Grover spoke next.
He recounted the story of how George had enticed him to Tildon, giving him six months’ pay, in a cash advance, and sweetening the pot by offering him the use of the apartment above the Chronicle’s office rent free, further promising him that there’d always be a plate for him at his dinner table. And how on the morning his six months were up he’d been packing his bags and had heard a knock at the door.
“It was George,” he said, “as I knew it would be.
“‘Getting an early start?’ he’d asked. ‘Train doesn’t leave until ten.’
“I told him I knew, grinning at him with the insolence of a young man with six months’ pay in my pocket and not a thing in the world to keep me from the promise of a whole new life, anywhere—and I mean anywhere—but here.
“He asked if he could walk me to the station and I told him it didn’t matter to me, weren’t nothin’ goin stop me from gettin’ on that train, I tellya that.”
Telling then of how after he joined the queue at the station’s ticket window he heard George’s voice alight from behind.
“‘It is a deep personal privilege to address a nation-wide Canadian audience,’ he was saying. He’d produced a milk crate from somewhere. He was standing on it and his eyes were roving over the half-dozen other people waiting for the train, all of them staring at him with the same startled unease as I, myself, felt, though there was no doubt in my mind that their discomfort and mine stemmed from an entirely different source.”
For, unlike the others, Grover had immediately recognized what George had said as the opening line in the Massey Lecture Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had delivered four years previously on the CBC and that he himself had heard along with his whole family and most of their neighbours, the lot of them cramped in the Parks’ living room listening in rapt amaze over four nights as if the voice of God himself was being transmitted through his father’s RCA console. Later, the speeches were published as Conscience for Change, one of only three books that Grover had brought with him to Tildon and which, at that very moment, was pressed inside his suitcase along with Soul on Ice and The Invisible Man.
“‘What the hell are you doing?’ I asked hurrying over to George, my anger mounting for I knew exactly what he was trying to do. And how dare he use His words towards his own selfish end!”
George ignored Grover’s desperate plea and the simmering rage hardly contained within his glaring eyes, answering him only, “Over and above any kinship of U.S. citizens and Canadians as North Americans there is a singular historical relationship between American Negroes and Canadians,” which was the speech’s second line.
He continued from there, delivering the third and fourth lines from memory and those leading him on and on with the same measured determination as a train chugging down its tracks. By the time he’d been speaking for ten minutes he’d attracted quite a crowd, accumulated in dribs and drabs as ten o’clock drew nigh. Grover was standing as its vanguard, his own anger deflating as the full weight of what George had done sunk in, and even more so by the force of the words flowing from between his lips. His voice had risen to the sonorous boom of their creator and, to Grover, it seemed he had become but a conduit through which the Reverend King was speaking directly to him.
He’d just got to the part—“You know the bit,” Grover had said as an aside, as if he’d taken it for granted that everyone should have known it as well as he did—where “negroes have endured insults and humiliation for decades and centuries but in the past ten years a growing sensitivity in the white community was a gratifying indication of progress, and the depravity of the white backlash shattered the hope that new attitudes were in the making.” Hearing this again, his younger variant couldn’t help but measure his own humiliations over the past six months against the ones endured by his brothers and sisters south of the border. Those were often accompanied by savage acts of brutality and the worst thing that had happened to him was the time someone had thrown a rock through his kitchen window late one night, “no small matter at the time,” Grover added, “alluding, as it did, to a violence yet to come.
“When the train’s whistle finally sounded from the far end of town, George was down to the last paragraph. The rest of the crowd was wandering off to wait in line or to say goodbye to their loved ones and I was the only person still standing before George as he stepped off the milk crate. He was grinning at me when he did and though I was trying not to, I couldn’t stop myself from grinning right back.”
Deacon had never heard the story told quite like that. On any other day he would have rejoiced in its telling, but sitting not five feet from Dylan he’d barely registered a word, fighting a losing battle to keep his glances towards him fleeting and when he’d failed at that, trying to find some crack in his calm and failing there too.
“George must have spent the last six months memorizing the speech,” Grover was saying from the pulpit, “and when I commented as much, he said, ‘Shoot, I started the moment you agreed to come with me.’
“‘Now why in the hell would you do that?’ I asked, and he answered, ‘Because I figured it might buy me another two months?’”
Grover then clenching his teeth, fighting back the tears. Loretta was too, as were the three children they’d raised, all of them a perfect blend of their parents and sitting alongside their mother in the pew behind Deacon amongst their husbands and wives and five children—the youngest still a baby and sitting in her mother’s lap, chewing on the braided tassels of her hair.
“It did,” Grover choked out.
Laughing then through tears.
“And don’t you know it, Loretta took the job at the library not three days later. And I don’t have the words in me to ever thank George enough for what he did.”
Grover shuffled back to his seat wiping his eyes and then Reverend Stephens was at the pulpit again.
