From the beginning he talked of the land. Maybe he was trying to say he was sorry. For the role he had begun to play in all our lives, for the figure he would become. Or maybe just once to say thank you, son, for saving my life. And just perhaps, in the last years, we drove once or twice together looking for my mother.
I drive these hills now, thinking about breaking old patterns, about opening some new road into a future. Maybe going overseas. There is a friend at a small college in Dubai. I imagine a curriculum of English and horse-breeding. Falconry.
I drive a while longer, thinking about my daughter.
Yesterday morning Elsa Aspen called to say Beulah had something to say to me. It was a very good sign apparently. June 19th. A good sign … I was not so sure. Asked or wrote? She’s stronger since my last visit. That was not a visit, I said. Would I come? There was an urgency I did not like the sound of. Would I come, please.
I have had time to think this question over. Exactly a season. I drove to Big Hill Springs yesterday afternoon, walked up along the creek winding through the wood below the grazed hills. My mother took me there when I was a boy. I was not much older than Catherine is now. I don’t know where my father was. There were just the two of us that day, as she walked me up into this wonder: a river starting fresh out of a hillside.
I should take Catherine up there soon, I will go into town to see her now. She’ll be bigger. I have to brace myself for this. At her age, one season is like forever.
It snowed last night. It began about three A.M., came down hard until six through a long, grey dawn. June 20th. It has snowed in each month of the past twelve. It is what we’re known for. Calgary weather. If you don’t like it, we say, wait ten minutes. It’ll change. The strange, wild winters, every year a little stranger. Snow in June; in February, powder skiers in sunblock and swimsuits. A kind of northern baroque.
I take the long way into town. First north through the wet snow then east under a wintry sun. Summer solstice, 9 A.M. I drive past the Baptist seminary. Up onto the tableland, then a right; the chipped saw-blade of mountains swings into the rearview mirror, dropping behind the deep swell of each hill as the car crests it.
The road rises and falls under a sky of cast aluminum, a pale rivet of sun. I drive past the Big Hill Springs turn-off and finally south towards the city. I follow secondary highway 722, through long prairie grass along the creek, smaller now, that begins at Big Hill Springs. I think of following that creek one day with Catherine, to see if it reaches a larger stream, or else runs dry somewhere to the east.
Fourteenth Street curves from south to west under the crown of Nose Hill, bald but for a little fringe of trees on the wetter, north side. Then curves back south, eventually, into Rosemont, one of the earliest suburbs, in what has become almost downtown.
I am glad to have taken the extra time. To figure out how to explain to Madeleine. Why I haven’t called, where I’ve been. To decide I won’t lie to her this time, I won’t lie to her again. To think about how I will ask to see Catherine.
I read the shock in Madeleine’s face to find me at the door. “How long have you been back?” In her eyes a flash of fury, at herself for asking this, at me for putting her in a position to. I see she does not really want the question answered. I think about not answering.
“Six weeks.”
“Six….”
I see her bite her lip, hard, bite back any comment. So as not to give me the satisfaction. But satisfaction is not what I would get.
I glance past Madeleine’s shoulder as Catherine runs around the corner and into the hall. She stops dead as she sees me. Never do I want to live through a moment more painful. It is just an instant really, of shyness, of not recognizing me. ‘Making strange’ we call it. It is like dying. Let me die before the next time comes. Never let it.
Whatever is in my face changes Madeleine’s mind. To let me in. To play with Catherine.
My daughter and I play outside, beside Margaret. White rabbit, hutched. We build a bunny out of melting snow to keep Margaret company. We build it where the barbecue used to be. While we work and talk, the summer sun burns the cloud to gauze, to mist, to blue. The snow melts off the sidewalks and then the green grass. It slips off droopy flower bulbs. We hold their heads up.
And everything is almost as before.
At lunch we eat two cheese sandwiches left on the table on the deck. Soon after, I leave and at the door Madeleine hands me one more little packet of dread.
