by John Metcalf
So. His father guddling trout.
His father balanced precariously across two boulders. He was not wearing his usual black suit and white plastic dog collar attached to the black dickey, but a blue shirt with a red tie and a dark-blue blazer. To see his father not in a black suit and clerical collar, not in black gown, not wearing starched Geneva bands, this was a Red Letter Day, this guddling with his father, rapturous festival.
Having put off black garb, free of vestments, his father was a different father from his everyday father who rarely spoke. This father was lavish with the gift of secret words, gems from a hoard, precious stones gleaming from the jumbled, black-tarnished hack-silver…
Elver, caddis larvae, tercel, jesses, drey
Screaming wrenched him from sleep.
Red round and round, washing the ceiling. He pulled himself up in the bed until his head was propped against the wall. He lay, stunned, until the thudding in his throat calmed. The scream of metal on concrete. The snowplow lowering the blade into roaring acceleration. The bellowing, the screams of steel, yellow lights now pulsing, the throbbing continuo of the attendant trucks piling with spewed snow, sounded like a battle, sounded like battling dinosaurs, sounded like the bounding raptors in Jurassic Park savaging smaller beasts, blood, rending and ripping, blood running on their serried teeth.
*
Kate scrunched up her shoulder to hold the phone in place and gestured at the pigeonholes.
A Guaranteed Acceptance offer of a MasterCard and a letter from The Arts Council of Ontario, known conversationally as TACO. He had applied to these pustular bureaucrats for a grant not much longer ago it seemed, than a week. He reread the letter with growing astonishment and rage.
Dear Mr. Forde,
We received your application to the Works-in-Progress Program. However, your application has been deemed ineligible because the manuscript material you submitted as a sample of your project, at 45 pages, is over the 40 pages stipulated in the Program Guidelines.
I have enclosed a copy of the Program Guidelines. Please refer to page 6 of the Program Guidelines for detailed information on how to submit an application.
Sincerely,
John Degstra
Literature Officer
“You cunt!” said Forde to his filing cabinet.
Piffler. Pencil-pusher, Prisspot. Pencil dick.
“You fucking merkin!”
Literature Officer.
Officer!
OFFICER
Christ!
You and whose army, Degstra?
Poor, posturing sod. Degstra was an officious fool, a footler, yes, a pettifogger, yes.
But no bigger fool than he, Forde, had been in applying to TACO and opening himself, and his work, to humiliation.
“A jury of his peers.”
Peers!
He felt—the best way of putting it, he felt—soiled.
The faculty lounge for a last coffee before heading to the Cathedral.
Checked his watch.
Crockery, cutlery noises as he went in. Oh, God! Beasley! Too late. That Brylcreemed bastard, the bugger’s hand already waving.
“Do come and join us. And how is our Itinerant Mountebank this merry morn?”
Forde nodded.
“Us” being the sniggering Beasley and some rheumy-eyed Emeritus of the History Department and a rather pongy old man who looked like a couple of settee cushions stuffed into a waistcoat, to whom Beasley said, “Have you met our Charlatan-in-Residence, Vicar?”
Beasley had arrived at UNB from some British bucket shop of a university—Bournemouth, that sort of place—having earned kudos by scouring foot-of-fines and manorial rolls and such for the amounts and frequency of scutage in the area roughly corresponding to present-day Hampshire, contributing information thusly towards a sociological portrait of lesser nobility in the fourteenth century.
Forde loathed him.
“So, old boy,” said Beasley, “you drew the short straw.”
“Straw?”
“The widow.”
“The only straw,” said Forde.
“What?” said the Vicar. “What?”
The Emeritus tilted onto one buttock and emitted a long, keening fart.
“Well-played, Sir!” said Beasley.
Sniggered.
“And it’s not his widow. His granddaughter.”
“But ancient,” said Beasley.
“Seventy-five?” said Forde.
The Vicar’s chin dropped to his chest.
Odd place, UNB.
The trophy wife of the History Department head, ferried about by her husband, apparently went trick-or-treating naked save for a fur coat and high heels.
“Spanish,” his informant had confided.
An ex-member of the English Department, now a fugitive, was wanted by the FBI for cross-border trafficking in stolen Rolls-Royces.
The Northrop Frye Poetry Chair was regularly sighted in the Lord Beaverbrook Hotel’s River Room en travesti.
“… in the library,” bore on Beasley. “I go over there to read Time magazine. Too cheap to buy one. And it started raining so I was rummaging around until it stopped, reading about this Bliss Carman person and Childe Chauncy and this Sir Charles D.G. Roberts…”
“G.D.” said the Emeritus.
“Pardon?”
“What?”
“Anyway,” said Beasley. “I discovered that this Bliss person had written a verse in a poem—
Let me have a scarlet maple
For the grave-tree at my head,
With the quiet sun behind it,
In the years when I am dead.
