by Glen Huser
PRAISE FOR
BURNING THE NIGHT
“Burning the Night begins with fire; the blackened sketches and journal pages of an artist fluttering down to become memories. Like these charred artefacts, Huser’s eloquent words become a puzzle on the pages, with pieces of the narrative fitting together to slowly reveal the lives of Aunt Harriet and of Curtis. This is the work of a master storyteller.”
—BETTY JANE HEGERAT, AUTHOR OF THE BOY
“This is a story of inner and outer sight, of blindness both acquired and enforced on us by society. Huser is a sensitive yet ruthless observer of human nature.”
—ALISON WATT, AUTHOR OF DAZZLE PATTERNS
“Like a vivid shock of red in a sepia photo or the lurid love letter of an historical icon, Burning the Night unshackles the past from our dusty preconceptions, bringing it roaring into the full-colour present with the force of an atom bomb. Painting on a wide canvas of famous Canadian history, Huser perfectly conjures that feeling we get when we see images of our old relatives as young adults and think, ‘Wow, they were just like us.’”
—BRUCE CINNAMON, AUTHOR OF THE MELTING QUEEN
Copyright © Glen Huser 2021
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication—reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system—without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Burning the night / Glen Huser.
Names: Huser, Glen, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200267493 | Canadiana (ebook)
20200267507 | ISBN 9781774390115 (softcover)
| ISBN 9781774390122 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781774390139 (Kindle)
Classification: LCC PS8565.U823 B87 2021 | DDC C813/.54—dc23
NeWest Press wishes to acknowledge that the land on which we operate is Treaty 6 territory and a traditional meeting ground and home for many Indigenous Peoples, including Cree, Saulteaux, Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Métis, and Nakota Sioux.
Board Editor: Sheila Pratt
Cover design & typesetting: Kate Hargreaves
Author photograph: Perspectives Photography Studio
All Rights Reserved
NeWest Press acknowledges the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for support of our publishing program. This project is funded in part by the Government of Canada.
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No bison were harmed in the making of this book.
PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21
In memory of Ellis and the years we had together
Who stares too long
At stars may err
In thinking she
Is like a star
Burning the night
In slow delight
—Theodore Roethke
Love Has Me Haunted
SOME OF THE PAPERS, I IMAGINED—THOSE THAT HAD NOT been immediately driven to ground by the black, oily rain—fell, in that odd, unhurried way that airborne papers have, drifting past the blazing islands of debris, fluttering to rest in the grass where moisture fixed and darkened the charcoal lines, the sinuous trunk of a jack pine, the slope of a Toronto roof, the curve of a man’s hip. Hours later, when the fires burned in on themselves and the snow came with a white, ashy fury, water hardened into barnacled ice, anchoring the papers so that, when fingers pulled at them, they were released with odd, torn patterns.
Others flew, like strange birds—cream manila, cartridge white, rag grey—into the racing currents of air, the giant exhalation, the gasp. These settled, finally, into nests of cracked porcelain, tumbled brick, kindled wood. Or they became lost in debris-strewn alleys, the yards, the shattered rime of the marsh grass along the beach.
In my mind’s eye, I could see the leather case falling with curtains and shards of glass, the tiny bottles and dresser-top jars, a tin coffee pot, that small oil painting on a piece of board. How long did it take for fire to travel through the trail of splintered wood that had been Mrs. McTavish’s house? Find the shattered washstand where the case had come to rest? The small portfolio was durable, though, and flames only managed to work their way into one corner before its bonfire underpinnings collapsed and it tumbled into the yard. The drawings tucked within barely damaged, seeming only to have been gnawed at in one corner by a rodent with fire in its teeth.
“I kept it all close by me,” Aunt Harriet told me. “The case with its journal, sketches and photographs tucked inside, resting on top of a ragged collection of the drawings people found. You should have heard the nurses complaining that it got charcoal and chalk all over the bedding and my clothing.
“Hospital volunteers, or Mrs. McTavish, when she visited, would do their best to describe their sequence. I thought I could remember the order in which the papers lay. On top were the ones from inside the case only burned in one corner, and then there were a few Mrs. McTavish retrieved from her front yard. The rest? Found by people sifting through debris. Added over several days.
“Of course it was only a matter of time until I accidentally knocked everything over. When the papers were gathered up, I had no way of knowing which was which. The loose ones that people found here and there were in with those that had been in the case. One of the hospital aides offered to iron the most crumpled pieces of artwork for me but I said no, I wanted to be able to feel the ridges, the rips and torn edges.
“The odd thing was that, in time, I got to know the shapes of the damage as well as I could remember the drawings and paintings themselves. That one, with a kind of spoon-shape torn out—it’s the figure of a soldier, isn’t it? I suppose there’s not much left of the actual charcoal sketch, but I imagine you can see his hands. Yes, I’ve been told, I think, his hands, and part of his uniform. That one was found half a mile away. Would never have been picked up, I suppose, if it hadn’t been for that little article in the newspaper. Church ladies or Mrs. McTavish would come in and read the papers to me, and, of course, there were stories to fill the pages for months on end. This one, with a crescent moon shape near the top—you might wonder what that is, but I think it’s a sketch of driftwood washed up on Kitsilano Beach.”
