The Motorcyclist

by George Elliott Clarke

  So impressed is Mrs. Victoria Black by her son’s artistic commerce, he has now a standing offer to visit her on Sundays for supper. Better still, because Carl has a real business to mind—his art—he’s no longer interfering in hers, i.e., her relations with Grantley.

  Carl’s talent is further affirmed, thanks to a letter from starlet Aunt Pretty, summoning him to New York City, where she’s secured him a contract, at three hundred dollars per week, to paint backdrop scenery for Broadway shows, starting May 1, 1960. Carl thinks, Hot diggity dang! The job will prevent any return to the drudgery of Mr. Beardsley’s CNR. It also means escape from the socio-economic Waste Land of Acadia, which sees Negroes kept in peonage, but ever so politely, with tea and biscuits and photo ops served up for “good behaviour.”

  Liz is supremely delighted when Carl insists she accompany him to Manhattan. She knows that the idea is tantamount to a marriage proposal, and, so, her answer must be a clapping, resonant “Yes!”

  But Liz doesn’t know about Pretty Waters’s “P.S.” to her nephew. It is frank: “I hear that you are seeing a woman. Black or white, doesn’t matter: I advise you to not let yourself be trapped by romantic feelings for anyone ‘down home’ in Nova Scotia. New York is twenty times bigger, and so you have twenty times the choice of a lover—or bride. Here, nobody cares what you do, so long as you succeed. Remember: For an artist, Art comes first.” (Carl recalls that Aunt Pretty gave her only child to a childless couple to rear.) “It sounds selfish, but it’s truly sound advice. Nephew, do not make your mother’s mistake of thinking that minutes—or hours—of baby-producing Pleasure is a pursuit. The Vocation of an artist is to create Art.”

  Carl rereads the letter severally, but hides its terminus from Liz. He knows that if he goes to New York, he’ll want Liz to join him, lickety-split. To go from her fishing village to Greenwich Village; to go from Halifax to Harlem. To advance them both. He’ll leap from earning three thousand dollars per annum—including tips (already twice the annual income of the poorest, working Halifax Negroes)—to accumulating fifteen thousand in Uncle Sam bucks, perhaps more. And he could paint even paperback covers on the side . . . And the models he could “audition”? Tempting! Righteously tempting!

  Saturday, December 12

  Dawn brings sad Duty: under a wet, rainy sky, Carl drives Liz II into winter storage at Corkum’s Halifax Motorcycle Shoppe. He’s sorry to store his machine again, but now that he’s painting, he just doesn’t cycle as much. Too, the machine’s motor has to be taken apart to be put back together in the spring. Corkum has to get the grit out. The BMW has been on the road for seven months—not a bad extension of the season, by some eight weeks, anyway.

  But as Carl assigns Liz II to her Christmas-until-Easter garage, he feels Time winging swiftly away, with no real accomplishment, on his part, to show. In less than six months, he’ll be twenty-five, and not employed at anything that most Coloured folk would recognize as a j-o-b. He is better off scrambling to sell his art than ever he was to humble and whistle and grin to secure train passengers’ tips. His relative economic independence is rare in Negro Halifax. He’s so unusual as to be eccentric. Might he now try keeping a wife?

  Certes: Carl likes being nominally single. From what he’s seen of marriage, it seems a headache, heartache, and pain-in-the-ass. The idea that two psychologically distinct persons should be able to live “in love” all their days strikes Carl as being more Mythology than Theology. His coupling—or affair—with L.P. is as fine as it can get, he thinks. He worries that marriage would, in fact, ruin all. Yet, should she agree to have his hand, if offered, he feels that they’d succeed. No need to rush, though: better to get to know each other better.

  Liz is ready. Privately, she thinks that Carl’s belated, but explicit, split from Marina is the bravest thing he’s ever done. Selfish, yes, are her reasons for this surmise. She believes that Mar was Carl’s code for Respectability and Conformity, the helpmates of Boredom and the enemies of Art. She sees Carl for who he is, and he is not a man who can settle comfortably for a mousy nurse (even if Coloured), all tawdry lingerie in the bedroom and total hypocrisy in church. Liz lauds Aunt Pretty’s initiative to line up a gig for Carl in “Gotham City,” a place where Caucasian-Negro couples are almost normal (as projected in John Cassavetes’s film Shadows). She wagers her Library Science degree can profit her in one of the supreme card-catalogue systems on earth. What an ascension: to go from chucking cod into South Shore barrels to shelving books in the New York Public Library. Too practical to be already eyeing wedding dresses, Liz will be firm—once Carl requests her hand—that they must marry before they head south to “You-Ça.”