“Uh, thank you Grover,” he said, pausing there, perhaps trying to think of something he might add and not finding the words, a strange enough feeling for a man who’d made his life out of always knowing exactly what to say. Looking down then at the piece of paper clipped to the pulpit’s stand, searching out the name that would show him a way forward and saying, “Deacon Riis, I understand, would also like to say a few words.”
Hearing his name came as a surprise. He’d since realized that he hadn’t told anyone he’d wanted to speak and had resigned himself to thinking maybe that was for the best. Grover, he now saw, must have spoken to someone on his behalf and with all eyes then beating into the back of his head, it left him little choice but to stand and step into the aisle. He locked his gaze on the pulpit’s microphone, telling himself that if only he could make it there without a sideways glance at Dylan, the next few minutes, at least, would take care of themselves.
The moment he reached the centre aisle he heard a familiar bark. He turned to the front leftside pew where Louise sat in the aisle seat, her husband, Ted, beside and their three teenage sons stretched at intervals towards the end. Trixie was lumbering up from the aisle, wagging her tail and straining against the leash held fast in Louise’s hand. Traces of the acrimony she felt towards Deacon lingered in her pursed lips as she jerked on Trixie’s lead, making the dog whimper and lie back down.
It seemed an unnecessarily harsh rebuke, and Deacon spun quickly on his heel, mounting the pulpit’s stairs and setting The Stray on its stand. He opened it to the page near the back he’d marked with an ace of spades playing card and, taking a deep breath, leaned into the microphone.
“I’d, uh, just like to read something George wrote,” he said. “It’s about my ma and pa.”
Clearing his throat, he began to read.
“He’d been walking for he didn’t know how long.
His feet were plodding with a will of their own, treading through the creek’s shallow, the water cold and numbing all sense of himself below his knees, fle
eing along this ragged vein, towards what end he couldn’t fathom nor did he care, only that it was leading him away from the bodies of the two young men he’d left on its bank—their blood on his hands and spattered over the wild fray of his beard and on his lips—knowing that it was a fool’s game, that he could flee to the ends of the earth and still never be free of them, for they had become a part of him, who he was and ever shall be: a taste of blood on his lips and the younger’s dying breath, a desperate plea: Niimi! Niimi!”
Carrying on from there his voice brokered a deathly still within the congregation, unmoored until he’d come to this:
“Scanning over the wall of flame remaking the clifftop into an inferno, he saw a figure perched at the edge of the precipice, her feet straddled in the thin veil of water cascading over the falls. Within the drench of smoke he couldn’t see much beyond that it was a young woman and that she wasn’t wearing any clothes. The dark triangle of her pubis and the two small mounds parting the hair draped to her waist left little doubt of that. The current’s flow was lapping at her ankles and she was raising her right hand. She was holding something in it, a sharpened stick or perhaps a bone. Opening her fingers, she let it drop, her body then leaning forward after it, Asger gasping as she fell into the breach, watching her plummet, her arms limp, adrift like two lengths of loose cord.”
Deacon then hearing a corresponding gasp from near the front and looking up and finding Crystal with her hand over her mouth, aghast, so that he knew she’d never found the time to read it herself.
Turning back to the page then and finding his spot, pushing onwards.
“She struck the water headfirst, the splash in her wake consumed at once by the turbulent froth. Nothing then to remark on her passing but Asger’s footsteps imprinted in the sand, spaced at a run, leading to the edge of the beach, and the ripples spreading over the reflection of the madly keening flames infecting the pool’s veneer from where he’d dived in.
“He was down for a good while.
“When he came back up, he was clutching the young woman by the hair and dragging her onto shore. He set her on her back and kneeled at her side, wiping the water from her eyes. Her body convulsed and she vomited a thin gruel. She coughed twice after that but died nevertheless.”
The whole congregation now sniffling and dabbing at tears with neatly folded handkerchiefs or wadded-up tissues, crying like Deacon had so many times when he’d come to the same, not so much because of what George had written, which had always seemed like an ode to hopefulness imagining how the scene must have really played out, but because it spoke so clearly of an even greater tragedy yet to come.
Deacon’s thoughts in perfect alignment with theirs as he carried on through to the end.
“You ought to bury her, Asger thought, gazing down upon the girl. It’s the least you can do.
“But he was so tired he could barely stand. He’d have to carry her downstream, find a patch of ground where he could dig a hole with his bare hands, and hadn’t he heard, anyway, that her People laid their dead to rest in trees, so as to let the birds pick their bones clean.
“They’ll get her easy enough down here, he told himself, nodding with the same resolve he’d done when he’d first set out, a lifetime ago.
“Best get a move on, then.
“It would be a long walk home.”
23
“I’ll see you downstairs?”
Crystal was leaning over the rail in front of the pew, beseeching him with a warm smile as the organ piped the congregants out the door behind her: solemn pilgrims making their way to the reception in the basement’s auditorium.
Deacon didn’t yet have the strength for words and shook his head.
