(1993) The Stone Diaries (8 page)

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 assure 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 assure 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 assure 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 assurance 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 assured 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 circumstances 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 God. In his case, God 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, God’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 superstitious 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 glass 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 1875–1905

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?

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 clusters 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 God’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.