Chapter 14
A Bottle of Gin
BUT IT HAD NOT felt like this at the time. The immediate shock of the fire too was a different matter.
Senor, Lord, I wish to be your disciple, Ethan thought on the bus. I say it to you passionately, you are in need of disciples, or at least interpreters, and I, who once lived among fishermen, am in a position to be one, even as the chipping sparrow, who has built his nest near the true disciples, who are fishermen themselves. I am not a Catholic, nor, in my opinion, may one change the religion of one’s birth without a feeling of great wrong. I am rid of the idols, except perhaps the sun and moon on the twin spires of Chartres Cathedral, as either hope or a hangover, rise majestically free behind the stubble fields in the weary pilgrimage from San Pres. And on the beach, the edge of the world in a way, what of the sun and moon there, on the twin cylinders of the oil retorts, as the refinery gruffly utters another gust of explodents, how shall I interpret this in a Christian light? Is it well with You? Eternal presence of the Creator, surely we may be inconsistent without being dishonest, as I have heard over the water someone singing on a fisherman’s radio.
Now has evil on earth its strong hour, You once said Yourself, through the mouth of some medieval anonymous poet, in the play of your own passion. Of my death ye are not aghast, You said, and then when they killed You, You asked God, how have I grievest Thee that Thou nailest me to a tree. But we are aghast at your death here. Is it well that our hearts are nailed to these trees? The birds have their nests, You said, but the son of man had nowhere to lay his head.
And Ethan thought again of the thunderless gold lightning behind the mountains. It is an esoteric lightning too, like magical powers, and there is the danger that in talking of it we may be guilty of trying to render exoteric the intrinsically esoteric, which, while seeming the most human, is the essential proliferating folly of man, but how shall we be sure of this if we take as anything like fact what is actually happening to an esoteric individual who practices sternly solely what he preaches to his initiates. What do we make indeed of Christ’s teaching and the Christian church? Are we to say that the former only begins to repossess its old authority when the latter is persecuted? Or can God change His own mind? However the lightning need no longer scribble exclusively in that void whose secrets are known only to mystics who, as Barbey d’Aurevilly said, “like the lobster knows the secrets of the sea but does not bark.” “We have the answer to everything,” The McCandless used to annoy me by saying, putting the tips of his fingers together, “except sprites.”
But Dr. S. L. Miller, of Columbia University and the Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has just descended to the world of medical research, via the old Vancouver Messenger I have in my hand, and hence to myself; I quote: Dr. Miller suggested that lightning may have had a hand in generating the complex chemicals of which living matter consists (the path of God’s lightning back to God, as The McCandless would say?). He described some experiments in which powerful electric sparks were sent through a mixture of gases such as may have made up the earth’s atmosphere in its early stages. Presently it was found that a variety of organic compounds had been formed, including various amino acids—the chemical building-bricks out of which protein, the basic stuff of life, is built up.
Dear Universe without terrors, for no hope can have them, but daily growing more terrific, I am a lawyer, concerned with justice, and have not until today at least considered myself, like Claudel, a poet set aside to proclaim God’s revelation as God’s spokesman, even though a jingle or so—never indeed until these last days have I progressed further than my eternal poem which begins and ends: Her wing doth the eagle flap, Hungry clouds swag on the deep.
And all this time the tide was inexorably coming in, higher and higher…
The fire had happened in May 1946, at about the time that Ethan, who had been, as The McCandless phrased it, “conscripted finally into intelligence,” was mustered out of the army, having returned from France less than a week before, after a year’s absence. True, he had been obliged to fight most of the war, if not exactly against his will, certainly against his conscience, then to his vast relief so far as Jacqueline and Tommy were concerned, behind a desk in Toronto; later to everyone’s quiet merriment behind another desk in Niagara-on-the-Lake itself.
