And each other’s love.
I have a story for you. I’ve included it below—‘The Legend of Siwash Rock’. Do you remember Siwash Rock from when I took you to Vancouver? It’s that big boulder sitting all by itself in the shallow water of the Narrows, on the edge of Stanley Park. My mother told me the tale when I was seven, but the words following are not hers, nor mine. They belong to a writer.
I believe this is something you must read, Adam.
Before it’s too late.
The Legend of Siwash Rock
It was thousands of years ago that a handsome boy chief journeyed in his canoe to the upper coast for the shy little northern girl whom he brought home as his wife.
Boy though he was, the young chief had proved himself to be an excellent warrior, a fearless hunter,
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and an upright, courageous man among men. His tribe loved him, and his enemies respected him, and the base and mean and cowardly feared him.
The customs and traditions of his ancestors were a positive religion to him, the saying and the advices of the old people were his creed. He was conservative in every rite and ritual of his race. He fought his tribal enemies like the savage that he was. He sang his war songs, danced his war-dances, slew his foes, but the little girl-wife from the north he treated with the deference that he gave his own mother, for was she not to be the mother of his warrior child?
The year rolled round, weeks merged into months, winter into spring, and one glorious summer at daybreak he wakened to her voice calling him. She stood beside him, smiling.
“It will be today,” she said proudly.
He sprang from his couch of wolf-skins and looked out upon the coming day: the promise of what it would bring him seemed breathing through all his forest world. He took her very gently by the hand and led her down to the water’s edge.
“I must swim,” he told her.
“I must swim, too,” she smiled, with the perfect understanding of two beings who are mated. For, to them, the old custom was law—the custom that the parents of a coming child must swim until their fl esh is so clear and clean that a wild animal cannot scent their proximity. If the wild creatures of the forests have no fear of them, then, and only then, are they fi t to become parents.
So those two plunged into the waters of the Narrows as the grey dawn slipped up the eastern skies and all the forest awoke to the life of a new, glad day. Presently he took her ashore, and smilingly she crept away under the giant trees. “I must be alone,” she said, “but come to me at sunrise: you will not fi nd me alone then.”
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He smiled also, and plunged back into the sea.
He must swim, swim, swim through this hour when his fatherhood was coming upon him. It was the law that he must be clean, spotlessly clean, so that when his child looked out upon the world it would have the chance to live its own life clean. If he did not swim hour upon hour his child would come to an unclean father. He must give his child a chance in life; he must not hamper it by his own uncleanliness at its birth. It was the tribal law—the law of vicarious purity.
As he swam joyously to and fro, a canoe bearing four men headed up the Narrows. These men were giants in stature, and the stroke of their paddles made huge eddies that boiled like the seething tides.
“Out from our course!” they cried as his lithe, copper-coloured body arose and fell with his splendid stroke. He laughed at them, giants though they were, and answered that he could not cease his swimming at their demand.
“But you shall cease!” they commanded. “We are the men of the Sagalie Tyee, and we command you ashore out of our way!”
He ceased swimming, and, lifting his head, defi ed them. “I shall not stop, nor yet go ashore,” he declared, striking out once more to the middle of the channel.
“Do you dare disobey us,” they cried, “we, the men of the Sagalie Tyee? We can turn you into a fi sh, or a tree, or a stone for this; do you dare disobey the Great Tyee?”
“I dare anything for the cleanliness and purity of my coming child. I dare even the Sagalie Tyee Himself, but my child must be born to a spotless life.”
The four men were astounded. They consulted together, lighted their pipes, and sat in council. Never had they, the men of the Sagalie Tyee, been defi ed before. Now, for the sake of a little unborn child, they were ignored, disobeyed, almost despised. The lithe
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young copper-coloured body still disported itself in the cool waters; superstition held that should their canoe, or even their paddle-blades, touch a human being, their marvellous power would be lost. The handsome young chief swam directly in their course. They dared not run him down; if so, they would become as other men.
While they yet counselled what to do, there fl oated from out of the forest a faint, strange, compelling sound. They listened, and the young chief ceased his stroke as he listened also. The faint sound drifted out across the waters once more. It was the cry of a little, little child. Then one of the four men, he that steered the canoe, the strongest and tallest of them all, arose, and, standing erect, stretched out his arms towards the rising sun and chanted, not a curse on the young chief’s disobedience, but a promise of everlasting days and freedom from death.
“Because you have defi ed all things that come in your path we promise this to you,” he chanted. “You have defi ed what interferes with your child’s chance for a clean life, you have defi ed us when we would have stopped your swimming and hampered your child’s future. You have placed that child’s future before all things, and for this the Sagalie Tyee commands us to make you for ever a pattern for your tribe. You shall never die, but you shall stand through all the thousands of years to come, where all eyes can see you. You shall live, live, live as an indestructible monument to Clean Fatherhood.”
