And I took her elbows and lifted, those divine breasts against my ache as she rose.
Because in some other life, she was my student. I don’t know. I think I’d heard that some teachers made it, as we used to say, with their students. I didn’t have a rule, not a written rule or hard and fast (excuse me) rule, but I just never had it off with a student. With a former student, well, yeah, but.
She took it well, though she seemed to be a confused Maritimer girl. Later I saw her at the party, and I was there with Honey, and of course I got only the tiniest bit drunk, which was a good thing, because I had to help a somewhat more tipsy Muriel Rukeyser through the revolving door at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. I thought she may have been thinking it would be okay if I helped her up to her room.
This boulder was resting on the edge of a long drop, on a stone shelf, smaller rocks around its bottom. Someday, maybe in the thirtieth century, it was going to go down, coming to rest on the flat land below, where several boulders had been lying for centuries, making a landscape far different from the orderly rows of fruit trees with a highway beside a river cutting through.
I was pretty sure I could get behind it and push hard enough to send it on its gravitational voyage. But what if it were to give way suddenly and I were unable to stop myself, following it into the mountainside air? I was carrying my hiking stick; maybe instead of pushing from behind the rock, I could use my stick to loosen the smaller rocks that were in front of it, holding it from rolling down. I managed to loosen a couple of these smaller rocks and send them thumping down the steep slope, but my boulder just moved a little forward.
Okay, I could just say I had done a century’s worth of erosion already and that was enough for this trip.
But no. If I am anything, I am a completist, which you might guess from the rest of this confessional running off of the mouth or whatever it is when you are writing it instead of speaking it. What I mean to say is that once started on this boulder, I had to get it off its perch.
I sat behind it and put my feet up, made a little prayer to God just in case, and pushed as hard as I could with my legs — and in a few seconds my feet were pushing mountain air. That boulder made a lot of noise going down. Once it hit something and went arcing out into the sunlight for a while, and as it thumped its way down Big Rock Candy, it loosened a lot of smaller rocks and stones and dirt, and then it was gone. I never got to see it land. When I climbed down to the flat bench I did not go looking for my boulder. I walked home as usual with my eyes down, watching for snakes.
But as I walked, I allowed guilt to meet me and cover my head all the way into town and up the paved hill to our house. When I was around five my father and I climbed several times, and he told me one of his serious things, this one being that you should never roll rocks down the hill. You should try to imagine what it would be like to be down there when a huge rock was on its way down to where you were. Now, by the time I got home and into the kitchen for a glass of Frostade, I wanted to undo the whole afternoon. It wouldn’t be too many days until I was pretty sure there had been someone down there.
I always listened to the news on the radio, but news from Lawrence seldom made the newspapers. On Thursday I read the local paper, but the paper hardly ever reported any news from the reserve in those days. I kept my ears open every time I heard people talking on the sidewalks.
It wasn’t too long till I was pretty sure I had killed someone, and I wondered whether there was someone I should tell about the boulder. The police, or Manuel Louie, or at least Bob Small. I decided to put it off for a week, and then I’d see.
Once in a while I find myself in Vernon, up there in the less familiar end of the valley, and three times in the last half a century I have found my way to Rick’s grave. The first time, when I was still a youngish cigarette-smoking demolition poet, I left a king-sized Export “A” ciggie on his stone. The most recent time I was with some other people, touring the valley for a semi-bogus literary reason, and that was lucky because though I was able to find the graveyard, and though I knew I had to be near the uphill edge of it if I were to have any hope of locating the name his family gave him, I just ran out of luck. Until a lovely Métis woman I had met only a couple days before called my name and then Rick’s.
She was not at all like the Métis woman I always danced with at the hall in Portage la Prairie, where Rick and I heard a young fellow singing Elvis songs when Elvis songs were still exciting and he was still skinny. I was sort of going with her, but I was still a few months short of my first full-bore piece of tail, as we used to say. She wanted me to go to a fiddle contest with her. I told her the names of some saxophone players she had never heard of. I gave her my ID bracelet, and it turned her wrist from light brown to green, but she still wore it, and I was encouraged.
Once I tried to impress her friends by lighting a cigarette with a burning twenty-dollar bill, but no one seemed to notice, so I made sure to put out the flame with 55 per cent of the bill remaining. One of her thinner friends told me months later that she could have gone for me if I had only had my eyes open. I used to slouch against a wall with my eyes at half-lid, to look mysterious in the common Manitoba night.
I was a twenty-one-year-old virgin and my body was buzzing all the time. I figured I must be the only twenty-one-year-old virgin in the province of Manitoba at least. Truth is, I was too chicken to talk a girl into going all the way. I was also just getting toward the end of my secret career as a quiet Christian boy. What I needed was a horny friend of my mother, but there didn’t seem to be such a thing, so my two-week leave in Lawrence was chaste. Sometimes I would open my eyes right up, but most of the time I thought I was the central character in a youth flick.
What I needed, and this would be a pattern all my life, was a female human animal who would take the initiative. Somehow I was able to resist verbal hints and provocative postures. It was as if I were being faithful to a girlfriend I didn’t have –– unless Wendy Love was going to consider me yet again.
