by Don Gillmor
The sun was weak in the afternoon sky. Harry drove north and crossed the ravine and parked near the gates of Mount Pleasant Cemetery. A few people milled. When he got to his grandfather’s crypt, he saw that the stone angel was gone.
Harry looked out along a low swale dotted with stone spires and Celtic crosses. The city’s builders contained beneath five feet of fertile soil. Tens of thousands who had dreamed in technicolour. Each one added singly to this heap, carted north after solemn prayer and laid down amid a crowd of distracted friends. The failure was palpable, an aroma that lifted out of the ground in spring, the rot of near-greatness, the essence of mortality.
His mother was recovering well. She might live another twenty years, though Harry guessed her liver would betray her. She was fragile and couldn’t bear fragility. Her final years would be a fresh argument.
Ben had found a new girlfriend, an uncomplicated business major, and Harry was buoyed by the laughter he heard when they were together. Sarah had been a foreign country—Ben was intrigued but never at home.
Dale was perched on a modest swell. His money was gone, come to dust like a living thing. Harry didn’t mourn his father’s passing, or even the passing of his money. He mourned the absence of possibility, the procrastination of his life with Gladys, the failure of his own imagination. They had gotten $800,000 for the house, paid off all their debts, bought a modest condo in the heart of the city. They’d sold the reliable Camry, too. They cycled and walked, urban pioneers. They had almost convinced themselves it was a fresh start.
Harry stared out at the granite markers rising out of the ground like early wheat. A flatbed truck with a winch lowered a pebbled gold coffin into a hole. Harry had failed to inhabit his own life. His father, for all his many flaws, had inhabited his; this was one area where he was a success.
Eventually Harry would be in this cemetery, staring up from the gloom of his coffin through the tangled roots into the empty sky. His ragged suit, the dry skin drawn tight, his last thoughts still rattling in the yellowing skull, the words lost on prevailing winds, the quiet deceptions, the fears of a child standing in new clothes among strangers on the first day of school. The hours collected like dust, the channel changer limp in his hand. Money swirling in useless eddies. What is left in that memory, what caress lingers, what unspoken love? His essential stats on the headstone, the enduring cold. Who will stare down with love in their eyes? Who will lay daffodils gently on the stirred earth and linger under the April sun? Who will pay to have him carted to the boneyard?
The sun was low, a wink of light against the horizon, the last of it, beckoning.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am very grateful to Nino Ricci, Ken Alexander, Gail Gallant and Ellen Vanstone for their early, astute reading of the manuscript. I’d like to thank my agent, Jackie Kaiser, for her support and insight, and my editor, Anne Collins, for her infinite patience and wisdom. And finally, my wife, Grazyna, for her ongoing support and editorial judgement, and my children, Justine and Cormac, my shining beacons.
DON GILLMOR is the author of the bestselling, award-winning, two-volume Canada: A People’s History, and two other books of non-fiction, The Desire of Every Living Thing, a Globe and Mail Best Book, and I Swear by Apollo. His debut novel, Kanata, was published in 2010 to critical acclaim. He has also written nine books for children, two of which were nominated for a Governor General’s Award. He is one of Canada’s most accomplished journalists, and has been a senior editor at Walrus magazine and a contributing editor at both Saturday Night and Toronto Life. He has won ten National Magazine Awards. He lives in Toronto with his wife and two children.