The Green Man

by Michael Bedard

  Copyright © 2012 by Michael Bedard

  Published in Canada by Tundra Books,

  75 Sherbourne Street, Toronto, Ontario M5A 2P9

  Published in the United States by Tundra Books of Northern New York,

  P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011923467

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Bedard, Michael, 1949-

  The green man / by Michael Bedard.

  eISBN: 978-1-77049-293-6

  I. Title.

  PS8553.E298G74 2012 jC813′.54 C2011-901448-3

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  Cover art: Derek Mah

  v3.1

  For you, Mom

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With many thanks to Susan Duff and Bob Knowlton for their insights into the world of the secondhand book dealer and for the generous gift of their time in reading and commenting on the manuscript.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Other Books by This Author

  I reckon – when I count at all –

  First – Poets – Then the Sun –

  Then Summer – Then the Heaven of God –

  And then – the List is done –

  EMILY DICKINSON

  1

  In the middle of the night the phone rang, wrenching O from a dead sleep. She lay listening through the thin wall as her father dragged himself from bed in the next room to answer it.

  “Hello? … Oh, hello, Emily.”

  Emily was her father’s older sister. She was a poet who ran a secondhand bookshop back East called the Green Man. One of the first books O remembered her father reading to her as a child was a collection of children’s poems Aunt Emily had written. She still knew some of them by heart.

  Her father said Aunt Emily was one of the finest poets of her generation. He kept copies of her books in a special place on the bookshelves that lined the living-room wall, along with a thin folder of reviews he’d clipped from newspapers and magazines over the years.

  The books were few – five slim volumes of about fifty poems each, each book separated from the last by nearly ten years. That worked out to about five poems a year, O figured, though her father assured her it was not quite as cut-and-dried as that. Instead, there would be sudden bursts of creativity, followed by long stretches of silence.

  It was during the most recent stretch of silence that the late-night calls started to come. Father never complained about the time of the call. He just listened to her quietly, as he did now, assured her that things were not as dark as they seemed, and walked her back to the days when they were young and the world was new.

  Eventually he calmed her down enough that she could go to sleep. Then he said good-bye, hung up the phone, and went back to bed himself.

  Next morning, over breakfast, O asked about the call in the night.

  “It was Emily,” Father said, “going through one of her spells again.”

  “Why does she go through spells?”

  “It’s just part of who she is, O. Part of what makes her the poet she is.”

  Later that day, O took down the books and the tattered sheaf of reviews and looked through them again. The reviews were generally good, though more than one reviewer wondered at the thread of darkness that ran through her work. On the back of one of the early books was an old photo of her aunt – a thin, intense young woman, her long hair caught up in a bun, staring straight into the camera lens as if she could see down the decades to the girl who looked back.

  It had been three years since O had last seen her aunt, at a rare family gathering one Christmas. With more than two thousand miles between them, and Father busy with his teaching and Aunt Emily with her bookshop, they saw one another infrequently. But there were always her cryptic letters in their spidery scrawl, and now the phone calls in the night.

  Last fall, shortly before O’s fifteenth birthday, a parcel arrived for her in the mail from Aunt Emily. It contained a secondhand copy of a collection of poetry called A Treasury of Great Poems. On the flyleaf of the book, her aunt had written For Ophelia – Begin!

  Begin what? she wondered. It was yet another mystery in the many that surrounded her aunt. But the strange thing was, shortly after the book arrived, a number of things did begin.

  First, early in December, they received word that Emily had suffered a mild heart attack. Endicotts had a history of heart disease – and a history of stubbornness to go along with it. Emily was kept in hospital overnight. The next morning, she checked herself out and went back to the flat above the bookshop, where she lived. She wouldn’t hear of her brother dropping everything to come and take care of her.

  Then, at the end of the winter term, Father received a grant to finish researching the book on the poet Ezra Pound he’d been writing for as long as O could remember. Ezra, slightly mad himself, was like a member of the family. The research would take her father to Italy for the summer. He invited O to go with him, but after the traumatic trip to Ireland they’d taken two years before, when the plane limped and lurched across the Atlantic on one engine, she refused to go anywhere near another plane.

  So her father came up with a plan. He would go to Italy – and she would go to Emily. He called it “killing two birds with one stone.” She, presumably, was one of the birds; Emily was the other; and he was the one with the stone. She felt he might have found another way of putting it.

