by Joy Kogawa
My mind was fixed on Stewart. He would walk into the classroom and voilà!, he would be wearing a blue shirt perfectly matching my blue blouse. The next day his shirt would be plaid. I would have the same colours more or less in my skirt. It was uncanny. In English class, the teacher would read a poem out loud. At crucial moments he’d cough, his head would turn slightly in my direction. He was signalling to me. I didn’t dare to catch his eyes.
The fact that Stewart was dating Janice caused me grief. Nevertheless, in the mulberry bush of my mind I was going round and round gathering nuts in May, morsels of nourishment. He dated her because she used to be my best friend, did she not, and it was a way of being close to me, for after all, was I not a talented Shelby? And then one warm evening, as I was playing the piano and singing some English folk songs with the windows wide open to the night breezes, I saw lights from a vehicle outside flashing on and off. I kept singing.
Early one morning just as the sun was rising
I heard a maiden singing in the valley below….
There was a sharp whistle. I stopped and glanced out. Beside the big willow tree in front of the house was a pickup truck. Stewart had a pickup truck. I got up from the piano, left the living room and went upstairs to the darkness of Charlie’s room. From behind the safety of the curtains I peered out. A lanky figure was leaning against the side of the truck. Stewart? It looked like him.
Another night, when I was in my room upstairs, I heard the truck again—this time in the back alley. There were voices. The light from a flashlight shone in a wide arc and touched the neighbour’s chimney and then my window. It had to be Stewart.
Every few days my diary had entries about his many foot-scraping messages, or the code he tapped on his desk top or the way he deliberately tried to get me jealous by putting his arm around Janice. Whatever he did, he was signalling to me. On the days that our colours didn’t match, it was because he was annoyed with me. We were linked by a mutual and secret obsession.
Then, in the spring, the fiction developed into a deeper implausibility. The moonbeams found a way through the walls.
One weekend afternoon I was listening to a symphony concert on the radio. My fiercely romantic heart was transported out of Juniper into a distant glade, into a walk along a seashore with Stewart, into fairyland. As I dreamed the hour away, a ghostly girl in my ghostly world, I began to note that sounds of static surrounded a particularly melancholy concerto—the same piece that we had been listening to in our music class. At first it was only a suspicion, but the following night it happened again. As the radio announcer talked, his words were punctuated by static. The signals were unmistakably specific. “And so all you listeners out in radio land (static), send me your letters. There’s nothing better than being in direct communication (static static).” I was convinced. Stewart was now talking to me through the radio, letting me know which music most moved him and connected us. I was in direct receipt of his thoughts and his often humorous comments. He delighted me. He enraged me. He moved me. He was my source of happiness. Incredibly, I would sometimes hear tiny buzzing sounds in my electric heating pad and these too were originated by Stewart.
In the next stage of my growing unreality, I suspected and then I knew that Stewart, my genius, had designed and created a device by which he could see into my room. How else could I explain the way the radio static punctuated the sentences at the very moment I was writing them in my diary?
“Are you there now Stewart?” (Crackle crackle.) “You are!”
It happened repeatedly at precise points of significant comments, or whenever I wrote his name, for example. When I realized that he had the power to look into my room, other pieces of the puzzle locked into place. I understood how he was able to wear the same colours as I did, day after day. I became embarrassed to undress. I took to kneeling behind the bed where I thought he could not see.
All the way through high school, I kept the secret of Stewart’s great powers to myself. I made no overtures to him in any open or public way. There were times when Janice and I were friends again and I wondered if Stewart could hear what we were saying.
“Do you believe in ESP?” I asked her one time.
She shrugged. “Do you?”
“Yes. But I can’t tell you with who. It would break it if I told you.”
After graduation, Stewart went to one university, I went to another. But late at night the radio static would continue, and on certain weekend nights I’d recognize the sound of his vehicle and I’d rush to the dormitory window, or I’d hear the signal of a car horn and wonder if Stewart was still faithfully prowling the streets.
