Carol Shields

The Stone Diaries

World Editions

breda 2016

Published in Great Britain in 2016 by World Editions Ltd., London. First published in Canada by Random House Canada in 1993 and in the U.S.A. by Viking Penguin in 1994.

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www.carol-shields.com

Copyright © Carol Shields, 1993

Published with the permission of Carol Shields Literary Trust

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The moral rights of the author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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isbn 978-94-6238-086-8

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FOREWORD

I have never written with such happiness as during the two-year period when I was working on The Stone Diaries. The book seemed to be about something that mattered (though I didn’t know what it was), and it went along willingly enough once I’d discovered a framework, which was the borrowed design of an old-fashioned nineteenth-century biography with its title sequences of ‘Birth,’ ‘Childhood,’ ‘Love,’ and onward to ‘Death.’

When I first began the novel I thought I was writing a family saga, or rather, a subversion of the family saga as we know it. Before long I realized I was, instead, writing about the subject of autobiography, about the central question of whether or not we can know the story of our own lives. How much of our existence is actually recorded, how much invented, how much imagined, how much revised or erased? The most substantial parts of a human narrative, it seemed to me, were borrowed from the impressions that other people—friends and family and passing acquaintances—had of us, and I wanted these imagined voices to enter the novel and to inform Daisy Goodwill Flett, born in rural Manitoba in 1905. What do people think of us? These received thoughts, sometimes tragically, make a life. Daisy survives into her nineties, and her life corresponds, more or less, with the span of the century, posing the question of where these last hundred years have delivered women, especially those women who failed to make the public record.

My plan was to cut into Daisy’s life every ten years or so, just to see what she was doing. I realized that my writer’s scalpel, with its autocratic and methodical slicing, would miss some major moments: Daisy’s sexual initiation, her education, her childbirths. But such arbitrariness might gather into its grasp something other: perhaps those less exclamatory and genuinely revealing events.

Each day as I sat down to write, I conjured up an image of a series of nesting boxes. I was making the outside box, Daisy was making the inside box—and inside her box was nothing. She was thinking—not writing—her own life story, but it was a life from which she, the subject, had been subtracted. This was the truth, I felt at that time, of most women’s lives.

Musing about autobiography made me think about the photographs that always accompany such books. I asked my publisher, Christopher Potter, if we could have a clutch of such photos in the middle of the book. I explained that I wanted, somehow, to gesture toward another form. I expected him to say no, that photos would be too expensive and, furthermore, one didn’t offer photographs with a novel. But he said yes, we can do that. Immediately I thought about what else I might ask for. What about a family tree? Yes, he said, we can do that too. And an epigraph from the family archives? Yes. His handful of permissions kept me steady as I finished the book.

Writers, famously, resist talking about their work in progress, but I talked and talked about this book to everyone. I asked my friend Jennifer Graham about her elderly father, Alf, and she told me where she suspected his thoughts drifted to and what they were made of. I asked my colleagues at the University of Manitoba—over lunch, meeting in the hallways of the Arts Building—about certain period phrases I wanted to use. Professor Lew Layman managed to track down the expression ‘See you in the movies’ to a novel published in 1929. (That was good news—I could use it!) The Stone Diaries only seems like a private book, almost, in fact, a woman’s intimate journal; I am astonished, looking back, how public the writing of it was. I loved this collective assemblage, this gathering of verbal cues and scattered anecdotes. This process was a large part of the joy I felt at that time.

I did believe, as I wrote the final chapter, that I had written a sad book. From its inception I found myself writing toward the phrase ‘I am not at peace.’ When I got there, finally, on the second-to-last page, I was reluctant to register those words. My wont had always been to find harmony and reconciliation, but the phrase pressed on my consciousness—and my conscience. Finally, I committed it to print. I’ve learned to live with that hard choice.

Carol Shields

December 2001

BIRTH, 1905

my mother’s name was Mercy Stone Goodwill. She was only thirty years old when she took sick, a boiling hot day, standing there in her back kitchen, making a Malvern pudding for her husband’s supper. A cookery book lay open on the table: ‘Take some slices of stale bread,’ the recipe said, ‘and one pint of currants; half a pint of raspberries; four ounces of sugar; some sweet cream if available.’ Of course she’s divided the recipe in half, there being just the two of them, and what with the scarcity of currants, and Cuyler (my father) being a dainty eater. A pick-and-nibble fellow, she calls him, able to take his food or leave it.

It shames her how little the man eats, diddling his spoon around in his dish, perhaps raising his eyes once or twice to send her one of his shy, appreciative glances across the table, but never taking a second helping, just leaving it all—for her to finish up—pulling his hand through the air with that dreamy gesture of his that urges her on. And smiling all the while, his daft tender-faced look. What did food mean to a working man like himself? A bother, a distraction, perhaps even a kind of price that had to be paid in order to remain upright and breathing.

Well, it was a different story for her, for my mother. Eating was as close to heaven as my mother ever came. (In our day we have a name for a passion as disordered as hers.)

And almost as heavenly as eating was, the making—how she gloried in it! Every last body on this earth has a particular notion of paradise, and this was hers, standing in the murderously hot back kitchen of her own house, concocting and contriving, leaning forward and squinting at the fine print of the cookery book, a clean wooden spoon in hand.

It’s something to see, the way she concentrates, her hot, busy face, the way she thrills to see the dish take form as she pours the stewed fruit into the fancy mould, pressing the thickly cut bread down over the oozing juices, feeling it soften and absorb bit by bit a raspberry redness. Malvern pudding; she loves the words too, and feels them dissolve on her tongue like a sugary wafer, her tongue itself grown waferlike and sweet. Like an artist—years later this form of artistry is perfectly clear to me—she stirs and arranges and draws in her brooding lower lip. Such a dish this will be. A warm sponge soaking up colour. (Mrs. Flett next door let her have some currants off her bush; the raspberries she’s found herself along the roadside south of the village, even though it half kills her, a woman of her size walking out in the heat of the day.)

She sprinkles on extra sugar, one spoonful, then another, then takes the spoon to her mouth, the rough crystals that keep her alert. It is three o’clock—a hot July afternoon in the middle of Manitoba, in the middle of the Dominion of Canada. The parlour clock (adamantine finish, gilded feet, a wedding present from her husband’s family, the Goodwills of Stonewall Township) has just struck the hour. Cuyler will be home from the quarry at five sharp; he will have himself a good cheerful wash at the kitchen basin, and by half-past five the two of them will sit down at the table—this very table, only spread with a clean cloth, every second day a clean cloth—and eat their supper. Which for the most part will be a silent meal, both my parents being shy by nature, and each brought up in the belief that conversing and eating are different functions, occupying separate trenches of time. Tonight they will partake of cold corned beef with a spoonful of homemade relish, some dressed potatoes at the side, cups of sweet tea, and then this fine pudding. His eyes will widen; my father, Cuyler Goodwill, aged twenty-eight, two years married, will never in his life have tasted Malvern pudding. (That’s what she’s preparing for—his stunned and mild look of confusion, that tender, grateful male mouth dropping open in surprise. It’s the least she can do, surprise him like this.) She sets a flower-patterned plate carefully on top of the pudding and weights it with a stone.