  Father wrote to Emily, explaining his dilemma and asking if O could possibly come and stay with her for the summer. If she said yes, which he hoped she would, it would also be a way of having O help Emily out – without her aunt suspecting it was part of his plan. Two birds, one stone.

  After some delay, Emily wrote back. She seemed a little hesitant about the idea but, ultimately, she agreed. Father firmed up the dates with her over the phone, and
it was settled.

  But one last thing had begun since O received the book with its mysterious inscription. And, by mid-May, with the time of the trip barely a week away, it was this that led O to question her father a little more closely on the state of his sister’s mental health, the morning after yet another middle-of-the-night phone call.

  “Is Aunt Emily crazy?” she asked.

  “We’re all a little crazy in our own way,” Father said. “Emily’s a bit eccentric. Her axis is slightly off-center, so the world wobbles a little as it spins around her. She’s a poet. Poets tend to be a little different than other people. Take Ezra, for instance.”

  “But is she a poet because she’s eccentric, or is she eccentric because she’s a poet?”

  It was a fine distinction, but O had her reasons for asking. She wanted to know whether her aunt was crazy before she began to write poetry, or if writing poetry had made her that way. For the third thing that had happened since she received the book inscribed Begin was that she’d begun writing poetry herself.

  For the time being, it was top secret – like some raging rash on an embarrassing part of your body. She hadn’t breathed a word of it to anyone. But what she desperately needed to know was whether she had begun writing because she was another crazy Endicott, or if that was just a little something she could look forward to down the line.

  “Emily’s been the way she is for as long as I can remember,” said her father, “always a poet, always a little odd. I’m not sure which came first. I think maybe some people are just born to be poets, and there’s not much they can do about it.”

  “Well, they could just not do it, couldn’t they?”

  “I suppose, but surely that could drive you crazy – not doing what you know in your heart of hearts you were meant to do.”

  “I see. So if you write, you go crazy. If you don’t write, you go crazy. Wonderful.”

  Up to this point, her father had been only half-committed to the conversation. His eyes kept drifting back to the book he was reading. Now he put the book down on his lap and took off his glasses.

  “What’s this all about, O?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  He gave her that squinty-eyed look of his as he sucked on the arm of his glasses. She wondered if he suspected her secret. Recently, she’d been finding stray books of poetry scattered around the house like fallen leaves.

  “Listen, O, Emily has a gift, a wonderful gift. But for every gift we’re given, we’re also handed an affliction. They’re two sides of the same coin. Poets are not normal people. Normal people feel no need to write poetry. They’re happy enough with the world as they find it and make the best of what life brings their way.

  “Poets see through things … see behind things. They remind us that the world is a much more mysterious place than we imagine. They’re like explorers, bringing back news of unknown lands. Like most explorers, they’re outsiders who don’t quite fit. But if it weren’t for the poets and the artists and all those other slightly eccentric people, there would be no one to remind us of the mystery. So we should be thankful for all those who are ‘counter, original, spare, and strange,’ as another crazy poet once put it.”

  That night, as she lay in bed trying to find the magic spell that would send her off to sleep, O thought of what her father had said about everyone being a little crazy in their own way. Some people might think her nightly ritual before bed was a little crazy – the way she had to arrange the things on her desk in a certain order, tuck the sheets in just so, tilt her mirror at exactly the right angle so as not to catch the reflection of the curtains, lock the closet door, and fold the quilt down carefully over the stuffed animals at the foot of the bed, so they wouldn’t sit staring at her in the dark.

  One night, simply to prove she wasn’t a prisoner to the ritual, that it was silly and childish and slightly mad, she deliberately didn’t arrange the things on her desk, didn’t fold down the quilt in the proper way or tilt the mirror just so. She left the closet door unlocked and let the stuffed animals stare at her to their heart’s content.

  She didn’t sleep a wink. The next night, she went back to doing things the way they were meant to be done.

  O glanced at the clock. It was after twelve. She flicked on her light and took down A Treasury of Great Poems, hoping a little reading might send her off to sleep. The book was arranged chronologically. There was a brief biographical introduction to each poet, followed by a selection of his or her work. She had started at the beginning with Chaucer and was working her way slowly through. She was up to Andrew Marvell now, and so far there hadn’t been so much as a whisper of madness.

