by Matt Cohen
Winner of the 1999
Governor General’s Award for fiction
“Splendid … Very funny … Full of … smouldering juxtapositions, edgy humour … and the out-and-out oddness that Margaret Atwood praised.… Matt Cohen plays plot, setting, style and character off one another in a way that delights even as it disturbs. What pulls them together and gives his work its thumbprint, and a very special beat, is a penetrating intelligence that expresses itself with cinematic immediacy.… Buy and read this book.”
—THE GLOBE AND MAIL
“Compelling, sad, erotic and funny.… There is such deftness to this novel, such sureness of approach and lightness of writing that an honest critic must begin with an apology. Sorry, dear reader, for the envy that infringes on the following: it’s hard to stumble along in review of such an accomplished work.”
—QUILL & QUIRE (STARRED REVIEW)
“[This] appealing yarn makes you wish for more Elizabeth. Cohen is an accomplished storyteller who knows how to portion out his plot details in tantalizing tidbits.”
—WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
“Like the best of our literature, Elizabeth and After is distinctively Canadian and absolutely universal, and its plot—to borrow a well-turned phrase—will burn a hole through your heart.”
—NEW BRUNSWICK TELEGRAPH JOURNAL
“In Elizabeth and After, Cohen is wholly successful.… [His] structure is both smooth and—rub it the other way—rough, in other words, perfectly suited to its context Elizabeth and After will make you suspect your wife, sell the farm, call your mother. Read it again.”
—Loma Jackson, THE MALAHAT REVIEW
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2000
Copyright © 1999 by Matt Cohen
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, in 2000. First published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto, in 1999.
Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage Canada and colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Cohen, Matt, 1942-1999
Elizabeth and after
eISBN: 978-0-307-36877-5
I. Title.
PS8555.04E44 2000 C813’.54 C99-932762-3
PR9199.3.C63E44 2000
v3.1
for Daniel and Madeleine,
and with thanks to D. M.
“All happy families resemble each other, but each
unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
LEO TOLSTOY, Anna Karenina
The West Gull Cemetery announces itself with a twenty-foot-high stone archway of quarried limestone. Its gates are black wrought iron with silver tips and fittings, and the matching fence stretches hundreds of yards along the highway. Located on a high and windswept plateau, it offers a unique and flattering perspective on Long Gull Lake, the town of West Gull itself and the rich surrounding farmland. Even a stranger would be impressed.
Once Elizabeth McKelvey was such a stranger. On a certain spring day that marked the end of a long winter, both real and metaphorical, she passed through the archway, drifted a palm along the silky-slick surface of the limestone, stepped gingerly onto the moist dense grass. The sky was blue, the light a sparkle of sun and budding leaves. Soon she could hardly see the car in which she had arrived, and the man who brought her had receded to a shadow. As she lost herself in this new world, the idea that she might one day be buried there seemed almost natural.
But when that time actually arrived the word everyone used was not “natural” but “unexpected.” Unexpected. Like the woman herself, like the accident that killed her.
On the day of the funeral Long Gull Lake was a distant stretch of snow dotted with fishing huts merging into the grey sky. The town, so picturesque in summer, was just a jumble of metal and asphalt roofs, columns of smoke rising straight into the still air. The fertile farmland was a barren waste with a few clusters of houses and barns.
Halfway through the ceremony, the sun surprised everyone by coming out. By that time Elizabeth, encased in her chrome-trimmed oak coffin, had been placed in the hole all eyes were trying to avoid. The sun melted the frost in the top layer of the mounded dirt beside the grave and tiny rivulets of water began to form. Gerald Boyce, who had dug the grave and whose head was still ringing with the brain-jarring experience of sitting on the front-end loader while its bucket smashed into the half-frozen ground, reached out in wonder to squeeze this suddenly pliant and beautifully glistening soil.
“Elizabeth McKelvey. An extraordinarily generous woman with an uncanny ability to touch and shape the lives of those who knew her—her students, her family, her friends. For all of us, Elizabeth passed through our lives like a dazzling shooting star. And in the way the light from a shooting star stays visible long after that chunk of rock has disappeared into its own nothingness…” And so on and so forth until Dr. Albert Knight’s eulogy to his friend and patient ended in a heartfelt burst of tears. But despite the fact that he’d compared Elizabeth to a chunk of rock, not exactly flattering the deceased, many residents of West Gull felt he’d hit the nail on the head with the bit about the light: a rich and haunting green-blue glimmer had emanated not only from Elizabeth’s eyes but seemingly from her entire being. “Like an electric shroud you would be afraid to touch,” alleged one of the spiritually minded Ladies of the Lnner Circle old enough to have witnessed her testimony.
According to the coroner’s report, at the time of her death Elizabeth McKelvey was 51 years old, a white female 66 inches tall and weighing 128 pounds, the possessor of chestnut hair and 27 teeth.
The cause of death was deemed to be “shock and massive hemorrhaging due to multiple fractures of the skull.” This event was accompanied by tears in the skin, including one over the right ear where a section of scalp was actually stripped from the bone, fractures of the nose and both cheekbones, internal injuries un-enumerated since an autopsy was not deemed necessary, and other outrages to what had been a healthy living body before it took an unplanned trip through a suddenly stationary windshield attached to a car that had accordioned into a large oak tree.