A cool place, the recipe says: ‘Set the mould in a cool place.’ (The book is an old one, printed in England more than thirty years ago, its pages limp, but the author’s tone vigorous and pungent.) Yet where on a day like today is Mercy Goodwill to find a cool place? Even the dark stone floor under the cellar steps where she stores her milk and butter and lard has warmed up, giving off this last fortnight a queer sour smell. The Flett family, next door, has recently purchased a Labrador Ice Chest, zinc-lined, and Mrs. Flett has spoken shyly of this acquisition to Mercy, mentioning its features, its ventilating flues, the shining tin provision shelves, how a block of ice is able to last through two warm days or more.

Some sharp thought, the worry over how to keep the pudding cool, or perhaps envy for the Fletts’ new ice chest, brings on my mother’s first spasm of pain. She gives a little cry. Her eyes pull tight at the corners, as though someone has taken hold of her hair and yanked it upward so that her scalp sings. A witness, had there been a witness present in the little back kitchen, might have feared a fainting spell coming on, even though my mother is not much given to faintness. What she feels is more like a shift in the floor of her chest, rising at first, and then an abrupt drop, a squeezing like an accordion held sideways.

She looks down and observes with wonder how the blue and white stripes of her apron are breaking into coloured flakes. Her hands fly straight out in the air, a reflex meant to hold back the crushing pressure, and she steadies herself by settling her shoulders and placing her palms flat on the table, leaning forward and letting go a long, soft whimper. The sound that comes from her lips is formless, loose, a wavy line of bewilderment. (Later, these words, more than any others, will attach themselves to my image of my mother: looseness, bewilderment.) For a heavy woman she perspires little, even during the height of summer, and she takes, if the truth were known, a shy pride in her bodily dryness—only now a broad band of dampness is spreading beneath her apron and down the channel of her back. She breathes rapidly, blinking as the pain wraps a series of heavy bands around her abdomen. Down there, buried in the lapped folds of flesh, she feels herself invaded. A tidal wave, a flood.

All spring she’s been troubled with indigestion. Often in the morning, and then again at night after her young husband has gone to sleep, she’s risen from her bed and dosed herself with Bishop’s Citrate of Magnesia. When she drinks ordinary milk or sweetened tea or sugary lemonade she swallows it down greedily, but Bishop’s cool chalky potion she pours into a china cup and sips with deep, slow concentration, with dignity. She doesn’t know what to think. One day she’s persuaded her liver’s acting up, and the next day her kidneys—she’s only thirty years old, but kidney trouble can start early in life, especially for a woman of my mother’s unorthodox size. Or perhaps the problem stems from constipation. Mrs. Flett next door has suggested this possibility, recommending rhubarb tablets, or else, speaking confidentially, some woman’s trouble. Excessive loss of blood, she tells Mercy, is the cause of discomfort for many young ladies—has Mercy spoken to Dr. Spears? Dr. Spears is known for his sensitivity to women’s complaints; he has a way of squeezing his eyes shut when he phrases his delicate inquiries, of speaking almost poetically of nature’s cycles and balances, of the tide of fertility or the consolation of fruit salts.

No, Mercy has not approached Dr. Spears, she would never speak to Dr. Spears of such a thing, she would speak to no one, not even her husband—especially not her husband. Her monthly blood has appeared only twice in her life, springing out of the soft cushions of her genital flesh, staining her underclothes with its appalling brightness, and mocking the small decencies and duties that steady her life: her needlework, her housekeeping, her skill with a flat iron, her preserves and pickles and fresh linens and the lamp chimneys she polishes every single morning.

The doses of Citrate of Magnesia help hardly at all. Fruit salts only make her suffering worse. Her abdominal walls have continued to cramp and heave all spring, and she’s wondered at times if her inner membranes might burst with the pressure. Bile rises often in her throat. Her skin itches all over. She experiences scalding attacks of flatulence, especially at night as she lies next to my father, who, out of love, out of delicacy, pretends deep sleep—she can tell from the way he keeps himself curled respectfully to his own side of the bed.

Only bread seems to ease her malaise, buttered bread, enormous slabs of it, what she’s heard people in this village refer to as doorsteps. She eats it fresh from the oven, slice after slice, sometimes not bothering with the knife, just tearing it off in handfuls. One day, alone in this kitchen, she consumed an entire loaf between noon and supper. (One of the loaves burned, she explained to her husband, anxious to account for the missing bread—as though a man of my father’s dreamy disposition would notice so small an item, as though any man would notice such a thing.) Frequently she sprinkles sugar on top of the buttered bread. The surface winks with brilliance, its crystals working between her teeth, giving her strength. She imagines the soft dough entering the bin of her stomach, lining that bitter bloated vessel with a cottony warmth that absorbs and neutralizes the poisons of her own body.

Her inability to feel love has poisoned her, swallowed down along with the abasement of sugar, yeast, lard, and flour; she knows this for a fact. She tries, she pretends pleasure, as women are encouraged to do, but her efforts are punished by a hunger that attacks her when she’s alone, as she is on this hot July day, hidden away in a dusty, landlocked Manitoba village (half a dozen unpaved streets, a store, a hotel, a Methodist Church, the Canadian Pacific Railway Station, and a boarding house on the corner of Bishop Road for the unmarried men). She seems always to be waiting for something fresh to happen, but her view of this ‘something’ is obscured by ignorance and the puffiness of her bodily tissue. At night, embarrassed, she gathers her nightdress close around her. She never knows when she blows out the lamp what to expect or what to make of her husband’s cries, which are, thankfully, muffled by the walls of the wood-framed company house where she and my father live. Two rooms up, two down, a privy out back. She knows only that she stands apart from any coherent history, separated from the ordinary consolation of blood ties, and covered over and over again these last two years by Cuyler Goodwill’s immense, unfathomable ardour. Niagara in all its force is what she’s reminded of as he climbs on top of her each evening, a thundering let loose against the folded interior walls of her body.

It’s then she feels most profoundly buried, as though she, Mercy Goodwill, is no more than a beating of blood inside the vault of her flesh, her wide face, her thick doughy neck, her great loose breasts and solid boulder of a stomach.

Standing in her back kitchen, my mother’s thighs, like soft white meat (veal or chicken or fatty pork come to mind) rub together under her cotton drawers—which are wet, she suddenly realizes, soaked through and through. There are double and triple ruffles of fat around her ankles and wrists, and these ridged extremities are slick with perspiration. Her large swollen fingers press into the boards of the kitchen table, and her left hand, her wedding ring buried there in soft flesh, is throbbing with poison. She seems to see a weak greenish light unfolding like a fan in front of her eyes. This is worse, far worse, than ever it’s been before. She wonders if her body will break apart, the bones drawn out from under the flesh, blood spilling on the floor and walls. She imagines her blood to be yellow rather than red, a thick honey-coloured sludge slowing her down, keeping her from crying out to Mrs. Flett next door.

Mrs. Flett, as it happens, is within easy earshot, no more than forty feet away, pinning her rough sheets and pillowcases on to a clothesline. She would come running if she only knew of Mercy Goodwill’s distress; she would be there in a trice, exhorting the poor dear soul to be calm, begging her to lie down on the kitchen couch, bathing her broad, damp, blank face with a cool cloth, easing her clothing, pulling off the tightly laced shoes and heavy stockings. She loves Mercy, loves her ways, her solid concentration, though on the whole (it must be admitted) her love is churned from fascination, and also from pity—pity for that large, soft, slow-flowing body, the blurred flesh at the sides of Mercy’s young face, and a blinking prettiness that shows itself in certain lights, in the curve of her upper lip or the tender spilt panic of her hazel eyes. When she looks into Mercy’s calf eyes she does not think ‘childish,’ but ‘child.’ Poor thing, poor lost thing. Never a mother to call her own, and now, from the looks of it—though who could tell such things, who can read the future?—no little ones of her own to rock and sing to.

