When his eyes adjusted to the light, he could see wooden crates and rolled-up tarps. Danny glanced back through the tent at Elizabeth. “Follow me,” he whispered. She looked behind her, and seeing no one watching, knelt down and followed. Inside the tent, the two snaked among the crates and ropes and tarps until they emerged at the opposite side of the tent and found themselves in a small, open-aired enclosure amid a crowd of people watching Professor Wormwood himself dressed in a dark tuxedo and bow tie over a white, high-collared shirt.
In his right hand, the Professor held a small dog on its back, its feet standing straight up in the air. The crowd roared with laughter and Danny and Elizabeth moved in closer. As they did, the professor threw the dog into the air and caught it as it spun round. Elizabeth gasped and laughed, and Danny shook his head with wonder. Then the professor moved the dog’s four paws to his left hand and held the animal high for all to see.
The audience applauded.
To his left, Danny noticed that a crowd was moving toward another tent. He tapped Elizabeth on the shoulder. “Let’s have a look,” he said.
She nodded and followed.
As they approached, they again found themselves lost in the crowd and quickly swept inside the tent. There, the crowd dispersed to fill the space, and Danny and Elizabeth looked to the far side. Their eyes grew wide with amazement. On the far side was a makeshift wall on which a cone of light was being projected. Danny followed the light to the source and saw the squared machine with two great rotating circular heads. The horn of light that spewed from the machine was speckled with dust and Danny cocked his head to the side trying to understand. But when he heard a gasp from the crowd, he returned his gaze to the far wall and saw there a staircase full of colourful wizards in high conical hats and near to them a large white telescope.
Danny’s mouth fell open.
He turned to Elizabeth, who had now taken a seat on the dirt floor, and her mouth had fallen open, too. Her eyes glowed with the reflected images on the screen, and Danny sat next to her, following her gaze back to the screen, where he watched one wizard pointing to a darkened chalkboard at a triangle that looked to Danny like a simple boat. He wondered what ocean it would sail on when the wizard pointed to a large circle on the chalkboard. The other wizards nodded and waved their hands and pulled on jackets of green, and yellow, and pink, and blue. Danny was perplexed. In the next moment, the wizards were working on their boat, overlooking an unfamiliar city of smokestacks billowing smoke. When they finished, they entered the boat, one at a time, waving goodbye to an assembled group of women dressed pink uniforms, and the boat was then pushed into a great tube.
“It’s a cannon!” thought Danny. A murmur rippled through the audience.
That was when Danny was aware that Elizabeth had put her hand into his. It was warm and soft and Danny liked how it felt in his. He looked back to the screen where a dozen women in blue suits pushed the ship into the cannon. It was lit and then it exploded, sending the ship off into space. The crowd gasped when the moon appeared on the screen, small but growing rapidly, the face twitching and smiling. Elizabeth squeezed Danny’s hand when the ship landed in the eye of the moon. The audience laughed.
“They’ve landed on the moon!” said Danny, though Elizabeth gave no indication of hearing him. He watched as the wizards exited the ship and walked along the strange and compelling landscape of gnarled rocks and tree roots. Danny looked at Elizabeth and thought for a moment that he was in a dream. The light from the projector flickered against her eyes and her cheeks. He became aware of a growing warmth in his chest, and he held her hand even tighter.
On the screen, the wizards were entering a landscape of large mushrooms, tree roots, and jagged cliffs when a human-like creature, with a horse-like head and a green body, bounded across the screen.
A woman in the audience let out a cry.
The wizards were terrified and waved large sticks at the creature. Though Danny and Elizabeth laughed at the antics of this strange moon being, playfully bouncing about on a great log, they both felt a bit nervous, aware of the wizards’ growing fear. Finally, one wizard stepped forward with his stick and struck the moon man. A huge mushroom cloud appeared, first red then green then black, and the moon man was gone. The crowd laughed, but Danny gaped. He was horrified. Elizabeth, too.
