one sitting on either side of Daisy on what looks like a gra.s.sy stretch of river bank, the three of them colored into character by soft gray tones, the family at ease, the family in love with itself, no trace of disharmony.
Occasionally he will wake from sleep with his body trembling and his head soaked with the sweat of memory. There, dancing in the darkness, as plain as life, are the walls of the resurrected kitchen with its tumult and confusion, its circle of shocked faces, and the silent, sheeted body of his dear Mercy. The clock is striking the hour, and the striking seems to go on and on without ceasing, clanging behind his eyes, and m.u.f.fling with its clamor the distance between that which is dreamed and what is remembered.
While the others stand and stare like statues, he runs out the kitchen door and throws himself on the ground, rolling over and over, shouting and weeping and pounding his fists on the baked earth. "She didn"t tell me," he roars to the vacant sky, "she never told me."
This is what he is unable to comprehend: why his Mercy had seen fit to guard her momentous secret.
He supposes he must look upon her silence as a kind of betrayal, or even an act of hostility, but he is reminded, always, of her old helplessness with words and with the difficult forms the real world imposes. He tries to imagine what she felt while this ball of human matter was growing inside her, how she accommodated its collapsed arms and legs and beating heart, whether she feared its intrusion or if she perhaps loved it so deeply she was unable to speak its name, to share its existence or plan for its arrival.
He admits to himself that his love for his dead wife has been altered by the fact of her silence. More and more her lapse seems not just a withholding, but a punishment, a means of humbling him before others who see him now, he imagines, as an ignorant or else careless man. What manner of husband does not know his wife is to bear a child?
Yes, it must be confessed-years later this is clear to me-that my father"s love for my mother had been damaged, and sometimes, especially when waking from one of his vivid dreams, he wonders if he is capable of loving the child. Daisy Goodwill, eleven years old, frozen in a camera"s eye. A little girl in a straw hat. A child perched on a river bank, solid, stiff, an unreadable smile playing on her lips. It would be unnatural if a father did not love his child, but what Cuyler Goodwill feels is only a pygmy love produced by the ether of custom. He has responsibilities. He sends money for her keep. He writes Mrs. Flett letters in which he expresses his concern for the child"s health and happiness, but, in fact, he seldom thinks in such terms. Who is this being, flesh of his flesh?
(Daisy is not a name he would have chosen, but the child had to be called something, and he was in no fit state after my birth to turn his mind to names.) He studies her photograph. He thinks of her at odd times of the day. He is mildly, intermittently curious about her, and a little afraid, and lately, learning that she has suffered from the scourge of measles, he has wondered if it might not be expected of him to take the train into Winnipeg one Sunday morning and rea.s.sure himself as to her condition.
But he shrinks from this awkward meeting. And from the confusion of travel-he has never been to the city, has never seen any reason for going-and is reluctant, anyway, to sacrifice the whole of a Sunday. On Sundays he reads his Testament, prays for forgiveness and works on his tower.
It"s Sunday morning now, a fine June morning, and the iron bell in the steeple of the Tyndall Methodist Church is calling the faithful to worship, but my father is not drawn by this clanging and banging.
Religion has not made a church-goer of Cuyler Goodwill. In the early days of his conversion he attempted, three or four times, the morning service in Tyndall, and once, once only, he walked seven miles west to the settlement at Oakmidden where he sat, bewildered, through the arcane rites of a Greek Orthodox ma.s.s. The noisiness of public worship-singing, praying, chanting, preaching-make him uneasy. The vestments of holy men, even the simple white Methodist collar, abrade his sensibilities, crowd him to the edge of his belief, and the dusted, raftered, churchy s.p.a.ces a.s.sault him with their perfume and polish, belittling him, taunting him. Moreover, his natural instincts feel constrained by the order of holy service, the breathy invocations and amens and numbered hymns, and afterwards the obligation to shake hands with others of the congregation, to greet them soberly, to engage his tongue in social exchange-all this rubs the man the wrong way.