Mrs. Flett—her Christian name is Clarentine—has three grown sons, Simon, Andrew, and Barker, but no daughter. The eldest of these sons, Barker, has gone to Winnipeg to study at the College, and the other two work at the quarry alongside her husband Magnus, a master stonecutter, a cold, lean Orkneyman who immigrated to Canada at the age of nineteen. His Orkney ways have stayed with him. He prefers simple things. A plainly furnished house. A carefully tended garden. Ordinary food on the table, a supper of porridge or smoked fish or even a plate of bread and butter washed down by tea. The sight of a Malvern pudding unmolded on a glass plate and covered with cream would distress him deeply, particularly a pudding set out on what is, after all, an ordinary Monday evening in high summer in the year 1905 (the year of my birth, the day of my birth).

Mrs. Flett, Clarentine, a neat-bodied woman whose skin is the colour of mushrooms and whose memory of her sons’ infancy has been washed clear by disappointment, dreams of taking Mercy’s large dry hand in hers and saying, ‘A woman’s life isn’t worth a plateful of cabbage if she hasn’t felt life stir under her heart. Taking a little one to nurse, watching him grow to manhood, that’s what love is. We say we love our husbands, we stand up in church saying as how we’ll love them forever and ever, till death do we part, but it’s our own blood and sinew we really love.’

She likes giving Mercy things. Only last spring, while cleaning house, she came across an old tinware jelly mould, and this is the vessel Mercy uses today to provide shape for her Malvern pudding. She gives Mercy flowers from her garden, sweet peas, nicotiana, dianthus, candy-tuft, snapdragons. Also lettuce when it’s in season, new radishes, carrots, broad beans. Also pots of berry jam or rhubarb pickle. Once a set of tea towels with embroidered corners, another time an appliquéd sham with an open-work centre. Why, she’s even given Mercy the cookery book the girl’s so everlasting fond of and has nearly worn out with use. At Christmas she gave her a bar of heliotrope soap fresh in its paper wrapper, and once, out of the blue, a hairpin glass trimmed with ribbon. These objects, passing out of her hands into Mercy’s, seem momentarily ringed with light, though the phrases she employs along with her gift-giving are calculated to diminish her generosity. ‘I’ve no earthly use for this myself.’ Or ‘I’ve more here than would feed an army’ or ‘Too fancy for us, but it’ll suit you’ or ‘Mr. Flett don’t hold with sweet-smelling stuff, and I do hate to throw a thing away what’s perfectly good and useful.’

Mercy’s softly focused gratitude, her slow-forming smile with its hint of bewilderment and her look of being unspotted by the world make Mrs. Flett long to take her in her arms. She can imagine Mercy’s compacted fullness pressing up against her own tidy dress front, heaving with emotion and surrender. ‘My dear,’ she would like to murmur into the pale bulk of Mercy’s neck, into Mercy’s soft shoulders and curling brown hair.

The moment lies in the future, it will come. This is what she thinks as she stands under the blazing sun, pegging her clean wash to the line—the linens first, then her aprons and shirt waists, then the men’s summer overalls. There is so little breeze that the clothes will dry stiff and hard—in two hours they’ll be dry, it’s that hot. She’s late with the wash today, and there’s still the garden to weed, and peas to pick for supper. She’s always running late, and always there’s a shrewish tune skirling away inside her head: now the stove to polish, now the mending, next the curtains to starch. The scolding voice is her own, so abrasive and quick, yet so powerless to move her. The men, her husband and sons, leave for the quarry at seven o’clock sharp and return at five. What do they imagine she does all day? It makes her shiver to think of it, how not one pair of eyes can see through the roof and walls of her house and regard her as she moves through her dreamlike days, bargaining from minute to minute with indolence, that tempter.

God sees her, of course. He must. God observes her at the window where she stares and stares at the shadows of the caragana blowing across the path, or sitting on one of the kitchen chairs, locked into paralysis over her mending basket, watching a fly creep across the table. The minutes tick by, become an hour, sometimes two. These segments of time are untied to any other time she recognizes. It happens more and more frequently, these collapsed hours, almost every day since the summer weather came on. She wakes up fresh enough, but as the hands of the clock move forward she feels a force beckoning, the teasing seduction of ease and secrecy, and then, with the next breath, she’s lost the battle. Whatever it is that encloses her is made up of tenderness. It rises around her like a cloud of scent. There’s no face or voice to it, only a soft, steady, pervasive fragrance, a kind of rapturous wave that enters her throat, then moves downward through her body, bringing tightness to her female parts and the muscles of her softened thighs. The silence is perfect, and yet a torment, and always a dry little thought plucks away at her—that God is not interested in her lapses. He has not spoken out to her in any way, has not given a sign, not even troubled Himself to betray her, even though she has baited Him with a scrap of embroidered linen on her kitchen wall:

Christ is the Head of the House

The Unseen Guest

at every Meal

The Silent Listener

to every Conversation

It is frightening, and also exhilarating, her ability to deceive those around her; this is something new, her lost hours, her vivid dreams and shreds of language, as though she’d been given two lives instead of one, the alternate life cloaked in secret.

Or does she deceive herself? Dr. Spears, when she met him by accident walking on the Quarry Road, did catch hold of her wrist and speak to her in a most curious and candid manner. ‘Women need the companionship of other women,’ he burst out after some polite talk about the weather. ‘A little laughter is a great comfort, a little harmless gossip. The Needlework Auxiliary or the Mothers’ Union—and I believe, Mrs. Flett, you were once a member of the Ladies Rhythm and Movement Club, that you used to find enjoyment in an afternoon of cheerful company. My own wife tells me the recent talk on the Chinese missions was diverting, as well as edifying.’

‘I’m very busy at home,’ Clarentine Flett told Dr. Spears.

‘Of course, of course,’ he nodded quickly. ‘Or perhaps you’re thinking of a few days’ visiting in Winnipeg. I believe you spend a few days there every year with your son Barker. He is still there, is he not, engaged in his studies? Botany, if I remember, his field of endeavour.’

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Flowers. Plants.’

‘I’m sure he does you credit. A fine young fellow. If you remember, I was one of those who put his name forward for the Epworth Scholarship.’

‘I do remember, indeed I do, and—’

‘Why not surprise him, then, with the pleasure of a visit? We all need a change of scene now and then, especially after a long hard winter. I could mention it to your husband, if you like—indirectly, of course. I could suggest the healthful benefits of a little holiday.’

‘Please,’ she’d said. She was thinking of the oval of silence she would enter as soon as she left Dr. Spear’s presence, the smooth pearl gloss of it. ‘There’s no need of that. I can speak to him myself.’

