Elizabeth and After

by Matt Cohen

  “Please!”

  “Stop whining, Ned. You think we like this? How much fun do you think we’re having?”

  Ned didn’t answer. Ray was whirling the posthole digger and it came to Carl that they looked like they were in a scene from some high school play.

  “Look, I’ll tell you what. Ray and I are going to dig you up and drive you back to your truck. Then Ray and I are going to come back here and drink a few beers and I’m going to tell him a story about a certain kid and a certain cat. Your job is to decide whether you want to behave from now on or whether you’re going to keep making problems. Okay?”

  Ned, who had started sobbing again, managed to stop. “You didn’t have to scare me so bad.”

  “I didn’t have to,” Carl said. “But I wanted to. Just like you wanted to do what you did. Or would you rather I just call your parents and the police?”

  “Okay,” Ned said.

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay, I’ve decided. I promise to behave.”

  “I don’t know,” Carl said. “How can I believe someone who’s just a head sticking out of the ground?” As Ray, in the midst of opening himself a beer burst out laughing, Carl found himself admiring Ned—who at this point looked like little more than a talking cabbage—for having remained convinced he was still a human being who could bargain with his captor. A helpless talking cabbage—that or worse—was probably how Ned had always seemed to his father; and suddenly Carl felt sorry for the boy and started digging him out.

  The next evening Carl was out back of the house again, inspecting the holes Ned had dug and wondering what after everything he was going to tell Lizzie about Marbles, when he heard a car slowing on the road and saw headlights swinging into the driveway. Ray again, he thought. The night before, they’d drunk the carton of beer and finished off a bottle of rye that Carl had driven across the country. He explained to Ray how he’d come back determined to be a sober good citizen, a responsible father to his daughter who was, after all, the only person in the world who loved him.

  “Ah shit,” Ray had said, “you’re just fishing.” The two of them had erupted into laughter the way they used to and Carl had almost told Ray about the idea he’d had of going into business together. But he hadn’t and in the morning he was glad he’d held back. Because as Ray himself had said, he was an old lonesome wolf or at least a wolf that wanted to sniff a few things out before he made any big commitments.

  However, he had told Ray about running into Chrissy at Frostie’s and going for a drive with her after. Ray had gone silent. “You and Chrissy,” he eventually sighed. They might have been back at Ray’s three years ago, after Carl moved in, drinking in the darkness that was not only the absence of light but also Carl’s misery, which back then had seemed to him a personal Black Sea he was doomed to drown in every night for the rest of his life.

  “It’s not like that any more,” Carl said.

  “Feeling bad about a woman is like a room,” Ray said. “It’s always the same, every time you’re in it, but one day you learn how to stay outside and lock the door.”

  Carl thought about that for a moment. You never knew what Ray was going to come out with but every week or month or year he’d say something so inside you that you’d wonder if everything he seemed to be was just a cover-up for an entirely different person.

  “Well, I guess I unlocked the door,” said Carl, “but I needed to see her or it would have just hung over me until I did.”

  Now Carl saw it wasn’t Ray’s truck that had arrived but a car. Despite what he’d said to Ray he had a sudden start as a woman’s silhouette detached itself and he thought he recognized Chrissy.

  He walked towards her slowly.

  “Mr. McKelvey?”

  It was the girl from the R&R. Moira someone.

  “Carl,” Carl said. “You don’t have to call me Mister.”

  “I didn’t mean to get here so late. I got lost.”

  “Better come inside,” Carl said.

  He went past her and into the kitchen, flipped on the light, waited for her to follow.

  “I didn’t mean to intrude. I’m from the R&R. Moira Lapointe, you remember—”

  Carl thought she looked almost as frightened as Ned Richardson. He moved away from her and tried to smile reassuringly.

  “Hey, it’s okay.” Then he realized he’d been talking to her as though she were a little girl. “Do you want a coffee? A beer?”

