Swan River

by David Reynolds

  I didn’t like the idea, but I couldn’t argue with him – he was my father. With my help, he got out of bed and grabbed my hand so that his forearm locked over mine. He was wearing a white hospital nightshirt instead of his pyjamas and his legs were shockingly thin. With one hand on me and one on the bed, he reached the ward’s central aisle. There, he put his arm round me so that it rested on my shoulder and told me to walk on slowly. As we moved away from the bed, he slumped against me. I put my arm round his waist and we took a few steps before he started to slide out of my grasp. His legs had given way and I found that I was holding him under his arms from behind. I was taking all his weight, but, as I struggled to hold him up, he paddled on with his feet in an attempt to reach the swing doors. A young male nurse rushed up and took hold of him, taking half the weight off me. ‘You mustn’t do this. He has to stay in bed. He isn’t at all well.’

  ‘I’m sorry. He just wanted to watch some television. I didn’t know he was so weak.’

  We put him back in bed and the nurse adjusted his pillows so that he was lying down. He looked tired – the few steps we had taken seemed to have used what energy he had. I poured some orange squash, leaned over him and held the mug for him to drink. He looked steadily at me and I saw how sunken his eyes had become and that his eyelids were tight hemispheres. ‘I regard awareness as life itself. I am aware. That is all that is worth living for.’

  I couldn’t remember his using the word before; the hippies and the new interest in Buddhism had made awareness a watchword for my generation, but surely not for his. ‘Yes. I think you’re right. But what made you say that?’

  He smiled. ‘Just a thought I had.’

  I told him about Corsica. He seemed to listen, but his eyelids soon began to droop. I kissed him and watched as he fell asleep.

  * * * * *

  I spoke to Ann several times that week – he was sinking fast, she said. I went again the next Sunday.

  He was lying in the bed, turned a little to one side – the side with space for his visitors. His body and his arms were underneath the bedclothes. Only his head was visible. Against the whiteness of the pillow, it looked small and the yellowness had turned to brown. His eyes were open but seemed unfocused. There were smears of yellow saliva at the corners of his mouth. I leaned over, kissed his forehead – gently because it seemed fragile – and said hello. There was a sour, acidic smell, unlike anything I had smelled before. As I pulled my head away, his eyes were drawn to my face, and were filled with puzzlement, and perhaps fear, as they wandered around it, apparently wondering who or what I was. Then his eyes settled on mine. ‘David?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it you?’

  ‘It’s me, David.’

  ‘Good.’ He closed his eyes. I pulled up a chair, sat down and looked at him. It was obvious that he would die soon. I put my hand on the sheet, where it covered his shoulder. He opened his eyes, but didn’t seem to see me, and closed them again. I sat for a few minutes watching him breathe with his mouth half open.

  I found a doctor and spoke to him in a hallway. No, he didn’t think my father would die today, but within a few days. He was sorry.

  I went back to his bed. He hadn’t moved. I sat by him a little longer, then kissed his forehead and said goodbye. Again, he opened his eyes and closed them without showing any expression.

  As I walked to the station, I muttered, ‘How are the mighty fallen.’ I said it out loud several times as I crossed a bridge. The shrivelled head on the white pillow was so far from the man I had loved and, occasionally, hated.

  * * * * *

  Ann telephoned me the next evening. He had lost consciousness and wouldn’t regain it; the doctors were certain of that. There was no point in my visiting again.

  He died two days later. Ann rang me at my office.

  ‘Thanks… Thanks for telling me… We’ll talk soon.’

  I put the phone down and stared at it for a few seconds. Then I stood up, stretched and walked around my desk. I looked out of the window at the traffic below, and wandered around the room staring at things on the walls without really looking at them. After a few minutes I sat down and carried on with my work.

  26

  On a Bridge near Durban

  It was late June, warm and overcast. As I drove north out of Winnipeg the spaces between the buildings gradually widened. Half an hour from the centre, new stone houses were set well back from the road with a quarter-mile of grass and woods between them. I began to wonder if I was on the right road. The signs said north, but made no mention of Portage la Prairie, Gladstone or Dauphin, the three towns that I recalled seeing in bold type on the Explore Manitoba map. According to the signs the road led to Lockport and nowhere else. I pulled the car on to the verge; I hadn’t heard of Lockport.