The Mothers’ Union. A few days in Winnipeg. Only months ago these diversions would have held some attraction. She might actually have spoken to her husband, Magnus, about a week away in the city. The words would have come forward—while she was engaged in some ordinary task, drying the supper dishes or taking the dead leaves off the fuchsia that hung by the window. Her husband was not a man who wasted words, but the two of them had managed over the years the simple, necessary marital commerce required for the rearing of three sons, for the ordering of supplies, the discussions concerning weather, illness, what manner of vegetables should be planted in the garden. And she guessed—though how was she to know such a thing? Who in this world would tell her?—she guessed her husband was no rougher in his ways than other men. ‘If you’re willing, Mother,’ he says in the darkness of their back bedroom, one hand working up her nightdress. A thousand times, five thousand times—‘If you’re willing, Mother.’ The words have worn a groove in her consciousness, she hardly hears them. And afterwards there’s silence, like falling down a hole, or a kind of grunt that she takes to be satisfaction.

‘Shall we marry then?’ These were the words of his marriage proposal delivered some twenty-five years ago, the phrase riding upward in a way she found disarming. At that time he had been less than one year in Canada, eight months working in the old granite quarry at Lac du Bonnet near to where her father farmed; his Orkney accent was pronounced and exceedingly harsh, though she fancied she heard something softer beneath it. He walked her home from a prayer meeting at Milner’s Crossing. It was a warm April night with stars spread thick across the sky. She felt she could gulp the clean air in like a kind of nourishment. This was the third time he had walked her home, and she knew—and he knew—that he was entitled to ask for a kiss. Out of curiosity she assented. His upper lip, moving quickly, too quickly, grated against her mouth and cheek. And then he spoke: ‘Shall we marry then?’

His presumptuousness moved her, it was so childlike. She had an urge to laugh, to tease him—she knew how to be merry in those days—but his face was too close.

‘What do you say, then?’ he pressed her. His features were covered over by darkness, but she felt his warm breath on her neck, and it weakened her terribly. She readied herself for words of tenderness.

‘I make a good enough wage,’ he said, ‘and I work regular.’

This was true. She could not contradict what he said. She never did learn to contradict what he said. He had a particular way of putting a thing that disallowed contravention. The new ice box, for instance. He had written away for it, secretly sent an order in to Eaton’s Mail Order, and now it occupied a corner of the kitchen. Suddenly it was there. Months earlier, for reasons of economy, he had refused to consult Dr. Spears about the lump behind his ear, and then he had to go and waste eleven dollars on an ice box, eleven dollars plus shipping. The neat metal plate attached to the ice box door said ‘New Improved Labrador Ice Chest.’ She had never asked for such a thing. She watched him on that first day run his fingers over the smooth wood and polished hinges, and against her will thought: those same fingers have touched me, my naked body.

Such thoughts are more and more with her. Her brain has been running wild these last months. She is a woman whose desires stand at the bottom of a cracked pitcher, waiting.

Even now, hanging out the wash, she is faint with longing, but for what? Embrace me, she says to the dripping sheets and pillowslips, hold me. But she says it dully, without hope. Her wash tub is empty now, an old wooden vessel sitting there on a piece of outcropping rock. The sky overhead is wide and blue; it makes her dizzy looking up. She feels a tweaking in her nostrils, and reaches in her apron pocket for her handkerchief. The smell of washing soda affects her, makes her want to sneeze. ‘I am not willing,’ she says inside her head. ‘I am no longer willing.’

It is three o’clock already, she judges. She will dispense with weeding the garden for today. If anyone asks, her husband or one of her sons, she’ll blame the heat. Why put her health at risk under a strong sun like this? She’ll seek out the coolness of the front room instead, the tapestry chair in the darkened corner. She’s done this before, unable to stand up to this sorrow of hers. Her prized star of Bethlehem sits rooted in its china pot; she likes to study its gray-green leaves for secrets. The wallpaper, too, holds her attention with its rows of flowers, its browns and pinks alternating and repeating. The little bevelled mirror in its oak frame sends back her image, her flattened-down hair and her eyes, hot as stones in her head.

‘I love you,’ she heard young Cuyler Goodwill say to his immense, bloated wife, Mercy. ‘Oh, how I love you and with all my heart.’

It was an early evening when she heard this declaration, a Monday like today. She had been standing beside the Goodwills’ kitchen door, a basket of early lilacs in her arms, a neighbourly offering. (In truth, she finds it hard to stay away; the houses of the newly married, she senses, are under a kind of enchantment, the air more tender than in other households, the voices softer, the makeshift curtains and cheap rugs brave and bright in their accommodation.) The Goodwills’ kitchen window was wide open to the fresh spring breezes. They were at table (she could see them clearly enough)—Mercy on one side and Cuyler on the other, the white tablecloth and the supper dishes as yet uncleared.

Light from the doorway fell on my mother’s broad face, giving it a look of lustre. My father was leaning toward her, his hand covering hers. The two of them, Clarentine Flett thought, might have been the subject of a parlour picture, a watercolour done in tints of soft blues and grays.

My mother, as I have already said, was an extraordinarily obese woman, and, with her jellylike features, she was rather plain, I’m afraid. It’s true her neighbour, Mrs. Flett, glimpses a certain prettiness behind her squeezed eyes and pouched chin, but the one photograph I possess, her wedding portrait, tells me otherwise. My mother was large-bodied, heavy fleshed. My father, in contrast, was short of stature, small-boned and neat, with a look of mild incomprehension flitting across his face. It can perhaps be imagined that among the men of the community coarse jokes were made at his expense.

With all my heart, Mrs. Flett heard him say to my mother. He seemed exhausted by the utterance, leaning back now in his chair. With all my heart. This was the sort of phrase that lovers in books invent. Love talk, sweetheart talk. The poetry of rapture. Occasionally Clarentine Flett has read cheap novels—hiding them from her husband who would think them time-wasting—in which people speak to each other in soft ways, but she had never suspected that such pronouncements might be uttered in the houses of ordinary quarry workers in a village such as Tyndall, Manitoba. Nor had she imagined the enrichment of voice or tone that could be brought to these offerings. ‘Oh, how I love you,’ Cuyler Goodwill said to his wife Mercy, crying out to her with a pitch of entreaty which Clarentine Flett has been unable to wipe from her remembrance. It’s been with her all spring, raining down on the dry weave of her daily comings and goings. It’s with her now as she stands beside the clothesline, sneezing and blinking in the brilliant sunshine and fighting a temptation to withdraw for the afternoon.

And then an idea comes to her. She would boil up a kettle for tea and invite Mercy to come across and share it.

Yes, a nice pot of tea, Clarentine Flett decides. And she’ll take down the best rose tea cups, Royal Albert, that belonged to her mother, and while she’s at it, she’ll set out a plate of jam biscuits. Women need companionship—that was the very thing Dr. Spears was fussing her about. Maybe that was all that was the matter with her, nothing but loneliness, not the unhappiness of life itself, but only a seasonal attack of loneliness. And Mercy Goodwill, the poor dear young soul, was lonely too—Mrs. Flett knows, suddenly, that this is true. She divines it. Never mind Mercy’s secret hoard of tenderness and the soft words her young husband pours into her ear, never mind any of that. She and Mercy are alone in the world, two solitary souls, side by side in their separate houses, locked up with the same circle of anxious hunger. Why had she not seen it before? This is what’s been keeping Clarentine Flett close to home these last weeks, away from the Mothers’ Union and the Needlework Auxiliary, away from the possibility of a few days’ visiting in Winnipeg; she cannot bear to travel outside the ring of disability that encircles the two of them, herself and Mercy Goodwill—a pair of Christian sisters uniquely joined.