  Carl would like to settle down. That age—twenty-five—which is soon upon him, says that he’s already a third of the way to the grave, given Life Expectancy (though, as a Coloured man, he is being overly generous in this allocation). Marriage could debase the chemistry, spoil the biology, of his coupling with Liz. But Carl can entertain the risk, for he supposes Liz broad-minded enough to allow him a discreet flirtation with a model, to maintain his studio as a private, bachelor space. So long as Art wins them Prosperity tantamount to Security.

  Monday, December 14

  Grantley Beardsley lands Carl a six-month railway gig in Moncton, N.B. Carl accepts: to expand his art business, he needs a horizon beyond Halifax. Station-to-station sales beat door-to-door. For now.

  Carl deems the move temporary: until Liz completes her Library Science degree and they can both remove to New York in the spring. He knows G.B. can replace him quickly once he gives his notice.

  So, come New Year’s Day, 1960, Carl will shuttle to Moncton to start his new railway job as “Coordinator of Linen Services”—the laundering of tablecloths, napkins, sheets, and pillowcases—for the entire Atlantic division of CNR. Carl will now be superior to the Halifax linen depot, though he’d need to acquire some French were he to keep the position. (Remembering his mother’s ex-career, Carl disputes this necessity: Are germs and dirt, or soap and water, cognizant of languages? A stain is a stain.) But he’s certain that he’ll continue painting, and now he can use the railway porters to help market his works (wares) to prospective customers as far west as Montreal and as far south as Boston.

  In the meantime, tonight, Carl taxis over to a green-painted, three-storey, wooden house on Buckingham Street that he now knows well. He rings a doorbell for the third floor, and the front-door buzzer clatters. The door opens, and he mounts stairs to Liz’s capacious digs; indeed, Carl could fit his rooms into her flat and have space left over. (But Belle Aire Terrace is in hard-up North End; Buckingham Street brushes downy South End.)

  When Liz opens her door and kisses Carl, he feels the world awake. She takes his coat and sets out red wine. He spills some, by accident, but fingers her name in it on white cotton, and she laughs—contemplative. Her candles splash an obscure yellow on the walls; the effect’s a Nativity scene. Carl jugs tender ounces of wine, and Liz plunks into his lap to urge drowsy struggling. Her Fall exams are done; she has the look of an unearthed diamond, instantly imperious amid the surrounding light, tonight.

  Liz leads Carl to her clean bed. She strips herself down to the nakedness of a nymph—all turmoil of eyelashes and Coca-Cola mouth and tang of sweat. Carl drinks in her port-hued hair; he caresses Liz’s delicate gap. He swells with triumph. Soon, there’s a nice, percussive smack as he touches bottom, again and again. His outrageous, prodigious loving follows Yma Sumac’s rhapsodic aphrodisiac “Ataypura.” Their climax is as conclusive as a definition.

  Tomorrow, Pablo Neruda will publish privately Cien sonetos de amor. What Carl and Liz have just made live.

  Sunday, January 31

  The Year of the Rat, 1960, came in with the same din of spoon-beaten pots and pans that one hears in Halifax. In Moncton, night catches in the pines like black hair in a comb. The wet, sweet scent of black ink images night.

  Since January 1, Moncton has been the sanctuary of commercial Negro Ar
t in the Caucasian-Art-market-dominated Maritimes. Carl has become a breakneck, rabid painter, striking, quickly, works that verify his quality and clarify his talent. Simultaneously, he jockeys—maniacally—by train, Moncton-Halifax-Moncton. In Moncton, he works and paints, fulfilling job demands and gratifying painterly inspiration. In Halifax, he has the deliria of Liz and her home and her very uplifting, very elevating “wine cellar.”

  Also, letters have winged to and fro New York City. Aunt Pretty is able to guarantee Carl’s post. He still believes he’ll carry Liz along (as un fait accompli), flouting his aunt’s advice that he arrive unpartnered to Manhattan. Spring—April—can’t come too soon!