“I don’t know why I’m giving you this. I don’t know why I kept it. Except to set it on fire one day and put it in your hands. I’ve been planning—rehearsing the moment, if I ever saw you. To hold Catherine up and as you reached out—to pull her back, to say, ‘Take a long, long look, Donald. For the last time. You will never see her again.’ I was ready to leave the country if I had to. And if you tried even once I’d make sure you never even knew where to write to her.”
If someone, if a man, can imagine falling in love with a character, say, with a woman in the pages of a book, could it be so hard for him to fall in love with his own wife again? If only he had paid attention.
If someone, if a man.
I drive down Crowchild Trail to Memorial Drive, west to 34th street, then up to the Foothills Hospital, where it stands above the Bow.
I sit in the parking lot, in the heat of the sun, a remnant of snow melting under the windshield wipers. I sit, and see all the women I have failed to love and forgotten, or have loved and forgotten how. I feel them all now, as though rolled up into a ball in my chest. All rolled up into a single person, that person who is me. I sit, hands at ten after two on the steering wheel.
After a while I get out. I walk around the west side of the grounds. Past the roaring column of a medical incinerator, venting what it has killed and what it maybe hasn’t. I sit a while at a scarred picnic table the maintenance crew appears to use for lunches, while they eat and talk and squint up the river valley.
I take the elevator to the seventh floor. I walk along the hall to the psychiatric nursing station. The duty nurse and a receptionist stand on either side of the Chief’s open door. The receptionist holds a phone receiver out at arm’s length in the doorway, the heel of her hand over the mouthpiece.
Dr. Elsa Aspen sits back, past that extended arm, behind an enormous cluttered desk, beside a fax machine sliding a message into the tray. Her own phone is wedged between shoulder and ear. The coiled cord disappears under a ragged line of straight red hair. She holds up a hand to keep her visitors at bay as she looks down, frowning in concentration.
Some kind of crisis it seems.
I walk past the duty station and down the hall. No need for note-takers, or chaperones. This won’t take long. There is only this parcel to return. Beulah might be needing it, if she is writing again. Anyway, it’s hers. For her to decide what to do with. Who knows how many more are out there. She should know I will be returning them all, all unopened. Like this one. I need to tell her this myself.
As I approach her door I feel my stomach lifting—a queasy solvent smell, and something like anaesthetic. The two slots beside the door are both empty of name tags now. Two beds through the window panel in the door. The one under the corner window is empty, newly made. On the other a woman’s form is draped in a pale green sheet. A janitor’s bucket and mop are pushed against the bathroom’s closed door. Sunlight streams in over the bed. A southwest corner view. The mountains, the river, a peaceful view. Familiar. Peaceful. This is important now.
How can they leave a bucket in a room with a dead woman? I feel an irritation sliding up to anger, then to a fear I cannot breathe with.
I stand a moment, fighting for breath.
I hear a light step.
Before I can turn I feel a small hand, its warmth on my shoulder.
They said she was stronger. They did not say she was signing herself out.
It is hard to speak. I give Beulah the packet. She has it now.
The June sun is hot i
n the late afternoon. Hardly a trace of last night’s snow as I drive back out west over the Trans-Canada, over deep swells of gold grass. In the troughs, stands of poplar are budding late, branches sharp through a faint spray of green. Ringing the sloughs are clumps of red brush, dogwood maybe, or alder. The hills are blue in the distance, below a line of white peaks.
I park beside the cabin, walk down to the Bow. Along the banks, among the alders and the poplars, are scattered still a few snow patches. Here and there, sprigs of Indian paintbrush, candles of vermilion against the white. Asters and goldenrod shaking their tops free.
If you bend low enough, look closely, right down on your hands and knees in the mud and the slush, you can see tiny wild strawberries, the palest pink. Not much larger than the pearl at the head of a tailor’s pin, but bursting, in a couple of weeks, with the most intense flavour, almost unrecognizably strawberry.
