We remain silently embracing each other for several seconds.
“Thanks,” Paul says, wiping his eyes with his shirt sleeve. He steps back to look me in the eyes. “You will never think of me again as Loki. You’re going to be proud of me the way I’m already proud of you. That’s a promise I will keep. And I will hound you until you finish your PhD.”
***
It’s an hour before the movers come. Paul and I are sitting in silence at opposite sides of the table. I look into the living room, at the cardboard boxes piled almost to the ceiling, at the naked walls. Anna, Paul, and I came here on January 1, 2000. She left first. Tomorrow Paul will make his second trip to Mexico, and, if all works out as planned, will return with Carlos.
I go in search of a notebook, return, sit at the table, and write, crossing words out and replacing them with other words. Our lives here, what have they been? What exactly have they been? I should ask Paul. No, it’s too soon. When he’s my age perhaps. Somewhere, I heard or read that the magic in promised lands ends once they’ve been reached, that promised lands should never be reached. For then tents won’t do, and there are fields to till, shrines to erect, heresies to root out, wounds to inflict and heal . . . And honey and milk come from bees, cows, and camels that must be cared for. The real deal. And the dwellers come to see that they’d been gulled. While in St. Vincent, Ma saw Canada as a promised land; and, in Grama’s eyes, Canada was a promised land for Paul and me. And in the opinion of those who decide which are the best countries to live in, Canada is as close to the promised land as we’ll ever get to on earth. Jonathan probably does not know it, but it’s what he seeks in wanting to wed his life to mine. In the end Ma upgraded to an after-death one, and sang about getting there:
To shady green pastures so rich and so sweet,
God leads his dear children along;
Where the cool flow of water bathes the weary ones’ feet,
God leads his dear children along.
Some through the water and some through the flood;
Some through the fire but all through the blood;
Some through great sorrow, but God gives a song
In the night season and all the day long.
Who would want to sully such belief? She had “a home in that rock. / Don’t you see?”
And so it has come to this: adulthood, every child’s promised land. One phase of life dies to clear space for another; one crop ploughed under to produce another. We wean ourselves from tutelage so adult life can flower. Does adult life flower? (In our more despondent moods we think we’re mere flotsam and jetsam in time’s sea; now I’m less sure of Paul’s labyrinth.) The agency we gain from leaving our parents’ and teachers’ leashes is quickly lost as employers, spouses, and children leash us anew. I never knew why I found Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” deeply moving when I first read it in CEGEP. “ . . . Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight, / And custom lie upon thee like a weight, / Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life: . . . shades of the prison house.” ( Not that my childhood resembled Wordsworth’s.)
Some of the friendships we’ve made live on in memory, some in occasional contacts: in person, by e-mail, by phone, social media; but the bonds that hold them get brittle, and the activities that nurture them wither — like petals ceding to seed, children to parents, students to workers, social activists to corporate directors. And quickly our faces show the hieroglyphs of life’s turmoil; our shoulders stoop and our backs bend under the burden of responsibility — for ourselves, our spouses, our children, and society’s misfits. For a while we may cling to the detritus of tutelage, remain perilously poised in a neither nor; but we give in — must give in. For it is expensive to preserve what’s already dead; and those who do so do so alone; and in the end they too give in, from wisdom or from weariness. Perhaps this is what Wordsworth meant by “the sad still music of humanity”; or Thoreau: “most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Of course, we mourn all deaths, much like we cry upon meeting the cold when we fall from our mothers’ wombs. And mourn we must, for death of whatever sort discords, dishevels, dismembers. And as for the new life this death clears the way for — we fear even the most exciting of beginnings — and in the new life that’s adulthood, we’ve already read in our parents’ lives what’s waiting.
Now I begin to see why Treadwell forsook humanity for the company of the grizzlies, why Gulliver found solace among the horses in his stable after sojourning in the land of the Houyhnhnms: the one real, the other invented. But to be human is to live with the belief that tomorrow will be better than today; and to bear the burdens of our species, even when alone with grizzlies in the wilds of Alaska; and to know that alone, we’re prey for grizzlies. Jay, brace your back. Begin.
Acknowledgements
I offer my thanks to the members of Ilona Martonfi’s writing group for the valuable critiques they offered, to Michael Mirolla for a rigorous editing of the manuscript, and to David Moratto for his evocative cover design.
About The Author
H[ubert] Nigel Thomas was born in St. Vincent and the Grenadines and has been living in Canada since 1968. He was a mental health worker, a high school teacher and finally a professor of US literature at Université Laval. He is the author of several essays in literary criticism as well as three novels: Return to Arcadia (2007), Behind the Face of Winter (2001 — to appear in a French translation in autumn 2015), Spirits in the Dark (1993); three collections of short fiction: When the Bottom Falls Out and Other Stories (2014), Lives: Whole and Otherwise (2010 — translated as Des vies cassées, 2013); How Loud Can the Village Cock Crow and Other Stories (1995); a collection of poems: Moving through Darkness (2000); and two scholarly texts: Why We Write: Conversations with African Canadian Poets and Novelists (2006), and From Folklore to Fiction: A Study of Folk Heroes and Rituals in the Black American Novel (1988). In 1994 he was shortlisted for the Hugh MacLennan Fiction Award; in 2000 he received the Montreal Association of Business Persons and Professionals’ Jackie Robinson Award for Professional of the Year; and in 2013 was awarded Université Laval’s Hommage aux créateurs.
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Thomas, H. Nigel, 1947-, author
No safeguards [electronic resource] / H. Nigel Thomas. -- 1st edition.
(Essential prose series ; 113)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
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