Since on the outskirts of Ethan’s home town had appeared an army camp, whose complement of new recruits were detrained, there having been no railway station in Niagara-on-the-Lake within any living memory, right in the center of town; the troop train, the first of any description to be seen there for half a century, approaching stealthily down the middle of the main highway from Ixion—or rather from Niagara Falls—along the disused metals, then drunkenly halting between the Prince of Wales Hotel-Licensed—which during the war opened at 4 P.M., on the one side, and an antique stable housing three cobwebbed stagecoaches preserved as a tourist attraction on the other; not, though, before it had concussively aroused, at least on its first visits, an excitement among the moribund inhabitants of the old capital such as perhaps had not been known since the Johnstown Flood. In this way the train traversed Niagara-on-the-Lake’s main street, and, as observed from the door of the public library (which was in the basement of the police station), blocked the end of that street entirely, drawn up across it, hissing mephitically beyond the two-hundred-year-old clock-tower, in complete possession; the approaching troop train no less unlikely a sight to anyone coming out of the Prince of Wales who had completely forgotten the existence of the single railway tracks (which didn’t belong to Canada at all but pertained to an old extension over the border of the long bankrupt Lake Erie and Michigan Railroad of America) than had it been, forming infinitely slowly out of a snowstorm in the distance, advancing down the main road, a long sperm whale walking solemnly into town from Niagara Falls smoking a cigar.
Or, Ethan thought in the bus, like something with as little right to be there as an evil spirit tentatively feeling its way into a human brain.
But Ethan had been sent over to France the previous spring, just prior to V.E. Day, in an advisory-liaison-postmortem-legal capacity; he had seen no fighting to speak of, brought up the rear guard of history everywhere. Still, because he’d formerly volunteered for active service as a private (he was astonished to discover in an official capacity how many had done so with an ulterior motive) and been rejected, and now had been in France as an officer, and still seen no action, both his pride and his conscience remained sensitive. And so he stood there with Jacqueline on that fateful Monday of their return from Ixion, unbelieving before this ruination, this dereliction of their hopes, before the bleak rebuke of that charred and ill-odored pile which no longer even smoldered, but at the same time uneasily feeling, apart from anything else he could already feel advancing on him again with paranoiac tread, that it must be some holocaustic revenge the war itself had taken on him, a view shared to some extent though from a different standpoint, by his son Tommy, then aged ten, who having spent that weekend with that American school friend whose father was the brigadier general, now on leave from occupied Japan, seemed at first almost delighted by the disaster, seeing in it perhaps some occult hint of his father’s military significance after all.
It was Tommy who had greeted them with the news. Ethan had driven Jacqueline to Ixion that Saturday, first having collected the car from the garage where it was being repaired, chiefly with the idea of taking her to an exhibition of French Impressionist paintings on loan there from New York, with the intention of returning by Sunday evening. More amused than hurt by his son’s infatuation with the brigadier’s family at such a time, Ethan had chosen to interpret this as a kind of inherited sensitivity, manly and precocious, in every way worthy of the father, to his desire to be alone with his wife. But the car had broken down again in Ixion on Sunday, could not be repaired till the following morning, and they’d phoned General Heatherington, who agreed to keep Tommy another nig
ht and deposit him at school with his son Pat the next day. That Monday morning they’d returned before noon and driven straight to the school. Tommy came running out yelling excitedly, what did they know, Mom, Pop, their house had burned down in the night! Finding himself a hero, in the manner of the “corpse’s mate” at sea, not only insisted, though let off, on calmly going back to school that afternoon, but announced his intention of going to a birthday party at a friend’s immediately after it.
Well, Ethan had not seen any fighting, but he had seen great suffering, and for a while, standing there, in the way the mind produces the most irrelevant and hypocritical considerations at such moments, he felt it shameful, remembering his first sight of shattered St. Malo, not merely to give way to emotion but even to cavil. Yet there is no gainsaying the tragedy of any fire or its heartbreak. And, comforting Jacqueline, he knew, despite her apparent stoicism, it would be long before they transcended it.