  The map showed that I had been driving north-east. My destination was as far west of Winnipeg as it was north and I had to drive west first, so as to get on the other side of Lake Manitoba. I drove back the way I had come. In one sense I had had little time to think about this trip; I had been working long hours, had left my office late on Friday and been at Gatwick early on Saturday. In another sense, I had had all the years since that grey March day when, on a whim, I had called in on Uncle George. After all that time I was at last rushing towards Swan River, perhaps a little unprepared.

  I didn’t even know what kind of car I was driving, just that it was grey and twelve years old, had the steering wheel on the wrong side and no tape deck, just a radio. It had been the only car the rental company had available. A man had hoovered the inside while I waited and I was glad that it was old and had a few small scrapes; the man had said that it was reliable and had made no apologies. And, except for the Rough Guide to Canada, my heavy old Nikon and some Neet Deet mosquito repellent, I had brought nothing that I wouldn’t have taken on holiday in England.

  I drove back, past the well-spaced houses with the plate glass and the shiny new jeeps, and into a stretch where the buildings were wooden and dilapidated, behind broken fences and rusting pick-ups; they were close together, there were children playing, and they made me think of my grandfather Tom, who I was sure had lived in a log cabin. I realised that I was driving more slowly, looking around. There was no need to rush; I was on the edge of a new city, away from my office and the hustle of London. The man had glanced at my map and guessed it might take nine hours to drive to Swan River, though he had never been there. I had already wasted an hour, but what did it matter if it took two days, or three; there was no one telling me what to do, no one with any expectations.

  I turned right on to a multi-lane ring road, the kind that encircles every modern city; Portage la Prairie was among the names on the signs. I settled into driving at about fifty-five and thought again about my grandfather. I had read through his letters soon after my father gave them to me and hadn’t looked at them again until a few months ago. Then, in order to understand them thoroughly, I had transcribed them on to my computer, peering at his elegant copperplate through a magnifying glass to decipher words that were hard to read.

  I had brought the typed transcriptions with me – as well as the original letters – and had read through them once again on my flight from London. There were eight letters, three written in London between 1902 and 1906 and five later, from Durban, Manitoba. In October 1902 Tom wrote to Sis thanking her for a letter telling him that she and Cliffie were well. He told her that he had no money at all, was using his last stamps and had tried to get work ‘of any kind, for anything’ but had failed. From the end of the week he would no longer have an address; he was leaving because he couldn’t pay the rent and he didn’t know where he would go. He ended by saying: ‘I don’t know what you will tell Cliffie about me but, if ever anybody’s heart bleeds, mine is now doing so with sorrow at what I have brought about by my thoughtless and bad conduct.’

  In December 1905 he sent Cliffie a letter, which was intended to arrive on his fourteenth birthday. Cliffie received it after
his mother died, in 1942 when he was fifty. Tom told him that ‘your Father has not forgotten for one moment his dear boy’ and that it was his ‘constant hope and prayer’ that he was ‘being treated with kindness and growing up to be an honest and straightforward man’. He acknowledged that he was not allowed to know where Cliffie lived, but asked if they could meet soon at Liverpool Street Station; there were things that he wanted to tell him that he could not put in a letter.

  I took the slip road on to Trans Canada Highway One and settled down in the slow lane. I held tight to the wheel as monolithic radiator grilles filled the mirror and trucks the size of houses swung past enveloping me in a maelstrom of noise and turbulence. I turned on the radio; a woman was giving advice about shopping for designer clothes in Winnipeg. I turned it off.

