Elizabeth and After

by Matt Cohen

  “Depends how fancy you want it.”

  “Plywood, with vinyl on top. No use getting Italian tile and a Jacuzzi for this place.”

  “What about the heat?”

  “There’s a new furnace. I had it put in last spring.”

  Luke showed him the kitchen, then the basement. It had a fieldstone foundation and the mortar between the stones was crumbling and riddled with ant tunnels. The floor was dirt with a drainage trench down the middle. The new furnace had rust along the bottom and a big dent on one side. “Took it out of another place,” said Luke. “Waste not, want not.”

  Outside again, Luke took down the sign, then pointed out the eavestroughs that needed reattaching, the garden with its crop of nettles and burdock, the rust-fuzzy mower in the garage that could use a new roof if he got around to it. But all the time Carl was trying to imagine himself there with Lizzie. What would they do all day? Would she follow him around the house while he soldered and hammered? Stand in the backyard and play catch with herself? Have picnics? When he got the tools for the bathroom floor, maybe he could make her a dollhouse. He’d built her one before, when she was just learning to crawl. She used to lie in front of it, peering into its empty rooms as though watching a movie of imaginary people.

  When they returned to town Luke parked at the side of his car lot. “I suppose you’ll be wanting a job.”

  “I thought I’d go back to the lumber yard. They’re usually short this time of year.”

  “Boyce’s? Vernon died, you know. Took a heart attack eating one of those Mexican-spiced veggie burgers at the Kiwanis barbecue. Terrible thing. Then MaryLou sold out to the Allnew chain. Got a new manager, too. Your old friend, Fred Verghoers.”

  Carl looked down at his hands. The lumber yard had been his plan. He’d always been comfortable with wood. In British Columbia he’d worked with a logging operation, piling underbrush and generally making things look pretty after the big chainsaws and tree cutters had done their damage. Cosmetic but not a bad way to get some thinking done. Over the last year he had developed a whole script for himself: back in West Gull he would start at Boyce’s yard, find some sources for buying good wood; then maybe he’d go in with Ray Johnson, start up a little side business making decks and screened-in porches; eventually he’d quit the yard altogether and he and Ray would have their own company putting up cottages and retirement houses. Just to think of it brought on the fragrance of newly cut cedar.

  “Fellow came to me last year and asked if he could build this little addition.” Richardson pointed to a small matching extension at the end of the supermarket. Above the door was a sign: THE MOVIE BARN. “The girl who used to work the main shift just moved to Toronto. Pays almost as much as Allnew and you won’t freeze your fingers off in the winter. There’s a couple of high-school kids part-time. But you’ll be in charge, keep things organized. And in the winter it’ll be just you, except when you need help on holidays or busy weekends.”

  They crossed to the real-estate office where Carl signed the lease. Then, unable to put it off any longer, he turned his truck towards the West Gull R&R.

  During his last year in high school, when all the senior students were doing local history projects, Carl had chosen as his subject what would eventually become the R&R but was then still the Richardson mansion. The core of the structure had been built by Caleb Richardson, a blacksmith who arrived in 1837 in what was then the mere hamlet of West Gull. Lucas Richardson, the logging baron, was Caleb’s oldest son and Luke Richardson’s great-great-grandfather; he had a son, Lucas Jr., who took over the house and carried on the logging tradition, making his fortune cutting primal white pine so tall and straight it was sold at the Kingston shipyards for the manufacture of masts. In 1886 Lucas Jr.’s son, Allan Caleb Richardson, started the custom of throwing his home open to half the county every New Year’s Eve; the parties would be an annual event for exactly one hundred years.