Nothing was said about the blood in the snow but there was a lot—more than you would think a body could hold. In some places it had clotted into frozen puddles, in others it was scattered in long splotched whips like scarlet maple taffy. Perhaps in deference to those who had seen it, and to ease the suffering of relatives and friends, the report added that “death was almost certainly instantaneous.”
At the funeral, following her father’s eloquent eulogy, Maureen Knight remarked that “my father was always one to exaggerate.” This statement was left to hover uncontradicted while those who had heard quickly whispered it to those who hadn’t.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part I Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Part II Chapter One
Chapter Two
Part III Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Part IV Chapter One
Part V Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
PART I
ONE
AS WILLIAM MCKELVEY LAY TWISTED in his bed, grizzled barrel chest barely moving, each drawn-in breath rattled like a truckful of gravel being poured through a giant tin culver
t. There followed a brief moment during which the echo grew as hollow as a horror-movie tomb, then the gushing exhalation began: a long moist flushing out of spongy lungs clogged by decades of tobacco and woodsmoke.
Asleep, as awake, William McKelvey made a large ungainly lump. But in his dream McKelvey was all air and fire, a sheet-wrapped ghost drifting through West Gull, a small farming centre and tourist town that for almost two centuries had been clinging to the shore of Long Gull Lake, an elongated granite-shored dip on the southern edge of the Precambrian Shield. The sky was black and moonless, the street lamps off. But in the residential area where William McKelvey slept, the tended streets with the expensive homes between the highway and the lake, most of the doors had amber-lit brass coach lamps showing the way for horses that would never come, and through the windows of their glassed-in solariums could be seen the glowing numbers of VCRs and digital clocks and sometimes the trembling green and red lights of fax and answering machines.
The main street brought more lights—the white fluorescent glow of the big glass-doored refrigerators in which the convenience store kept its milk and juice, the tricoloured neon pop sign that burned day and night over the counter of the Timberpost Restaurant and the light Luke Richardson kept on at the Richardson Real Estate office. Luke Richardson. There was a man who could turn a dream into a nightmare. These days he liked to come up to McKelvey and stand too close, his lank black hair shining with grease. “Hey, Bill,” he would start, his jaw dropping to reveal the dark poison hole of his mouth. “How’s my man? Where you been hiding?” William McKelvey, convinced eight years ago by Luke Richardson to sell his house and farm to the West Gull Rest & Retirement Villa in return for the privilege of resting and retiring there until he died or became a vegetable, would turn and walk away.
The dream-ghost of William McKelvey was looking for fresh brownies in the bakeshop when the radio woke him up.
“Five a.m. at TWANG FM,” rhymed the all-night DJ, his tinny voice emerging discreetly from the clock radio William McKelvey kept under his pillow.
He rolled onto his back and began to massage his bad knee. It was late June. The sweet smell of clover and fresh-cut hay lay across the township and filtered through McKelvey’s screened window, along with the beginning ripples of bird-song and the restless trembling of the poplars that stood in the yard of the R&R, originally the home of Luke Richardson’s great-great-grandfather and now the penultimate residence of two dozen officially ambulatory souls whose bodies, like the slowly collapsing barns that dotted the landscape, now gave only the most provisional shelter to anyone trapped inside.
McKelvey pushed away the covers and silently dressed in the clothes he had laid out. Soon he was padding downstairs, shoes in hand.
Once in the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator door and helped himself to a package of sliced salami and a square of cheese, both of which he stuffed into his fishing vest, a beige labyrinth of pockets and zippers sent to him by his son on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday. From one of the pockets within a pocket, he withdrew a key he’d confiscated the afternoon before and used it to unbolt the deadlocked kitchen door.
By now there was just enough light to make silhouettes of the surrounding trees and nearby houses. Even in the few minutes it had taken him to dress and get outside, the birdsounds had grown more complicated, new calls and songs crowding into the pre-dawn sky. He crossed the grass to the sidewalk. A few steps took him to the delivery lane that emerged on Main Street. There, standing beside the real-estate office, the same one his dream-ghost had passed, he peered across the street to Richardson’s New & Used. Beside the garage, parked where it had been for the last week, was the white Pontiac.
The white Pontiac! There was a ghost worth catching. He’d first seen it when he was out for an afternoon apple pie and coffee at the Timberpost. Something about its tilt made him think that his own old Pontiac—a gold-orange dinosaur he’d long ago sold for scrap—had somehow wound its way back from wherever it had been, got itself painted, then settled in Luke Richardson’s car lot to wait for him.