Along the jagged opening, the twisted branches reach out, dead wood on sand, sand marked with small stains of—what? Blood? Oil? The liver spots of age?
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
AUTHOR’S NOTE
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER 1
WHAT WAS HER AGE WHEN I FIRST SAW HER? Fifty-five? She was not that much older than my mother—a few years—but, to my eleven-year-old eyes she was an old woman. I was one of those children, though, who are at ease with adults, and from that first visit, I believe, we bonded in a strange, ineffable way—a spell was cast that caught me and held me for all the ti
me I knew her and well past her death. Walter would say there are vestiges of it still. The way I frame a sentence. My affection for old bits of furniture, pictures, books from the time of the First World War. A violin piece that might well have been played in a Vancouver parlour as men waded through trench mud in the Somme.
“Ashes from the past,” he says, the words edged with affectionate indulgence.
Like Aunt Harriet, I had spent a good deal of my life in blindness, but a blindness of my own selection. In hindsight, I can see we were kindred spirits, the old woman and the young man, with our dreams and denials.
I remember visiting her only once before her husband, my uncle Hartley, died and I left my own family to move to the city. My mother disapproved of Harriet Coleman. In her mind was the certainty that Harriet had somehow used her handicap to trap her brother Hartley into a fruitless marriage. It was a thought that continued to rankle over the years: that Hartley should have raised an illegitimate child and provided for a woman who spent most of her waking hours reading, tracing Braille characters with one hand while she chain-smoked with the other. Hartley Coleman, in my mother’s opinion, could have had his pick of women.
Of the visit in question, perhaps because my mother would speak of it in the same voice with which she spoke of Communist aggression in Korea and Catholic bingos in St. Paul, I recall a good deal. With my brother and myself in tow, my face still numb from the ministrations of a dentist in the Tegler Block, we made the trip from downtown Edmonton to the South Side.
It was a day heavy with heat, slaked with the sound unusual to us of the continuous movement of traffic. After we got off the trolley, we straggled along a side street south of Whyte Avenue and stopped at a small stucco bungalow. My brother and I fought over who should be allowed to ring the doorbell, an altercation that led to its being activated two or three times by flailing fists and jabbing elbows before we were cuffed away from it. At this point, my mother looked like she had spent the morning herself underneath the dentist’s drill. She swept back a strand of hair that had escaped from her church-and-town hat and fixed us with a look that indicated our weekly allowances were in peril.
“Shitheel,” my brother hissed in my ear.
“Dinkbrain.” I shot back, practicing the lip control of ventriloquism.
A woman with a tea towel in one hand opened the door. She looked at us quizzically.
“Is Mr. Coleman in?” My mother stationed herself in front of the two of us.
“He’s not home.” The woman protectively blocked the door. “Can I do something for you?”
“Mrs. Coleman. Is she home?” We recognized a rasp-edge to our mother’s question. At home we would have taken it as a cue to disappear.
“Who is it, Jean?” The voice, issuing against the soft heat of the early afternoon startled me with its clarity. Coming from the recesses of the house, it had the kind of definition and presence I associated with film actresses whose words drifted into the cocooned darkness of the Legion Hall in Yarrow on Saturday nights.
“It’s Violet,” my mother shouted, “and Bradley and Curtis.”
“Oh my.” The clear, distant voice. “Come on in. Jean, have them come in.” We followed her to a kind of sitting room, with its Venetian blinds drawn against the invasive sunlight of a southwestern exposure. It took a minute for my eyes to become accustomed to the filtered light, and then I saw Uncle Hart’s wife sitting in an easy chair in the far corner. She looked like some kind of exotic, alien creature to me, a creature with dark glasses, two bottle-green eyes. Sure enough she held a book open in her lap.
“Violet.” She marked her place in the book with a piece of ribbon, closed it, and set it on a small round table at her side. “Jean, this is Hart’s sister and her boys. What a surprise. Hart didn’t mention anything.”
“We didn’t know ourselves—that we were coming in. But Curtis had a bad toothache and Mr. Jenkins who runs the grocery store in Yarrow was making the trip anyway so we had a ride and the dentist, when I phoned, was able to fit us in. He won’t be going back today but we’ll catch the bus. Hart mentioned he was taking some time off this month and I thought maybe this might be one of the holidays, you know, and we’d get to see him, and you of course. The boys have only been to the city once before and we’ve none of us seen where Hart lives …” Our mother was never one to run on. I think both Bradley and I listened to this spill of explanation with something close to amazement.
Aunt Harriet rose from her chair. And while she couldn’t see our mother, she divined where she was standing, barely in from the door. Tall and long-legged, it took the blind woman only a couple of steps to reach her and wrap her arms around her in a hug.
Mom uttered a little gasp. Her own hands, one clutching her purse and a shopping bag—we’d spent some time in Kresge’s next door to the dentist’s after my tooth had been filled—remained at her side.