I mean, I needed a young woman to say the magic words. A number of them tried, I think. Remember, this was in the 1950s, when a young woman would not admit to knowing certain words, and a young man often said them only to impress his friends.
Sometimes I think I was not sufficiently trained to get around in the normal world, that place where non-readers spent all their time. I spent my most meaningful time in books, mainly novels and short stories, not as an expert, not yet as a writer, just someone who loved the gleam of a drugstore paperback before opening it and falling into the first hundred pages.
This was long before I sold my soul to a drugstore paperback outfit that liked the way I could paint horses and revolvers, and didn’t hold out for too much money.
Around the time I am talking about, I was crazy for the Danny O’Neill stories of James T. Farrell. It got so that I was almost, but not, you understand, really, walking the pavement-patched streets of Chicago, where immigrant parents didn’t have time to keep tabs on their sons. I remember that in my diary, unsophisticated as it was, I asked how come James T. Farrell knew so much about what was in my heart, what I was thinking while doing my repetitive job with my hands and a small portion of my brain.
Whenever I mentioned James T. Farrell to a rare fellow reader he said something along the lines of “Oh yeah, Studs Lonigan. The young gangster. Pretty real, I guess.”
“No. I have read the Studs Lonigan books, but I’m more interested in Danny O’Neill. A World I Never Made.”
“Did you know that A.E. Housman died in the year that was published?”
“Well, no, but what?”
“I, a stranger, lonesome and afraid, Asshole.”
This was a young man my age who had read a lot more than I had, or at least had better reading habits. I felt embarrassed, maybe even humiliated, and I don’t know whether that was his intent, didn’t know how serious he was in the nickname he’d called me by. But
in a few years I had read Housman and his Juvenal, and I was thankful to my fellow reader. No star, I thought, is lost.
All my life I have flipped Housman aside as poetry not worth reading much in a lifetime that isn’t likely to let you read all you should. Now I am an old man, repeatedly close to the last delivery, and wondering how to fit Housman in.
I’m what you might call a shopworn lad.
But we were talking about (or so we typists say) a time during which I changed from being a traditional lad to seeming to be a container of knowledge.
Portage la Prairie, for us airmen at RCAF Macdonald, was the nearest town for beer parlours and dance halls, and poontang, if you were that lucky. The beer parlours were not strict about the age limit, which was twenty-one in Manitoba in those days. And as I’ve mentioned, people like Rick hid bottles of wine in the tall grass because last call at the beer parlours, where women were not allowed, by the way, was called at 9:45 p.m. However, the cab ride from the beer parlour to the dance hall was assessed at seventy-five cents, and five airmen could get into the cab. This was not an intellectual life.
But after a couple years, when my discharge was a few months away, Portage became something else. I had a friend who had a girlfriend in town, and his girlfriend had a friend, and you probably know how that goes. We went to the park and had picnics, can you imagine? We went to the agriculture museum and had our pictures taken on harvesters and the like. For a while I was the most-recently-arrived person in a foursome, and I behaved as an easygoing young westerner ought to. In short order I became Ellen’s steady. I had had other steadies in other air force towns, so I wasn’t expecting all that much. I had made it this far, hard to believe, as an innocent, and I asked myself how many ways I could remain special, for heaven’s sake. I was also just about at the end of the line in my relationship with God.
As you know, I was a book-reading young man, and of course I would compare my life and how I conducted it with the lads and young men in the books I bought, most often those drugstore paperbacks, or as I later learned to call them, mass market paperbacks. Back in those days a good percentage of those twenty-five-cent books were by F. Scott Fitzgerald or John Steinbeck, not so many by the authors whose names you see embossed in airport waiting rooms nowadays.
Not that those books told us the stories of male defloration; I don’t know whether it ever occurred to me that Lieutenant Henry and Catherine were having it off between chapters. When you are an innocent trying to look like a sophisticate, who knows or will remember what hints might be laid out there by Mr. Farrell and how many were developed in the boy reader’s mind.
The boy was kind of a purist in other ways too. He consumed books like mad, but he did not collect them. As soon as he was finished, say, Donovan’s Brain by Curt Siodmak, he would pass it on to another airman to read, but as for the 1955 issue of Baseball Stars with Stan Musial on the cover? He would still have that more than half a century later. Passing on a novel he had just finished reading was a little like taking part in erosion, one of the many personal things he could never describe to anyone else.
I can’t remember why this lad was toting a Speed Graphic around town that day or whether it was legal for him to carry it off the base for personal use. Once in a while I come across one of the four-by-fives I shot that day, and I remember that the other guy’s name was Mel, but I don’t recall his girlfriend’s name. I would keep running across Mel in other provinces and territories in the years to come. Ellen I always wanted to see again, sort of. At this moment of typing I suddenly remember being on the train leaving the air force and the Prairies. I imagined continuing to be with her. I have often told young writers that they would be courting ridicule if they ever employed the word suddenly in their fiction.
There is a photograph of Ellen and me lying together on a public lawn somewhere in Portage, she in her long coat, he kissing her perhaps awkwardly, the shine of oil in his hair that was as long as you could get away with in the air force.