  Tom’s last letter from London had been written on 3 August 1906 to a nameless friend of his brother Bertie, who had helped him before by giving him a suit and who had agreed to help fund his passage to Canada. Tom wrote very politely, enclosing the £4 bill for his passage and asking for extra money to retrieve his clothes from a pawnbroker. He told the man that he was ‘quite destitute and starving – and subsisting on what is given me by others little better off than myself’. He gave an address where ‘letters are taken for me but my sleeping here or anywhere else is most erratic’ and asked if the man might persuade his brother to send him ‘a few shillings to get food. I can put up with being out at nights but it is hard to starve.’ He ended: ‘If I am incoherent you must excuse me as I am in a weak state although, I hope, well enough to pass the doctor on board ship.’ The existence of this letter among the others, that were all to Sis, Cliffie or Uncle George, had puzzled me, but then I thought that Bertie’s nameless friend – whom he addressed as ‘Sir’ – probably passed it to Uncle George with the bill for Tom’s passage, because they had agreed to split the cost.

  I turned the radio back on, pushed the tuning buttons and found a station that was playing Blur and Alanis Morissette. The road was flat and straight, like the surrounding country. This had to be the prairies. I drove faster. Portage la Prairie, which had seemed romantic and faraway on the map in London, passed quickly by, an orange smudge, pierced by a few concrete high-rises. I turned off the Trans Canada on to a two-lane road signed to Gladstone, Neepawa and Dauphin.

  The sky was dull grey and getting darker, the country green all around; patches of conifer broke the uniformity. There was little traffic, and T-shaped telegraph poles stretched out ahead for miles. I stopped the car, got out, stretched and looked around. A red pick-up whooshed past. I watched until it became a dull point two or three miles ahead and disappeared over a distant ridge. I was on the open, north American road, and belonged for a few hours in the myth driven by movies and fuelled by rock music. I looked at the car. It was a Ford; some chrome lettering read ‘Tempo’; it was old and anonymous, which suited me.

  I drove on, pushing buttons on the radio and thanking Tom Reynolds for bringing me here. The road climbed gradually. After an hour’s driving a storm broke. Even with the wipers on double speed, I couldn’t see out of my Ford. I pulled to the side of the road, cut the engine and stared at the dark, swirling water inches from my face as the country music station played soft. When the rain eased, I drove to the next diner and sat across from a short, fat man in dungarees whose upper lip bumped into his nose as he ate.

  Gladstone was a village, a mix of red brick and timber where the road bent west beneath wooded hills. The sun came out as I drove past the malls and filling stations of Neepawa and Minnedosa and turned north on to Highway 10. The road climbed, dipped and twisted through cultivated valleys and hills, as I listened to oldies from the 1960s: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; Mick Jagger yelling ‘No Satisfaction’. Suddenly there was white light on the horizon and clouds like dirty smoke overhead. Rain fell again, fiercely and briefly, and the sky was a thin blue as I drove into a town with wooden sidewalks and weathered square-fronted buildings like main street in a western. I stopped for coffee and browsed through the histories of Manitoba in a second-hand bookstore, looking for mentions of Swan River. There was just one; it told me that the first homesteaders arrived in the valley in 1898, a century ago – before then the area had been visited only by trappers and fur traders.

  I passed a warning silhouette of a moose stamped on a yellow diamond, as the road widened and swept on through an undulating forest. It was mid-afternoon; the sky was blue again and the only clouds were thin white streaks. I turned off the radio and listened to the birds and the silence. I wondered if my grandfather had been in this place, and I thought about Uncle George who had paid half his fare and then told me to follow him. I stopped and strolled by a lake where there were birds and no humans, and watched its ripples sparkle in the sun. I drove on and when I thought I saw a bear by the roadside, turned the car to go back and make sure: it was small and black with a brown snout, a young one, idly pulling leaves from bushes and putting them in its mouth.

  From the edge of the forest a straight road led north to Dauphin. I had a vision of Deborah, aged about twelve, in my room in Marlow. Dauphin was the town she and I had noticed in an atlas because it was the nearest place to Swan River; I knew now that it was more than a hundred miles away. It was years since I had seen Deborah; she had married a doctor and gone to live somewhere in the west of England. One day, I might just find her unexpectedly once again.