Instead, almost by accident, he has fallen upon a mode of sustained personal meditation which is not so far removed from that practiced for centuries on the Asian subcontinent, a trance of concentration which was to become fashionable in our own culture later in the century, the foolish sixties, the seventies.
In his case it is an ecstatic communion. On Sundays he approaches his Maker by a series of ritualized steps, rising at dawn, taking a breakfast of tea and bread, then walking out, and in all weathers, to the burial grounds off the Quarry Road. As he walks he recites to himself a sc.r.a.p of scripture, a single verse usually, which he repeats over and over.
There is none holy like the Lord, there is none beside thee.
Again and again. The words beat at his temples like a secondary pulse. His boots strike the surface of the roadway in an answering rhythm that draws him behind the scrim of ordinary consciousness. He meets no one coming and going-the hour is too early for man or beast. In a small handcart, which he has cobbled together himself from odds and ends, he transports the stones he intends to set. He has come to believe that the earth"s rough minerals are the signature of the spiritual, and as such can be a.s.sembled and shaped into praise and affirmation. He also conveys, hooked into the loops of his belt, a mallet and a number of small chisels. His tools, his music, his offering-he carries all that he needs on his body.
Where my mother"s solitary gravestone once sat, now rises a hollow tower some thirty feet in height and still growing. The stones that const.i.tute its fabric have been chosen for their strength and beauty and for their effect on the overall design. A spiral of cantilevered stones protrudes, and these allow him to ascend the steep sides as easily as an insect or a lizard might scale a wall.
More and more my father chooses to decorate the stone surfaces with elaborate cipher, even though Tyndall stone, with its mottled coloring, is thought to be resistant to fine carving. Patterns incised on this mineral form seem to evade the eye; you have to stand at a certain distance, and in a particular light, to make them out. This impediment is part of the charm for him. What he carves will remain half-hidden, half-exposed, and as such will reflect the capriciousness of the revealed world. Here he inscribes a few holy words, there the image of a bird, a flower, a fish, a face, a sun or moon. An angel half the size of his hand freezes on a worked limestone sky. A tiny stone horse grazes in a stony meadow. Cupids, mermaids, snakes, leaves, feathers, vines, bees, cattle, the curve of a rainbow, a texturing like skin-the tower is a museum of writhing forms, some of which he has discovered in the Canadian Farmer"s Almanac or the Eaton"s catalogue or in his ill.u.s.trated Bible.
The carving is done on winter nights in the warmed untidy cave of his widower"s kitchen, where he has set up a workbench and vise and a good gas light. He has already, after a day at the quarry, eaten his supper of fried eggs and tinned peas, and is ready to make the stonedust fly. His tools are simple, and his technique somewhat unorthodox-he is after all, a self-taught carver, grown skillful through long periods of trial with the wooing of relief and shadow and with the spare particularity the stone is able to release. Working slowly, he feels the world shrink around him, small as a pudding basin. His attention becomes concentrated as he moves from scratch to groove, as he joins line and curve, elaborating an image that is no more at first than an atom flickering in his brain, bringing to it all its possibilities while guarding its pure modality, its essence-this, always, is the hardest part-and preparing himself for the moment when the worked stone is complete. (I wish somehow you might see these carved surfaces, how they send back to the eye a shiver of yielded revelation, so full of my father"s sad awkwardness and exertion, yet so cunning in their capture of precious light.) Despite his gifts, the act of carving never ceases to be a labor for him-the whole of his body bends into the effort, and his face takes on that twisted monkey look of concentration you see on the faces of real artists or musicians. (Of course he never thinks of himself as an artist-his innocence is wide open like air and water.) Only when he finishes a piece and carries it to the site of the tower does he experience the fever of transcendence (though transcendence, like art, is not a word he would utter or even recognize). What he feels when the finished stone slips finally into its waiting s.p.a.ce is the hand of G.o.d upon his head, the Holy Ghost entering his body with a glad shout.
The religious impulse, as everyone knows-certainly I know-is hard to pin down. There are ecstatics, like my father, who become addicted to the rarefied air of spiritual communion, and then there are cooler minds who claim that religion exists in order to keep us from feeling our own absurdity.