What made it all so much the more poignant and hard to bear was the contrast everywhere about them with the miraculous loveliness of the Niagara spring of that year, evoked for him by Jacqueline in all her last letters to him in France, full of longing for his return in time to see it with her; how she pictured it for him, that eastern spring, every bit as extravagant as the tamarind mulberry and fire-colored autumns, and coming with such a rush and bloom of life after the breaking up of the ice on the lake; the fountainous elm trees with their pale green fluttering leaves over-arching the stately avenues of the deserted town (which a few weeks hence would be as crowded each weekend with tourists from Toronto and across the border as a Coney Island beach) and the blue lake itself beyond; the white dogwood, the pink dogwood, the celestial clouds of peach blossom, the capricious cardinals so splendidly crested and caparisoned in scarlet (so red, she had written, that when they flash through the trees you don’t believe it), the trapezing scarlet tanagers that lived in their orchard, so precariously in a nest of leaves on the end of a branch; the first snowdrops and crocus in her garden; and the fantastic canoe-wood tree; a flurry of snow out of a clear sky (all these details of nature which were to possess far more meaning and reality for him when, in Eridanus, he came to pronounce the names of all birds and flowers and living things with love); but which then, insofar as they were also appurtenances of “Niagara’s springtime beauty” did not yet appear, as they did now, to have been somehow forever outside and slightly withdrawn from them—as if this had been the one curse of truly inhuman meanness his taxless paradise, through its loss, had put on him, “Spiritual Babbitt” Jacqueline had once hurled at him—the beauty itself seeming now in retrospect to have a “Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted” notice on it, a “Keep Out” sign; the ferocious taxes that had to be paid for it to have given one the sense at every moment that despite one’s ownership, even of the orchard, they were beholden for it to some wretched human official rather than to its creator or even themselves, that the beauty moreover was beginning to capitulate, that nature herself was becoming tame and domesticated and actually looked up smugly as to a superior force at the hideousness of civilization inexorably surrounding it. And Jacqueline had written of their finding one another again in some renewed springtime of their love, which was what he thought his wife’s wild girlish heart meant: and now the words had proved consubstantial with what they described: for here he had come back in time to see it all with his little family, and here he was: and now this.
They turned away from the sight, but then morbid curiosity, triumphant even at one’s own expense, had to go on looking.
Jacqueline started to cry. “My—my bluebells, my hyacinths…”
There was something almost admirable at first in the very completeness of the destruction. If this were the war’s revenge, it had almost exceeded its own terms. A bomb might have spared a wall, a room, a floor, left them something to build a hope of rebuilding on. But here there seemed absolutely nothing left but ashes. It looked less like the result of a fire than as if the whole place by some evil magic had been submerged in a great vat of sulfuric acid and simply melted away: house, garden, even part of the orchard was gone, or blasted and scorched, gone, all gone in that sudden infernal cataclysm, that biblioclasm. And they hadn’t been here to help, to prevent, to save, if saved it could have been. And still standing there staring, unbelieving, seeing the house still where no house was, and seeing inside the house, the as yet undeparted graceful phantasm of staircase and polished bannisters, tallboy and century-old wainscotting and grandfather’s clock, they heard the bell ringing from the Catholic school nearby, mingling with the laughter of children (who, in a yard flanked by the cemetery outside the chapel, were playing baseball with the priest), a sound that would always accompany in memory these moments, just as the warning bell tolling along the railway lines on the other side of the inlet would always be associated with their first glimpse of their cabin and Eridanus (and with The McCandless’ later comments on it), the bell ringing and ringing wildly, while now before Ethan’s eyes rose the terrible shell of St.-Malo Cathedral as he’d seen it not long before his return, and he heard once more its great bell tolling within the hush of the tower, making a mournful incantation of the words he read posted in the vestry:
Vous qui passez
Ayez pitié
d’une Paroisse
totalement sinistre
—par le Fer et par le Feu
—de 6 et 7 août 1944
—un église en ruines
—plus d’écoles de filles
—plus de Parsonages
—plus de Presbytère
Aidons nous, merci!
