by D. M. Fraser
What is the sign of the Father in you? … a movement, and a rest.
This is the end of the story. Somewhere along the road, a few miles out of Lonesome Town, or perhaps farther, perhaps almost within sight of its intended destination, the bus fails to negotiate a curve, spins out, keeps spinning, in widening circles, until at last it’s over the edge of the cliff that’s bound to be there, an abyss incalculably deep. That’s one explanation, as good as any, for the enduring absence of Jamie McIvor, hereafter. Another theory is that he has, for reasons of his own, “gone underground.” That is plausible enough, on a number of levels … Isobel Monadnock keeps her own counsel, avoids former friends, is rumoured to have taken up witchcraft. There have been no bulletins, recently, from Lonesome Town.
Or have there been? In a drawer of unanswered correspondence, unpaid bills, unfinished stories, a few scraps of mouldy paper turn up by chance; the handwriting is unaccountably shaky: “What has become of us? J. died. I went to the funeral, stood there scruffy and embarrassed in a borrowed suit too large for me, while a clergyman neither of us had ever known recited words J. had never pretended to believe in. It was a duty to be done, to be there, and I felt only the sticky heat of the afternoon, the smell of sea-salt and fishmeal heavy in the air, and my own strangeness, the distance I’d come. The service was elaborate and it went on for a cruelly long time: I had to watch the others to know when to bow my head, when to stand, when to sit down. When everyone else moved lips, made gestures, I followed. I had to remind myself: They’re burying him; it didn’t register. I was thinking: you’ve wrecked everything, done everything wrong, you haven’t a clue how to make it better now. You’ve asked for it. The music, in which I might have taken comfort, was tinny and remote. No one wept. The mother looked angry—at J., for having gone bad as all her children had, and at the world, for having been helpless to rescue him. It was only another hardship, another disappointment to be dealt with, gone through, paid for. It would be over. Christ would be asked for mercy, and mercy, as always, would be withheld … Hadn’t we always lived on the layaway plan? Death was a costly nuisance, but at least it got the future out of the way; J. could be disposed of. For the occasion they’d cut his hair, shaved him clean, dressed him in sober clothes such as he hadn’t worn for years; dead, he looked like someone I might have been, or he might have been, if we hadn’t left home when the world was changing. Cosmetics and embalming fluid had taken the madness out of him. It was a mistake to have gone back …”
“I am among friends, doing the work I want to do. Coming to the end of the story, the one I hadn’t set out to tell, I sit hunched over this desk in a slummy downtown office, in the middle of the night, grateful for whatever has led me here, guided me, me, this unworthy vessel. There’s nowhere else now.”
It may signify nothing. It may be a message. The long skinny hand of coincidence reaches in here, tightens at the throat, makes any number of interpretations likely.
This is what has become of us, then. This. Messages do arrive, from Lonesome Town and elsewhere: laments, compleynts, calls to action. Who knows how they get through? “There survives … something … out of all this … a desire I knew the name of once … before I began to lose the names of things … The feeling continues, can’t be shaken off … as if, waking one morning in perfect sunlight, on the forest floor, you were to remember all the words you always loved … all the stories … the times long gone and far away … the friends who drowned, went crazy, married dull men or shrewish women, made money … any song that ever crawled out of the radio to clutch at you … all this absurd radiance, your life, gathering unseen around you while you slept … a protective circle, enclosing your frailty, under the quick light … all this, all this … What more do you need?”
In Lonesome Town, any moment now, the bus will start to pull out, away from the depot, picking up speed. People will wave goodbye, and go about their business. It may not be too late. Someone said: The struggle is just beginning. Someone else said: I will hang in … This is the end of the story, the end, the end, the end, the end.
A movement, and a rest.
SOURCES for assorted plagiarized matter in this book, some of it quoted verbatim, some of it misquoted, almost all of it taken out of context, include: Friedrich Nietzsche, Gesammelte Werke; Clara Beers Blashfield, Worship Training for Primary Children (The Methodist Book Concern, 1929); Wallace Stevens, “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” from the Collected Poems; Bob Dylan, “Too Much of Nothing” (song, from a bootleg album, circa 1967); the Department of English, University of British Columbia, for various memoranda; G.R.S. Mead, The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition (London, 1920); The Letters of Abraham Lincoln; Johann Pachelbel, Canon in D for Strings and Continuo; Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal; Baker Knight, “Lonesome Town” (song, 1958); Gustavo Sainz, “Self-Portrait with Friends” (Triquarterly 13/14, Fall/Winter 1968–69); The Gospel According to Thomas; Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (Vintage Books); Cony-Catchers and Bawdy Baskets, ed. Gamini Salgado (Penguin Books); Curious Articles from the Gentleman’s Magazine (Volume IV, 1811); Sydney Smith’s Essays; Joseph Mazzini, The Duties of Man (Everyman’s Library, 1907); and no doubt other items now forgotten and probably untraceable.
This being the Second Edition, a few stray remarks may be in order, if only to preserve the illusion of the book as a document (not, after all, a “fiction”) shared among friends. The first printed text named and thanked those persons who, against formidable and often unpredictable odds, laboured and produced it, because it seemed and still seems to me that the actual human manufacture of a book is at least as important, as honourable an activity, as the composition of the words out of which it is made. This imaginary “Fraser” gets to have his name on the cover; the others do not. They know, or some of them know, or should know, who they are. So this time I will not name them; there are too many. Let the epigraph to “Lonesome Town” stand for the book as a whole, as for all of my work hereafter.
—DMF
D.M. Fraser (1947–85) was born in Stellarton, Nova Scotia, grew up in Glace Bay, NS, and spent his adult life in Vancouver. He was the author of two acclaimed story collections, Class Warfare and The Voice of Emma Sachs; following his death at the age of thirty-eight, Arsenal published Prelude, an edition of his collected works, and Ignorant Armies, an unfinished novel brought to life by Stephen Osborne and Bryan Carson. Fraser was also Pulp Press’s de facto editor for much of the 1970s and early 1980s.