Exquisite, isn’t it? A sort of Canadian William McGonagall. Anyway, an old chap I met in here one evening told me that a chap called Pacey, Desmond Pacey—used to be here—organized just such a tree with some graduate students in an act of—”
“They used to give you little cookies with the coffee,” said the Emeritus. “Coconut. With sugar sprinkles. I was particularly partial to them.”
“IN AN ACT,” said Beasley, “of—can one say?—‘Parnassian Homage.’ And then,” said Beasley. “And this is the funny bit, tickled my funny bone. Do you know what happened? The tree, the scarlet maple with the quiet sun behind it, the grave-tree, died.”
“Who did?” said the Vicar. “Who did you say?”
“Particularly partial,” said the Emeritus.
“But the most interesting of these sorry chaps, apparently quite well known in his day, was this Roberts fellow.”
“G.D.” said the Emeritus.
“Quite,” said Beasley. “By all accounts, quite the swordsman. A real alpha male. Rogered his way from coast to coast.”
He stuck up his forefingers above his ears, indicating horns.
“Monarch of the Glans.”
Again did his snigger.
Forde recalled a photograph of Sir Charles G.D. and remembered thinking that Sir Charles had put him in mind of W.C. Fields, the famous photograph of Fields from—was it, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break—Fields holding a spread poker hand to his chest.
Both men exuded fraudulence.
“When these lady audiences were suitably moistened by metre, mmm? Mmmm?” said Beasley. “When they were suitably lubricated by lyrics, he was noted for slipping selected belles a length of the old Parnassian pancetta.”
“The cathedral,” said Forde, getting up and glancing at his watch.
Nodding to the Vicar, Gentlemen, and the Emeritus.
As he started across the expanse of floral carpeting, Beasley’s voice at his back.
“After the bestowal of his knighthood he was everywhere…”
He was through the doorway.
Beasley baying in horrible triumph…
“… treated with vas deferens.”
*
Forde walked through the great West Door, accepted an Order of Service from a Boy Scout and stole from the Tract Rack A Guide to Christ Church Cathedral.
“What party, sir?” said another busy Scout.
“Party? Ah, yes, UNB.”
He followed the boy.
He sniffed. Most peculiar. He seemed to be smelling mothballs.
The pew ends bore printed signs: Fredericton Fire Services, Fredericton High School, Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Parks Canada, St. Thomas University, Mount Allison University, The Maritime Forest Ranger School, Mayoral Party and City Council, Scouts Canada, Fredericton Police Services, RCMP.
The smell of mothballs was becoming both acrid and cloying. Simultaneously, if that were possible.
Royal Canadian Legion, Micmac and Maliseet Nations, Canadian Forces Base (Gagetown), University of New Brunswick.
Around the brass-eagle lectern with its widespread wings, CBC and CTV were taping down cables and messing with blinding lights.
He took a seat at the rear of the UNB contingent so that he could look around. Academic hoods colourful against the black academic gowns, some tasselled mortar boards, a few puffy, velvety, Muffin Man caps. Mothballs, much stronger, yes gusts. The gowns’ annual airing, he realized.
Priests progressing about in unctuous robes and chasubles and albs and gold-thread-glinty stoles, hands folded over tummies. The white stoles were lesser stoles, Very Reverends, but the alpha stole, the Right Reverend, was purple.
CFB (Gagetown) had sent a Lieutenant General, a Brigadier General, two Colonels, and two Majors.
As he looked at the rings and loops and curlicues on their cuffs, he resolved for the umpteenth time to find out what it meant in New York Times bestsellers when an officer was described as a “bird colonel.”
The Scouts were apparently no longer The Boy Scouts but rather Scouts Canada. The seated Scout brass were wearing neckerchiefs gathered at the throat through little leather napkin-ring-things, and lanyards and patches and badges. The Chief Beaver, or whatever they called him, wore glasses that hung down his chest on a cord decorated with seashells.
On an elaborately carved oak chair up near the Choir, more throne actually, sat the Premier of New Brunswick in conversation with three what Forde supposed one would call aides, young men with razor-cut hair and shaved napes.
The peaked caps, the gold braid, the insignia, the medals, the glitter and deportment, it was all, thought Forde, all more entertaining than television.
Certainly, his television.
He returned to glancing through the stolen Guide.
“… completed in 1853… new edifice was the first entirely new Cathedral foundation on British soil since the Norman Conquest… ‘Decorated Gothic’… the whole modelled on the Parish Church of Snettisham in Norfolk… stonework executed by a former mason of Exeter Cathedral.”
Over the Credence niche beside the altar “a beautifully carved head of Christ… the only surviving fragment of an ancient stone reredos brought from England but reduced to rubble in transit.”
To the left of the altar, Bishop Medley’s crozier, “believed carved from an oak beam from Christ Church Monastery in Canterbury.”
