Elizabeth and After

by Matt Cohen

  The lamp beside her bed had a shade she’d decorated with animal decals. When Carl turned it on, shadows of teddy bears and squirrels were thrown onto the wall. He lay down on her bed. Her ceiling was wallpaper that he’d painted white and he could see that some of the seams were starting to peel. On one wall was a Superwoman poster, on another a rainforest poster she’d won at school for hard work on a project. The wall beside her bed was decorated with cat pictures she’d cut out from magazines. Quite a little kingdom she’d arranged. While her mother was getting beat up by her stepfather who was running for reeve, and while her real father was driving around worrying about shooting or getting shot, Lizzie had her official universe of innocence. Easy to think that one day she’d remember her childhood in a much more sinister way; but for right now, Carl considered, Lizzie’s world was a pretty good place to be.

  He started to doze but decided to turn off the downstairs lights and go to his own bedroom. In the kitchen he saw the blank cassette which he’d forgotten about. He popped it into the VCR.

  Later he would re-examine the envelope, see what he’d missed the first time, the lightly pencilled message: “To Carl, from your pal, Ned.” But for now what he saw was a room in bright sunlight, a bed, a woman’s face, Chrissy’s, jumping into focus, her mouth opening in surprise, then a stifled cry of protest as one large hand covers her mouth and the other jerks away the sheet.

  THREE

  THE FIRST SNOW CAME AT THE BEGINNING of November before the ground was frozen hard. Using a sledgehammer, Carl was able to loosen the posts of Luke Richardsons election signs. There were sixty-six in all, enough to make a big mound in the back of the truck that he had to tie down so they wouldn’t blow free while he was driving them to the dump. Even so, they clattered and banged the whole way, a weird raucous chorus, Carl thought, to the sound of Luke’s voice when he’d called to ask him to gather the signs and added that the hunting trip had better be put off. “Or maybe we’ll just go alone,” Luke had finally said. “You and me and a couple of bottles of something.” After unloading the signs, tactfully placed between a truckload of green garbage bags and a rusted woodstove, Carl went and opened the Movie Barn. While he was still making the coffee, Arnie Kincaid appeared in a brightly coloured parka with fur trim around the hood that reminded Carl of Christmas.

  “They say the first cup is the best,” Arnie offered, watching the coffee drip into the pot.

  “You shovel your way out?”

  “The lad next door does my driveway with a snowblower. Guess he’s going to have a pretty good year.” Arnie set a heavy briefcase on the counter. He unfastened it and withdrew a thick file.

  “You ever see anything like this?” Arnie opened the folder. On top was an insurance policy.

  “I never took out insurance,” Carl said. “You think I should be getting some for the Balfer place? I thought Luke took care of that.”

  “This is life insurance.” Arnie leafed through it. Then he went to the next policy. “This is house insurance.” He quickly flipped through the other files. “Automobile, theft, disability, furniture and contents, animal—there must be fifty kinds of insurance I deal in and maybe another hundred in the city.”

  “That’s something,” Carl said, pouring two cups of coffee. His hands were still cold from working out the election signs. “But I’m not in the market that I know of.”

  “I thought you might like to read them over just the same. Something to do.”

  Carl looked down. He thought he would have to be stuck at the Movie Barn for a very long time before he started reading insurance policies. “Sure. Let me just put them under the counter. I’m getting sick of crosswords.”

  “I was thinking,” Arnie said, “I could use some kind of assistant. Someone who could eventually take over the business. Unless you’re planning to spend the rest of your life renting videos to horny housewives and old geezers like myself. What do you think of that idea?”

  Arnie Kincaid’s face: grey, a bit loose under the ears, his eyes slanted down towards the policies. Carl was conscious of a desire not to hurt Arnie. “I don’t know,” Carl said. “I’ve never really thought—”

  “You keep this place pretty organized,” Arnie said. “You’re good with figures. And the customers—well—just like here, it’s a bit of everyone. You seem to be able to handle that.”

  Now Carl’s hands were on the policies. Touching them made Arnie’s offer more real.