I walk west along the north bank, steam rising off the snow. A silver braid trembles in the stream where it narrows.
If there are many rivers left among us as beautiful as the Bow, I have not seen them. One other, once, in New Zealand … the Clutha, I think, under a hydro reservoir now. I follow the Bow’s baffled murmur, walk its passages. Soft tracts of a vague marble clatter.
Here and there in the stream glimmer highlights of an alluvial blue, a shift to mint as you turn to look, then to smooth jade in deeper water. The south bank winds in and out of shadow. Half in sun, half in shade, a flock of mallards gabble and preen in the shallows among the rocks. A drake, head of vivid emerald in the sun, spreads its glistening wings and shakes off a spume of rainbows—a whale’s-breath against the shadows.
What do you say to someone who doesn’t want to go on?
I have learned one answer is in the land.
Bundled in a blanket I sit out on the cabin’s veranda until after dark. Around midnight a locomotive pulls into a siding somewhere up the valley and begins assembling a pull. Now and again the bang of a coupling. The engine like a bellows that rises and falls in the quiet. Soon just quiet and stars. For twenty minutes or more.
Then, as I stand to go inside, I hear a whistle-blast. One long, pure, organ-chord that rolls away up the valley.
I am about to turn away again when I hear its echo. Ten seconds after, at least … coming from somewhere far off.
Then another blast. I count off a slow, steady ten to the echo. Over the next minute or so, three more chords. As though the engineer can hear over the engines, hear the echo return to him in the sweet-spot where he finds himself parked. Or maybe they all know the spot, and another railway man tugs on the whistle-cord while he stands a way off from the rails to listen.
Then they are off. Two longs, two shorts, and the roar of several engines at once. Then they are gone.
I have been afraid of so many things, I almost lose track. But I have not for a moment lost track of this dread, long known to the lesser breed of scholar—of a finer version of the truth, of some revolutionary discovery that overturns an entire life’s work. That makes of that life a sad jest. Or it is the forger’s fear of being confronted by the master.
I had begun to think my fear was that one day I would have her answer. That she would see what I have done and in her eyes I would read her judgement. That it would be devastating and clear. On the work I have finished for her, on the ending I have made.
But today, I discover at last it’s not quite as I thought, as I feared. It was not judgement there in her eyes today. There was a … kindness.
I have had my season here. Tomorrow morning I’ll be leaving. In a few more hours. To where, I’m not sure, but a little closer to my daughter. I won’t be going far. This is my place; my life is here. I love this landscape that has shaped me, I remember now. I remember how much.
And as the dread subsides, it comes to me as a sort of gift. That in all those drives, in all those years, my father was not trying to apologize, he was trying to say he loved me.
Until today I kept telling myself, reminding myself, that at the very end Beulah had after all found some reason to reach out to someone. Even if only to me. For these past months I have so wanted to see, to find what it was she found. And all the while I’ve felt I was writing, somehow, to keep her alive. Yes, to make believe. Until I could find it.
What do you say to someone who doesn’t want to go on? But who knows, who can make sense of this. And just when did we start to presume some divine right to understand things?
The miracle is that we understand anything at all. In the end.
In her pages I have seen the Sistine Chapel made with Popsicle sticks, I have wandered with her ten years in the Amazon, to the ruins of the absolute book. I have tried to make sense of some small part of it. And now, maybe, I have.
You see, I always thought she’d called that night to ask for help. In all this time, in this season of thinking about nothing else, it never once occurred to me. It might have been the other way around.
What do you say to someone who doesn’t want to go on? The man who would, the one who chooses to go forward is the man who lets himself be broken. So he can begin as new. That man begins in some small way as her creation, and sets out to make a life of his own. To make another start.
This ceremony, too, begins with the heart.
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
In recognition of the inimitable plumes of Europe,
whose praise has so increased my work’s worth
When, divine Spirits,
gentlest Swans, when
did my carelessness
merit your cares?
