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Wide World In Celebration and Sorrow

Page 21

by Leon Rooke


  “That Riel fella were hanged, yer know. Captured at Batoche and strung up.” The captain pauses to gnash the gears, to kick at some hum of engine irregular to his ears. “Oh, not so long ago. Quite a fella. Yer. My old sidekick, in my rough-and-ready days.”

  He turns and looks at me. It is the first time I have seen his face near a lantern, in good light. His face shows the cascades of a thousand years.

  “Didn’t know yer husband. Knew his father, though. Old Two Foot, yer know. Two Foot in the Water. Now there were a man could chew yer up and spit yer out. Yer give him cause. Not the man for that Chair, though. Not a Jefferson man. The way yer husband was.”

  Beneath the wheel, where the captain rests his leg, is my chained steamer trunk. I started with seven, and now am returning with one. I have gone up and gone down.

  I root a finger into the monkey’s ear; I ream the knobby flesh.

  “Yer can go on with yer tale, yer know,” the captain says. “Anytime yer like.”

  Yer. My infant daughter ripped from my chest and flung into the Plum, even as these same tormenters tore away my dress and dropped down astride me. Shouting insane currency in my ears. Another of Luther’s gang standing by at the ready. “We’ll show you democracy!” My child at squall in rapids and no shriek too many to proclaim the atrocity.

  Jackals at gnaw upon our bones.

  Later on, my child at float, head down and much bloated. I pushed the swollen child along in the tide. Go, I said. Why do you tarry?

  I observed her spirit rove ashore some further distance along; it arose sprightly, and joy flooded my heart. But then her legs kimbered and the arms spun as in a cripple’s dance and the head sailed loose of her frame and one arm spiralled eastward and the other westward and in the sky I saw lips nose eyes and ears all disassembled and whirling in wind and the next moment the form that remained in the water toppled backwards and sank into the fathomless bottom.

  “Ujiji,” the captain says. “Kigoma. Yer. By daylight. Then only three thousand more miles. Yer see slave ships in yer mind, princess?”

  Yer. And the cry of the birds when their wings are axed and the sky is no longer theirs and the slave ships slip away with the bird wings stacked one upon the other and the night of all nights has come down.

  “Yer. I thought yer was.”

  We are entering a lake mouth. A soft rain is falling; the leaves are dripping.

  “More rum, princess?”

  I think not.

  A hush of people, come from nowhere, are lining the bank.

  “Yer dress, princess? Yer think?”

  Already he has unlocked and opened my trunk.

  “Yer are their princess too, yer know. Yer are the Chair.”

  Yer. My bones, my beads, my princess dress. Sticks in the hair. My face painted.

  Yer.

  WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

  I came out of my writing room only wanting what I was thinking of as a small break from the tedium of composing, endlessly composing, but actually just sort of sitting there, sitting in there, I mean, though earnestly sitting, reverentially sitting, you could almost say, though actually unable to get out of my mind that line in the Joyce Carol Oates memoir A Widow’s Story, the line that goes Why did you not fall in love with the many others with whom you did not fall in love? which I have found is a darn intriguing line to be thinking about whether you are me or some other party. Why, yes, why? – is what I was in there thinking, that being the very same thing Joyce writes that she was thinking after the death of her husband of four decades – among other related questions she – and I, yes, after the death of my wife of four decades: what we were thinking. And also thinking What next? Is there a next, and if so, What? Then it dawned on me that maybe it was time for a well-deserved release from all that composing, or non-composing if such is how you prefer to see the matter, if, that is to say, you want to be absolutely literal about something that is none of your business in the first place. Except that it is your business, I guess, if you’re reading this.

  So that was the situation, up to a certain moment. Which certain moment arrived the very moment I quit that room. A woman I know, know very well, have known and loved through forty years, have been unreservedly intimate with a minimum three thousand times, that being her estimate – three thousand, just imagine! – and these physical encounters existing as the merest prelude or introduction – the landscape! – to the intimacy aggressively present in the entire frontier of intimacy as known and practiced by those of us so fortunate… when… when this same woman places herself directly in front of me, places herself between me and where it was I thought I was going, so close I dare not move, I dare not breathe, and what she says, says in this serious, no-nonsense way, is Listen here, you, don’t monkey with me, I know exactly why you’ve abandoned that room, I can see it in your face, you are quitting that room because YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT, you cannot figure it out, you have not THE REMOTEST IDEA, and DO NOT think to blame it on me, do not so much as consider blaming it on JOYCE CAROL OATES, or on your father or mother or children or on our dog and cat.

  That is precisely what she said. And I, who at any other time might have claimed to always know what happens next, was now blind and dumb in that regard.

  Her appearance was unanticipated, lovely – a thoroughly inconclusive – next. Now what?

  Katherine Mansfield arrives in a yellow cab. She’s wearing a nice hat. Look at her. A nice yellow hat with gold piping – a garden party hat! She’s trying to pay the driver with a concrete poem found this morning in a broken tea cup. Among the tea leaves! Who broke that cup? D.H. Lawrence broke that cup. What did he call her? He called her loathsome! A reptile! A loathsome reptile! Let’s say no more about that. We may not, because Katherine’s taxi driver is speaking. “Not today, Lady!” the driver is saying. “No poems today!” No one should talk this way to Katherine Mansfield. They should not say, as this driver does, “I will however accept as payment your pretty hat.” “Not my hat!” shouts Katherine. “I am going to a garden party!”

  This is outrageous. Someone must intervene. Jump up! I’ll pay the man! My wife is speaking. Heroic even in death – “All right, Katherine, the nasty people have gone. Here, darling, take this chair. Relax. Don’t even think of seducing anyone today.”

  “Too late, too late I did.”

  Table of Contents

  COVER

  WIDE WORLD IN CELEBRATION AND SORROW

  Contents

  ADDRESSING THE ASSASSINS

  BALDUCHI’S WHO’S WHO

  THE WINDS OF CHANGE, THE WINDS OF HOPE, THE WINDS OF DISASTER

  THE UNHAPPINESS OF OTHERS

  HEIDEGGER, FLOSS, ELFRIDE, AND THE CAT

  BAD MEN WHO LOVE JESUS

  OH, NO, I HAVE NOT SEEN MOLLY

  GO FISH

  LAP, A DOG

  SIDEBAR TO THE JUDICIARY PROCEEDINGS, THE NÜRNBERG WAR TRIALS, NOVEMBER 1945

  AARON & MAE

  FAMILY QUARRELS

  DON’T COOK A PIG

  FURTHER ADVENTURES OF A CROSS COUNTRY MAN

  HERE COMES HENRIETTA ARMANI

  A ROUGH CUSTOMER

  AT HEIDEGGER’S GRAVE

  WHY SO OFTEN YOU ARE AT A LOSS FOR WORDS

  THE YALE CHAIR

  WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

  Guide

  Cover

  Contents

 

 

 


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