  “I know you didn’t grow up hoping you’d be an insurance agent. But it’s a good living. Reliable. It paid my mortgage and put my daughters through school. You’d have to take a course. Maybe two. Why don’t you think about it? We can talk again in a few days.”

  Mid-November the snow melted, then the cold returned, hard, and the ground was like one huge slippery rock. Carl called Moira. That night he hovered over her and the icy light turned her skin to white glass.

  Again and again he emptied himself into her. “Wouldn’t have thought I had that much juice,” he said afterwards, embarrassed. Moira curled around him until sun-up when he came into her one last time, at first stiff and sore, then moaning and groaning along with Moira until it turned into a song, the howling music he’d needed during all those long lonely drives in the truck, except that he wasn’t in the truck, he was in Moira and was naked and new and sweaty and for at least a few seconds nothing meant anything.

  Later in the month the sky softened and it snowed again. One evening he and Lizzie made a giant snowman in the backyard. That Sunday Carl went with Lizzie to the West Gull R&R and brought his father back for lunch. With the help of a recipe book, Lizzie baked a meatloaf that came complete with ketchup on top. “Like icing on a cake,” Lizzie explained. McKelvey ate three helpings. Sitting at the same table with his father for the first time in years and watching him as he methodically spooned up his food, Carl felt unsettled. Something about the way the old man’s head dipped submissively towards the plate with each mouthful. Lizzie, meanwhile, chattered on as though McKelvey being there was entirely normal. As soon as he had finished the meatloaf she rushed to the freezer and presented him with a giant bowl of chocolate ice cream decorated with two circles of chopped nuts.

  After they drove him back to the R&R, Lizzie told Carl she was going to make his father a scarf just like the one she’d made for the snowman. Carl thought she seemed to take particular delight in saying “your father” to him. The knitting took Lizzie well into December and she was so pleased with the result she decided to make a toque as well. For hours every evening Lizzie worked at her grandfather’s Christmas presents. It was as though she was knitting McKelvey into their life. And on Christmas Day when he put on his new hat and draped the scarf around his neck, he announced that he was warm for the first time in ten years.

  On Boxing Day, McKelvey, Gerald and Carl were sitting in the middle of Dead Swede Lake. They were surrounded by the fishing shack Carl had constructed out of lengths of two-by-four covered by double-sheeted plastic. A wavering grey-white light filtered through the plastic, which was so fogged up all they could see was the altered colour of snow and the vague silhouettes of the pine and willow trees at the edge of the lake. For warmth, aside from Gerald Boyce’s five-star brandy, they had a kerosene heater going, and there was even a fishing line dropped through the hole in the ice.

  William McKelvey had given up shaving. With his grizzled hair and beard he had the look of an old lion patiently waiting to die. Even walking the few hundred feet out across the lake had made the pain in his left knee spread all through his leg and hip.

  “You know,” McKelvey said, “it’s pretty strange to be sitting here in the middle of Dead Swede Lake absolutely blind.”

  “We got nothing but window,” Carl said, gesturing to the plastic around him. “If everyone wasn’t breathing so hard, we could see out.”

  McKelvey looked at his son. He hadn’t believed Gerald when he’d called to say that Carl had made a shack on Dead Swede Lake and they were going fish
ing. “Impossible.” Meaning, first, impossible that Carl could find a way to drag out the ton of materials that went into an old-style fishing shack; and second, impossible that Carl would ever do something so … something so much for him. Like the crazy hope he used to have that Carl would grow up, marry, have a herd of grandchildren and transform the farm into a little heaven of carefully planted gardens, groves, a Noah’s ark of animals. He, the proud granddad, would walk through this miraculous paradise, grandchildren scampering about him like so many friendly little puppies.

  “You shouldn’t complain,” Gerald said. “You probably can’t see that well anyway.”

  “I have seen,” William said. “I have seen so much I don’t need to see much more.” Then he reached into his coat and pulled out a dark cardboard cylinder, opened it up to reveal a green smoked-glass bottle. With a penknife he slit the seal. He read out the label before handing the bottle to Gerald. “You remember the bottle I brought back after the war?”