“Are you out there this minute, Stewart?” I asked my diary. “Do you remember our happy days in Juniper? Do you miss me as much as I miss you?”
Years and years later, in a moment of easy intimacy and growing doubt, I spoke with Eleanor about “a genius I used to know.”
“Oh Millicent, he couldn’t have had a machine like that,” she said. “To build such a thing? No.”
“It wasn’t possible?”
“No.”
That simple word and the chuckle that accompanied it were the first major assault on my fantasy. Gradually over the months and years, as I graduated to other forms of moondust, Stewart faded from my mind, and my secret place of solace vanished like the house of smoke and mirrors that it was.
My adolescent fiction was slain without a psychiatrist, without pills and without labelling. On the surface I’ve managed to appear calm, but inwardly I’m as tentative and unstable as a ping-pong ball. I still fly through the air, scraping the skies for evidence of love.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I have made lunch for Father. The usual. Soup and a sandwich. Tomato soup today, a bit thin, cheese sandwich.
“The soup is rather weak, I’m afraid,” I say apologetically.
“It’s fine, Millie dear. Perfectly fine.” Father is so polite. He has always been so polite.
I look at his tranquil face. There is not an angry line anywhere—no hardness around a tight mouth, no frown of impatience—a few deep smile lines around his round dark eyes, a few lines of curiosity on his high forehead. It’s the beatific peaceful face of a child or a saint. Small wonder that people smile at him so readily and greet him with reverence. “Isn’t he radiant?” one woman in church whispered. “What a joy your father is.”
How can any of us know anything about one another except through the evidence taken in by our eyes and ears, except by what we sense in their presence? “He’s a genuine innocent,” his doctor said recently. Father, in his old age, continues to have a child’s enthusiasm for life, still trusting, still welcoming strangers into the house, and still delighting in having afternoon tea with the old silver tea set as he and Mother used to do every day.
In the past decade, as Mother weakened, Father kept up the habit of inviting neighbours in for afternoon tea. Throughout her growing senility, he attended upon her day and night, dressing her, combing her hair, bathing and feeding her, cooking and shopping.
“Meredith, my sweet, shall we put on your lovely pearls today?”
He was her willing and happy slave. People visited them like pilgrims to a shrine. This is the simple truth, Eleanor. I can swear on my mother’s grave that Father was devoted to her, that he cared for her as tenderly as a mother cares for her baby, that with patience and forbearance he watched over her, indulging her throughout her late-night wanderings, her mind-impaired repetitive speech, her confusion, her fits of incomprehensible laughter. He called her “my queen” as he took her hand and walked with her through the garden, examining the roses.
“Can you remember the day Charlie was born? Can you remember what day your birthday is, dearest?”
She was so deaf he’d cup his hands to her ear. She refused to wear a hearing aid. “Barnabas is a good man,” she would chant suddenly in the middle of conversations or during grace.
There were days when Mother was so confused she didn’t know
where she was—in England, or Alaska, or still in our old house in Juniper. She never quite got used to any of the people in Ragland, this picturesque lakeside resort in B.C. that Father chose for their retirement years. Ragland was a good choice. The winters here are snowy but not too severe.
Father, the once well-known host of “Shelby Selects” and founder of the Juniper Centres, was eagerly welcomed by the priest and parishioners of St. John’s Church in Ragland. But Mother, increasingly deaf and senile, was unable to keep up.
After years of driving back and forth between Edmonton and Ragland, I finally moved down so that I could keep an eye on Mother when Father went away on his many trips. My apartment was two blocks away. But a little over a year ago, as her condition worsened, I moved in to help Father.
Occasionally, I would suggest that she be placed in a nursing home, especially after she became incontinent, but he would not hear of it.
“Mother belongs at home,” he said firmly.