  I saw a road sign and braked. I had been expecting this sometime soon, but it was still a surprise. A white arrow on a green ground pointed to the left. Next to the arrow were the words Swan River.

  Of course I knew the town was there – maps, my grandfather’s letters and the hotel receptionist to whom I had spoken on the phone the previous night proved that – but this mundane notice somehow thrilled me. It wasn’t that it showed that I was getting closer, but that it made the town seem like a real place instead of a blurred picture inside my head, a myth that I had been carrying around for most of my life. I got out of the car and used the Nikon, instead of my pocket camera, to photograph the road sign from the best angle, showing the sky, the horizon, the straight road ahead to Dauphin and, to the left, the road to Swan River.

  It was eight o’clock, but not cold and the sun was far from setting. The road was straight and empty. Some of the land was cultivated, but there were more woods here than further south and a few miles to the west was a Provincial Park called Duck Mountain. At nine o’clock I stopped to look at the sky and think about someone whom I loved and had left behind in London two days before. It was still light, and low down, where the road ahead met the sky, the thin clouds glowed silver. As I drove on, I tuned to a country music station and swayed in my seat as a man and a woman sang a duet I had heard a few hours earlier. As the slide guitar faded, I listened to the voice of the host: ‘Vince Gill with Patti Loveless, “My Kind Of Woman, My Kind Of Man”.’

  The clouds thickened and daylight faded. When I reached the sign that announced Swan River there was darkness on the ground and the silver in the sky had turned to gold.

  I passed a filling station and anonymous lots displaying combine harvesters, tractors and pick-ups. A giant supermarket loomed unlit behind a car park. There were streetlights ahead. The place seemed to be flat and there was no sign of a river, or a valley. I drove through traffic lights, the first I had seen since leaving Winnipeg, and saw a sign to The Pas and Flin Flon, towns even further north. I knew that the hotel I’d booked into was a little way down that road, but I drove on towards the streetlights; I wanted to see Swan River now, at least from the window of my Ford.

  A sign said Main Street. There were three or four blocks with shops and business premises on both sides of the street – I saw another hotel, two or three eating places, a bank and the office of the Swan River Star and Times. Main Street crossed a broad level-crossing without gates – and the last streetlight was beyond a small cinema and another place serving food. I made a U-turn and drove slowly back through the town towards
the hotel. A few yards down the railway track from the level-crossing was a corrugated-iron tower, which I guessed was a grain store; otherwise the buildings were low with flat roofs.

  The hotel was modern and sprawling, with space for cars on every side. I checked in and went straight to the bar; it was ten o’clock and they would soon stop serving food. It was carpeted and crowded, and filled with people of all ages chattering. I drank bottled Molson Dry and looked at a copy of the Swan River Star and Times, as I waited for a half-pounder with bacon and cheese. No one took much notice of me. It seemed to be the kind of place where they were used to strangers passing through.

  The front-page story was about star pupils at local schools who had won prizes and places at Canada’s universities. Inside, a teenage boy had drowned in a remote lake in the Duck Mountain Provincial Park and there was a call for improved safety measures. There was a preview of the annual Swan River Rodeo the next week – I felt sorry that I would be back in London by then – and a feature on ‘Swan River Past’, divided into ten, twenty-five and fifty years ago this week, a past that was too recent for me. The burger arrived on an oval plate with plenty of salad and too many chips.

  My swift trip up and down Main Street had given me a sense of anti-climax. It seemed to be a long strip of garish signs – new buildings dumped along a road. There seemed to be nothing old, nothing that would have been there when my grandfather was here, and I wondered if it would have seemed different if I had come sooner. It was 1998; Tony Blair and New Labour had been in power for a year, Spurs had been saved from relegation from the premiership by David Ginola and the brief return of Jürgen Klinsmann. It was twenty-nine years since my father had died – and thirty-eight since Uncle George had tapped my knee and told me to come to this place. ‘When you’re grown-up and can afford travel,’ he had said. Perhaps it was appropriate that I had delayed so long, until I was forty-nine. I had been busy and had thought little about Swan River or my grandfather for thirty years. Now I had five clear days to make amends.