Something must at last be done, and she will do it; she’ll knock on Mercy’s door this very minute and call her over. She’ll make the tea light and sweet the way Mercy prefers it. And she might—she feels suddenly bold at the thought of an afternoon tea party, the sort of tea party Dr. Spears’s wife might have with Mrs. Hopspein, the Quarry Master’s wife—she might, after a cup or two, ask Mercy to call her by her Christian name. ‘Why don’t you call me Clarentine,’ she’d say. ‘I wouldn’t mind one bit, I’d welcome it, in fact. We’ve been neighbours these two years now. Why, you’re like a daughter to me, that’s my feeling, and if you could only bring yourself—’

But this is the moment when her reverie is interrupted. She hears a voice, a man’s high-pitched yipping, and looks up to see the old Jew stumbling toward her across the garden.

It’s hard nowadays to talk about the old Jew. It’s a tricky business. The brain’s got to be folded all the way back to the time when the words ‘old Jew’ could be said straight out: old Jew; here comes the old Jew.

And there he was with his dirty black clothes flapping in the heat, his hair all wild and strange about his head. He wears a hat of some kind, shredded and filthy and pushed to the back of his skull. His cheeks, high up under his eyes, are brown and wrinkled as walnuts. The long eroded lines of his face are seamed with dirt, either that or it’s the queer foreign tint of his skin.

His horse, poor creature, stands by the roadway, tied to the little bent aspen by the side of Mercy Goodwill’s door. Trust him to tie up carelessly like that when he might have chosen the fence-post just as well. And that wagon, all broken down and shabby, so that it hardly deserved to be called a wagon, the way it rattles, and creaks as it jerks along its way, scattering the very crows in the fields.

His arrival is everywhere dreaded, for almost invariably he asks for the refreshment of coffee or a swallow of cold water, and then there are the cups and glassware to be scalded after him. Travelling in winter, in the remote countryside around Arborg where the Icelanders have settled, he often dares to beg a roof for the night. Bedding, then, will have to be produced, and boiled the next day, and the windows opened wide for airing. He carries into those clean, frugal households the stink of garlic, onions, mildew, and unwashed skin. The buttons and bootlaces and needles he sells, though hard to come by, are scant compensation for the risk of bedbugs and vicious unnamed diseases. His tongue is thick and sour, his eyes bewildered. He wheedles. He addresses every woman in the region as ‘meesus,’ their husbands as ‘meester.’ To the young men in the boarding houses he sells filth. He might be forty years of age or sixty. He carries a selection of pills and lotions, pocket knives and small toys, tobacco and hard candy, all poison. He looks no person in the eye. It’s said he helps himself to fresh eggs from the hen houses, pinches tomatoes from gardens, slips teaspoons under his coat and carries them off. He reaches forth a black hand and pats young children on the head, catching them before they can run away, discomfiting their mothers and fathers.

He can be seen on back roads putting a whip to that poor nag of his. He shuffles up to doorways and knocks in a way that is obsequious and yet demanding. You hear that knock and you know who it is. His gait is damaged, a slow uneven shuffle that calls up memories of old-world contagion. Yet here he is on a July afternoon, running raggedly toward Mrs. Clarentine Flett, who stands beside her clothesline—her banner of bedsheets and towels—like a figure burned into a wood panel.

He grabs first at the sleeve of her dress. Instinctively she pulls away, gasping, protesting, but of course he grabs again, this time catching her roughly by the wrist. His face is screwed up with sorrow, and he’s sobbing, wailing, ‘Meesus, meesus,’ his face so close to hers she can smell the rankness of his breath and body.

‘Come, meesus; meesus, come.’

The voice is demented; it has the creak of terror in it, too high-pitched for a man’s voice, and the words nothing but gibberish. He has no more than three teeth in his head—she registers this with something like awe. A sore blackens his upper lip. Clarentine Flett, pulling herself away from him, feeling faint with disgust, is unable to take her eyes from that dried scab, which she unaccountably longs to reach out and touch.

He refuses to let go.

‘Come, meesus.’

She is made queasy by the roughness of his hand on her wrist, but the sight of his thready coat sleeve, and the way his pale arm shoots out beyond its length, gives her pause.

It is an ordinary man’s arm, Mrs. Flett observes, and it is only mildly grotesque, not that different really from her husband Magnus’s arm as it slips free of its underwear casing on a Saturday night and plunges into the scum of soapy water—exposed, scarred, knotted with veins, tightened with exertion, yet surprisingly, touchingly, womanlike.

She wonders—and all these images of hers crowd together in the space of a few seconds—wonders if the old Jew might possibly have relations somewhere in the neighbourhood, a roof, a warm stove, a bed of his own to return to. If so, he might also have a woman’s body next to his under the bedclothes, and a sack of loose blue flesh between his legs like every other man. These thoughts are repellent, she must shift her gaze to what is wholesome and good. And a name, of course he must have a name, you can’t enter this country and become a citizen without a name. Two or three names perhaps. Unpronounceable. Unspellable. Someone would have given him those names, but who?

These questions rush at her, depriving her of air. At the same time, overlapping like an eddy of fresh water, comes the thought of her darkened front room, the armchair with its cool felt seat cushion, the way the green tapestry cloth is worn away at one corner, and how careful she is always to keep that corner turned from view.

The old Jew hangs on to her, and with his other hand gestures wildly in the direction of Mercy Goodwill’s kitchen door. ‘Meesus sick,’ he manages, ‘sick, sick,’ and finally she understands.

The ground between the two houses is uneven, full of rocks and roots and tufted grass. They run together toward the open doorway, awkwardly, bumping up against each other, the old Jew’s fingers never once letting go of the woman’s wrist.

It is a temptation to rush to the bloodied bundle pushing out between my mother’s legs, and to place my hand on my own beating heart, my flattened head and infant arms amid the mess of glistening pulp. There lies my mother, Mercy Stone Goodwill, panting on the kitchen couch with its cheap, neat floral cover; she’s on her side, as though someone has toppled her over, her large soft trunky knees drawn up, and her woman’s parts exposed. Like seashells or a kind of squashed fruit.

Her blood-smeared drawers lie where she’s thrown them, on the floor probably, just out of sight.

There’s nothing ugly about this scene, whatever you may think, nothing unnatural that is, so why am I unable to look at it calmly? Because I long to bring symmetry to the various discordant elements, though I know before I begin that my efforts will seem a form of pleading. Blood and ignorance, what can be shaped from blood and ignorance?—and the pulsing, mindless, leaking jelly of my own just-hatched flesh, which I feel compelled to transform into something clean and whole with a line of scripture running beneath it or possibly a Latin motto.

And there is my father to consider, for here he comes now, walking home down the Quarry Road. He’s whistling, slapping at the sandflies, kicking up dust with his work boots. He is exhausted. Who wouldn’t be exhausted after nine hours of hacking at the rock shelf, fourteen cents an hour, which is less than the cost of the pound of Vestizza currants his wife, Mercy, put in her Christmas pudding last winter? But he’s whistling some merry tune, ‘Little Cotton Dolly’ or perhaps ‘Zizzy Zum, Zum.’ At Pike’s Road, which leads to the graveyard, he stops and empties his bladder.