Another moon man then appeared, clearly enraged. It turned on the wizards but was quickly vaporized into a mushroom cloud. The wizards danced in celebration, until a dozen or more appeared and chased the wizards across the ragged landscape. Frightened, Elizabeth leaned against Danny, and he was aware that could smell her hair and aware, too, that it somehow made him feel warm.
On screen, the king of the creatures had captured the wizards, who were bound, until one broke free of his bonds and attacked the king, lifting the surprised monarch into the air and throwing him to the ground. Once more, a mushroom cloud appeared and the creature was gone. The wizards then took flight across the barren landscape to their waiting ship. Once inside, the wizards were pushed over a cliff by the creatures and the ship fell to earth, landing in the ocean. The screen then went white and the crowd in the tent laughed and applauded. Danny smiled but was suddenly conscious of holding Elizabeth’s hand and he looked at her. She smiled. Danny pulled his hand away, embarrassed.
“We’d better get going,” he said.
Sitting next to Elizabeth now, years later, Danny’s memory of that day seemed more vivid than ever. He looked at Elizabeth’s hand and wondered whether she remembered.
He so wanted to hold that hand again.
Music at the Close
Harold Horwood
In this haunting, elegant work of fiction, one of Canada’s finest writers of his generation explores the complex relationship of love and death as Jonathan watches his soulmate, Sarah, fade.
Death may come like a stroke of lightning, or it may sneak up on you without warning, or in many other ways. “Behold, I come as a thief,” said the angel of the Apocalypse. Azriel – was that his name? – the angel of the darker drink, as Fitzgerald called him, hovered for a long time barely at the edge of Jonathan’s consciousness, then, more and more became a presence that he and Sarah could not ignore.
In their forty-five years together (nearly half a century! he reflected) she had been so healthy, so completely without the need of doctors, that she at first dismissed what she believed might be a temporary indisposition. It seemed such a slight thing – a lack of energy, an occasional sense of confusion, a tendency to tire easily, intolerance for certain foods that she had formerly enjoyed – that it could be ignored, but gradually it all began to coalesce into a pattern of weakness and decline. By that time the diagnosis was clear and the visits to the doctor had multiplied, but the outlook was still uncertain: a forty to fifty percent chance that chemotherapy might work the way it is supposed to; otherwise, temporary improvements, but not permanent recovery.
A few weeks later it was obvious that the treatments were providing only intermittent regressions; then she and Jonathan and their daughter Judith gradually came to accept the inevitable, and the specialist was talking in terms of months rather than years.
“Sometimes these things go quickly,” he told her. “Sometimes there are long periods when you can continue to work at a reduced pace; you may even feel better for a while; once in every thousand cases or so there is even a spontaneous recovery. That’s what happens at Lourdes and such places often enough to confirm a belief in faith healing, but temporary remissions are much more likely. Try to live normally. That way you’ll likely escape the misery of a long terminal illness, and of course we can provide palliative treatment with drugs.” (At least, she reflected, he didn’t call the drugs “medication.”)
Jonathan seemed to be more devastated by all this than Sarah herself. He became haggard, lost weight, lost sleep, found his work at the university almost intolerable, and warned his department that he might have to apply for leave.
Judith was mor
e philosophical. “There’ll be time to adjust,” she said, “time to tie up any loose ends between us, time to get used to the idea of her death.”
“That doesn’t change the emptiness that lies ahead,” Jonathan told her.
“No, but we can at least make some plans to cope with it before it’s actually on top of us. This won’t be the kind of horror you’d face if you were called out of a lecture hall one day and told she’d been killed on the street.”
“Oh Lord!” He paused, reflecting. “I’m not sure that a sudden shock would be any harder to bear. I’ll try to work to the end of the semester, but I’ve already warned them that I’ll have to have leave of absence if she gets critically ill before then. A lifetime of interdependence is hard to shake, you know, and I’m going to spend every possible minute with her.”