Unable to believe such a gift, he’d approached it slowly, telling himself that if the upholstery was the same mesh polyester, the steering wheel faded on the left side by sun and sweat, the corner of the glove compartment bent where he’d had to pry it open with a crowbar…
But this ghost Pontiac had upholstery of gleaming white leather, a white suede-covered steering wheel, a glove compartment that resembled a strongbox. This Pontiac was lower to the ground, equipped with twin stainless-steel exhausts, hood and fenders shaped in expensive aerodynamic curves. This Pontiac was no ghost, it was a bomb—a white bomb—and underneath that hood was most likely some kind of fuel-injected V-8 nuclear power plant that would send the car smoking along on the oversized tires that bulged out from beneath the fenders.
McKelvey wished he’d woken up an hour earlier. He had his old car keys with him, not the exact ones but copies he’d made before selling it. Just in case. Of course this was a different car. But those manufacturers were cheap bastard fools and his key slid unresisted into the lock.
No one was watching. He pretended to be looking through the window as if he, seventy-six-year-old William McKelvey, had won the lottery at five in the morning and decided to spend it on this bomb that had a price of $34,999.99 crayoned in red wax onto its windshield. The key was in the lock and now he tried to turn it. No luck. No matter how carefully he jiggled, it wouldn’t work. Then, just because he was a stubborn old ass and he hadn’t gotten out of bed for nothing, he tried the passenger door. The lock yielded with a smooth oiled click. McKelvey opened it, leaned across to release the driver’s side. He walked around the car and let himself in. Being surrounded by the white bucket seat was like sitting in a cloud of whipped cream. He took the key and carefully, a tiny wiggle at a time, hardly daring to hope, inserted it so-slow-slowly into the ignition. “Please go,” he said, twisting it. The engine caught immediately, a deep and powerful purr.
Two seconds later he had adjusted the driver’s seat to accommodate his long legs, reversed out of the lot, turned the corner and was cruising down Pine Street, fat tires humming in tune to the engine’s low growl. His foot barely touching the accelerator, he floated past the cop shop, then the Brewer’s Retail at the edge of town. The light made a narrow red-yellow band along the horizon and the car was skimming towards it; then gravity and impatience grabbed his foot and rammed it to the floor. The big Pontiac rocketed forward, pinning him back like an astronaut in his seat. McKelvey was laughing. Again he stamped the pedal and this time the bomb exploded, shooting him over the hill and into the sun.
After a few miles he turned off the highway and stopped to wipe the price off the windshield. As the sound of the engine drained away, a nearby crow cawed; its sharp wild call tore through the air and McKelvey looked up to see the bird gliding to rest on the top branch of a dead elm. “Good morning, crow,” he said. The crow looked down at him, startled, then flapped away cawing into the morning sky. McKelvey began winding his way through the back roads, his window open. The air here was sweeter than town air could ever be, the grass thick and tangled, the maple and oak that lined the fields heavy with their brilliant loads of green, the rising light.
He rounded the corner that the swamp flooded every spring and suddenly his chest filled up with a terrible homesick feeling he wouldn’t have known he could still have. Even before the house, his eyes went to the sign. It was centred in front of the row of pine trees he and Carl had transplanted one day when Carl was just six years old and happy to go anywhere with his father in the big pick-up. That summer Carl was always playing in the truck, jumping in and out of the box, trying to climb into the front seat to get at the radio. Evenings at twilight McKelvey would find his son stretched full length in the truck seat, baseball glove clutched like a teddy bear to his heart, listening mouth open and mesmerized to the country music flooding through the oversized Motorola AM/FM McKelvey had hung beneath the dashboar
d of his old Ford.
RICHARDSON REAL ESTATE, the sign read. Big black letters against a green background with a telephone number beneath. At the side of the front yard, near the road and where the bugs were always the worst, was a set of swings that hadn’t rusted yet.
The house. Like the Pontiac it had turned white: the straight polished gleam of its new aluminum siding taunted him like the echo of a two-handed slap. “Tastefully renovated” was how the ad described it. Reading the description of his old farm had made him so angry he blushed.
Country hobby waterfront jewel. Tastefully renovated century home near tourist town offers rural playground for young family. Safe swimming in Dead Swede Lake, outbuildings that could be converted for offices or horses, drained fields, vintage maple bush.
“Country waterfront jewel,” he had read aloud, sitting on the porch of the R&R. “Century home.” He remembered hanging from his father’s huge hand as they wandered through the house for the first time. The damp musty smell of the wet basement rising through the rotting pine-planked floors he would eventually replace with hardwood. The peeling mildewed wallpaper. The windows with more spiderwebs than glass. Waterfront jewel … rural playground … safe swimming in Dead Swede Lake. He’d cut the advertisement out of the newspaper, put it in his fishing vest, then kept pulling it out to see if it was still true—like a love letter or a bottle of rye that knew how to fill itself in the dark. A couple of days later the Pontiac had appeared.
A black chain was draped between the gateposts. He undid it, drove in, put the chain back in place. He cruised slowly down the driveway, approaching the metal-clad box that had once been his house with all the caution due an enemy fortress, continued past the kitchen door and parked behind the chicken coop so the car wouldn’t be visible from the road. The sun was fully up now, sending brilliant shards of light from the new aluminum windows, the shiny metal door, the white siding. It was amazing that they could buy a man’s life like this, then turn it into a tin box looking like it needed to be kicked in. Century home.