  “Yeah,” Gerald said.

  McKelvey had been twenty-three years old when he came home. Travelled down from Ottawa on the train, still wearing his uniform. It was September 1945. His father was away on a fishing trip when he arrived. Some neighbours took him back to the house. Like an overflowing privy was how his father had left it. McKelvey’d dumped his bag on the porch, then driven the tractor over to the Boyce house.

  Gerald and Vernon had been standing in their yard. “When I came to your house you were trying to make a car go. The two of you. You were wearing matching pairs of suspenders. You remember those suspenders? I never saw anyone look so foolish in suspenders as you used to.”

  They’d drunk the bottle, then McKelvey had driven his tractor home, thinking the whole time that if there was one thing he was not going to do, it was to sink back into this pile of mud and spend the rest of his life rotting away like the Boyce brothers.

  “You see some foolish things around here,” Gerald said. “I’ve even seen people try to drive across this lake.”

  McKelvey looked at his son. Carl was inspecting the label and had his eyebrows raised in admiration.

  “Things aren’t so bad,” McKelvey said. “If you’ll excuse me for a moment.” He stood up and pushed open the blanket that was the door and went out onto the ice. There was a north wind that had given the snow a hard crackling crust and was so cold he could feel it biting through his beard. Those first winters back, before he got the money to go to Queen’s, he’d spent enough winter days out on the ice of Dead Swede Lake with the Boyce brothers, drinking, fishing, trying to invent a future. But he’d always held back. Always known he was different, that having got away once he would get away again. Even that day he’d brought Elizabeth to meet his father, it had been just a visit to a country he’d escaped for ever. And yet here he was. His whole lifetime later. Standing with his back to the wind pissing out his brandy the way he’d pissed out his whole life.

  He turned towards what had once been his dock, his shore, his road up to his house. Five years ago, even one year ago, he couldn’t have come back to Dead Swede Lake this way, practically a tourist, and stood looking at what had once been his and before that his father’s without feeling loss twisting through his gut like a knife. The only way he could have returned was the way he had: in Luke Richardson’s white bomb, with his foot on the floor.

  But now, with Carl back, it was almost beautiful—the snow-covered frozen lake ringed by leafless trees, the blue-grey dome of the sky, even Carl’s fishing shack. That had to be the most unlikely building, or unbuilding, that he’d ever seen. Strange, the way the sun shimmered and rolled in all that curvy plastic, and just as Carl had appreciatively raised his eyebrows looking at the label of his single malt Scotch, McKelvey had to admire this bizarre construction of his son’s. That was the thing about Carl. You just never knew where he was going next. All the way to the Pacific Ocean or straight into an oak tree.

  For New Year’s Eve, Luke Richardson gave the R&R money to throw a special New Year’s bash. The occasion was the senator’s one-hundredth birthday. Two hours before midnight he arrived in his van, got wheeled in, a fur rug draped over his knees, and Reeve Fred Verghoers presented him with a big old skeleton key he said was the key to West Gull. The senator drooled just a bit, a few whispered jokes were made about what graveyard or coffin the key might or might not be intended to open, the senator had a glass of champagne and was wheeled out again.

  Adam Goldsmith saw it all. Positioned at the mantelpiece like a ship berthed in a familiar port, Adam stood tall and pearish, radiating his usual deferential courtesy. Tonight his attentions were concentrated on Dr. Albert Knight. Since his daughter’s departure, Dr. Knight and Adam had rekindled their old friendship. “You’ll forgive an elderly man for speaking his mind,” he’d said to Adam on the evening he came over to mend fences, the “elderly” adding that touch of ironic exaggeration Adam was known to appreciate. On this occasion, suitably unsuited in shapeless grey flannel and a hairy tweed jacket, Dr. Knight puffed at his pipe and amused Adam so well with his comments on the passing crowd that Adam almost forgot to spend the evening bemoaning his lack of Elizabeth.

