by Joy Kogawa
Centuries ago, I’m told, in another world, in a place called Ellensburg, a minister called Martin Rinckart toiled in the hell of the Black Death. Within months, four and a half thousand people are said to have died. Martin Rinckart was conducting funerals. Fifty a day. One of the deaths was his wife’s.
In that extremity, from the depths of the valley of the shadow, there came a mysterious and blazing and perhaps defiant light.
Martin Rinckart’s great shout of thanksgiving endures.
Now thank we all our God with heart and hands and voices
Who wondrous things hath done, in whom the world rejoices
Who from our mothers’ arms hath sent us on our way
With countless gifts of love….
There are some who will conclude that Martin Rinckart was insane. But I think not. Suffering and evil are great mysteries. But so is love.
It is not, I have learned, the absence of night that creates the light. It is the gift of light received in the night; it is the attention of the light that creates our seeing.
I do not know how “countless gifts of love” from a “bounteous God” were apprehended by Martin Rinckart in the time of the Black Death. But it may be in the nature of sight that we can only see the brightest light when our world is most bleak. Glory, someone somewhere said, is what glows in the extremities of our experience.
I have no doubt that Martin Rinckart dwelt within the overwhelming evidence of Love’s presence, and that he surrendered to it gladly. And it is even possible that my father, the thief of children’s souls, received on his last Thanksgiving Day the light’s reward. A thankful heart.
Many would be appalled to think that a man like Father could be the recipient of so great a gift. But perhaps it is not for us to know the workings of grace. For me it is enough to know that, as surely as night follows day and trial follows victory, there remains at all times a light that it is given us to glimpse. In a world such as ours, I would not ask for more than this.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
At certain times of the day, especially in the early morning, the lake is the face of tranquillity. We have learned to pace ourselves throughout the intense summer and fall programmes with a few quiet days in between.
We are standing at the water’s edge, Constance Hobbs, Lee Armitage and I, watching as the water creatures reveal themselves. Little slits of grey fish emerge—one, then two more, then still more. Small schools of slightly larger silvery fish crisscross through the ripples. On the surface, skater insects, tiny catamarans, zap and pause on their long-legged stride past the white water lilies, past the dragonflies. A toothpick-thin black water snake quivers into view and disappears again.
Constance laments the diminishing worlds of songbirds, fireflies, butterflies, and the disappearance of the little green frogs, noting that the lake is being overrun by a new breed of bullfrogs, noisy and aggressive. We walk along the water’s edge, old Boots sauntering along behind, as marble-size tadpoles, large black commas, plip and plop, rushing in their wriggly underwater race away from us.
Yesterday, the sun was particularly direct and hot. Lee and I came across Constance clambering naked down from a stone ledge and into the water. In her old age she is still tall and graceful, her breasts dangling, her long white hair a cloud around her angular shoulders.
“Why, Constance Elizabeth Hobbs!” Lee called, laughing delightedly and applauding.
“Come in, come in, you two!” Constance called back. “Hang your clothes on a hickory limb and—and….”
“But don’t go in the water?” Lee completed the nursery rhyme, and raised her eyebrows at me enquiringly. I shrugged. We peered nervously through the trees to make sure we really were the only ones around, and undressed self-consciously. Then, giggling like schoolgirls, we minced our way into the tingly cold of the startled lake.
We were about to come out when we were somewhat alarmed to hear a car, and moments later Donald Grantham, Lee’s occasionally infuriating ex-husband, showed up.
“Aha!” he shouted as he came bounding down the path. He fiendishly made a lunge for our clothes, cackling that the three wicked witches were now in his power. Lee rose out of the water, a Venus de Milo, perfectly proportioned though not according to today’s skeletal standards. “Out, out, out of my sight!” she shouted as she grabbed our garments from him, and Donald retreated sheepishly, his eyes feasting on his naked ex-wife. He is obviously still smitten by Lee, a classic beauty.
Donald Grantham and Lee Armitage both come from obscenely wealthy families. It’s a good thing for the Juniper Centres that they remain friends. We owe our basic existence to the benevolence of the Grantham Foundation, but it’s the musical genius of Constance and James Hobbs that built the heady reputation of the Juniper Centres.
Donald Grantham is a great-nephew of Judge Grantham, the former United Church stalwart in Juniper who defected to our Anglican team and left his mansion and grounds to Father. Donald has been rather intent on securing the Grantham name for the Juniper Centres and refers to his great-uncle as the founder. He has revised history quite considerably, and Father’s singular place is virtually gone from the literature. I have not objected. Nor has Charlie or anyone else. The truth that matters to me is not to be found in plaques or dedications or brochures. Of far greater value is the health that endures in the lives of those we leave behind. Constance agrees.
We spend much of our free time these days in the new Alice Grantham Morrison room, named after Donald’s great-aunt, Judge Grantham’s sister. Lee calls it the Great Grantham Ego room. It’s a handsome space with a fireplace, dark oak bookshelves, a glass wall that looks out over a field of wildflowers. Our old piano shares the room with a new baby grand, and, like all musical instruments here, they are both lovingly maintained.
In the evenings, Constance and I often reminisce, lounging on the comfortable leather sofas and watching as the last embers in the fireplace flit and disappear. I’ve talked of Father’s exquisite care of Mother in her last days. She’s told me of James’s long illness.
Earlier this spring, Lee, after one of her arguments with Donald, brought up the idea of an exhibition of the beginning of the Juniper Centres.
“You’re the ones to do it,” she said to Constance and me.
“Of course you are. You were both right there.” And down we went to the storage room in the basement to look at the things I’d sent years before.