  Allan Caleb Richardson’s years in the mansion, years when its magnificence was well known to men in top hats and ladies in layered frocks, years during which genuine European paintings in gilded frames were added to the Great Hall, the dining room furnished with a grand piano once owned by an Austrian prince, the kitchen expanded and refurbished with the latest in black cast-iron stoves, a special bread oven, sets of matching ceramic sinks half the size of bathtubs for washing the vertiginous stacks of dishes generated by lavish dinner parties, years that flowed from the dizzying heights of Queen Victoria’s reign down to the rat-infested trenches of the Great War—those years were West Gull’s idyll of peace and prosperity. In that golden age, logging and farming kept bellies full and money rolling in, barns and pastures thronged with sleek contented livestock almost begging to be roasted and laid out on the table, fields were green and fertile and milk foamed with butterfat. Photographs from that time still hang in the Great Hall, and the largest of all shows Allan Caleb Richardson and his wife, Eileen, in the midst of their grinning liquor-happy guests, gay and stout with the fat of the land, the muscle and sinew and blood of their hundreds of workers.

  Then came the drumbeats of war. Colonel Sam Parker galloped across the country on his toy horse handing out his toy rifles, and of the 187 township men who went to war, half were sucked into the French trenches, chewed up by shrapnel and hunger, pickled in mud, shredded by bullets. The rest came home as they could. Arms or legs missing, metal plates in their heads, lungs scoured by mustard gas, the real and imaginary memories of their collective past transformed into a dark nightmare they would never stop dreaming. That, too, is recorded in the photographs: a small train at the West Gull station house disgorging groups of men in uniform. Some walked tall, others hobbled on crutches. On stretchers were two bandaged shapes who’d survived seven thousand miles of cart and sea and train in order to die at home.

  From 1921 on, the photographs are organized into annual albums guarding memorable images from each year along with photos of the New Year’s party itself. As the years pass, the backgrounds begin to include automobiles, radios, electric lights, once an airplane in a field—the whole glorious parade of man-made splendours. In the 1940 album Carl found a full-page portrait of William McKelvey. Sixteen years old, raw wrists protruding from a suit that fit him six inches ago, lanky face still waiting for its flesh, he is caught with his eyes open wide, a startled wild animal with his thoughts wiped clean under the pressure of this historic moment. Another picture shows him more relaxed, posing with a few other youths who’ll soon step out to the stable to drink and talk about the one thing on their minds these days: this new war and whether it will end before they get sent there; this new war and whether it will be like that other one—the Great War—the war that left widows still young enough to take to the dance floor before midnight; the war that left a list of names so long it required ten minutes to be read out loud every November 11 at the Remembrance Day assemblies at their schools. They’ll drink and then they’ll drink some more and imagine themselves shot, gnawed and buried, nothing left but living ghosts who might come home to hear their names mispronounced by a bunch of kids who aren’t theirs.

  After the final New Year’s bash, the Richardsons moved out of the old mansion into the new house Luke had built by the lake. Then following the instructions of his great-great-grandfather’s will, Luke turned it into the West Gull R&R, a monumental sarcophagus for the living where those who once danced became paying guests, music provided by an orchestra of pocked leathery lungs wheezing towards the millennium accompanied by a chorus of drug-induced gurgles, moans and muffled cries from dreams of long-ago childhoods, memory buried deep in hairless skulls, mutating cells, dreams of nights when the forest held them and their skins were young and the cries they made were not desperate calls to a mouldy time now disintegrating in the soft cheese of their decaying brains, but cries and prayers to the gods of summer and desire.

  Two of those lungs belonged to William McKelvey. Back from his big splash, the very picture of self-satisfaction and se
renity, McKelvey sat on the porch of the West Gull R&R smoking a cigarette and staring into his newspaper. Everything on the street seemed frozen in place: the crystal sky, the massed leaves, the big mansions with their yellowing sheers tied open to the afternoon sun. As Carl approached, McKelvey struggled to his feet and started to speak before interrupting himself to cough. His hand rose to his mouth, the back thick with brown stains. You are old, Father William. “How’s the boy?”

  “Not bad,” Carl said. “How are you?”

  For an answer McKelvey spread out his arms so he could be inspected, then indicated that Carl should sit down in the chair beside him. “So. You’re back.”

  “I’m back.”

  “Visit the kid?”

  “Saw her this morning. She’s grown. She says she comes to see you.”

  “Christine brings her.”