I arranged for the homecare worker to come an extra day a week to cope with the huge pile of laundry. The house smelled disgusting—urine and mouse droppings and old food. I bought stacks of Attends, the diapers of old age, and potpourri and deodorizers and new slippers. I called in the carpet cleaners. I had the leaky washing machine fixed. I even brought home a kitten from the SPCA—a black and white female. Boots was a good mouser and quite amusing. She had a way of wanting to lick people’s noses with her rough tongue.
Father was grateful for every little thing I did. “You’re so considerate, dear. Thank you so much,” he’d say. “What would we do without you?”
I told Charlie that Father was a wonderful nurse. Charlie said Father only took care of Mother because of the praise he received from guests. I disagreed. Anyone could see it was love. His face was wreathed in smiles and he walked through the days like a bubble, lightly. In his old age he was living an enchanted life. “These are the happiest days of my life,” he said.
Charlie’s voice on the phone whenever I praised Father was tight and tired, stretched out like old elastic ready to snap. The admiration he’d once had for Father had so withered away that it was as if nothing, no heroics of any kind, could revive it now.
Charlie has never been one to want to talk about personal matters. I would try sometimes to get his feelings on our family’s fall from grace, but he would only sigh and shake his head. “You can’t break away from it, can you?” he said once, when I was up for a visit. He was trying to read, sunk deep in his armchair, while Eleanor and I talked, half watching the evening news.
“You mean you can?”
“I’ve got a life to live. I’ve got Eleanor, thank God. And Eleanor’s family.”
“My family?” Eleanor laughed. “You mean my crazy sister Stephannie and her weird son? My family’s warped and woolly too. Whose isn’t?”
“Your parents are great,” Charlie said.
“That’s true. How the two of you have survived your mother and father, I cannot imagine.”
“Mother isn’t so bad,” Charlie said.
“You don’t think so? I think she’s crackers,” Eleanor said. “But it’s your father who’s—”
“It was Mother’s fault,” I interrupted. “If she hadn’t been so frigid….”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Eleanor said. “Your father hasn’t got a conscience. She’s not the cause of that. She is icy, but who wouldn’t be around him? Don’t you see the way he’s always trying to use people, always trying to see what he can get away with? It’s just a wonder that no one’s tried to strangle him.”
Charlie, who was still trying to read, turned the volume up on the TV and asked if we wouldn’t mind talking somewhere else. And then Eleanor asked him, as if only my presence, the blaring news and the book could cushion the impact of the question: “Charlie, did your father ever—did it ever happen to you?”
“What?”
“I mean…. That. You know what I mean.”
“Oh. That.” His eyes had the slightly faraway look that Mother so often had when she was perplexed and sad. He shrugged. “No, not me.” He hunkered down into his book.
Eleanor wouldn’t accept that simple answer. “How do you know, Charlie? He’s so corrupt anything’s possible. Maybe you were too little to remember.”
“Well, who knows,” Charlie said, and turned the page rather aggressively.
Eleanor has always had a singularly uniform and bleak view of Father. But I believe the truth about him to be brighter, stranger, more terrible and complex than we can know. What I want is for all the truths about Father to be brought forth. I want his pastoral labour to be known, I want his furtive deeds to be dragged from the dark dungeons. I want the sick who were comforted as well as those who were harmed to bring their stories forth.
“The truth is, he’s got a cog missing,” Charlie said. “The truth is, he can’t die because he isn’t at peace.”
“That’s not the only truth, Charlie.”
Here in the town of Ragland, people still flock to him. A young couple dropped in today, deeply distressed, grieving the death of their only child. He placed his hands on each of their bowed heads. “My children,” he whispered, his voice filled with tenderness, “take heart. There is One who knows us and loves us beyond all comprehension. We can go to Him who holds Becky forever safe.”