The distance between Garson and Tyndall is two miles. The other quarry workers, after a day in the lime kilns or working with their picks at the stone face, ride home to Tyndall in the company wagons, their boots hanging over the side. Sturdy teams of horses—those beautiful, thick-muscled, ark-worthy beasts scarcely seen nowadays—pull them homeward. But not my father. He prefers to walk. He’s an odd sort, that’s what’s said of him in these parts. A loner. Daft-looking. Goes his own way. A runt. A quick worker though, no flies on him. Smart with machinery. Has a touch. Quiet, sober, comes from Stonewall Township, himself and his wife too. As for his wife, well (this said with a wink, a poke of the elbow), there’s enough woman there to keep two or three fellows busy all the night long.

He likes to stretch his legs after a day spent bending over the limestone face or peering into the innards of the cantankerous old steam channeler. The quarry is only a few years old, discovered in 1896 by a farmer digging a well behind his house, and sold four years later (a steal, an outright swindle, some say) to one William Garson, owner and proprietor. Already 100,000 tons of stone have been cut and carried away, and already the landscape has been transformed so that the earth steps down in tiers like an open air arena, the shelves measuring some 12 to 36 inches in height. There is controversy about how much stone actually lies beneath the ground. Some say, the way things are going, the place will be quarried out in five or ten years; others, more optimistic, and more knowledgeable, estimate the seam to be half a mile wide and to run all the way to Winnipeg and beyond.

The stone itself, a dolomitic limestone, is more beautiful and easier to handle than that which my father knew growing up in Stonewall, Manitoba. Natural chemical alterations give it its unique lacy look. It comes in two colours, a light buff mixed with brown, and (my favourite) a pale gray with darker gray mottles. Some folks call it tapestry stone, and they prize, especially, its random fossils: gastropods, brachiopods, trilobites, corals and snails. As the flesh of these once-living creatures decayed, a limey mud filled the casings and hardened to rock. My father has had only limited schooling, but he’s blessed with a naturalist’s curiosity and not long ago he hacked out a few of the more interesting fossil pieces and carried them home to show to his wife, Mercy. (The stone with which she weighted her Malvern pudding on the day of my birth contained three fused fossils of an extremely rare type, so rare that they have never to this day been properly classified.)

What is it that makes Cuyler Goodwill walk home at the end of the day with the sun still hot and yellow overhead, what makes him whistle the way he does? I’ve already said he likes to stretch his cramped muscles after his hours of toil, and I imagine—this is a particular fancy of mine—that he likes to extend his very limbs, to feel himself grow taller, bigger, stronger as he moves closer to home, closer to the man he is about to become. A husband. A lover. He is awaited. This is an unlooked-for gift of happiness—to be awaited. He possesses a roof (rented to be sure but a roof none the less), and a supper table already set, and a wife he worships. Body and soul, he worships her.

Nothing in his life has prepared him for the notion of love. Some early damage—a needle-faced father, a dishevelled stick of a mother, the absence of brothers and sisters—had persuaded him he would remain all his life a child, with a child’s stunted appetite.

His family, the Goodwills, seemed left in the wake of the stern, old, untidy century that conceived them, and they give off, all three of them, father, mother, child, an aroma of impotence, spindly in spirit and puny of body. The house they lived in faced directly on to the lime kilns of Stonewall. It sat at the end of a dirty road, its porch askew. The windows, flecked with yellow ash from the kilns, went unwashed from one year to the next, and the kitchen roof leaked; it had always leaked. In rainy weather the chimney smoked. Bread baked in this house was heavy, uneven, scarce. Wages that might have been spent on repairs or small luxuries were kept in an old jam pot, the dollar bills heaped up there like crushed leaves, soiled, aromatic. In the summer time the men of the town might gather at the corner of Jackson and Maria for a game of horseshoes, but the Goodwill men, father and son, were seldom asked to take part. The reasons for their exclusion are not clear. Perhaps it was assumed that they were indifferent to forms of recreation or that they lacked essential skills, or that they might contaminate the others with their peculiar joyless depletion. Sharp-eyed Mrs. Goodwill, on the other hand, out of some worn Christian persuasion, pinned a felt hat to her head each Sunday morning and attended services at the Presbyterian Church, but no one suggested that Cuyler come along.

No inquiries, in fact, were ever made as to his spiritual or physical health. His opinion was not sought on any issue. His growing skill as a stone worker was seldom remarked on. Until the day of his marriage, not one person had given thought to taking his photograph. No mention was made of his birthdays (November 26)—there were no gifts forthcoming, no cakes, no bustle of ceremony, though when he turned fourteen his father looked up from a plate of fried pork and potatoes and mumbled that the time had come to leave school and begin work in the Stonewall Quarries where he himself was employed. After that Cuyler’s wages, too, went into the jam pot. This went on for twelve years.

It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity. Even the sentence parts seize on the tongue, so that to say ‘Twelve years passed’ is to deny the fact of biographical logic. How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced—and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation. For twelve years, from age fourteen to twenty-six, my father, young Cuyler Goodwill, rose early, ate a bowl of oatmeal porridge, walked across the road to the quarry where he worked a nine-and-a-half-hour day, then returned to the chill and meagreness of his parents’ house and prepared for an early bed.

The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course; I admit the truth of this; even our own stories are obscenely distorted; it is a wonder really that we keep faith with the simple container of our existence. During that twelve-year period it is probable that my father’s morning porridge was sometimes thin and sometimes thick. It is likely, too, that he rubbed up against the particulars of passion, snatched from overheard conversations with his fellow workers or the imperatives of puberty, or caught between the words of popular songs or rare draughts of strong drink. He did attend the annual Bachelors’ Ball, he did shake the hand of Lord Stanley when the old fellow steam-whistled through in 1899. My father was not blind, despite the passivity of his youthful disposition, nor was he stupid. He must have looked about from time to time and observed that even in the dead heart of his parents’ house there existed minor alterations of mood and varying tints of feeling. Nevertheless, twelve working years passed between the time he left school and the day he met and fell in love with Mercy Stone and found his life utterly changed. Miraculously changed.

Stonewall in those days was a town of a mere two thousand souls, but some accident of history or perception had kept the two of them apart, and he had never, as a child and then a man in that town, laid eyes on her, had never heard mention of her name. She grew up, cloistered as any nun, in the Stonewall Orphans Home, an austere, though by no means heartless, establishment at the eastern edge of town. Here at the Stonewall Home, out of an impulse for order or perhaps democratization, all constituents lacking family names of their own, that is to say infants given over to the institution’s care by their unmarried mothers, were called Stone—thus the register ran through the likes of Bertha Stone, Caroline Stone, Gareth Stone, Hyram Stone, Lamartine Stone, and so forth, coming down to my mother, Mercy, whose lineage, like the others, was entirely unknown, though her colouring, her fine hair and hazel eyes, suggested Ukrainian parentage, or perhaps Icelandic. She was left when only a few days old, wrapped in a flannel blanket—for the June nights could be cool—and placed in the old flour barrel that sat close by the back door of the institution. These flour-barrel babies, as they came to be called, were looked after by the township, given an elementary schooling, taught a trade, and sent at fourteen or fifteen into employment—except for my mother, whose housekeeping skills made her too valuable to part with. At the age of sixteen she was assisting the housekeeper on a regular basis; four years later, when the old housekeeper died, she assumed full command.