For Jonathan that was when the dreams began. In one of the first that he remembered after waking, he was back with his grandfather, Captain Joshua, in a boat near the headland between Brigus and Cupids in Newfoundland’s Conception Bay, jigging for codfish. He recognizes the sudden, familiar weight on the line, and draws the fish steadily toward the surface, taking in the line hand over hand, letting it fall on the floorboards between his feet. He can look down through the water and see the green-black shape of the big fish moving beneath the surface. Then, suddenly, the line is slack, and the fish disappears, diving into deep water.
Try again. Toss the jigger a couple of yards out from the gun’all, wait for it to sink, then move it in short tugs a few feet above the bottom. There is a bump, but it is a false alarm, a jerk on the line that seems somehow unlike a fish, afterwards nothing at all, not even the weight of the leaden fish-shaped jigger. The line is clean and empty. Try another jigger. But there isn’t one. Somehow the tackle box has become empty. There is nothing in it – nothing at all. He wonders about cod hooks. Yes, sure enough, there are cod hooks that have appeared from somewhere, and a strip of sheet lead with which he can wrap them together to make a jigger of sorts. But try as he will the wrapping never comes out right. He can’t make the hooks stay in place.
And then, in one of those scene shifts where dreams resemble the movies, he is no longer in the boat, but on a wharf with a crowd of strangers, and his grandfather is no longer there. At that point he knows he is dreaming, and wakes with a feeling of emptiness and frustration.
He is back in college, but not in the one he knew as an undergraduate. It is a strange place with endless corridors and unmarked doors. He has to write an exam today, an exam in mathematics, his most demanding subject. He is on his way to a room where the papers will be passed out, but he can’t remember which exam he is supposed to write. Is it elementary calculus, theory of invariants, symbolic logic? Surely he passed the first one years ago, and has never dabbled in the others. Somehow, the number 666 is mixed up with it. Is that the number of the room he is supposed to find? If only he could remember, he could ask one of the passing students for directions.
This time he is a university lecturer. He knows he is going to be late for class, has a minute or two at most, and has lost his lecture notes. They must be on his desk … in a drawer … in his briefcase … perhaps on a shelf beside the books … The longer he looks, the more places seem to be possible … under the desk, on the floor … in the waste-paper basket … that’s it! Those crumpled and torn papers, just scraps, even smaller than when he first looked at them. Can he possibly fit them together, patch them with mending tape? The more paper he fishes out of the basket, the more there appears to be …
He has to make an emergency phone call. There has been an accident, and he has been asked to call an ambulance. It is only a three-digit number, but he gets the digits all mixed up, starts with the wrong one, tries again, gets a recording that gives him meaningless instructions, hangs up, tries again; meanwhile the phone has turned into one of those ancient wall-mounted models with a handle you have to crank. How many cranks? He has no idea. He has never used anything like this before.
Jonathan, unused to analyzing, or even remembering, his own dreams, does not connect his nightly frustration with his inability to do anything to halt Sarah’s progress toward death. He does not blame himself consciously. He knows that in such matters you should rely on whatever the art of medicine has achieved, up to now. In some areas the achievements have been great, indeed; in the matter of chronic, fatal illness, the achievements have been pitifully small.
Sarah’s condition grew worse only slowly, but steadily. She quit working and spent her time at home, at first seated at her desk, reading and writing, then more and more hours of each day in bed, often asleep, sometimes in a quiet, trance-like state that she seemed to be able to maintain contentedly for long stretches. While Sarah could still help herself, Judith got leave of absence from her editing job and came to stay with her mother.
“I know you don’t really need me,” she said. “It’s I who need you. We have to catch up on the conversations we’ve missed in recent years, when we were both too busy to talk. While you can still manage it, without getting unduly tired, I want to get from you everything that I can.”
“Well, whatever I can do,” Sarah said. “You can have my accumulated knowledge of English literature, to add to your own wide reading, if it’s any good to you. Or my knowledge of how to conduct your life according to the principles of the Tao-teh-King.” She laughed lightly. “Is that what you’re after?”
