The Museum at the End of the World

by John Metcalf

  Compère spelling bees, bugger the dean

  He was sworn to taking home much more than half what the application forms had termed “all or any emoluments.” He wanted to be able to give money to Sheila. With financial conscience thereby a fraction eased, he wanted to buy time to explore oddly congruent images that were besieging him. He wanted to get the images down before they stopped insisting, before they faded. And then—delicious, delicious—he wanted to smooth them down, push them around, shape them, sculpt them like ice cream with a spatula, like the manufacture of ice-cream sandwiches—“wafers” were they called?—from the Italian carts of his childhood, the spatula scraping the excess along the edges, mounding it back on top, tamping it down into corners…

  He had investigated a recommended long-term bed-and-breakfast deal, a late-nineteenth-century gingerbread, but was stifled by toy bears, flounced dolls, wicker hoop-handled baskets of soaps, the notice on an easel in the foyer:

  Cherished Guest, please remove your Shoes to Join us in Preserving the Beauty of our Floors.

  He sprinkled the shirt with Tide, squelched the big bubble under, sloshed the shirt about. It and the water felt slimy. He left it to… marinate? steep? macerate?

  Desperate to save, he had settled for this furnished living room with a swayback bed, and kitchen-cum-bathroom, in what had turned out to be a building not simply grungy but a refuge for alcoholics, people “on the pension,” dubious women, and single men furtive as fugitives, silent in undershirts.

  He broke the seal on the screw-top wine, filling the apartment’s tumbler.

  Switched on the TV; a screen of buzzing snow; thumped the top, turning the blizzard into bars of upward-scrolling opalescence.

  Wandered into the kitchen/bathroom. Sprayed Lysol onto the warped backsplash.

  “Eat that, you fuckers!”

  Back into the living room/bedroom. Looked at the Fredericton Daily Gleaner. Under a photograph of a swamp or pond, from which stuck out a stump, a caption reading:

  Moments before this study, a family of mallards had taken wing.

  Consulted his watch.

  “Sheila. It’s me.”

  “Hello, you.”

  “Everything OK?”

  “I know it’s you. One of those days. That Cloutier… the putz!”

  “Sheila! Hello out there? I’m lonely. I miss you.”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  He paused.

  “The implications of your question are both insulting and—”

  “Oh, don’t be silly, Rob. Pogo misses you. He goes up to your room and whiffles about. Poor beast can’t figure it out.”

  “Pogo! Pogo is a dog! Don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Miss me.”

  “Oh, yes, I know—don’t forget it’s Ben’s birthday. Don’t send him CDs. You’d choose Miles or Robert Johnson or something and it’d just lead to, I mean, what he listens to we’ve never heard of. Oh, and no books. Definitely no books. Just send him a cheque. No, a money order. That’d be safer after that contretemps at the—”

  “I was not likely to forget my own son’s—”

  “Oh, don’t do huffy, Rob. Not after today.”

  “Tomorrow,” said Forde. “Tomorrow’s another stretch of horror. I have to squire the granddaughter of a poet about all day.”

  “Granddaughter?”

  “Don’t you raise your eyebrows at me.”

  “What do you mean ‘granddaughter’?”

  “She’s bringing his ashes to Fredericton. Well, already brought, I suppose you could say.”

  There was a silence.

  “Or sent, rather.”

  “Whose ashes?”

  “Her grandfather’s.”

  Another silence.

  “She’s coming on the train,” added Forde.

  He knelt down in the kitchen beside the bathtub and scrubbed at the collar and cuffs with his toothbrush. Even hanging the shirt from the string dripping wet didn’t get all the wrinkles out, so he was relieved that the temperature had been dropping all afternoon, with snow threatened overnight. That would give him reason to wear a sweater covering up most of the shirt, and the sweater mostly covered by his rather dark-coloured sports jacket. As for the “business attire” called for in the Bulletin, he had neither attire nor business.

  Tresillian, that was it. This granddaughter. Mrs. Tresillian.

