(1993) The Stone Diaries (12 page)

South, and further south the train went, an arrow of silver cutting through the uncaring landscape. The sun shone brilliantly. As the miles clicked away, it seemed to Goodwill that the seriousness of the world was in retreat. Singing could be heard from the club car: "Ain’t She Sweet," round after round, as they crossed the Illinois border into Indiana. Rivers, rounded hills, paved roads, fenced fields. Advertisements for chewing tobacco appeared on the sides of barns. The towns grew larger and dirtier. Electric wires slashed the bright air like razors.

The first day was the worst. He talked wildly, knowing that shortly he and his daughter would be called to the dining car for the second sitting, and he deeply feared this new excitement. Soon after that the sun would sink from view, and he would be confronted with the aberration of a Pullman bed, of the need to arrange his body in a curtained cubicle, yielding it up to the particles of displaced time and space.

It was against all this terror that he talked.

He told the child about his boyhood in Stonewall, laying out for her the streets of that town, the site of his parents’ house by the lime kilns, the smell of burning lime on a winter morning, how sometimes he was wretched and sometimes joyous. He confessed to her his simple amusements, his liking for tasks, his ready adaptation to the trade of quarrying, his curious bond with rock and earth.

On and on. Dinner came and went. The little girl felt faintly sick, the train lurching this way and that, and the heaviness of chicken and gravy in her stomach. In the dining car she had spilled a trail of this yellow gravy on the white table cloth, and her father had pulled the linen napkin from his shirt front where it was tucked, and covered the spot over, never breaking for a moment his flow of words. He was talking now about his dead wife, the child’s mother; her name was Mercy—Mercy Goodwill, a young woman uniquely skilled with pies and preserves and household management.

Some of this the young Daisy took in and some she didn’t. The hour was late. She drifted in and out of sleep, but even awake her mind kept coasting back to the surfaces of the Simcoe Street house in Winnipeg where she had lived most of her life, its snug-fitting windows and doors and its flights of wooden steps, down into the cellar or out to the side garden where Aunt Clarentine’s flowers grew in their rows. The face of Aunt Clarentine floated by, smiling.

(This face must now be returned to dust, a comforting thought, dust being familiar, ubiquitous, and friendly and not at all threatening.) Uncle Barker would be packing up his instruments and specimens and preparing for the journey to Ottawa, another train journey, but eastward instead of southward. He had pointed out on a map where Ottawa was placed, a small black dot sitting in a nest of intersecting waterways.

Dreaming her way backward in time, resurrecting images, the young girl realized, with wonder, that the absent are always present, that you don’t make them go away simply because you get on a train and head off in a particular direction. This observation kept her hopeful about the future with a parent she had never known, a parent who had surrendered her to the care of others when she was barely two months old.

Her eyes nodded shut, but still her father talked. It seemed to her that his voice continued all night long, but that was impossible, for she woke once or twice to find herself alone on a smooth cool cotton sheet and a mattress of wonderful thickness, with darkness all around.

In the morning it began again, the two of them breakfasting in the dining car (soft poached eggs, triangles of buttered toast), and her father talking, talking. His restlessness was stirred up now, stirred up so it couldn’t be put down. The child had to shut her ears; she needed calming, not this assault of unsorted recollections. Sealed in, she reconstructed in her head the patches of grass and gravel that lay behind Aberdeen School back in Winnipeg, and the bushes that rubbed up against the rough fence of the schoolyard. Her father was going on about the intricacy of stone carving, how the right chisel had to be selected, and how carefully it must be held, how too much pressure in the wrong place can split and ruin good material, how every piece of stone in the world has its own center with something imprisoned in it.

Green corn filled the passing fields, every row made perfect as it swung around out of sight, each stalk a long-leafed gentleman or lady bending toward its neighbor, chattering there in the breeze, so tall and polite. Her father was explaining the difference between sandstone and limestone, between granite and marble. She felt his voice filter into her veins and arteries, and spread out in her memory.

Deeper and deeper into the well of his life he went: a rainbow, a gravestone, a slant of morning light.

He talked to fill the frightening silence and to hold back the uncertainty of the future, but chiefly he talked in order to claim back his child. He felt, rightly, that he owed her a complete accounting for his years of absence. Owed her the whole of his story, his life prised out of the fossil field and brought up to the light. Every minute was owed, every flutter of sensation. There was so much.

He would never be able to pay it all back.