  “No thanks.” She was standing near the door, poised for flight. “I just came out because your father was hoping—he didn’t have your phone number or anything—that I could ask you to come visit him at the home on Sunday at lunchtime. Guests can come on Sundays. You left so quickly he didn’t get a chance to tell you. And he didn’t have your phone number.”

  “I can give it to you. I’ll get something to write it down.” His father had never wanted regular visits before. Was he now expected to spend every Sunday at the R&R, eating lunch and making polite conversation? What were they supposed to talk about?

  There was a pad of paper in the living room, he remembered. He went in to look for it. Moira trailed him. He suddenly realized that the living-room light had popped last night and he’d forgotten to buy new bulbs. He wondered if Moira had been assigned a social-worker spy mission by his father. When he and his father were living at the farm alone, a social worker had come to visit them a few times after one of McKelvey’s first trips to hospital. She would appear unannounced as though she were just dropping in to visit old friends and it was the biggest coincidence in the world that the government paid her to have tea with them.

  He started to explain to Moira about the light but she had already sat down in the old armchair in the corner and was holding an unlit cigarette in her hand as if to announce that having managed to arrive, she now intended to stay He wondered what she’d learned about him to make her so curious. Or maybe she was just lonely like him. He wanted a beer, but if he drank a beer every time he imagined his hand curling around a bottle … He reached into his pocket for matches and walked over to light her cigarette.

  “I guess you and your father are pretty close,” Moira said. “He always talks about you.”

  It occurred to Carl that all things considered she must be joking. He tried to think of some remark to come back with. Being smart was what McKelvey used to call that kind of comeback. His mother had known how to use her tongue. “Used it like a razor,” McKelvey had once complained to Carl after the accident and Carl got an unwanted picture of his father and mother kissing, of his father stepping away with blood running down his mouth and chin. These days Carl wasn’t much for being smart with words. He was in too deep, too deep inside himself. In even deeper than Ned Richardson had been. Even deeper than the cat Ned Richardson had killed. He was way down deep, six feet under, down so deep he couldn’t feel anything except for Lizzie.

  Dark hair, a nice smile, almost pretty. Wearing some kind of polo shirt and skirt combination. Some kind of flowery scent. He lit her cigarette, accepted one for himself. He was standing across from her, his cigarette in one hand; the other was still trying to wrap itself around that phantom bottle of beer. His mouth felt dry. He took a step backwards towards the kitchen, stopped himself. He was aware of his jeans hanging awkwardly on his legs. If it hadn’t been for Ned Richardson he would have soaked all his clothes in the bathtub this weekend, then hung them out to dry in the sun. He liked the way they smelled after that.

  Carl sat down on the sofa, waiting for what she would say, what he would think to reply. There was a patch of light from the kitchen, the pale glow of the moon. Gradually he realized Moira had let him off the hook, she too was just sitting and breathing.

  Young woman, nice smile, almost pretty. Likes to show up uninvited. Smooth breather. Answers to Moira. Likes sitting in dark. Might be social worker.

  Moira finished her cigarette and sat looking at the moon. She liked Carl’s face in the moonlight. His hair was combed straight back on t
he sides, almost to a ducktail, decades out of date. But there was something in him so fine and tightly drawn you could almost hear it—like the fine sharp twang of a banjo string. You could almost hear it—a song that keeps going in your mind after the music stops. She wished he would say or do something, or maybe his silence meant it was time for her to go. She got out of the chair and crossed the room. Carl stood up.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  He took her hands. They were small and delicate, like a child’s. When he released them, they began to slide up his arms and he drew her down to the sofa. The silky run of her arms. Legs touched with her flowery perfume, waves of muscle beneath skin that ran sweet and smooth beneath his tongue as it slid to the insides of her thighs. Her fingers digging into his hair, mapping his skull, pulling him up. Breasts wanting his mouth. Giggles as he carried her upstairs. Then her voice moaning deeply, humming, rising high, casting its spell on him.