  So far as he could untangle matters, this ashes person—and reading even potted biogs of these poetasters had been scarcely endurable—this Childe Chauncy, the ashes person, had been termed a “Confederation Poet” because he’d been born in Fredericton in 1864 and had been an acolyte of the ineffable Bliss Carman. And had also been somehow related to the Confederation biggie, Sir Charles G.D. Roberts.

  What sort of weird, wondered Forde, were parents who would name a child Childe? Assuming they weren’t nineteenth-century Fredericton fans of Lord Byron or students of medieval titular address. Which seemed a safe assumption.

  What sort of weird named a child “Bliss”?

  On leaving the Fredericton Collegiate School, Childe joined his mentors Carman and Roberts in Boston and Connecticut, variously, where they scrabbled with hack journalism and editing while emitting skim-milk bleatings claiming mystic kinship etc. with Mother etc. Nature.

  According to the UNB Bulletin, Childe Chauncy’s slim vols were entitled, after a phrase of Emerson’s,

  The Vernal Ides

  Followed by:

  April’s Benediction

  Anthem of the Hermit Thrush

  Open Road

  and culminating in:

  A Pealing Cadence Thrills

  Childe!

  Christ! thought Forde.

  The Early Canadian Texts Society, conversationally referred to as “Etcetera,” was preparing a Variorum Edition.

  Rinsing was vital.

  Several rinses.

  He was worried particularly about granules of detergent possibly trapped in the slots for stays.

  This drivelling Chauncy had died in 1935. His ashes had been sitting on the President’s desk when Forde had been summoned to receive his marching orders. They were in a small ebony casket set off with silver fittings. The ashes had been handed to Childe Chauncy’s daughter and on her death had descended to her daughter, this Mrs. Tresillian, and were now to be interred in Poets’ Corner in Forest Hill Cemetery beside the ashes of Bliss, Childe’s stupefying mentor. The casket had arrived in advance of Mrs. Tresillian by UPS.

  He ran clean water and gave the shirt a final swish and slosh. He felt apprehensive of becoming tense, weary, harassed, and sweating therefore, the hot sweat interacting with insufficiently rinsed residue of Tide causing him at cuffs and collar to become sticky or, possibly to even publically foam.

  For dinner, he made himself baked beans on toast.

  The apartment’s toaster, an authentic “collectible,” opened downwards on each side like an upside-down-gullwing-car, glinty mica in its insides. It smoked when the toast was done.

  With the beans he finished off the Chilean ordinaire.

  He watched the thick flakes in the street lamp glow. The silence in the apartment was deepening, that unnatural quiet of the world being blurred, muffled.

  Lay on the bed.

  Read further into R.S. Thomas’ Tares, but couldn’t tether his attention to the poems.

  On the plus side, of course, the advent of Mrs. Tresillian would save him from morning’s Creative Writing One. He flicked through his mental file cards of those bovines. The obese boy with the laceless high-tops… God! He couldn’t have cared less if they’d all contracted ebola fever and dropped in hemorrhagic heaps. He found the pretence of humility, modesty, warmth, concern and caring, the projection of benevolent charm, left him desperate for numbing qu
antities of Famous Grouse and Bombay Sapphire London Dry Gin. Or any London Dry Gin, come to that, with or without Botanicals…Vince, Vince Somebody; Middle Earthite; laceless high-tops; grey, pissy drawstring sweatpants; particular interest: Trolls. Jane Parkin. Denim jacket cluttered with buttons and badges, army-surplus bag hung with miniature pink teddies and Garfields, sparkly thing in nose, carabiners. No apparent particular interests. The impenetrable Mrs. Williams, Laetitia as she insisted, forty, forty-five, somewhere in there. Face like that on the porcelain head of an antique doll. A woman effaced. Coloured-advertisement woman in a coloured advertisement for a washing machine, Saturday Evening Post, the Eisenhower era, joyfully smiling upon washing-machine installer in peaked cap like chauffeur smiling back at Laetitia. Also joyful.