It’s been a nostalgic summer. Along the east wall we have arranged a story line—a photograph of Judge Grantham in front of his mansion, and the rolling hills before anything else was built, the architect’s drawings, some enlarged snapshots of the opening day, the parade and concert, the combined church and school choirs, excerpts from the article that made us famous and the first flyer announcing a concert featuring The Shelby Singers and the Hobbses.
These days we find ourselves sighing our way through a box of photographs that belong to Constance. There are several snapshots of Charlie and me that I hadn’t seen before. One shows me on stage, my large alto recorder to my lips, my small hands stretched out over the instrument. For some reason, I’m looking cross-eyed. Then there’s one of Charlie that stops my heart whenever I look at it. Charlie, about twelve, is gazing up at Father with unalloyed adoration and attention.
“A beautiful, beautiful boy,” Constance said.
There is something in the way Charlie looks in the picture that reminds me of Jeffrey at that age. A certain purity of heart. An openness. Utter innocence. Two young boys. What do I know of what a young boy feels? My brother, my son. Here they were, suddenly interchangeable in my mind and walking into my heart through an old friend’s old photographs. The many avenues of Love’s walking. Love melting stones.
“Maybe Eleanor was right,” I said. “Maybe it was harder for Charlie.”
“Yes, it was, it was, Millicent. It broke his heart. I saw the change.” She stood and went to the window. Even in her jogging outfit, Constance was regal. She looked
out into the darkness. “How is he now? When did you last see him?”
“It’s been years. Years and years.”
“Some wounds take a long time. A lifetime. More than a lifetime.”
“Or an instant.”
Constance the healer turned to look at me, her moist eyes brimming. “Or an instant,” she nodded. “Or an instant.” She went to the old piano and sat playing softly for a few moments. “It may be just magical thinking on my part,” she said, coming back and picking up Charlie’s photo, “but I think that it’s….”
I waited for her to finish her sentence. “It’s?”
“Childhood. Such light.” She shook her head. “How can one tell? How can one know? But my sense is—that the tenderness we feel at certain moments—these tiny tiny moments when the heart melts—when the heart opens—I think that moments like this, when we re-enter another time, a better time, a healing time—these are the world’s most important moments. They’re not heralded. They’re not measured. They don’t make headlines. But I do sense they affect the world immeasurably. I do think this, Millicent. When the heart opens, the light shines through.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
It’s another brilliant blue-sky Ontario and tall green trees everywhere morning. Clear. Crisp. A tiny mosquito bats itself against the screen.
I have waited so long—a lifetime—for this visit. I had expected to meet my curly-mopped little grandson years before, but life did not conspire to grant my fervent wish until this happiest month.
When he was about a year old, either Jeffrey left Lisa and the baby, or Lisa and the baby left Jeffrey. Jeffrey does not speak of that time. Perhaps Lisa had a need to discard the shadow of the Shelby skeleton. Their story has disappeared into the mists of England’s countryside. I too had felt myself disappeared into the company of lost grandparents missing out of family albums, cut off from our baby-watching, story-telling years. All I had was the picture of a newborn in a birth announcement card—a tiny squinched-up muffin face in a hospital stocking cap. I searched the smudge for family resemblances.
Then, about two weeks ago, Constance and I were in the kitchen with some of last year’s campers as we were waiting for a few stragglers to pick up their box lunches and join us for a hike. Constance was teaching a familiar round from my childhood that I hadn’t heard in years and I was flooded with nostalgia. I was annoyed at the blaring interruption of the intercom.
“Long distance, Millicent.” Everything was long distance here. The kitchen phone was on the wall beside the two refrigerators.
“Hello?” I heard Jane in the office hanging up.
“Hello, Mom?”
“My heavens! Jeffrey?” I turned to Constance. “It’s Jeffrey! It’s my son!”
“No!” Constance shook her head, her mouth open in amazement. She swung her guitar around to her back and quickly ushered the group outside.
“Jeffrey, where are you?”
He was calling from Toronto. He and Matty had just flown in, he said, and they were staying with an old school chum. They would be driving up to see me. My grandson wanted to meet his grandmother.
“See you in a few days,” he said blithely.
I couldn’t believe it. I was stunned.
“Mom. Are you there?”
“Tell me again, Jeff? What did you say?”
I hung up the phone and whooped and ran out to hug Constance.
Jeff and Matty arrived a week ago, driving up in a small truck complete with tent and sleeping bags and propane cooker. Constance, to give us a bit of privacy, reorganized the camp’s plans and took the girls camping in the guest house by the waterfall. They all came back late last night.
The morning light whispers in now through the curtains, soft and salad-green and impish. Over by the campground in the trees, Matty, wearing his red Juniper Camp cap, is hopping about like a grasshopper with some of the other children. Not far from where the old wash house and cabins used to be, my blond lanky son, Jeffrey, so unlike his father, is squatting on the ground, leaning against a tree and droning into his seven-foot-long yidaki, an Australian aboriginal didjeridoo. He carved it out of a juniper tree years ago, when he was in Colorado at a music camp. The twenty-five-thousand-year-old primeval call thrums its ancient way through the air and into my room.
I open the window wider to let in the sound, to let in the sky. Matty sees me waving and is running this way. My grandchild. My own child’s own sweet child. I step into my thongs and out through the sliding glass door onto the wraparound balcony, then lightly flap flap over the cool dew and down the steps to the gravelly path to greet him. Around us rises the fresh morning scent of the woods, the incense of the forest. Matty’s arms are wide with welcome, as are mine. He’ll probably want to go down to the lake again, as he does every morning, but I can’t wait to show him off to Constance. I wonder if she’s up. I wonder if she’ll notice that his hair, thick and curly, is like mine. That was the first thing I saw when they arrived. Matty was asleep, zipped up in a sleeping bag. “Jeffrey,” I gasped, “the hair!”
Jeffrey grinned and hugged me. “He’s a Shelby, all right,” he said.