  In their new silence and the moonlight she made him lie still, first on his back and then on his belly, while she inspected him, hovered over him, cruised her snub-nosed face over his whole body, sniffing and kissing and touching and licking, massaging fingering stroking until he could no longer feel his muscles his bones the mattress the sheets the air, until he was released from everything that had weighed him down since he’d begun returning home and he was floating carefree and satisfied, safe and alive, alive in his own new bedroom in his own new house.

  He knew he’d fallen asleep when her hands woke him. Again they glided together; this time what was torn from him came reluctantly, remnants of a bitterness hoarded too long.

  And then there was the last detail he needed to take care of, the arrival that would complete his homecoming. He asked her if she would go somewhere with him. Soon they were in the truck driving through the last of the night. She was sitting beside him, her body pressed close, and as he drove she took his right hand and tucked it under her jeans and her panties, so that his hand was filled with the tangled half moon of her warmth.

  By the time they got to the cemetery there was a faint blue line between the horizon and the receding dark dome of the night. They climbed over the metal fence and walked to the wide twin gravestone of his grandparents and to the matching twin gravestone with his mother’s name and dates on one side, the other with his father’s name already engraved but without the final date. In the light of the rising dawn the polished grey marble took on the colours of the sky.

  Moira bent close to read the writing. As she ran her hands along the letters, Carl could almost feel the cut stone beneath his fingers. He went to sit on the grass. From somewhere down the road the cattle began lowing in a barn until the milkers were switched on and a low hum of machinery spread into the growing light. So strange—all these people gradually being stripped down to bone, accompanied by the twice-daily music of milk being pulsed from swollen cow teats into shining steel tanks.

  Moira came and sat beside him. Carl told her how ten years ago, following the last of those New Year’s Eve parties Luke Richardson threw at the mansion now known as the West Gull R&R, an all-night booze-up farewell to a century of all-night booze-up farewells, William McKelvey had got so drunk that Elizabeth had insisted Carl drive them home. About two miles from the farm, Carl had fallen asleep at the wheel and piled his car into an oak tree. “When I woke up my father was screaming from a broken knee. She was dead. I was just fine. I walked home and called the police.”

  They sit, silent, for a long time. “That’s how close my father and I are,” Carl finally says. “Just wanted to show you. Killed my own mother.”

  Driving home as light fills the air: trees, houses, barns, rising into the sun. Carl parks the truck, they go into the kitchen. While Carl opens the coffee tin, Moira sits at the table.

  “Okay,” she starts.

  He’s at the stove, feeling vulnerable and exposed, he knows he’s shown too much. But he had needed to go there, needed someone to witness his truth. His eyes fall onto the cold world of white-enamelled metal and grease stains. “Okay,” he agrees and he thinks, Okay, so what? He’ll just make coffee and then he’ll drive her back to the R&R. It’s not as if he doesn’t know the way. Then he remembers she came on her own. He takes the kettle to the sink. As the tap runs the sun climbs high enough to shoot its light into the streaming water. He tears his eyes away, turns off the tap.

  Even at the cemetery where she watched him standing like some crazy tragicomic icon beside his mother’s tombstone as the dawn came over the horizon like the yellow light of a slow-moving train, half of her was thinking: Brother, brother, am I supposed to believe all this or is this guy just one big good-looking slice of pure country ham. Then the train had come closer and the light began to spread along the rims of the hills and from the cemetery she could hear the noises of the farms starting and in the east see the low silhouette of the town roofs and she stopped thinking because her heart was beating so hard.

  The sound of the kettle now fills the kitchen and as the water climbs towards boiling Moira decides that once Carl has poured the water into the filter he has prepared, she will stand up and go to him again.

  “There are things I have to explain,” Carl says.

  Moira wonders what else that quiet voice of his could have to confess.

  “I can’t be with anyone right now,” Carl says. “I mean tonight was great but that’s all I’m good for.”