  Christine. Once he’d called about Lizzie and she’d had to call him back. An hour later someone had shouted out to him, “Hey Carl, there’s a Christine on the phone for you.” And his heart had started to race as though it were ten years before and Chrissy was going to talk in that hoarse little whisper she had when they were arranging to spend the night catting.

  “How long you staying?”

  “For a while,” Carl said. “Luke Richardson rented me the old Balfer place.”

  “What about the old McKelvey place?” his father said. “He’s got his sign out front. Made me want to puke. They covered it in metal and now it looks like a white cookie tin waiting to be squashed.”

  His eyes were closed. The way they’d been the night Carl told him it was over with Chrissy. When his eyes had opened again, he’d started shouting that Carl was cursed like every McKelvey—cursed to drink and fight and lose or kill his woman and Carl should be thankful at least that he’d had a daughter and not a son.

  Now William McKelvey put his newspaper down and reached into his fishing vest for a package of cigarettes. His hands were shaking.

  “Liver,” McKelvey said. “Liver, kidneys, pancreas, stomach, gall bladder—the whole thing.” He squeezed the package open, managed to extract a cigarette and get it into his mouth. “Like it’s one big septic tank in there, right? Pour shit in one end, clean water flows out the other.” He reached into another of his pockets, found a Zippo, flipped it open and watched the flame dance while his hand trembled. “Then it gets plugged up, right? Doesn’t work any more. Put shit in one end, shit comes out the other. Or alcohol. You’re supposed to wake up the next morning sober. I wake up like this, only worse. Takes two weeks before I can walk a straight line.”

  “You lost the habit,” Carl said. “Good thing or you’d be dead.” His father’s face and eyes were tinged with yellow. The way they’d been when he’d collapsed and the doctor had told him to quit drinking or he’d be dead in six months. McKelvey, being McKelvey, had circled the day on the calendar and kept on. At the end of six months, the yellow had turned orange and he was staggering around the farm like a walking cesspool. Carl had come down one morning to find his father lying on the kitchen floor, panting like a cow in labour.

  “Coffee,” McKelvey had commanded.

  Carl had made him coffee, put it on the floor beside him. Then he’d taken down the bottle of brandy and set it beside the coffee. “Go ahead. It’s fifteen minutes before I have to go to work. If you die first I can get the day off.”

  “Fuck you,” McKelvey had said.

  That was when they still had the farm. Or what was left of it. All the stock gone except for one bull and the few cows it serviced to give them some calves to sell for beef. A couple of tractors they spent most of their time repairing so they could get in enough hay to winter the cattle.

  “You should have seen this place in my father’s day,” William McKelvey would say. At some point, Carl didn’t know how or when, his father had lost it—it being the ability to get up every morning and make the farm a farm instead of a mass of unpredictable vegetation and broken machinery, the ability to go out there and do whatever had to be done instead of wandering about the countryside, a bottle in his pocket, or sitting at the kitchen table tied to his coffee pot and the newspaper. “I could have done it with her,” McKelvey told Carl, and Carl first thought he meant if Elizabeth had lived. Then he realized that McKelvey meant not only her presence but her cooperation, he meant he could have done it if she’d stayed at home instead of going out to work—he could have done it if she had done it for him.

  “You want coffee?” The door had opened and a girl was standing beside them holding a tray with two full cups, containers of sugar and milk. She was short, black-haired, almost pretty, and she was smiling down at McKelvey.

  “Meet my boss,” McKelvey said complacently. “Her name is Moira and I mostly do what she tells me.”

  “My father,” Carl said, nodding at McKelvey.

  “One of my favourites,” Moira said. She had a quiet voice and as she set down the tray Carl could almost see her judging him, trying to make sense out of the fact that not only was William McKelvey his father, but he William McKelvey’s son.

  Carl McKelvey looked out at his truck. Being born William McKelvey’s son was like being born with a limp or a blind eye or a birthmark on the face. “I‘ll be seeing you,” Carl said. He stood up and started across the lawn. Now he was really back. Carl McKelvey, the McKelvey boy, another fuck-up McKelvey whose fists moved faster than his brain, always ready to lash out or wrap themselves around a nearby bottle; after everything that had happened he was back and pretty soon he’d probably either be in jail or in hospital. One certain thing: he had a long way to go before he’d be splayed out like his father on a fat wooden chair with a pretty girl to pat his head and bring him coffee.