“I’m after your capacity for love, if the truth must be told. I’m hoping to catch a glimmer of the light that your students see in you. I’m hoping to learn how to love someone for half a century, as you’ve done with Jonathan.”
“My, that’s a big order.” Sarah paused, considering. “It’s a gratuitous grace. All you can really do is pray for it. It can’t be learned.”
“I was afraid that might be so, but perhaps grace, like evil, is catching. Rub up against it long enough, and a little might rub off on you.”
Sarah laughed. “It’s a good theory. Anyway, there’s no great mystery about lifelong attachments, if that’s what you’re talking about – Jonathan and me? Many animals mate for life. Wolves do. And Canada geese.”
“But it’s something more than mating.”
“Oh yes. Much more.”
“A lifelong commitment of the whole person, isn’t it?”
“Who are we, Judith, to say that a goose is incapable of such a commitment? Or a wolf? Just because it isn’t common among people, at least in our culture, in this century? How do we know what emotional depths exist in other creatures?”
“So all I can do is pray?”
“I didn’t mean that literally. Prayer works for some people, for people with a religious gift. But there’s none of that in our family that I’ve ever noticed.”
“Anyway, you’re doing just fine, Sarah. This is the kind of thing I wanted. I’m not tiring you?”
“I’m still pretty strong, Judith. You’ll notice it when I become feeble, and that may be pretty soon – who knows? I’m glad I can still be of some use.”
With Jonathan there was much less need for talk. Many years earlier they had reached something like total understanding, but one day he praised her for “being brave.”
“I’m not fighting it, Jonathan,” she said, “none of this Reader’s Digest stuff about battling to the bitter end, throwing the burning torch to your family, and so on. None of that for me. Kicking and screaming against the inevitable might have suited Dylan Thomas. You know, ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ I’m not a half-crazy alcoholic.”
“Dying isn’t that difficult,” she told him on another occasion. “The suffering might be, if there was a lot of it, but the dying isn’t. Like birth, it happens of itself.” She kept her sense of humour to the end: “Modern medicine,” she said, “really comes into its own with the business of dying. Doctors can only rarely help you to live, but they can almost always help you to die.”
Jonathan’s laughter was forced. He found little
joy in those hours he spent with Sarah during her last illness. She understood this and tried to help him bear it, but with little success. As she grew weaker, she also grew quieter, but continued to share with him her thoughts and feelings, mostly in brief snatches, but now and then in more extended communication:
“Dreams,” she said. “I dream all the time. The dreams are vivid and continuous, and mostly very pleasant. Often I’m walking in a tropical garden, in a world that seems more real than waking life. Some part of my mind is becoming more creative, as my body grows weaker. Does that make sense? Each time I wake from one of those long slumbers that have become so common, I have a sinking feeling, as though the real world were fading out, and a bleak fantasy taking its place.”
There was little pain, and only bearable discomfort. She didn’t ask what drugs were being prescribed, but the sedatives seemed to affect only her body; her mind remained clear, if placid. After a while she could not get out of bed without help. Her skin had become not just pale, but transparent, like the skin of a grape. She had taken on a new kind of beauty, Jonathan realized: she looked not so much frail as spiritual.
“I dreamed we were on a ship,” she told him. “You were just as you were when we first met, young and lithe and beautiful, and there were other people on the ship, too, but they all became ill, and disappeared one by one – going below to their bunks, I suppose. Then there was a storm, and you and I had to manage the ship together, just the two of us. And you know, I felt wonderful. I was trying to help you as much as I could, but I was quite sure that you could bring us safe to port. The storm roared, but there was music in the storm, too, and birds of some kind – storm petrels? – I don’t know, but they were beautiful, like butterflies, and the music sang through the rigging like the strings of a wind harp – and you were just wonderful, Jonathan – a young god among the elements …” So saying, she fell asleep again.
Nova Scotia Love Stories Page 14