When we think of the past we tend to assume that people were simpler in their functions, and shaped by forces that were primary and irreducible. We take for granted that our forebears were imbued with a deeper purity of purpose than we possess nowadays, and a more singular set of mind, believing, for example, that early scientists pursued their ends with unbroken "dedication" and that artists worked in the flame of some perpetual "inspiration." But none of this is true. Those who went before us were every bit as wayward and unaccountable and unsteady in their longings as people are today. The least breeze, whether it be sexual or psychological—or even a real breeze, carrying with it the refreshment of oxygen and energy—has the power to turn us from our path. Cuyler Goodwill, to supply an example, traveled in his long life from one incarnation to the next. In his twenties he was a captive of Eros, in his thirties he belonged to God, and, still later, to Art. Now, in his fifties, he champions Commerce. These periods of preoccupation are approximate, of course, for naturally there is a good deal of overlapping, some spiritual residue in his business activities, some memory of erotic love to sweeten his art. But on the whole, his obsessions, growing as they do from the same tortuous biographical root, then branching and proliferating, are attended by abstinence: "One thing at a time" is the rule for Cuyler Goodwill. He is like a child in that way.

And he is oddly unapologetic about his several metamorphoses, rarely looking back, and never for a minute giving in to the waste and foolishness of nostalgia. "People change," he’s been heard to say, or "Such-and-such was only a chapter in my life." He shrugs with the whole of his small, hardened body and smiles out from that little leather purse of a face. He has, after all, in his life as a quarryman, seen star drills give way to steam channelers, and hand-powered cross-cut saws to mechanized gang saws. Back in the year 1916 he had been hired as a carver for the Indiana Limestone Company and he is now a principal partner in his own subcontracting firm. He has seen limestone overtake softer sandstones as the nation’s favored building material. (Last year, 1926, 13 million cubic feet of Indiana limestone were quarried and sold, much of it for the dazzling new monuments of New York City and Washington D.C.) One thing leads to the next, that’s life.

You should know that when Cuyler Goodwill speaks, as he often does these days, about "living in a progressive country" or "being a citizen of a proud, free nation," he is referring to the United States of America and not to the Dominion of Canada, where he was born and where he grew to manhood. Canada with its forests and lakes and large airy spaces lies now on the other side of the moon, as does the meagreness of its short, chilly history. There are educated Bloomingtonians—he meets them every day—who have never heard of the province of Manitoba, or if they have, they’re unable to spell it correctly or locate it on a map. They think Ottawa is a town in south-central Illinois, and that Toronto lies somewhere in the northern counties of Ohio. It’s as though a huge eraser has come down from the heavens and wiped out the top of the continent. But my father, busy with his carving contracts and investments and public speaking schedule, has not spent one minute grieving for his lost country.

That country, of course, is not lost at all, though news of the realm only occasionally reaches the Chicago and Indianapolis dailies. The newspaper-reading public of America, so preoccupied with its own vital and combustible ethos, can scarcely be expected to take an interest in the snail-like growth of its polite northerly neighbor, however immense, with its crotchety old king (sixty-two years old this week) and the relatively low-temperature setting of its melting pot. Canada is a country where nothing seems ever to happen. A country always dressed in its Sunday go-to-meeting clothes. A country you wouldn’t ask to dance a second waltz. Clean.

Christian. Dull. Quiescent. But growing. Yes, it must be admitted, the Dominion is growing.

Seven hundred settlers, representing nearly every European nationality, reached Montreal last week, arriving aboard four rather motley steamers: the Letitia, the Athiaunia, the Pennland, the Bergenfjord. But what difference, you say, can a mere seven hundred citizens make in all that vastness? A grain of sand added to a desert. A teaspoon of water dribbled into the ocean. Moreover, reverse immigration must be taken into consideration, those settlers who fail to adapt and who, in a year or two, or sometimes twenty or thirty, return to their countries of origin.

Such a one is Magnus Flett of Tyndall, Manitoba, retired quarry worker, who is on his way "home" to the Orkney Islands. What a misery that man’s existence has been—these exact words have been said of him by at least a dozen acquaintances, for he has no one who might be called a friend: the poor man, the unfortunate soul, his tragic, lonely life. A life that carries in its blood a romantic chill, or so some might think.

