The Motorcyclist
Page 23
Carl’s seated at the table. Mrs. States’s oval face communicates amply her ample disapproval of him, so ample as to seem unending. Still, Carl can’t say he blames her.
(She is a very white-looking Coloured woman, and pretty, but Laura takes her beauty from her father. Carl sees again that the few-miles-from-Windsor Three Mile Plains has lots of mixed people: part-Coloured, part-Caucasian, part-Micmac. Some women here are actually English ladies who fell in love with a black or brown man in uniform and a notion of Canada. They came after World War II, from London, to live like frontierswomen here.)
Mrs. States sets a good, solid plate of chicken, potatoes, and stewed carrots in front of Carl, along with a side of bread, butter, and molasses, and a good glass of milk. But she also says, directly, “No one here wants—or expects—anything of you, Mr. Black.”
“Please call me Carl.”
“Land sakes, Carl,” she says (without offering her first name), “Laur wants nothing from you; we ask you nothing. I called you over Laura’s objections, just because I believe your fatherhood is more important than your once-upon-a-time friendship with Laura. She has a right to keep her distance from you, but you have a right, I believe, to know you are a father, seeing how sick Roy is.”
Her voice is now a pair of scissors crunching through cardboard. Her glance is corrosive.
Mr. States adds, “We love that boy like our very own.”
The phone rings. It’s Laura. She says she’ll stay at the hospital until Carl leaves. Mrs. States tells her, “The man’s come right over from Moncton. You might say hello at least. Anyway, you come home when you want. Your brother will bring you.”
Mr. States says, as if Carl is invisible, “Now there’s a real man: he made our girl a mom, and now he’s come up straight after the phone call. He left everything and came up to see the boy. He has some decency.”
Mrs. States serves Carl Red Rose tea with Carnation milk. Mr. States tosses a thimble of rum therein but pours himself a generous tumbler. “Son, there’s no point in you gettin toxicated. You’re the one who’s gotta decide things—with Laur. I’m givin you a drop for sociability and me a drippin for my health.”
Looking about, Carl sees that the house is right cozy and clean. The Blacks might have a better family name, but the States are clearly better off in wealth. Front and centre in the living room is, poignantly, a crib, stocked with toys and soothers. Given her parents’ provision for his son and their love for their daughter, Carl sees that she’s not been undone. They’d sent her to teachers’ college; that she’s returned a mother is no diminution of her in their eyes.
Mr. States snaps on the radio: AVR plays Craig Douglas’s hit “Pretty Blue Eyes.” The melodic song ripples all over the kitchen and washes over Carl’s heart. Ricky Valance and his equally emotive song “Tell Laura I Love Her” follows the Douglas tune.
Then the kitchen door swings open and Laura comes in. Carl’s eyes fix on her, but she lowers hers. Her skin is cream like handmade paper. She wears a flared skirt. Her little limp now tears at Carl’s heart: her slender hips, slightly malformed, had made the delivery of his son excruciatingly difficult for her. Carl rises from his seat and goes to her: “How’s Roy Anthony?”
Laura smiles: “Better and better.”
Carl asks her how she is doing. Laura begins to weep. Mr. and Mrs. States say, “We’ll leave you two together a spell.” Mr. States pours more rum in Carl’s cup and slides it over before he leaves the kitchen. Nicely, the rum clears the warm wash of tea. Carl tells Laura that they’ll both take their time.
Lightning as jagged as nerves jangles down Spring Rain Tea:
Love reminded me of you, but Love reminded you of me.
A few hours later, Carl picks his way down potholed Green Street toward relatively smooth Highway 1. He’s grateful for the effortless, no-shift, speedy ride that Liz II allows as he races to Halifax. He thinks about the motorcycle to keep from fixating on difficult choices. But his actual thinking now, subconsciously, is nostalgic. Maybe the Triumph Bonneville motorcycle is the fastest production machine of 1960, but my Liz II still yells into the wind. Her engine is frothy, twittering.
Carl negotiates the good road, the dark road, the Nova Scotia road. Carl makes for the third floor of a house on Buckingham Street. He has to decide things. A reckoning. A rectified account. But where is his—their—pavement leading him now? Might he have Freedom and a family? What kind of Freedom? Which family?
The future? It possesses the serene silence of clouds—untouchable, unbreakable—a fragility secure in its distance. Wounds—and blessings—remain clandestine.
TERMINATION
You owe me nothing but the truth of your journey.