  He did not, did not understand—and it was by now a time-worn puzzle—why they wanted to write and talk about writing when they did not and would not read. Scarcely could. He always asked them to write down titles and authors he might mention when in spate, but the request was merely part of his “benevolence” act. His pearls were never noted, his “spate” a device to fill an hour. Literary history was for them a blank. History was a blank. They stared at him with heifer eyes as if he were a source of danger.

  He always failed to interest them in words or sentences. What they did want to know was how to secure the services of an agent. Or how to copyright stories or works-in-progress; would the letter “c” inside a circle be sufficient protection against the predations of an editor or the mailman?

  Should one insist on a sliding scale of royalties?

  When negotiating subsidiary rights, was a separate agent for film rights the best way to go?

  Would he recommend self-publication?

  When he reminded them that self-publication used to be called “vanity publishing,” they stared uncomprehendingly, reminding him one couldn’t “remind” them of something they’d never known.

  He always politely sidestepped their delusions. Summoning the “bluff commonsensical” aspect of his persona, he always recommended getting the Shorter Oxford and a good American dictionary, Webster’s New World Dictionary: College Edition, say. And passing on years of wisdom, he’d advise them to buy hardcover copies because perfect-bound paperbacks would fall to pieces with constant use.

  “Constant use” was one of his dry comic conceits.

  And then the crazies.

  Women, oddly nearly always women, placid, impervious, who had written one story or Chapter One and offered it up for discussion, unchanged, year after year, to courses and workshops from coast to coast.

  One who wept because all the artists the professors said were important were all elitist and many also sexist and racist and how could writers be good who did not care about the people? Her problems and the problems of others like her were, Forde suspected, other.

  Other troubled women phoning his hotel room at night saying they’d just been passing and were now in the lobby…

  Men who wished to share with him Polaroid evidence of their wives’ infidelities.

  Strange young men whose writing ambitions veered towards obsequious aggression who, after courses were over, phoned him from “group” or “the facility,” saying they saw exactly what he’d been saying, very good, absolutely agreed with every word, everything he’d said about words and sentences, yes, no contest, all that, they absolutely agreed with all that, no question, but had he thought that what he was saying was because he was of an older generation?

  Perhaps he wasn’t into Urban Fantasy, Alternative Worlds, Heroes, The Knights Templar, Genghis Khan.

  He thought it was all probably something to do with dominance.

  They offered to lend him Vampire books.

  Forde switched off the light and lay on the bed, staring towards the glimmer of the street lamp and the steadily falling snow and the unhappiness of his life.

  He laced his fingers behind his head.

  Mapped the shadowed ceiling.

  Wandered.

  “I’m forced to ask, Mrs. Williams.”

  “Laetitia.”

  “Laetitia. I’m forced to ask if you’ve ever been to New York.”

  “Well, to Radio City Music Hall.”

  “Ah, the Rockettes?”

  Jocular/avuncular.

  Mrs. Williams responding with tight, minimal smile.

  Blouse.

  Collar frilly.

  Buttons pearlescent.

  Floral brooch.

  “Because, you see, Mrs…. You see, Laetitia, I wondered why you had set your story in New York.”

  The heifer stare.

  “Because that’s where they are.”

  “Who are?”

  “The gangsters.”

  The “one-on-one,” strongly suggested by the English Department head, Professor Sinclair—got to leave them feeling they’ve had their moneysworth—the one-on-one dragged on its weary length. His unravelling briefcase might be stitchable by a shoe-repair man. Thinking about lunch occupied him; the day felt chopped-eggish; with a half-sour; wondered if Fredericton could rise to a half-sour. Professor Thing on sabbatical; titles on his shelves immediately to the right of the desk: Homilies of Aelfric, The Poems of Cynewulf, Awntyrs of Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne…

  Christ!

  “No, you see, it’s the words themselves—when you write “going to” the reader can’t escape the idea of going, leaving the room. Right? But she isn’t, is she?”

  The cornered stare.

  He glanced down again at the pristine typescript.

  “Bananas” often commanded her to go to the bathroom on his head.