  But when he got home it struck him in a way he hadn’t experienced for years. Even walking through the snow, his left side was burning and tense and by the time he got his coat and boots off and had collapsed in an armchair, his chest was so tight he was certain he was having some kind of heart attack. That’s how it had been after Elizabeth was killed: attacks of the heart, where it cramped and constricted, as though unable to stop clutching its emptiness in search of what used to be there. The first few times he believed he was having some sort of cardiac emergency, even if grief was what had brought it on. He would be curled up on the floor with pain, pounding his ribs to release the cramp in his heart while waiting for death to take him. Not that, in extremis, such a wait was obligatory: Albert Knight had long ago provided him with a means of escape should his situation become intolerable.

  Once, a much more ideal departure had almost been assured—that last night, exactly eleven years ago, when Elizabeth told him she was going to leave with him New Year’s morning. “Adam, Adam, you must believe me.” And he had, or almost had, or had at least been willing to pretend.

  What a New Year’s that had been. Barely able to keep from howling his good fortune to the sky, Adam had rushed home from the party, his heart cavorting like a moronic puppy, and run up and down the stairs to prepare his suitcases, too excited to sleep but making himself stretch out in the easy chair with his feet up on the same hassock his mother used for propping up her swollen feet in the heavy heat of summer. With his head back and plans whirling through his mind like clouds of asteroid dust, he’d been able to taste the taste of Elizabeth on his lips, hear the cosy sound of her voice, sink into the coming luxury of a life spent with her. The future: a carefully planned and furbished treasure chest of bank accounts and hidden investments that Adam had spent twenty years waiting to open and enjoy. That night in the half-darkness, nursing a drink in his easy chair, Adam imagined himself somehow communing with his mother. Triumphantly broadcasting that after everything, he had finally ended up with the Glade daughter, the daughter Flora claimed he had inspired into existence. Although she would not have approved of him stealing her from another man. Adultery, deceptions, such sins had not been her stock in trade.

  When the pains in his chest eased, Adam took up paper and pen to indulge in his annual New Year’s ritual, his substitute for their evenings of gossip by the hearth: writing a letter to Elizabeth recounting the year’s events. This year’s letter was longer than usual. Carl’s return to West Gull, the state of his relationships with Lizzie and Chrissy, the events with Fred, all required long explanations. Then there was the video. It was hard to know whether minor-key porno deserved a place in an essentially dignified medium—a letter to a dead person—but in the end, because Carl had given him the video for safekeeping and its presence in his house was an endless irritatio
n, he divulged. Adam described how their world had become an absurd parody, how an event that between them had been so romantic and so satisfying had been transformed by Chrissy and Fred into a series of celluloid impressions depicting various unimaginative acts, carried out by two near-animals apparently equally hungry for pleasure and pain.

  When he finished it was almost morning, almost the time of night eleven years ago when he had started wondering if he should begin to expect Elizabeth or prepare to be disappointed, almost the time when Luke Richardson had called to tell him about the accident. He made himself a hot chocolate to wash down his sleeping pill, watched the letter burn in his wood-stove, went to bed.

  In the beginning were the voices. Adam was a child then, with the innocence of a child. The innocence, the craft, the cunning. At night he would awake crying out in unknown tongues, nightmare legions flaming across his walls and ceilings, and his mother would carry him to her bed and fold him into the hot flannel of her nightdress until finally the voices stilled and Adam was asleep again, asleep among the marching legions of old empires. And then the dream would start again and in the dream Adam was a child of those legions, a soldier’s child was the child he was, and one night his father took him in his arms and told him that the empire had called, that the empire had need of his legion, that he would be marching on to other countries, other wars, and then in the dream it was dawn and Adam was alone on a cold hill watching the legions as they disappeared in the direction of the rising light, and only he was left behind to remember, to preserve, to await the return.

  In the beginning were the voices and Adam was nothing until the voices filled him and when they woke him in the night he screamed out their scrambled message while his mother held him close and tight because Adam had become his father his father’s father his father’s father before him. Adam was the father of all fathers the voice the sun the son the tongue of the Church of the Unique God and then the voices left and Adam was nothing again, just emptiness waiting for a memory he could no longer speak until Elizabeth came and spoke his name and hers was the voice Adam heard and then she was gone and Adam was empty again.