  Later that night, his first in the Balfer place—trying to drive out the ghosts with the smell of cooking, the sound of his own voice, his boots on the floor, the disorganized pile of possessions he was unloading into the centre of the living room—he wondered how it would be to have a woman here, what kind of wild echo that woman’s voice might find in the empty rooms.

  The truth was, thinking about women he had never met was a way of avoiding Chrissy: the way she’d looked opening the door to him, her eyes larger, more liquid than they used to be; her tawny hair cut shorter; her lips pale, full, lips he’d kissed for the first time on a New Year’s Eve, kissed while he was stealing a dance with her from Fred Verghoers, kissed then kept his lips on hers through the whole song and when it was over they were sealed together, run into one another like melted candles.

  More than three years had passed since, following the last and worst fight with Chrissy, he had driven to the army surplus store in Kingston, bought himself a giant cardboard suitcase, stuffed it with the contents of the bottom drawer of the big maple dresser Chrissy’s uncle had given them as a wedding present. Three long years, he would say in those imaginary conversations he had with himself or Chrissy, rambling interviews he would conduct while driving his truck or punching holes for new trees in the grainy soil of the forest floor. Three long years, he would say, the he who believed fate, alcohol and an uncontrolled temper had set him and Chrissy on separate roads, roads that would converge as soon as his sins were atoned for, the devil bottle put aside, the temper mastered by calm reflection on the pulse of the universe, or failing that, the fact that its main victims were himself and his daughter. But no matter which of his various selves held the floor, those years had been long, and the more time that passed the more cut loose and adrift he felt, unable to remember being in sight of shore, unable to remember if shore existed or if its memory was merely invented to give geography to his loneliness.

  After leaving Chrissy he moved into a half-finished lakeside cottage with Ray Johnson from the lumber yard. They’d played together on the West Gull Junior Hornets for a couple of years before graduating to the Hornets proper—two-thirds of a second line where he provided the speed, the determination and sometimes the craziness it took to get the puck to the net where Ray
could always be found holding off the enemy with his elbows.

  Chrissy had told him that she was sick of his drinking and that now he could drink all he wanted. He had wanted to drink a lot, or at least enough to make a bridge across darkness to sleep and to make him sleep deeply enough that he didn’t wake up until light.

  Eventually that bridge crumbled and in the middle of the night sleep would desert him. Those were the times he had gone to bed hammered but woke up even drunker. So nauseated he could no longer lie still, he would get to his feet only to lose his balance on the way to the bathroom, bouncing off the walls, grabbing furniture to keep from falling on his face. Trembling and feverish, breathing the darkness to keep himself alive, he would turn stone-cold sober while thinking that if he actually did manage to drink himself to death not a single person in the universe would think anything except that Carl McKelvey had got what he wanted.

  “You ever hear of Socrates?” Chrissy had once shouted at him and he had immediately thought of the picture of the white-bearded man in the fat russet book she used to prop up her lamp at university. “He said all knowledge is self-knowledge. If that’s true you don’t know dick. Did you ever think of that?”

  Chrissy had been bending over the couch, trying to change Lizzie. Carl snatched Lizzie away and yelled that Chrissy was “about as much mother as a half-ton truck.” Seeing her fury, he thought he’d hit the nail on the head but afterwards, repeating it to himself, he wondered exactly what he had meant. And then for some reason he asked himself how much mother his own mother had been. All this while holding Lizzie in the crook of his arm, swaying on his heels like a boxer about to bounce off the ropes, hurtle into the centre of the ring swinging. Hurricane Carl.

  Lizzie was crying.

  “Give her to me.”

  “No.”

  “For Christ’s sakes, listen to her cry. Can’t you tell you’re scaring her? Or is that how your father was just scaring the piss out of you to make sure you’d end up like him?”