The four men lifted their paddles and the handsome young chief swam inshore; as his feet touched the line where sea and land met he was transformed into stone.
Then the four men said, “His wife and child must ever be near him; they shall not die, but live also.”
They, too, were turned into stone.
And if you penetrate the hollows in the woods near
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Siwash Rock you will fi nd a large rock and a smaller one beside it. They are the shy little bride-wife from the north, with her hour-old baby beside her.
From the uttermost parts of the world vessels come daily throbbing and sailing up the Narrows. From far trans-Pacifi c ports, from the frozen North, from the lands of the Southern Gross, they pass and repass the living rock that was there before their hulls were shaped, that will be there when their very names are forgotten, when their crews and their captains have taken their long last voyage, when their merchandise has rotted, and their owners are known no more. But the tall, grey column of stone will still be there—a monument to one man’s fi delity to a generation yet unborn—and will endure from everlasting to everlasting.
E Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake
Whatever has confronted you of late, Adam—whether it’s your writing or something else that is beyond my comprehension—don’t let it deviate you from your path. Stay the course and keep swimming, so it can be washed away.
And we will be ever near.
Love. And Faith.
Your Wife
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Any Last Requests?
25
A dam stood before the bathroom mirror. Despite the puffy bags under the eyes and the gaunt form of the cheeks, he was recognisable to himself again. The unkempt beard was gone. The hair, washed on consecutive days for the fi rst time in two months, fell in its natural arc across his right eyebrow. His clothes were from the drawer rather than the fl oor.
He exited the bathroom, walked down the hallway and stopped at the thres
hold of the once-spare room. The transformation to a nursery-in-waiting was complete, save the computer and desk in the far right corner. They would be relocated this afternoon. It was his one allocated job.
He entered and moved toward the open window. With elbows resting on the ledge, he took a moment to observe the day of his reckoning. It was grey, cloudy. A brisk August westerly toyed with the antenna on the neighbour’s roof. The roundabout that emptied into the fi nal, fl at sweep of James Street down toward Merthyr Road and the Powerhouse contained no traffi c. The cacophony of New Farm bustle, often a rasp in the throat of any sustained glimpse of outside, seemed distant, subdued. Adam closed the window and yanked the string of the drawn blind, sending the slats tumbling toward the ledge.
The unfi nished manuscript lay on the left edge of the computer desk. Perched on top was the pewter lion-serpent.
Adam twisted the souvenir until the creature’s impassive gaze and gaping jaw faced the monitor. He looked around the room, pushed the ergonomic chair away from the desk,
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and clicked the mouse. ‘The Umbilical Word’ fi le came up on screen.
He placed a nearby cushion on the fl oor and knelt, both knees grounded, before the keyboard.
*
From: “Adam O’Doherty”
Hello? Are you there?
I’m always here.
Can we talk like this?
It’s not written in stone that you must kneel.
I thought it was. Regardless, I probably prefer it that way right now.
Then fi re away.
I want to talk to you about…my future.
Always an important subject.
Is my future determined by you?
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You choose the bus you ride. I provide the driver.
So this…bus I am on now, I have chosen it.
Absolutely. You hung your thumb out and everything.
Can I choose a different bus?
This one has your writing dream seated beside you. Why would you want to hop off?
Because perhaps others’ journeys are more important than mine.
So it would not be your bus at all. It would belong to somebody else.
Can I choose it nevertheless?
Can you ring the bell? Of course! But not until this current
journey—your chosen journey—is complete. It is complete when it pulls into station. At that time, the choice of a route is once again yours.
Do we have to keep using the ‘bus’ metaphor?
Writers like metaphor, don’t they?
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Not as much as their friends.
Would you prefer a train?
No, thank you.
As you wish.
Have I not already arrived at some point of change, of decision. Am I not standing at…okay, you win…a fork in the road?
No. You have presently encountered an opportunity to learn.
You mean a test.
I would’ve said a pothole…but if that’s what you want to call it, go ahead.
Do I have to take it?
You sound like one of your former students, Adam! Put it this way—a note from ‘Adam’s Mum’ won’t help much.
You have created this test?
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The opportunity to learn was always inherent in this journey.
So you have created this test.
Okay, okay, if it helps us move forward…then, yes, I came up with the questions, determined the marks, set the standard for a pass. I created this test.
*
Adam sat back on his heels. He chewed a thumbnail then inhaled through his nose. The air already carried the twin tinges of lanolin and talc. Like corner cobwebs, those smells could hang around in a room a long time. They could haunt a man’s memory for longer still.