Whence, to me, such elegies?
Whence, on me, such encomiums?
Can distance by so very much
have enhanced my likeness?
Of what stature have you made me?
What Colossus forged,
that so ignores the height
of the original it dwarfs?
I am not she whom you glimpsed in
the distance; rather you have given
me another self through your pens,
through your lips, another’s breath.
And abstracted from myself,
among your quills, I err,
not as I am, but in her—
the one you sought to conjure….
TIMELINE
1321 Dante’s The Divine Comedy is written not in Latin but in an Italian dialect.
1325 The Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, is founded on the site of present-day Mexico City.
1428* The Aztec poet-emperor Nezahualcóyotl creates the Council of Music, for the study of art, astronomy, medicine, literature and history.
1440 Cosimo de Medici founds the Florentine Academy, for the study of antiquity and the patronage of the arts and sciences.
1478 Ferdinand and Isabela receive papal approval to establish the Spanish Inquisition.
1492 Columbus discovers India somewhere near the Bahamas.
1517 Bartolomeo de las Casas, first Spanish priest ordained in the New World, begins a campaign against the oppression of the American Indians.
1519 Cortés lands on the shores of the Aztec empire.
1520 A guest of the Aztec Emperor, Hernán Cortés takes his host prisoner.
1521 The Aztec capital is sacked after a siege and naval blockade.
1532 A guest of the Inca Emperor, Francisco Pizarro takes his host prisoner.
1543 In Mexico, the apostolic Inquisitor Juan de Zumárraga is relieved of his position, for excess of zeal.
1571 The Spanish conquest of the Philippines is consolidated; Spain is a dominant power on four continents.
1577 Catholic mystic and poet John of the Cross is imprisoned in Toledo, Spain; composes Dark Night of the Soul subsequent to his escape.
1583 Examined at length by the Inquisition, The Interior Castle by Saint Teresa of Ávila is published following her death.
1588 First performance of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus.
1588 The Spanish Armada i
s destroyed off the English coast
1589* The grandfather of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is born in Andalusía, Spain.
1600 Philosopher Giordano Bruno, author of On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, dies at the stake in Rome following an eight-year trial.
1600 Shakespeare writes Julius Caesar and Hamlet.
1615 Cervantes completes Don Quixote.
1618 Start of Thirty Years’ War.
1624* Sor Juana’s grandfather leaves for the New World.
1630 Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina creates the character of Don Juan in The Libertine of Seville and the Stone Guest.
1633 The Holy Office of the Inquisition begins the trial of Galileo.
1634 An affair involving Cardinal Richelieu of France, the Ursuline convent of Loudun, demonic possession of nuns, priestly satyriasis and exorcisms, culminates in Pastor Urbain Grandier’s being burned alive at the stake.
1648 Sor Juana is born Juana Inés Ramírez de Santillana y Asbaje in a mountain village near Mexico City.
1648 End of Thirty Years’ War.
1649 Massive auto de fe conducted by the Inquisition in Mexico City.
1650 René Descartes dies at the palace of Queen Christina in Sweden.
1659 In Spain, the painter Velázquez is made Knight of the Order of Santiago.
1660 Peace of the Pyrenees: Louis XIV of France marries María Teresa, daughter of Spanish King Philip IV.
1661 Hunchbacked, mentally deficient Carlos, future King of Spain, is born to Philip IV and his niece, Queen Mariana.
1664 At the age of sixteen, the poetess Juana Inés Ramírez de Santillana enters the Viceroyal Palace in Mexico City as handmaiden to the new Vice-Queen.
1665 In the year of his death, Philip IV loses Portugal, his army reduced from 15,000 to 8,000 in eight hours of battle.
1665 A royal edict is issued forbidding unauthorized books to enter the Americas.
1666 Antonio Núñez, a Jesuit officer of the Inquisition, is appointed Juana’s confessor.
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