For Cuyler Goodwill, a man untrained in conventional theology, the human and the divine are balanced across a dazzling equation: man"s creation of G.o.d being exactly equal to G.o.d"s creation of man, one unified mind bending like a snake around the curve of earth and heaven. (It has taken him years to work all this out.) For those seven pacifists forced out of the Methodist ministry in the city of Winnipeg in the year 1916, religion finds its net worth between the hard rock of private conscience and the equally hard place of the political platform.
For those farmers and their families who are-right now, in the month of June-rebuilding the Chain Lakes Meeting House after it was burned to the ground by so-called patriots-for this congregation of Friends, religion is the cement that seals shut their door on the world.
For Clarentine Flett, lying in a coma after being knocked down by a bicycle at the corner of Portage and Main, religion is a soft flurry of petals drifting and settling peacefully on the evening of her life. And for the seventeen-year-old butcher"s boy, Valdi Goodmansen, whose bicycle (exceeding the legal speed of eight miles per hour) was responsible for the accident, religion is the bottled broth he sucks like a starved infant in the middle of the night. Seek ye forgiveness and it shall be given. For Abram Skutari, who sold the boy the bicycle (twenty-five dollars), religion is an open window, as well as the curtain with which he darkens the window.
For Magnus Flett of Tyndall, master stonecutter and abandoned husband of Clarentine Flett, religion is both the container and water of remembrance, holding sacred (that is leaving untouched) the shriveled leaves of a particular parlor plant of hers called the star of Bethlehem; also the vivid tactile memory of loose beds of stone from his native Orkney; also an image he recollects of his own father and mother, the two of them at dusk, dragging hay into a barn, and his father stopping to extract a foreign object that had flown into his wife"s eye, leaning down and removing it with the tip of his tongue.
For Princ.i.p.al MacIntosh of Wesley College religion is the physic for right thinking, correct living, and earnest praying. "One thing this war has done," he writes in a letter to the Free Press, "is shaken us out of our self-sufficiency and brought us nearer to our Maker."
For Bessie Perfect, a Wesley College student ardently in love with her botany professor, Barker Flett, religion is a painful obstruction that forms in her throat when she whispers his name against her pillow, and also when she sings, "Keep the home fires burrrrning / While our hearts are yearrrrning."
Left to himself, Barker Flett, professor, scholar, collector of some seventeen different species of lady"s-slippers, believes religion to be a glorious metaphor for the soul"s desire. There is no G.o.d, no Son of G.o.d, no Holy Family, no resurrection, there is only desire. Desire for more. For perfection. For self-knowledge. Desire to possess all fifty known varieties of lady"s-slippers. Desire for sleep and forgetfulness. Desire for good and for evil. Desire for rapturous union, the object of which, he knows, can be, and often is, fraudulent. Lately he has been reading about a pollinating mechanism in which a male insect is attracted to certain small orchids, the lip of which simulates the s.e.xual parts of the female insect. As a man of science, Flett finds the phenomenon obscurely disturbing, particularly the copulative gestures the excited male performs at the edge of the mute petal. He is also disturbed, though he has yet to acknowledge it, by the presence of eleven year-old Daisy Goodwill in his household, the bold unselfconscious movement of her body, her bare arms in her summer dresses, the unnatural yearning he experienced recently when he entered her darkened sick room and observed the sweetness of her form beneath the sheet.
Winnipeg in the year 1916 is an agreeable place. One can live a decent life in this city-despite its geographic isolation, despite the war across the ocean. Even the long hard winters are cheerfully borne by the complacent, generally law-abiding population, and indeed winter brings a benign, clean countenance to the raw look of wooden buildings and laissez-faire planning.