I love being a writer when it comes to pronouns.
In the following scene, I guess, he went up the stairs and later I came down them.
Ellen was an actual farmer’s daughter. I went with her to her parents’ farm once, not that far from town. They lived in a farmhouse on a little island in a little lake on the baldheaded prairie. Well, there was a strong little bridge you could cart furniture or boyfriends across, eh? We had mashed potatoes with gravy. I might have gone there again, but there was the question of time, or so I say.
I thought it fitting, and later liked to mention to people, that I was delivered of my innocence by an older woman. I think she was less than a year older, maybe a year, but still . . . She was also a mother, so there was a baby in our lives, with numerous people to take care of her. Among these was Ellen’s landlady, Mrs. Smith. For years later, while I was not corresponding with Ellen, I exchanged yearly letters with Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Smith was a little crippled and a little swarthy, kind of mysterious and welcoming in the way that Manitoba people like to have people think they are. She was from Malta, and that was the source of all the mystery. I don’t know why I didn’t quiz her about her background and life; maybe I wanted the mystery. Ellen was quite a nice-looking, not glamorous, farmer’s daughter from the Canadian breadbasket. Mrs. Smith, with her two teen sons, was probably, I thought, the daughter of an Englishman and a Maltese, whatever they were.
Years later I would find a few Maltese people on the Rock of Gibraltar, where I lost sight of Honey for most of a night.
I wish I had studied the history of Malta when I was a schoolboy. There’s this rock in the middle of the sea, between continents, between the East and the West. Ruled by Phoenicians and Romans, Byzantines and Normans, the Knights Templar and Napoleon, the loved and detested Brits. Can you imagine? In 1924 British Malta had a prime minister named Sir Ugo Pasquale Mifsud. He would be followed by Sir Gerald Strickland. Nowadays, Italian has been turfed as an official language in independent Malta, leaving English and Maltese to do the job. Maltese, you will be interested to know, is the only Semitic language written in the European alphabet. Oh, I wish I had another lifetime, so I could devote years to Malta.
Anyway, Mrs. Smith looked sort of Middle Eastern, and she was a kind hobbling woman. I never did find out how come Ellen and her baby lived with her, but Mrs. Smith meant a lot to me. If you plunked me down in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, today, I could find my way to her house, where I visited with my single language sixty years ago, during the last years of British rule on that Mediterranean rock.
When I think back on that house now, I think about how kind Mrs. Smith was to Ellen, how kind and how respectful. I never did meet the father of the baby, and I was a pretty gangly young man, but Mrs. Smith never snooped, never pried, never questioned my intentions. What an unusual correspondence I would have with her for years, following the lives of her sons and her endurance of pain. I’d give her gifts if she were alive and I were sensitive.
Anyway, one afternoon or evening or something, Ellen and I were in her room, no baby around, and I had taken a few shots that day with my borrowed Speed Graphic. Now we were mostly horizontal on her bed, and during some awkward motions various items of our clothing had found their way to the floor.
Eventually, she said the words that changed my life.
“You don’t want to stop, do you?”
What could I do? There was a part of me that wanted to stop, as I had done so many times before, in other beds, in other books. That was the chickenshit side, I suppose, or to put a better or maybe worse picture on it, the pure Christian side.
Did I proceed thankfully? Did I think she wanted to go on so much, being a young single mother on a bed with a young man better-looking and smarter than her husband, wherever he was?
Thankfully, I think. She showed me, reached down and placed it for me, whispered to me and used her short fingernails on my back. I did the best I kn
ew how, abandoning myself to our ties with forests and star clouds.
Then, honest to God, I got up and took hold of the loaded Speed Graphic and took a picture of her, of the moment, she has the little blanket to her neck but there is a bare shoulder in the picture I have just now looked at, her home-curled hair, a little mouth smile, and a really transported look in her eyes, I kid me not.
I think my chest was actually sticking out as I walked, camera in hand, to the RCAF bus that night.
I wanted to tell someone a witty narrative about exposures.
This morning I was sitting and thinking the way I often do now, after my cardiac arrest and induced coma and all that, and I was slightly shocked to realize that I can’t remember Ellen’s last name. I can remember Mrs. Smith’s last name and her first name. Her first name was Maude, but everyone called her Mary. One of her sons was Raymond; the other may have been Michael. But Ellen — what was her family name, and what was her married name?
I mean, for a while I wrote letters to her from wherever I was working in British Columbia, so I often wrote her name and address on envelopes. It might have been something like Douglas. Might have been. No, probably not. Can’t remember. I remember her round face and her short curled hair. I have a number of photographs of her. But her name is gone.
Come to think of it, I thought this morning, that is true of a number of women I once touched bare skin with.
Is that an all right way of putting it?
Anyway, my life changed a great deal when I left the air force and enrolled in the university. I was twenty-one, where most of them were nineteen. Up till then anything I wrote in the way of poems and stories and non-fiction I chucked, even if it was published in some paper or magazine — except for a very few items. Even a few years later, when I was writing a column in the arts pages of the university paper, and another in the hometown paper, I didn’t keep copies of these things.
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