The World War I memorial “made in the shape of a cross of stones taken from the Cathedrals of Arras and Ypres.”
On the opposite pier “a replica of an eighth century cross, discovered beneath the streets of Canterbury in 1918, set in stone taken from the walls of Canterbury Cathedral.”
He was becoming bored, irritated even, by these orts and scraps of another time and place. 1853 seemed to him like yesterday, a great-great grandmother away, a blink. The only thing in the Cathedral that had engaged him were the colours, the regimental flags hanging out from poles high above the aisles, faded wisps, flags as transparent now and fragile as the skeletal ribs in dead leaves.
Aha!
Purple Stole ascending into the massive pulpit. The organ stopped its doleful stooging about. Chatter slowed, ceased.
Order of Service
O God, our help in ages past
our hope for years to come,
our shelter from the stormy blast,
and our eternal home.
Under the shadow of Thy Throne,
Thy saints have dwelt secure;
sufficient is Thine Arm alone,
and our defense is sure.
The congregation sat again.
Silence extended.
A scout brass rose and stood in the aisle looking anxious; Purple Stole inclined his head towards him; the scout signalled to someone Forde couldn’t see. Two little boys appeared from the left transept carrying the remains of Childe Chauncy by the fore and aft silver handles of the ebony box. Cubs or kits or whatever they called them now. Knee socks, those little green tabs below the knees, khaki shirts with two pockets, badges. They were bumping the ebony box into the back of the front cub’s thighs, back into the front of the rear cub’s thighs. Forde imagined a comic cloud of mortal ash rising from the accident and dusting over the assembled academics, sifting onto the Gagetown spit-and-polish, ash and bone-particles insinuating their way between Mayoral shirt and waistcoat.
The scout brass helped the little boys settle the ebony box onto a small table beside the eagle lectern; a White Stole spread over it a shiny purple cloth emblazoned with a yellow cross.
Order of Service
From the West Door a bugle sounded the Last Post, leaving behind a solemn silence. Into that silence, the sound of boots on the stone flags. Six soldiers from The Royal Canadian Regiment followed, at an interval, by six soldiers from The Royal Canadian Dragoons in the ceremonial slow march down the nave towards the Choir, the rear brought up by two kilted pipers of The Nova Scotia Highlanders.
Eyes Right at the purple-draped box.
At the Choir the crash of boots, crash again, choreographed turns, The Royal Canadian Regiment disappearing into the left transept, the Royal Canadian Dragoons into the right, leaving the two pipers at Parade Rest facing the congregation.
Order of Service
I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.
Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow and never continueth in one stay.
In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased?
Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.
Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us, O Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, thou most worthy judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour for any pains of death, to fall from thee.
For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed: we therefore commit…ah, his ashes to the ground; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ…
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
The Cathedral’s Dean, white stole, crossed to the eagle lectern.
The Very Reverend Herbert A. Butterfield.
Order of Service
“Childe Chauncy and his beloved friend Bliss Carman were famous poets. We are gathered here this morning less in grief than in celebration. A native son returns.
“The ashes of Bliss Carman, as most of you will know, are buried in Poets’ Corner in Forest Hill Cemetery. As are those of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, that slightly older poet, fr
iend, and relative of both Bliss and Childe.
“Some of you will be familiar with Bliss Carman’s poem “The Grave Tree.”
Let me have a scarlet maple
For the grave-tree at my head,
With the quiet sun behind it,
In the years when I am dead.
“Tomorrow, Childe Chauncy’s ashes will be buried beside those of Bliss Carman, two luminous spirits reunited.
“Childe Chauncy and Bliss Carman were famous poets. But before they became famous they were simply… boys. New Brunswick boys. Fredericton boys. They attended Fredericton Collegiate Grammar School—and we are especially pleased to welcome students this morning from that school’s evolution in excellence, Fredericton High School.”
“Boys! High-spirited boys! Boys whose love of Nature, what Bliss always referred to as their kinship with Nature, was nurtured by their adventurous expeditions on the St. John River and the Nashwaak by canoe.
“This was no placid paddling. In the spring on the St. John, when the water is at freshet level, the paddler has to stand to battle the current and the waves. They would cross the St. John, navigate the Nashwaak and reach its tributary, Kane’s Creek, in the upper hills. This was the Adventure Heroic!
“Bliss’ first canoe he named Cheemaun after the canoe that had carried Hiawatha to the great Gitchi Manitou, the Giver of Life. Some years later, Childe named his canoe Mishe-Nahma which means ‘Sturgeon’ and refers to that section of Longfellow’s mighty poem where Hiawatha subdues Mishe-Nahma and tells the people to bring all their pots and kettles and make oil for winter.
“I like to imagine that the forests through which Childe and Bliss paddled were not unlike the arboreal landscape Longfellow so memorably describes as surrounding the wigwam of Nokomis, Daughter of the Moon.
Dark behind it rose the forest,