Her body reflected her diet of bread and porridge, but despite her girth—by age ten she was ‘heavy,’ at twenty she was elephantine—despite this she liked to get down on her hands and knees and polish a floor till it shone. Sometimes, bending over to take a rack of pies from the warm oven, she felt herself grow dizzy with pride—the gold of crisp pastry, the bubbling of sweet fruit, the perfection of colour and texture. She took only a passing interest in the dozen or so boys and girls who lived in the Home—‘Mercy Stone weighs forty stone’ was chanted as a skipping rhyme among the foundling girls—but she loved to lay a table, thicken a sauce, set a sleeve, to starch and iron and fold a stack of neat linens. She was gifted. And her gifts were put to use. Worse lives can be imagined. When she stepped into a room, the girls’ dormitory, for instance, her eyes went round to take in whatever was disorderly or broken or in need of a good buffing, and then she rolled up her sleeves and went straight to work.

On a spring day in her twenty-eighth year, a day of brilliant sunshine and cold breezes, it came to her notice that the door sill at the main entrance of the Home had heaved upward, displaced no doubt by severe frost, so that the door now opened with difficulty, making a wretched screeching sound. A mason was called to reset the stone. He turned out to be my father, Cuyler Goodwill.

He was at once taken with my mother’s gentleness, a certain graciousness in her face, and the way her hands moved distractedly, one circling inside the other as she stood beside him, prompted perhaps by some obscure notion of social obligation—but he was moved beyond anything he had imagined by her sheer somatic presence. Her rippling generosity of flesh and the clean floury look of her bare arms as she pointed out the irregularity in the door framing stirred him deeply, as did her puffed little topknot of hair, her puff of face, her puffed collar and shoulders—framing an innocence that seemed to cry out for protection. He yearned to put his mouth against the inside shadow of her elbow, or touch with his fingertips the hemispheres of silken skin beneath her eyes, their exquisite convexity.

As he worked, she stood close by, keeping him company, speaking in her halting way of the harshness of the winter, the worst in years, bitter winds, deep frosts, and now it seemed there was flooding in the fields south of Tyndall.

Yes, my father replied, looking up at her, studying her solemn mouth, he had heard news of the flooding, the situation was very grave, but then—he lifted his small shoulders—flooding occurred every year at this time.

He noticed that my mother’s corpulence had swallowed up much of her face but had spared her pure, softly fringed eyes.

He refused payment for the work, saying it had taken him less than an hour to set the stone right, that it was work he took pleasure in, a change from the monotony of the quarry, and besides—nodding vaguely in the direction of the door, the roof, the facade of the Home, the cluster of noisy children playing near the road—besides, he said, he felt moved to offer what he was able. She insisted, then, that he come into the big warm kitchen, where she served him coffee and one of her brown sugar slices, just out of the oven. These slices were a miracle of sweetness, of crispness, their pastry layers neat and pretty, and the filling richly satisfying.

He held his cup and saucer on his knee. Later he remembered looking down at his thumbnails and at the dark outline of dirt that defined them. His hands shook, but he managed to say, ‘May I come again?’

She stared hard, imagining the bony plate of his chest beneath his shirt, then busied herself clearing away the crockery, moving away from him. This pleading man made no sense to her. Words flew out of his mouth and melted into the warm kitchen air. She liked him better, though, for his trembling hands and the faint oniony smell of his sweat. Despite herself, she turned and offered him a strained smile.

‘We could go walking?’ he suggested.

‘I’m not,’ she said helplessly, turning toward him and gesturing weakly, ‘much of a one for walking.’

‘Please,’ he said, astonishing himself with his courage. ‘We could sit and talk, if you like.’

She gave him a dry, shy look which he interpreted as a form of assent.

Ahead of him, turning over like the pages of a heavy book, he saw the difficulty of all he would have to learn, of courtship, of marriage itself and its initiations, of a new way of speaking. The thought of so much effort brought him close to discouragement, yet he felt driven to carry on, to learn what he needed to know and to test his strength. Within a month he had exacted a promise from her. She would become his wife. They would move to the village of Tyndall thirty miles away where he had been offered a job in the new quarry. He announced his intentions to his mother and father—who were stunned into silence—and a wedding day was set.

People smiled to see them together, this timid, boy-bodied, besotted young man leaning attentively toward the immense woman, taking her wide, heavy hand on his lap and stroking it delicately. It was observed that he was an inch or two shorter than she. Standing at the doorway of the Home, saying goodnight, he placed his fingers on her broad cheek, tracing the outline of her curved pink untroubled skin.

From the beginning he knew that Mercy Stone’s ardour was of a quality inferior to his own, of a different order altogether, and this seemed to him to be natural, rightful. The potency and fragrance of erotic love that overwhelmed him so suddenly in his twenty-sixth year was answered by Mercy with mild bewilderment. She was not cold toward him, not in the least, but returned his first shy eager embraces with a sighing acquiescence. About their future life together she seemed incurious, almost indifferent, though the fact that they would be let a modest company house did stir a response—her own home to order and arrange and run as she pleased. She would like that, she told Cuyler shyly. It was something she had not expected ever to have. She was, you might say, a woman who recognized the value of half a loaf.

When, in 1903, he married Mercy Stone, my father knew nothing of women, the hills and valleys of their bodies or the bent of their minds, and he had no idea at all how to organize a household, where to begin, what might be expected. Certainly he could not look to his laconic parents for an example, though they did rouse themselves to the extent of attending the simple marriage ceremony and presenting a wedding gift, the adamantine clock which chimed the hour, never failing to remind him of his luck in throwing off his old comfortless arrangements for a new set of pleasures, all the bleak rooms of his life freshly ordered and radiant.

He was changed. The tidal motion of sexual longing filled him to the brim, so that the very substance of his body seemed altered. He felt that he carried in his head some ancient subtle strand of memory, a luminous image of proof and possibility, the coast and continent of achieved happiness. He had no learning, knew little of history or of literature, had never been told that men in medieval times were put to bed with a disease called lovesickness, which was nothing more than a metaphysical assault too strange and powerful to be absorbed by simple flesh.

All day, at work in the quarry, breathing in clouds of mineral dust, my father thinks of his Mercy, the creases and secrets of her body, her fleshy globes and clefts, her hair, her scent, her way of turning toward him, offering herself—first bashfully, then finding a freer ease of movement. She sighs as their bodies join—this is true, he cannot deny it—but he loves even her sigh, its exhaustion and surrender. Lying together in their shallow bed, she is embarrassed about the attentions of his hands, though by accident her own fingers have once or twice brushed across his privates, touching the damp hair encircling his member and informing him of the nature of heaven. He is not repelled by the trembling generosity of her arms and thighs and breasts, not at all; he wants to bury himself in her exalting abundance, as though, deprived all his life of flesh, he will now never get enough. He knows that without the comfort of Mercy Stone’s lavish body he would never have learned to feel the reality of the world or understand the particularities of sense and reflection that others have taken as their right.

He dares not concern himself with the future for fear of disturbing the present—but the thought sometimes comes of a satisfaction even fuller than what he knows—of a more commodious house, lit in the evenings with brighter lamps and perhaps—why not?—children asleep in the rooms overhead. In his early married days Cuyler Goodwill came close to weeping as he observed the arrangement of his wife’s kitchen shelves, the stacked plates and separated cutlery, the neatly stored foodstuffs—rice, flour, sugar—that represent her touching, valiant provisioning for the future, but, in fact, it is only the present that he requires.