  “Think, Laetitia. By using a euphemism… and would a woman who would do that use a euphemism? I mean, you describe her as a ‘moll,’ don’t you?”

  Pretending to consult the crisp pages.

  “‘A gunsel’s moll.’ Now. What is she doing? She’s naked and she’s crouched over his face with her legs apart. See her, Laetitia. Do the words ‘go to the bathroom’ capture what we’re looking at? Would she think those words? What words would she use to describe to another—er—‘moll’—what Bananas liked her to do?”

  Head lowered in the heifer stare.

  Forelegs braced.

  Silence.

  “What is this woman doing, Laetitia?”

  “She’s…”

  “Mmm?”

  “Doing…”

  “Pardon?”

  “Doing Number One.”

  *

  As he settled towards sleep he summoned up again the picture. Or, as he had come to think of it, The Picture. The sequences, the silent, cathedral-high barn, the rumbling collapse of the drystone wall, the feed shed with its strong, brown smell, the leveret in the hedgerow and the wavering weight of the old double-barrelled twelve-bore, partridges rocketing low out of the dew-drenched rows of kale… these pictures flowed from The Picture. It was all about something that had not yet come together, something he hadn’t yet got a grip on.

  What was going on started with The Picture. He was with his father in Cumberland, staying on his Uncle Joseph’s farm. He was—couldn’t quite figure this out—ten? Ten or eleven. It must have been on a summer holiday. All the sequences were sunlit. In The Picture, he and his father had been setting nightlines in the beck. The hooks, No. 12 on 4-lb. leaders, were baited with worms, thin red worms they’d dug out of a manure pile behind the barn. This particular kind of worm was the very best for fishing, his father had said, they were called brandlings. He silently rehearsed the word.

  The beck dropped down through the fields from the tarn in the fells above. The water level was low in the summer, only inches deep through the stones and boulders except where it pooled, widening, deeper, silent, until the slow current chattered on again through stones and eased down towards the next little pool,
flowing eventually into the river at the valley bottom.

  The water rilled into the little pool down a big slab of rock. In the wet gloom of that end of the pool under the hazel trees, maidenhair and hart’s tongue ferns grew out of the cracks and he half-caught the flit of wrens. The pool was perhaps two feet deep, boulders dry and grey above the water. Somewhere in the shallow water lay small, speckled trout and eels that rather frightened him. The green-and-pink stipples on the trout faded so quickly.

  Hazelnuts, his father told him, were called cobs.

  One morning, as they checked the nightlines, his father showed him how to still the writhing knots of an eel so that he could get the hook out. It seemed almost magical how immediately motionless the eel became on sheets of newspaper. His father nailed the eels to the barn door with a nail through the head, cut around the neck until he’d loosed a flap of skin, stuck a tine of an old fork into the skin and pulled down, skinning the eel like turning a sock inside out or unzipping a boot. The collie waited in the nettles for the guts and skin. When they’d cleaned the trout and eels, his father fried them in bacon fat and they ate them with hunks of dry bread for breakfast. His mother refused to stay in the kitchen, calling them “disgusting” and “barbarous,” her revulsion a piquant sauce to the rich, white flesh.

  In The Picture, his father was balanced across two boulders, face an inch or so above the water, moving his hand very slowly along the underside of the stone. This, he told Rob, was called “tickling” trout. The fish held their position against the current—no one knew why—until the caressing fingers reached the gills and hoisted the fish into air. There had been no fish that day and his father had not used the word “tickling”; he had used a word that Rob had never heard before.

  When The Picture first started he could not remember that word, knew it ended in “ing”—grappling, cuddling, something like that, but it would not come. The Picture was incomplete, without it, powerless. For several weeks he had tried—out walking, sticking on a stamp, while reading—to conjure that word. He thought eventually it might be “guddling,” that was the word that kept coming back, but such a word wasn’t in the SOED or Brewer’s or any dictionary he tried. He mentioned this to a dinner guest who had grown up in Scotland and who said, yes, of course it was “guddling,” a common enough word in Scotland, a dialect word. Scottish words and usages would have been common in Cumberland their lands being so close together.