  She read until her eyes began to grow heavy. The stuffed monkey had managed to squirm out from under the quilt and was looking at her. She crawled to the foot of the bed and pulled the quilt over him. Before closing her book, she fanned to the front and read her aunt’s cryptic inscription again.

  “Begin,” she whispered as she drifted off to sleep. “Begin.”

  2

  Emily paced around the desk that stood in the center of the room. Round and round she went, as was her habit when the words would not come. Over time, her pacing had worn the rug around the desk almost bare. Some magic in the moonlight brought the pattern in the Persian carpet to life, so that as she passed through the band of light, she seemed to tread on a lush bed of luminous flowers and winding vines.

  A swing-light with a dim bulb shone down on the typewriter that stood on the desk. Each time the circuit of the desk brought her back before the typewriter, she paused to glance at the sheet of paper it held, hoping to shake loose the next word … the next phrase … the next line in the poem that refused to be finished.

  When words came, she sat down and added them to the rest, then began to pace again. Now and then she veered off course and stood by the window, staring into the night. Apart from the occasional car that whispered by, the street slept. There was something peaceful about the city at night, something calming in standing here surveying her estate.

  She turned from the window and began her circuit of the room again. She let her mind prowl, pretending not to pay much attention to it. Her thoughts crept like a cat through the shadows, ready to pounce when the words showed themselves. The better part of writing was waiting.

  As she paced, Emily recited the opening lines of the poem aloud:

  “The long dead come back

  Dressed in rags of dream.

  Eyes sealed in sleep

  Open wide again.

  Years slide away like stones

  Rolled back from mouths of tombs.

  The dead stride blinking

  Into blaze of noon.”

  As she rounded the desk, her eye fell on the corner of the envelope she had tucked under the typewriter. It was a letter from her brother Charles. She and Charles had kept up a correspondence that went back to when she had left home in her late teens and he was barely more than a boy. She had kept it all.

  Over time, there had come a change in their relationship. Once, she had been the one offering comfort, especially during the dark months after his wife, Anne, had died, when Ophelia was not yet two. And then as he struggled to raise the child on his own, while establishing himself at the university.

  But now, he was the one giving her advice. What had happened? Time had happened. And then there was the heart attack – just a minor one, the doctors assured her, but more than enough to send a shiver of mortality through her. Suddenly she was no longer invulnerable. Suddenly her mind was full of memories of her father, who had died of a similar attack while still a young man.

  And now Charles was off to Italy for the summer to complete his study of Ezra Pound, and Ophelia was coming to stay with her. Emily suspected Charles had an ulterior motive for sending the girl to her. She suspected he was worried about his older sister and was seeing to it she had someone around to watch over her.

  He had included a snapshot in his letter, a recent picture of Ophelia.
She picked up the photo and studied it again. The girl, no longer a child, was a radiant young woman who stared boldly back at her. Her fair hair was short, her head cocked slightly to one side. Definitely an Endicott. She reminded Emily of how she herself had looked at that age – about the time when it had all begun.

  And now it was poised to begin again. The thought filled her with dread. With the dread came the now-familiar tightening in her chest, the sudden knifepoint of pain, the feeling that she was unable to breathe.

  She made her way over to the cot in the corner of the room and lay down. Fear washed over her in chill waves. She had been a strong woman once, but she was as weak as a kitten now. She closed her eyes. Just a few minutes rest and she would be fine. The lines of the poem spun round in her head:

  The long dead come back

  Dressed in rags of dream.

  Eyes sealed in sleep

  Open wide again.…

  Sleep stole over her like a shadow. With it came the dream – the one that visited her almost nightly now. The dream of the magic show.

  3

  The furniture in the room had been pushed back against the wall to make room for the evening’s entertainment. It was a rare treat, and there was a thrill of excitement in the air. The children sat on the figured carpet before a makeshift stage that had been set up against one wall of the room. It was a hot August evening, and the tall bay windows had been thrown open. The curtains billowed lightly in the breeze, and the dim flames danced on the gas jets that had been turned down for the show, casting weird shadows on the walls.

  A gilded table sat on the low platform that would serve as a stage. On it was a candelabrum and a box, about a foot square, decorated with Egyptian symbols. A full-length mirror stood to one side of the table and, on the other side, a low long wicker basket with a hinged lid. To the rear, a wrought-iron pedestal supported a brazier of coals that glowed in the shadows like a beating heart.