—CHARLES MINGUS, BENEATH THE UNDERDOG
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Motorcyclist was inked in Vichy, France (July–August 2006); Istanbul, Turkey (December 2006); St. Andrews by-the-Sea, New Brunswick (December 2006); Washington, District of Columbia (January 2007); Rodos, Greece (March 2007); Halifax, Nova Scotia (March 2008); Nantes, France (April–May 2009); Porvoo, Finland (June 2009); Istanbul, Turkey (December 2009); Paris, France (July 2011); Mont-Tremblant, Québec (August 2011); Cable Beach, The Bahamas (May 2012); Puumala, Finland (August 2012); Rönnäs, Finland (July 2013); Ilonojaa, Finland (July 2014); Lunenburg, Nova Scotia (August 2014); Coral Harbour, The Bahamas (August 2014); Bordeaux, France (September 2014); Grotto Bay, Bermuda (December 2014); Fort Lauderdale, Florida (April 2015); Krakow, Poland (May 2015); and Toronto, Ontario (off and on from June 2006 to October 2015). A long, strange odyssey, yes, but 2015 mirrors 1959’s calendar.
Thanks—in particular—to Elizabeth Eneroth, Gordon and Marilyn Hamlin, Angus “Sock” Johnson, Gerry Marshall, Joan Mendes, and Reid Kenneth White. They knew the facts—and the stories—that serve as the foundation for this novel. Dear friends (principally Diana Manole, Althea Prince, Robert Edison Sandiford, Mansa Trotman, Riitta Tuohiniemi, and Paul Zemokhol) critiqued, queried, and encouraged. I also thank my excellent editors, Iris Tupholme and Jane Warren, and my patient agent, Denise Bukowski, for their poignant alterations and savvy suggestions. Copy editor Stacey Cameron finessed improvements.
I consulted several works to verify geographical, historical, and psychological details: Bob Beatty, Florida’s Highwaymen: Legendary Landscapes (2005); Elizabeth Bishop, “First Death in Nova Scotia” (1965); Ted Bishop, Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books (2005); Michael Boudreau, City of Order: Crime and Society in Halifax, 1918–1935 (2012); Louis W. Collins, In Halifax Town (1975); Dalhousie University, The Condition of the Negroes of Halifax City, Nova Scotia: A Study (1962); Fred Kaplan, 1959: The Year Everything Changed (2009); Clem Kovak, Casebook: The Interracial Sexualists (1971); Norman Mailer, The Presidential Papers (1964); André Pieyre de Mandiargues, La Motocyclette (1963); Bud Masters, Coed for Hire (1966); Bill Osgerby, Biker: Truth and Myth (2005); Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974); Christine Cromwell Simmonds, The Colour of My Memories (2006); Larry Tye, Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Working Class (2004); and Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (1944).
Beatty’s book (a gift from Denise) was spooky: his chronicle of Afro-Floridians who turned to painting landscapes and seascapes, in the latter 1950s, to escape wage-slavery, is like the story of my father, Bill Clarke, in the autumn of 1959. Did he know of the Florida Highwaymen? Did he meet any? Or was his turn to painting an accidental—and parochial Nova Scotian—decision? Was he the first Africadian, naïf artist?
My peripatetic, authorial style has been supported by Dr. Sonia Labatt, Ph.D., and Victoria University (via the E.J. Pratt Professorship at the University of Toronto), the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation’s Fellowship Prize (2005–08), the International Writers’ and Translators’ Centre of Rhodes (March 2007), and Harvard University’s William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professorship in Canadian Studies (2013–14). Irrefutable and unforgettable is my
patrons’ largesse.
ABOUT THE TYPE
THE BODY TYPE was set in Minion Pro, a typeface designed by Robert Slimbach in 1990. The inspiration for Slimbach’s design came from late-Renaissance period classic typefaces in the old serif style. This is most apparent in the lowercase characters of Minion, which use old-style Baroque glyphs.
THE DISPLAY TYPE was set in Bill Clarke Caps, a font named for its designer. It is an elegantly eccentric serif, featuring cuneiform-esque brackets and boldly contrasting strokes. The author remembers his father painting the letters in 1969 and thanks Andrew Steeves (of Gaspereau Press) for digitizing this font in 2011.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE’s books include George and Rue, which won the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction and was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; Execution Poems, winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry; and Whylah Falls, winner of the Archibald Lampman Award for poetry and a selection for CBC’s inaugural Canada Reads competition. In 2008, he was appointed to the Order of Canada at the rank of Officer. He was recently the Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012 to 2015) and currently teaches at the University of Toronto.
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CREDITS
COVER DESIGN: GREG TABOR
COPYRIGHT
The Motorcyclist.
Copyright © 2016 by George Elliott Clarke
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Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Interior photos appear courtesy of the author, except where otherwise specified.
EPub Edition: December 2015 ISBN: 9781443445153
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