But not even the cathedral had been as “totally destroyed” as their home, its tower and bell survived. Yet, ah God, the fire itself, what on earth could have caused it? The fire department did not know, the chief of police had already advanced his theory of lightning, the insurance man was coming to investigate. Was the poor scarlet tanager the culprit, the tanager still whizzing about their heads, brokenhearted, angry as hell, chipping and chirring, still looking for the nest of leaves in the vanished peach tree, was he the miscreant? The scarlet tanager, warbird, redbird, firebird, and firebird of legend: did they make off with lighted cigarettes thrown on the road as people said? had he flashed through some window accidentally left open, dropping the burning cigarette within? Naturam expellas furca tamen usque recurret, Ethan thought in the bus, that just an instant, as he opened his eyes again, seemed not in Vancouver Island, but racing through the cavernous avenues of Niagara-on-the-Lake.
“Don’t look any more, Jacky. Oh Jesus Christ, my poor darling.”
“Don’t talk about it. And don’t mention phoenixes to me or I’ll scream.”
“Well if the bloody bird’s going to clap its wings at all, I’d say this was a damn good time.”
Well, their house was dead. And the world still burned on. Somewhere or other it did, even though it was now supposed to be peacetime. And you cannot look indefinitely at a bad stench. Leaving the car, they walked away, wanting to walk right away, walking hand-in-hand, even from time to time swinging their hands together in interlocked anguish, through the stupid beautiful little town, already blossoming too with more jukeboxes (that all seemed to be playing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas”) and Coca-Cola advertisements than he ever remembered (and a new advertisement too for Mother Gettle, though fortunately not the one) and dragonred filling stations like Chinese pagodas, all of them feverishly suggesting grotesque fire stations full of imaginary winking fire engines pulling away to the rescue—wanting to walk, as once in their first October there, along the Niagara River through the bronze and amethyst oak forest, “living on the land,” as they’d called it, eating raw meadow mushrooms, fallen hickory nuts and two windfallen apples, beside the arrowy, swift, sun-shot Niagara River to Queenstown, wanting to feel this time the remorseless weight of their suffering falling on them there, though all the while their feet were remorselessly taking them to the government liquor store, which was
shut. “I guess the only entry is a nolle prosequi,” Ethan said, his nose flattened on the window, elbows spread, hands vizoring his eyes, their faces reflected among the bottles in the closed liquor store looking completely cuckoo—which they might well have been. “Probably they’ve just locked the doors and are boozing our rations away in the back room.” And the Prince of Wales beer parlour shut too, for it was only 2 P.M., the Prince of Wales Hotel, where, having successfully eluded so far all kind offers of hospitality with the touchingly gruesome exception of some banana sandwiches and “Grape-up” specially prepared by their neighbor the postmaster’s wife for their lunch—and hugely appreciated by Tommy, fortunately, who had eaten most of theirs—the Prince of Wales where he intended they should stay—
“And I won’t stay at the Prince of Wales! I won’t I won’t!” shouted Jacqueline, all at once clapping her hands to her ears. An electric motor-horn in an empty car across the street had been yelling to itself above the jukeboxes, and was still dinning: suddenly the empty car blazed before their eyes: a short circuit somewhere. Now with a promptitude and exactness nothing less than brutal, bearing in mind the late circumstances (which had no doubt encouraged them to take time off that afternoon to practice) the volunteer fire brigade clanged up, while Ethan actively started across the street, accompanied by the chief of police shouting, “Keep away from that car, Captain Llewelyn!” But the grocer opposite had come running out of his shop and put out the fire with a pyrene extinguisher.
October Ferry to Gabriola Page 9