  Good Friday, April 15

  “Your son is dying.”

  Carl was in the Moncton station’s Linen and Equipment Room when a co-worker handed him the phone yesterday. The tone of the female speaker was harsh, shrill, and commanding: “You’d best come and see your son before he dies.”

  That one sentence left Carl shaken, flabbergasted, and anxious. Still, his interlocutor did not allow him time to even wish to hang up. She had much to tell, and she had long delayed in saying it.

  His son’s birth had been “biblically hard,” said the mature female voice. It had been natural, no Caesarean, but extremely painful, and the newborn had been sickly from the start—seemingly prey to every flu. Now he is deathly ill with pneumonia and back in the hospital.

  The mother hadn’t wanted to call: Carl’s son was born in February, but the mother had kept her pregnancy private and Carl’s paternity secret, preferring to raise the child within the swaddling embrace of her family home. Once her son was old enough, she had decided, she’d return to college and likely find a proper husband there.

  But given the potential mortal illness of the infant, the grandmother had overruled the mother, declaring that Carl should have a chance to see his son before he perished. Carl should be grateful for that grace, though part of him would consider the death of the boy, if he is his son, liberation for the mother—and a painful blessing for himself.

  So, yesterday, Carl learned that he’s a father—perhaps—though ephemerally—perhaps. Yet, he should wish the child’s survival, whoever his sire. He—Carl—has seen more death than most young men who are not soldiers. He should like the tyke to survive, if not thrive.

  Today, he leaves Moncton on Liz II (rescued from storage after a visit back to Halifax in March) and motors back to Nova Scotia to see the child—and to verify that he is, in face, his very own. After that, and if the boy lives, decisions must be entertained.

  Pleasant it is to have thirty-five horses bottled up in the R69’s two-cylinder, horizontally opposed, 590 cc engine. It gives Carl the sensation that he’s flying. Flying! Again. But will his wings be clipped—will he have to crash to earth—if he is no more a single being, but now half the fount of at least one new genealogy?

  Cold, sunlit day. Gobs of snow are still clotting ditches and clumped on hillsides. Lots of meltwater, mud, and runoff. The countryside is brown with hints of green: here a patch of grass, there a stand of spruce. Still, Carl notices the imperious Petitcodiac River, its perennial April occupation of adjacent farms and brush, and its dispatching of squads of ice onto the surrounding fields, turning them into plantations of “Arctic cotton.” Typical springtime in Nouveau-Brunswick—half-Acadian, half-angler. Carl’s mind flashes back to dead Mack and dead Sandy, two once–motorcycle pals, his, who can never now know Paternity, throughout all of Eternity.

  Carl roars from Moncton down to Sackville, then back across the Tantramar Marshes and into Nova Scotia. From the border town, Amherst, he has a two-hour drive to Truro, and from there, he meets the Truro-Windsor highway—The Glooscap Trail—a vista of mud flats, Bay of Fundy inlets, one-lane bridges, and timber truck chasing, shadowing, timber truck, the woodlands looking on, askance.

  At Windsor, Carl motors to the Memorial Hospital, a kind of bungalow with barracks that crowns a slight hill above the Avon River. His heart is stuck in his lungs: blood wallops through his veins. He half-expects to hear that the infant is dead—and if he is, Carl suspects he’ll feel reprieved as much as bereaved.

  Carl gives the boy’s name (only learned yesterday), and a nurse brings him to look in on a tiny being, brown, and trailing tubes: he is asleep and sucking his thumb. But when he hears Carl’s whisper, his eyes—dark brown—suddenly open, and Carl sees himself in his gaze—and he sees himself in the boy’s smile.

  When Carl sees his son, he feels himself suddenly connected to Genealogy—the epic poetry of Biology—despite the mistakes of his parents and his own sins. And his son’s mother?

  Carl’s heart dissolves. He gasps, “My boy . . .” He remembers calling Muriel “my love” at the moment of her miscarriage, nine months ago. Then, Carl must exit the room: tears choke his breath. Still, he asks, “How’s Royal Anthony doing? What’s the prognosis?”

  The nurse warns: “Pneumonia in infants is dangerous, and there may be injury to his organs that’s so far invisible, but his heart is strong, and he should pull through.” Carl begs her and the doctors to keep his son alive.