  He turns his back to her as he pours the water. She’s watching her hands and she remembers what she did with his hand as they were driving to the cemetery.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Carl says. “For all I know you hated it but I thought you should know it’s all I’m good for. I’m just too fucked up about my wife and drinking and the old shit in the R&R and the whole thing out at the cemetery and I’m going to try to be a father to my daughter and that’s going to take everything I’ve got.”

  Now she’s glad his back is to her. “You’re more than that,” she says. God.

  “I’m nothing,” Carl says. “I’m just an old used-up piece of shit and I know it. But I’m going to do my best for Lizzie.” He turns around. “That’s the way things are.”

  PART II

  ONE

  MYSTERIES BEGIN WITH THE DISCOVERY of the body. Through a careful examination of the relevant details, the circumstances, facts as supplied by witnesses and other third parties, the human body no longer alive becomes the simple and inevitable conclusion to a story of tangled plots and complex motives. In the rush towards this classic finale it is easy to forget that bodies have not only endings but beginnings, beginnings surrounded by complications and entanglements, the kinds of entanglements themselves susceptible to vivid and compelling description, forensic details, even witnesses.

  To the beginning in question, the catalytic event that would lead to the existence of the living body of Elizabeth McKelvey, the self-proclaimed prime witness was Flora Goldsmith. It happened late in the afternoon of December 18, 1932, in front of West Gull’s historic Long Gull Lake Inn.

  At noon, the day had been mild enough to set the town’s icicles dripping and to melt what snow remained on its sidewalks so that a friendly almost springlike atmosphere reigned beneath the Christmas decorations that had been strung across Main Street in the hope of loosening a few tight fists. But as the sun followed its shallow arc towards the horizon all that had melted became ice once more. Flora Goldsmith, accustomed to such variations, was keeping her eyes to the pavement as she walked past the inn on her way home from a last-minute trip to the butcher. In one hand she held her shopping bag; the other she used to drag along her son, Adam, at that time a tallish three-year-old with adorable blond ringlets, a babyish way of stumbling when he walked or ran—a quiet well-behaved child who would sit placidly on his mother’s knee while emitting an almost inaudible and as yet unintelligible stammer during the bible meetings she held in her kitchen.

  Meanwhile, moving in the opposite direction was a Kingston couple. Louis and Lil
lian Glade had come north to spend a few days at Long Gull Lake Inn because Louis, a clerk at the Queen’s University Medical Library, had been advised that he needed a vacation to provide relief from a puzzling series of dizzy spells. Immigrants from Galicia, the Glades made a striking couple: Louis was a tall slender man with distinguished greying temples and narrow handsome features marred only by heavy-lidded eyes; his wife, Lillian, was much shorter, almost stout, with a luxuriant mass of red hair she wore coiled and pinned to the back of her head. In her youth this hair had dazzled at piano recitals where she specialized in moody Rachmaninoff concertos. “Like a big copper snake just waiting to strike,” Flora Goldsmith later complained to her son, who would have his own part to play.

  Arm in arm, the Glades were also keeping their eyes to the icy sidewalk. Just before the collision, Adam Goldsmith looked up at the Glades and let out a warning shriek. The Glades, startled, lost their footing and pitched forward into Adam and Flora. All four went down, in the process jolting free the egg that must be considered the beginning’s beginning. In the barrage of soothings and apologies that followed, Louis Glade insisted that the inconsolable Adam, along with Flora and her husband, Hank—the assistant manager at the local bank—join them that evening for dinner.

  After the dinner the Glades retired to their room where the inadequate radiators combined with several layers of down comforters and a sagging mattress to produce an intensely romantic interlude. Nine months later the previously unim-pregnable Lillian Glade, copper snake and all, gave birth to a daughter. Overwhelmed with happiness they decided their princess must be named after a real princess—Elizabeth.

  Meanwhile Adam, apparently himself catalyzed by this incendiary collision, soon progressed from uncontrollable stammering to speaking in tongues. In an ecstasy of thrashing and drooling he would fall to the floor and moan wild strings of babble—possessed by the Holy Spirit, demons, or the need to show off, depending on whom you asked.