Adam lifted himself back onto his knees.
As he re-commenced typing, he failed to notice changes in the manuscript at his elbow. The lion-serpent now stood to the side of The Umbilical Word, facing the writer. Several of the manuscript’s initial pages fell from the desk and settled in various locations on the nursery fl oor.
*
What if I refuse to take this test?
Ah, you want to be the defi er, the stone warrior immortalised!
The Siwash Rock legend is a wonderful story, isn’t it? Sadly, though, it is not real life. The ‘shy little bride-wife from the north, with her hour-old baby beside her’, they were destroyed thirty years ago so that a concrete path could be laid down for tourists. The young husband and father now stands alone, his ‘ever near’ family sacrifi ced for the viewing pleasures of backpackers and grey nomads.
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Are you saying I cannot refuse?
I am not the giants of the Sagalie Tyee. I will not become as other men if our courses collide.
Then I want to take a different test.
Do we have to keep using the ‘exam’ metaphor?
Can I take a different test?
I have already mentioned that what you are presently encountering is inherent in this pathway.
But as the creator of all pathways, could you not devise a new test?
One that Maddy doesn’t have to endure as well?
Maddy doesn’t view this in the same way you do. She, like me, sees it as an opportunity to learn.
She hasn’t experienced the miracle of our child’s connection. And then had it taken away.
Hasn’t she?
Not in the same way I have. She doesn’t know what’s coming.
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And you do?
I think it has been made abundantly clear what lies ahead. And I am prepared to accept that it is my destiny. But why should innocents suffer?
History shows that it is inevitable.
Then create a new History! Start with Adam O’Doherty! Let him take a different test! One that doesn’t affect others! One that can only affect him self and his dream!
You are thinking of The Umbilical Word.
Yes.
You would see it sacrifi ced?
I would.
For the sake of your child?
Yes.
‘To be a good parent requires a good sense of self’—your words are they not?
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I would re-defi ne my sense of self.
What would you be?
A father.
So you wish to sentence your child to a lifetime of providing meaning and value for your existence as well as his or her own? You would let your child come to an unclean father?
Let me take a different test.
Adam---
Please.
It’s not possible, Adam. I’m sorry.
*
Still kneeling, Adam laid his forehead on the desk. His right arm cradled his head. The left dangled and swung in front of his leaning torso, fi ngertips swiping the coarse calico of the cushion. The contact was like a serrated blade. After a dozen passes, the pendulum halted. He turned his hand palm-up, revealing the underside of the wedding band on his ring fi nger. Crafted into the gold surface was the tiny image of a wolf, symbolic of teaching, pathfi nding and family.
Adam wedged the tip of his thumb under the ring and
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levered. The loss of weight in the last two months now saw his fi ngers visibly thinner than in the days of a reliable miracle. The band slipped easily over the knuckle. It fell, bounced off the cushion and rolled under the cottage-style timber baby cot, positioned against the northern wall.
It came to rest on ‘page 94’ of The Umb
ilical Word manuscript. The previous ninety-three were distributed elsewhere across the nursery fl oor space.
*
Any last requests?
Watch over Maddy when this is done.
You wish that I should do your job?
I don’t ‘wish’ for anything of the sort.
You don’t trust her when she says she believes in you, and has faith in you, and that your love for each other will serve you well throughout this journey?
I feel this might be beyond the consolation of our love.
You have felt this way before, on three previous occasions.
Your love stood fi rm.
We were blameless.
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Maddy didn’t think so. She blamed doctors, she blamed me and, ultimately, she blamed herself.
She was not responsible. Those tragedies were beyond anyone’s control.
And you told her so.
Of course.
And you held her and comforted her and read to her, until she believed in the promise that things would be different next time around. You imagine such a treasured guardian of her dream would not be welcome in her future?
She deserves more than guardianship of her dream.
Any last requests for yourself?
End this quickly.
*
Adam stood and pivoted away from the computer. Sheets of printed A4 fl ew up from his feet. He checked where the manuscript had lain previously, on the left corner of the desk. Only blank pages remained. He scanned the room. The entire fl oor was concealed beneath The Umbilical Word.
“It will be today.”
Adam looked up. Maddy stood at the entrance to the room.
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She held an overnight bag in one hand and a bookmarked, purple paperback in the other. Her eyes glistened. The tears on her cheeks shone like diamonds from heaven.
Adam crossed the paper carpet between them and led his wife to the front door.
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Hard Labour
Hard Labour
26
From: “Adam O’Doherty”
Subject: Today
Dear All
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