Born in 1862, the man is now sixty-five—sore of spirit, toothless, arthritic, deaf in his left ear, troubled by duodenal ulcers, his great frame bent, his hair grizzled, his skin broken, his muscles atrophied, his testicles shrunken, his feet yellowed. He has lived in the Dominion since he was a mere lad. Here is where he brought his strong, young body, which was all he possessed, and his skill with stone. Here is where he sought his fortune. Where he met and married one Clarentine Barker of Lac de Bonnet Township, a farmer’s daughter. Where he sired three sons, Barker (now a fancy-talking civil servant in Ottawa), Simon (a machinist in Edmonton, a drinker), and Andrew (a Baptist preacher presently living in Climax, Saskatchewan, himself the father of a daughter).

You would think old Magnus Flett would be rooted in this new country, that the ties of family and vocation would bind him tight, and that he would wish, when the time came, to be buried in Manitoba’s thin saline soil under a chunk of mottled Tyndall stone. Instead he has forked out a hefty portion of his savings for passage back to his homeland in the Orkneys, a place where he has no remaining blood connections that he knows of, and very few memories.

He doesn’t know what he’ll do with himself when he arrives.

He’s cranked up the courage to leave Canada, but he’s waiting for the bare Orkney landscape to rise up and inform him, to advise him, of what he must do next. Something will emerge from his past, he’s sure of it, some wisdom to rescue his last days. This faith comes out of a vacuum, an absence of recollection, though he does dimly remember the stripped hills and vales of home, their sudden, minor angles of incline, and the freshness of the wind diving about, and a remnant of other sensations too, none stronger than the smoky, blocked airlessness of his parents’ kitchen, the blackened ceiling and the way the breath caught in the throat, offering a promise of safety, yet a threat too. There was a good deal of loud quarreling under that low roof, he’s certain of that, it went on for years, but over what? His parents and an older brother are buried in the churchyard at Sandwick, and he imagines that he will join them there sooner or later. Dust to dust. A gathering of spirits.

Something anyway.

He traveled first to Montreal by train, four days, and then boarded ship for the eight-day crossing to Liverpool. He has his savings, which are respectable. He has a trunk packed with warm clothing, enough to last him the rest of his days, and with a few mementos of his forty-six years in Canada: some stone specimens, Tyndall dolomites, beauties, carefully wrapped round in woolen underwear. His tools. His pipe. Five pounds of his favorite tobacco. Four books—these protected in triple layers of newspaper—from which he is never parted. Some family papers too, immigration certificates, birth documents (the three sons, his progeny, his only trace in the wide world), and his wife’s goodbye note, left for him under her handkerchief press in the year 1905.

Goodbye, it said; that was all, after twenty-five years of marriage; goodbye. A penciled scrawl.

And there are a few photographs too. His wedding photo: a formal pose, 1880, his young bride seated on a carved studio chair, her hands stiff in her lap, her hair whisked back flat, her expression blank. And he, a fine figure of a man—impossible to deny it—six feet three inches, standing behind her, his left hand raised to his ear lobe, tweaking it somehow, or scratching it. Was it the photographer who instructed him to fool with his ear in this manner?

And, if so, why had he obeyed?

Another photo: the three boys. Barker, at six years, staring sullenly into the lens: Simon, four (in short velvet pants, unimaginable those pants, where had they come from?), sitting cross-legged on a cushioned bench; and Andrew, two, squirming—unmistakably squirming—at Simon’s feet. His sons. His dear sons.

Lost.

And one more photo.

It is a group portrait, undated, but he believes it was taken in 1901 or 1902. Before his wife went "strange." Before everything altered. On the back of the photo someone—the handwriting is unknown to him—has written the words: "The Ladies Rhythm and Movement Club." There are six women in the photo. He recognizes the doctor’s wife, Mrs. Spears. He recognizes Maude Little and Mamie Heftner standing at the back. He recognizes each of those staring ladies. Oh, aren’t they just chuffed with themselves. It makes you laugh to look at the lot of them. They’re all got up in identical skirts and waists, some kind of colored border around the collar, and a wide sash wrapped around the waist. They are daft in their expression, but oddly stern too, saying with their teeth and lips and with the lift of their shoulders: aren’t we swell though, aren’t we just something else. Clarentine Barker Flett, his wife, is in the front row, a wee bit shorter than the others, slim, pretty, mischievous, cheeky; it’s hard to believe she is in her early forties and has borne three sons, she looks so like a fresh girl. She’s biting down on her lower lip as if life was one wonderful lark. Happy, yes, she seems irreverently happy.