Increasingly, though, the city is growing mannerly. A series of wide, new boulevards has been proposed, and an immense new legislative building in the neo-cla.s.sical style is underway. Ground was broken back in the year 1913. The vast amounts of stone required for this ambitious undertaking have kept the Tyndall Quarry working full-tilt and the stonecutters steadily employed and well out of the Kaiser"s reach. Churches now stand on many of the downtown corners, sometimes two or three different sects represented at one crossing. ("Let us hope G.o.d has a sense of humor," quipped a well-respected Baptist pastor at a recent civic meeting.) These churches are made of stone, as are the many fine banks and insurance companies, also the well-known Wesley College and the new Law Courts. Scanning the munic.i.p.al horizon, you can"t help thinking: isn"t this astonishing! A stone city rising up out of our soft prairie loam! (An eminent Chicago architect, on seeing the blocks of polished Tyndall stone, declared that American builders would be clamoring for the material, were they but to lay eyes on its beauty.) During the winter season Winnipeg offers a variety of theatrical productions, skating parties, b.a.l.l.s, and dinners. In the summer the well-to-do flee the heat for the Lake of the Woods, and the less privileged make do with day trips to Victoria Beach or to various other interesting attractions of the region. Among the young people, those, say, between eighteen and twenty-five years of age, a railway excursion to the village of Tyndall has become exceedingly popular of late. The cost of a train ticket is moderate, and the young people, picnicking on sandwiches and bottles of cold tea, grow very merry. The ladies greatly outnumber the gentlemen during these war years, but the gender imbalance, far from dampening spirits, produces an oddly exhilarating effect. Many bring along bathing costumes, since the old abandoned part of the quarry provides a sunken cube of clear, cold water which is ideal for swimming. But it is really Goodwill Tower they come to see.
To be sure, getting to the tower requires an energetic halfhour"s tramp along a country road, and then a further stretch to the east, down a dirt trail. But this exertion is part of the day"s pleasure for these lively young people. They are full of ginger and fizz, invigorated by fresh air and the relief of having escaped for a few hours their more sober responsibilities in the city, not to mention the horror of a war being fought across the sea.
Across the low-lying fields the tower can be easily spotted.
"There it is," someone will shout. (For some of them this is the second or third visit.) When the sun is high overhead the tower appears white; later in the afternoon it takes on a blue-gray softness.
Always, one or two of these young people will break into a run.
First man there is a starving bear. They reach the low stone cemetery wall, scramble over it-never mind the gate with its rusted hook-dodging the gravestones and stands of thistle. There! At last! They pat the tower"s b.u.mpy sides, which are surprisingly warm from the sun"s rays, and clamber up and down its stepping stones-the young women often have to be coaxed, or a.s.sisted, before they"ll go all the way to the top, being fearful of heights, or of exposing their undergarments. They persevere, however, since the view of the surrounding countryside is said to be superb, and they are curious, every last one of them, to peer down into the tower"s hollow core at the circle of weeds, beneath which lies a small gravestone-or so it is said.
There is a good deal of shrieking and laughing on these excursions. Someone locates the mermaid stone. Someone else finds the carved cat, and the little stone down near the bottom which is inscribed with the single word "woe." The most knowledgeable person in the party will recount the history of the tower: a beautiful young wife dead of childbirth. A handsome young husband, stunned by grief-a man who can still be glimpsed occasionally, working away on the tower in the early morning hours, although he is no longer young, no longer handsome by the day"s standards, and no longer building with his original fervor; he is happy enough, in fact, to stop work and pa.s.s the time of day with visitors.
And the baby, what happened to the baby? No one seems to know.
It touches the heart. It does.
And now, just look at the time; the day-trippers must head back to the village and catch their train. The sun is dipping low. They walk more slowly; some of the couples hold hands or go arm in arm. One or two of them may turn, on an impulse, and look back at the tower. They are heard to comment aloud on the almost medieval look of the structure, and how strange it is to see a sight like this poking up in the middle of the prairie horizon. A remark will be made about the beauty of the limestone, how nearly it resembles Italian marble. One of the young men has pocketed a small carved nugget, which he fingers as he walks along. Someone else, one of the more bookish of the young women, murmurs something about the Taj Mahal in faraway India, how it too is a monument to lost love.
How does a poet know when a poem is ended? Because it lies flat, taut; nothing can be added or subtracted.