A hand touched Crystal on the shoulder. She turned to her father, her mother beside, finding support with one hand in the crook of his arm. In honour of George perhaps, Edward looked like he hadn’t shaved in going on a week. The first curls of white were poking through his beard’s chestnut and his eyes were red from crying through his own eulogy, though that hardly softened his expression. He cast a stern glance at Deacon on his way to saying to Crystal, “We’ll be downstairs.”
“Be there in a moment,” Crystal replied, turning back to Deacon as her parents joined the slow shuffle filing through the door.
Reaching over, she swept a loose strand of hair from his face, tucking it behind his ear and tracing the pad of her thumb along the scar above his left eye.
“I better make an appearance,” she said, straightening up. “See you after?”
Deacon gave her a noncommittal smile and then Dylan was pushing her along.
“Come on, then,” he said. “You’re blocking traffic and I’ve got a hankering for some of them canned ham and egg-salad sandwiches.”
His voice was cavalier and nothing in its tenor suggested it was anything but a harmless comment from someone who hadn’t yet eaten lunch, and here it was after two. But the sideways wink he gave Deacon made his meaning plenty clear, as did what he said next.
“We know what George’d have to say about those, eh, Deke, but I kinda like ’em.”
For hadn’t George, in the opening chapter of Marble Mountain, made his own feelings clear about the trays of canned ham and egg-salad sandwiches the women’s auxiliary would undoubtedly spend all morning preparing in the kitchen on occasions such as this?
There, the ghost of the deceased, an old man, wandered through a crowd of mourners gathered in the basement auditorium of a small-town church, eavesdropping on their conversations and trying to find anyone among them deserving to reap the harvest he’d sown over a lifetime of toil. Finding only bitterness and acrimony amongst his family and so-called friends, he took no small measure of delight in having had the foresight to empty his bank account the week before he’d died, stuffing the piles of hundreds into his old army rucksack and burying it six feet beneath the plot where he grew his prized tomatoes.
He laughed then, like he’d never laughed before, like he’d never thought he was even capable of laughing. He had always, in fact, been wary of people who laughed like this, believing laughter to be a sign of moral turpitude or, worse, simple-mindedness. He now saw that he’d been wrong about that. The thought that he’d wasted much of his life in flight from the unbridled joy that had suddenly overcome him, when it was about as useful to him now as the withered corpse laying in the chapel above, only made him laugh harder still.
And perhaps he would be laughing yet and this would be an entirely different tale had he not then felt something nudging at his arm.
He looked down at a young girl. She couldn’t have been older than four. She had a pink bow in her hair and was wearing a matching dress that was all too frilly for his taste. The front of it was drizzled with the blood-red punch from the plastic jug beside the coffee urn on the food table. In her right hand she held two triangles of white bread, their crusts cut off, the egg salad between them overflowing onto her dainty little fingers. And in her left, another sandwich leaking a mush of canned ham, mayonnaise, and diced pickles.
The expression on her face was so solemn and stern that the moment he set his eyes upon it the laughter that had threatened to consume him had suddenly withered.
Why are you laughing? the little girl asked when he’d gone quiet.
He hadn’t been dead long enough to realize how remarkable a moment this was. It would be years before another of what he would come to call “fleshbags” would have the kind of sense needed to see him. Had he known that then, he might have been a little less impatient to get back to his eavesdropping but as it was, he’d only been dead for two days and so can be forgiven if a little girl nudging his arm produced in him the same scorn he’d have felt when he was still amongst the living.
None of your damn business, he growled at her.
The girl scrunched her face, as if she couldn’t imagine that anyone could be so mean.
&n
bsp; My mom says you should never laugh at a funeral, she said after she’d recovered. She says it’s disrespectin’ to the person who died.
I’ll try to remember that. Now, go on, get.
The girl’s face scrunched again and the old man looked away but the little girl would not be deterred.
Do you want a sandwich? she asked. I have egg salad and ham.
The old man looked back down at her. She was holding them both up and the look of innocent benevolence in her expression had the old man searching about for something to say to teach her the error of her ways. It took only a moment before something occurred to him and he bent to the girl so he could whisper into her ear.
Do you want to know a secret? he asked.
What?
The best thing about being dead so far is that I’ll never feel inclined to eat another one of those.
It was Dylan’s way of telling him that he’d been lying about not reading George’s Fictions, as if the matter was still up for debate, the subtlety of its inference suggesting he knew them as well as Deacon himself, and perhaps even more so. It was a challenge then, of some sort, Dylan providing him another piece of the puzzle as if he were playing at being the villain in a Hollywood action movie, feeding the hero clues along the way. It had always seemed to Deacon a cheap device to drive the narrative, but now, in the despair he felt watching the congregants filing through the door, Deacon understood it served a more diabolical end: to isolate the hero, drive him crazy, knowing the villain had something nefarious planned and he couldn’t do a damn thing to stop it.
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