  Carl has a son, is a father. Must he husband the mother? The boy, should he survive, is the natural consequence of a spring fling, yet he was not wished for. To the mother’s credit, she has not tried to trap Carl, but has been eager to leave him free, while she gets on with her own life. Carl thinks, She’s quite the girl—obviously.

  Carl remembers that his own father married his mother under duress, then sailed away, only God knows where. He deposited his seed and signed over his surname. Carl don’t want his son to say the same of him, but he also don’t want to marry the mother (if she wants him), merely to satisfy Propriety. Fate has made him a father, but Necessity has made him an artist, and trial-and-error (much error) has brought him to Liz and she to Carl. What is to be done?

  Too, Royal’s—Roy’s—mom may reject Carlyle: she may feel, rightly, that Carl spurned her by not responding to her November letter mentioning “illness.”

  At three p.m., Carl drives east on Highway 1, through the rolling countryside of Windsor’s Avon River delta. Currently a tan waste, the fields are just commencing to green out of muck and ferment.

  After only ten minutes, Carl reaches Green Street and turns right. He jumps over the train tracks, near where Mar’s family lives, and continues up a hill on a road that’s mud, gravel, and potholes. (This dirt road would drive any driver snaky.)

  Carl passes a house with a B/A (British American) Oil Company sign used as decoration (because its initials match those of the homeowner, Boyd Auburn, whose wife left him for a bodybuilder). Opposite sits the now-empty house of Rev. Ohio States. (His son, Washington, married his own pupil, Beulah White [Mar’s aunt], but they were never allowed consummation: her father prevented it. So Washington quit teaching, became a railway porter, and remarried. At that point, he was arrested, convicted of bigamy, and jailed. Then, his father died, his sisters wed and moved; thus, the house now sits vacant, evaporating slowly into weeds.)

  At the top of the hill is a modest house, a plain affair—two storeys of white-painted wood—but boasting a verandah. It is the largest house on Green Street, with a flower garden beginning to sprout out front beside the lawn, and a tractor and a horse in a field, plus crabapple and pear trees about the property. For a rural dwelling, in a Coloured village, the house boasts Prosperity. Carl turns into this driveway, feeling very self-conscious as he rolls to a stop beside a new car and a truck and removes his helmet.

  He goes to the back door—the kitchen door—and knocks. At the same time, a mangy, barbed-wire-mean dog roars and growls alarm. The man of the house, Mr. States, meets Carl, “the man of the hour,” so to speak, man-to-man. His dog’s hullabaloo settles to a series of mutters and yelps once it spies Carl admitted to the household.

  Mr. States is gruff but not discourteous in welcoming Carl into his comfy kitchen. It is “his,” but the real overlord is Mrs. States, who looks
at Carl with a face first sour, then severe. Carl looks away, but now sees, in every nook and cranny, whittled sticks, including a forked one used undoubtedly for “water witching,” and even a handmade bow-and-arrow set.

  Mr. States wears a plaid shirt and blue denim overalls. He holds a lit pipe in one hand. The handmade moccasins that adorn his feet suit his Micmac heritage: pure copper skin with wavy, sloe-black hair that he wears slicked back straight.

  (Laura told Carl last year that her dad had—has—a Casanova reputation, and Carl can see why: he’s a fighter, a clear “Indian,” with muscles enlarged by the woodwork he does on his substantial land holdings. His history is gypsum quarries and throwing raw punches at big mouths.)

  Carl’s arrival was anticipated. “Laura called. She’s at the hospital with your son. She told us that you’d been to see Royal—we call him Roy—and she figured you’d come up home. Take a seat, Mr. Black.”

  “I’m sorry that I didn’t see her when I was at the hospital.”

  “You didn’t come to see her when she was carryin your child. Why should she make herself available to you now? She stayed in another room until you left.”

  That rejoinder came from Mrs. States. She spat out the words like hot bullets. Carl had to accept her harshness. His selfishness—if inadvertently harmful—had been harsh.

  Moreover, Carl now realizes Laura was already “with child” when she came to see him last August. Thus, she’d brought along the suitcase, and had maybe planned to stay with him, to tell him about their “family situation.” But she’d not said a word about her condition, maybe because he’d treated her so cavalierly, so casually, in seeking to sate his own desire. He felt ashamed now.