“Hart did take holidays but he’s out of town. For a couple of days. Fishing with his sales manager. I’m so sorry.” Aunt Harriet released Mom from the hug. “Please, find a place to sit.”
The woman who had let us in—Jean—moved some mending from the sofa and nodded toward a couple of upholstered chairs.
The next few minutes of conversation were lost in my sudden and pressing concern to find a washroom. Bradley smiled angelically, but with evil knowledge, as he watched me squirm and cross and uncross my legs. We were invited up to Aunt Harriet’s chair so that she could trace our facial features with her fingertips. “Bradley has his uncle’s jaw,” she decided. By the time she was ready to feel my face, I was so in need of a facility that no part of my body would remain motionless for even a second.
“For heaven’s sake, stand still,” my mother said.
“He’s got to pee,” said Bradley.
I was grateful that Aunt Harriet could not see the shade of crimson I was turning. She laughed, a tinkling, beautiful laugh that was nearly disastrous to my bladder. Jean was called and I was shown to the bathroom tucked between the dining room and a bedroom. I inhaled the smell of scented soap and tobacco as I relieved myself into the shining porcelain and water of the city commode. Running water had not yet made its way to the street we lived on in Yarrow, Alberta.
When I returned, I heard my mother saying, “After all this time, we keep expecting you’ll come with Hart when he visits.”
“I’m not a good traveller.” Aunt Harriet smiled. It seemed she was about to say something more, but instead she put the cigarette to her mouth again and for a minute there was nothing but silence and smoke.
“And Phip? What is he up to these days?”
“Phip? He’s at work too. And he’s got his own apartment now.”
In the two years since his parents had moved to Edmonton, we’d come to know Phip, Uncle Hartley’s stepson. The last time he’d been to Yarrow, he’d taken in a dance at the Legion Hall.
“Dancing’s the most fun you can have that you can talk about in a mixed crowd,” Phip had laughed. He seemed to have music running in his veins as he jigged around our living room to radio tunes, warming up to the prospect of the evening. Bradley and I begged to go too, but my mother had stuck to her guns. In her parental calculation, you needed to be fourteen to go to a public dance, and Bradley and I both had a ways to go.
“When you see him, tell him not to be a stranger,” my mother said and I felt the heft of that last phrase, the way my mother put it out there—something Harriet could not fail to recognize as a criticism.
There was another weighted silence.
Although Harriet Coleman had no way of seeing where she was looking, I sensed my mother trying to keep from staring at her sister-in-law. Mom’s gaze settled on Bradley, who had his arms crossed over his chest, and whose gaze in turn was focused on the table where a coffee cup and the remains of a sandwich sat beside the library book and cigarette box. Bradley was pop-eyed with excitement. He kicked me as I sat down again and nodded toward the tabletop. A large black beetle made its w
ay leisurely across the sandwich plate, stopping to inspect a shred of lettuce. I wondered what Aunt Harriet would make of my mother’s sudden intake of breath followed by a noise that sounded to me like a whimper.
Jean came in at that moment. “Aah,” she said, “a wee beastie.” She scooted the bug into a saucer and carried it out.
“What?” Aunt Harriet continued smoking, hardly moving.
“A bug,” said Bradley.
Aunt Harriet laughed. “Hart thinks they have a secret passageway into the house. He gets mad at Jean because she keeps putting them back outside.”
My mother, I could see, supported her brother’s stance.
“Tell me about yourself, Bradley.” Aunt Harriet had finished her cigarette and, removing her glasses, massaged the bridge of her nose. The removal of the glasses made the network of scars that covered her face more noticeable.
“Uh,” Bradley gurgled and looked desperately at our mother.
“Bradley loves sports.” Our mother still eyed the table anxiously as if a trail of the beetle’s relatives waited close by. “He’s a lot like Hartley in that way. Hartley was the best baseball pitcher around when he was younger.”
I had trouble imagining this. The few times I had seen Uncle Hartley he seemed to have trouble moving his huge frame at a walk, never mind a run.
“And Curtis?”
“Oh, Curtis is our scribbler. Always writing something or doodling pictures.” My mother laughed apologetically.
We generally depend on a person’s eyes to indicate interest, but somehow Aunt Harriet managed to do it with her body. Her head craned forward; her hands grasped the arms of the easy chair.
“You write and draw,” she said.
I nodded and Bradley kicked me in the shins again. “She can’t see you jerking your dumb neck.”
“A little,” I muttered. There was a tingling feeling in my lips as the freezing began to wear away.
“Can you see the pictures over on this wall?” She gestured to an alcove just to the left of her chair. There were four framed pictures—three sketches in chalk ranked around a small oil painting of dark blackish-purple trees foregrounded against a blaze of distant autumn brush. One of the chalk sketches was of an old man in an elaborate, carved chair, looking up from a book he was reading. Another was a still life with a Chinese vase filled with chrysanthemums, a couple of golden pears and a green apple beside the bouquet.