In his private life he is faithful in his devotions. Every morning around five, Father reads the Bible and says his prayers. He has a prayer notebook with the names of people to whom he is intimately connected by letters and phone calls. Every day, he faithfully prays for each one, and sometimes he becomes aware of someone in special need. Later a letter will arrive telling him what he learned while in prayer. Over the years, the corners of the notebook’s pages have grown thin as dragonfly wings.
“Why,” I asked him one time, “do you pray for so many people every morning?”
“Because,” he replied, “the spirit moves in the lives of the people as I pray.”
Miracle is part of his daily life. Last week, for example, he felt the urge to call Godfrey Adams, an old friend in Ontario. I overheard bits of an intimate conversation, Father listening, responding. “I’m glad to hear you say that, Godfrey.” They shared a few moments, gliding through the air together on the wings of prayer. That very afternoon, Father received a letter from Mrs. Adams asking Father to call, saying her husband was suffering from severe depression and had not been able to talk to anyone for months.
“I had no idea,” Father said, marvelling. “He spoke perfectly clearly to me.” He shook his head in wonder as he read the letter.
And a month ago, on the way to testify at a court hearing for a young single mother, Father fell on the sidewalk and injured his back. His face was white with pain, but he would not be dissuaded from helping.
“You are so very kind, Father Shelby,” the young woman said as she held his arm and tears welled up in her eyes. “So very good and kind.” The judge too seemed impressed.
These daily realities cannot be adequately described. But neither can they be slain. When Father is gone, the effects of his wrongdoing will continue, but his loving deeds too will remain. Whatever the two words meant—sex, boys—I still cannot imagine that Father ever intended harm.
I go in and out the windows of my mind, in and out, back and forth. How can a man so good be so bad? How can a man so bad be so good? He is loved, he is despised, he is Jekyll and Hyde. The puzzle spins from dark to light, light to dark, as the earth spins, as the sun spins, as my mind spins and reels and burns a black hole in the palms of my praying hands.
Dear Goddess, could it be that we humans are simply wild beasts on the dreaded island of Dr. Moreau, children of the knife, being sliced and cauterized and sawn asunder by a Creator hungry for drama? I am flying over the madness on your magic carpet and look down upon the poor maimed animals, their forelegs clawing the air as they hobble and hop to their clearings and caves. There they gather at dusk to chant their creed. “
We shall walk upright. We shall not kill. This is the law. Are we not men?”
In spring the waters come rushing, surging onward, shaking the ground. The creatures fear it. They watch it from the safety of banks and bridges. When it breaks the acceptable bounds, when it threatens to flood their towns and pleasant villages, they gather their forces. “We shall contain the rage. We shall build our walls.”
But look over here, over the towers and rooftops, over houses and churches, where a creature sits brooding. Look at the rising lust in its loins, rising like the sap in the tree. An uncontrollable passion seizes its limbs. A sharp intake of breath and the energy surges through its body. This is the moment when right gives way to wrong, to untamed passion, to body hunger, to the madness and thrill of the uncivilized appetite, the moment when remorse, obligation and all humane urges are lost in the chase.
Who is that furtive half-creature, late at night now, lurking in the foliage by the forbidden glen? Down on all fours lopes the lion-man, King Barnabas. In the darkness his eyes are luminous as the moon. His tawny hair bounces in the night breeze as he leaps upon his prey. As high as the sky is the small animal cry.
Good Lord deliver us! Good Lord deliver us!
In the daylight, the monarch is back in his palace, sitting on his throne, surrounded by his court. He is the wise king reigning over his pain-racked kingdom. Each day he leads his writhing subjects, the maimed and crippled half-human forms, as they whimper and scream their praises to their maker, Dr. Moreau.
Kyrie eleison
Lord in your mercy
And then one early not-yet-dawn, the king’s daughter rises from her dreams into the teal blue sky and the blossoming perfume of the summer. She peers out of the palace windows to the marketplace where the monkey-men pedlars have not yet arrived to set up their wares. Down the palace corridor she hears the pad, pad of the king’s royal feet and she springs to the door to greet him.