It is miracle enough to find that love lies in his grasp, that it can be spoken aloud, that he, so diffident, so slow, so thwarted by the poverty of his own beginnings, is able to put into words the fevers of his heart and at the same time offer up the endearments a woman needs to hear. The knowledge shocked him at first, how language flowed straight out of him like a river in flood, but once the words burst from his throat it was as though he had found his true tongue. He cannot imagine, thinking back, why he had believed himself incapable of passionate expression.

This is what he thinks about as he walks home from the quarry, how in a mere two years he has been transported to a newly created world. (With the toe of his boot he kicks along a loose stone, exactly as a schoolboy might do, and he draws into his lungs the dry smell of dust suspended over the fields. Nothing will ever seem so fine to him as the air on the Quarry Road in July of the year 1905.) His body at the end of the afternoon is pleasantly tired, but he cherishes each minor ache of bone and muscle, knowing that his day, even an ordinary Monday like today, will be rounded by rapture. He will wash himself clean when he arrives home, eat a good supper washed down by tea, and enter forthwith, before the sun has sunk from view, that other reality, wider and richer than any mere bed might be thought to afford: the gathering of tenderness, rising blood, a dark downward swirl of ecstasy, and then—this seems to him particularly precious—the miraculous reward of shared sleep, his beloved beside him, her breath dissolving into his. A coil of her hair will be loosened on the shared pillow and without waking her he will kiss the tips of this hair.

What a distance he has come! Now when he looks into the faces of other men, even his own dull-witted father, he thinks: so this is what the world offers us in exchange for our labour—this precious spark of joy!

A breeze is coming up. He’s walking faster now. The Quarry Road takes him across flat, low-lying fields, marshy in spots, infertile, scrubby, the horizon suffocatingly low, pressing down on the roofs of rough barns and houses. A number of Galician families have settled lately in this area, building their squat windowless cottages which the women plaster over with a mixture of mud and straw. At one time he would have looked at such houses and imagined nothing but misery within. Now he knows better. Now he has had a glimpse of paradise and sees it everywhere.

Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to us. Our own memory is altogether too cherishing, which is the kindest thing I can say for it. Other accounts are required, other perspectives, but even so our most important ceremonies—birth, love, and death—are secured by whomever and whatever is available. What chance, what caprice!

My own birth is attended by Clarentine Flett, a woman half-crazed by menopause and loneliness, and in mourning for her unlived life, who two months later will climb aboard a train for Winnipeg and leave her husband forever, not because he beat her or betrayed her, but because he withheld the money (two dollars and fifty cents) she required in order to consult Dr. Spears about an abscessed tooth.

Another witness, wringing his hands most terribly and wailing loudly, is Abram Gozhdë Skutari, aged thirty-four, known locally as the old Jew, a peddler of trinkets, born in the Albanian village of Prizren, the son of a Sephardic maker and trader of nails, who was the son of a professional scribe who was the son of a rabbi who was—the history (compiled by Skutari’s Canadian grandson, and later published, McGill University Press, 1969) goes back to the fifteenth century—born of a woman famous in her region for having given birth to twenty-eight children, all of whom lived to an old age and who paid her tribute at the time of her death, then quarrelled viciously over her bedcoverings and pots.

Also present at my birth is Dr. Horton Spears, aged fifty-five, who had been hurriedly fetched by the old Jew, interrupted while taking a cup of coffee, a mid-afternoon indulgence, with his wife, Rosamund, who had returned, buoyant, from the woods north of the village with a new butterfly specimen for her collection, and who was attempting, with her spectacles sliding down her long, narrow, unlovely nose and her books spread wide on the dining-room table, to find its name and correct classification. Dr. Spears is a man of ardent sanity and tact who possesses a rich, secret, almost feminine sensibility.

And there too is my father, Cuyler Goodwill, young, brave-chinned, brimming with health and with gratitude for what life has so unexpectedly given him, hungry for the supper already prepared, eager for whatever tenderness the evening will bring. His small dark face and sinewy body burst through his back door, the tune he has been whistling dying on his lips as he falls upon this scene of chaos, his house with its unanticipated and unbearable human crowding, a strange sharp scent rising to his nostrils, and a high rhythmic cry of lamentation—where is this coming from, where?—these terrifying vowel sounds, iii-yyeeee, spiralling upward and joining the derangement of linen and of air, at the centre of which lies his wife—on the blood-drenched kitchen couch, its gathered cretonne cover—my mother, her mountainous body stilled, her eyes closed. ‘Eclampsia,’ Dr. Spears says solemnly, pulling a sheet—no, not a sheet but a tablecloth—up over her face, and staring at my father with severity. ‘Almost certainly eclampsia.’

Shadows from the open door are printed upon the floor. And there lay I on the kitchen table, dragged wet from my fetal world, tiny, bundled, blind, my heartbeat contingent upon a series of vascular valves which are as fragile as the petals of flowers and not yet, quite, unfolded. Where, you ask, is the Malvern pudding, weighted with its ancient stone? It has been set aside, as has my mother’s cookery book. They will not be seen again in this story. I am swaddled in—what?—a kitchen towel. Or something, perhaps, yanked from Clarentine Flett’s clothesline, a pillowslip dried stiff and sour in the Manitoba sun. My mouth is open, a wrinkled ring of thread, already seeking, demanding, and perhaps knowing at some unconscious level that that filament of matter we struggle to catch hold of at birth is going to be out of reach for me.

Everyone in the tiny, crowded, hot, and evil-smelling kitchen—Mrs. Flett, the old Jew, Dr. Spears, Cuyler Goodwill—has been invited to participate in a moment of history.

History indeed! As though this paltry slice of time deserves such a name. Accident, not history, has called us together, and what an assembly we make. What confusion, what a clamour of inadequacy and portent. Mourners have the power to charge the air with blame, but these are not yet mourners. A delirium of helplessness binds them together, or rather holds them apart.

The adamantine clock chimes six, and on the final stroke these witnesses turn and look at each other, and at me, the uninvited guest. The mysteries, secrets, and lies of their separate selves dance like atoms across a magnetic field so that the room, this simple low-ceilinged country kitchen, is charged with the same kind of vibrancy that precedes a cyclone. I am almost certain that the room offers no suggestion to its inhabitants of what should happen next, what words might be spoken, what comforts are available, tea, whisky, or the jointed, stuttering rhetoric of piety. These good souls, for that’s what they are, are borne up by an ancient shelf of limestone, gleaming whitely just inches beneath the floorboards, yet each of them at this moment feels unanchored, rattling loose in the world between the clout of death and the squirming foolishness of birth.

Embarrassed, or perhaps ashamed, they cast their gaze one last time on the great white covered form of Mercy Stone Goodwill who lies before them, silent and still as a boat, a stranger in the world for all of her life, who has given her child the last of her breath.

It’s this wing-beat of breath I reach out for. Even now I claim it absolutely. I insist upon its literal volume and vapours, for however hard I try I can be sure of nothing else in the world but this—the fact of her final breath, the merest trace of it lingering in the room like snow or sunlight, burning, freezing against my sealed eyelids and saying: open, open.