Her eyes became the eyes that I had seen in Jack’s face when he had admitted to me the truth about his letters to his sister that day on the porch swing.
“I think we should leave Teresa and Stanley alone. Not stir up the ghost between them.”
She looked at the letters in her lap, looked at me. “Thank you.”
It seemed best. It seemed like what Jack would have wanted if he’d known he had a daughter.
“I have to go,” I said.
Her hands tightened on the letters. “Will I see you again?”
“I think so. I’ve got friends here.”
She smiled weakly.
“Family, too.” I touched her arm. “The place gets into your blood.”
And it was true. Family, I thought, looking at her clutching the letters. Woven together with threads of steel. Sometimes the threads bend and twist, and you have to hammer them back into shape. But they don’t tear. They don’t break.
Jack was in Toronto, with his father, somehow, somewhere. I had seen the rose, fresh and alive, in my mother’s hand.
I stood on the sidewalk outside the Scott and gazed at the “luxury accommodations in the heart of the city” on the north side of Winchester. The Ashland Plaza Hotel had opened. Glancing back at the Scott, it was clear that its days were numbered.
I didn’t know if there would be any more letters, from Ashland or anywhere else. I had no way of knowing what the future would bring.
It didn’t matter.
I had no way of knowing what the past would bring either.
I felt good. Adventure wasn’t in the past or the future. It was right here. Living my life. Now.
Jeanne and Adam were waiting for me on the veranda when I pulled up in front of the house. I shook hands with Adam, then put my arms around Jeanne and held her. She was wearing the perfume, the subtle Southern scent from the evening of the Chimney Corner Tea Room, and nothing that I could remember had ever smelled so good.
“Got a trip planned for tomorrow,” I said. I took a swig of warm beer from the long-necked bottle of Bud and digested the look on Adam’s face. We were back outside, sitting on the steps beneath a warm October sky.
“Where?” he asked.
“Got to get up early. Take us half the day to get there. We’ll stay over in a motel tomorrow night, come home Sunday. My flight doesn’t leave till Monday.”
“Cincinnati? Baseball?”
“Nope. Not this time.”
It was Jeanne’s turn to become curious. She had thought she had guessed it, too. She balanced her beer bottle with a hand on her knee. “Where?” she asked.
“We’ll have a picnic while we’re there. We’ll make sandwiches tonight.”
Adam drank his Coke, eyes jumping from one to the other of us.
“I’ve been studying maps, brochures,” I said. “Kentucky travel guides. Places to go, see. You know.”
They waited. Jeanne smiled, watching Adam, her happiness evident.
“Ever been in a cave?” I asked Adam.
There was genuine surprise on his face. The expression on Jeanne’s face wasn’t far behind.
“No,” he said.
I looked at Jeanne.
“Can’t say that I have,” she said with some wry amusement. Her eyes held mine warmly.
“Guess you could say they’ve become a bit of an interest of mine. Kentucky’s shot through with some of the best anywhere. Got more than any other state. Over three thousand of them. Crystal Onyx Cave. Diamond Caverns. Just across the state line, West Virginia’s got Lost World Caverns. You even got Carter Caves about thirty miles west of here.”
“Is that where we’re going?” Adam was smiling now, catching on.
“Nope,” I said. “It’s a surprise. Farther.” I moved my hands apart the way someone does when describing a fish just caught. “Bigger.”
“Man flies down from Canada, takes us on a mystery tour,” said Jeanne.
“Wear walking shoes. Bring a coat.” I looked at Jeanne, at Adam, smiled back at both of them, glad I was here.
2
We left at dawn and took 64 to Lexington, stopped and ate breakfast at a Bob Evans Restaurant in the city, then got onto the Blue Grass Parkway to Elizabethtown. From there we went south on 65.
“Where are we going?” asked Jeanne, finally. “Are you going to tell us?”
“Trust me,” I said.
Adam giggled in the backseat.
Shortly before noon, we reached Mammoth Cave National Park, the longest cave systems ever discovered on earth.
“I’ve been reading about it,” I told them as we pulled into the vast parking area. Buses from around the country were massed at various locations amid the sea of cars. “There’s two hundred ninety-four miles, charted on five levels.”
“Is it free?” asked Adam.
“Reasonable rates,” I said. “I bought the tickets through a Ticketron outlet before I left Toronto.”
“You’re kiddin’, “ said Jeanne. Then she thought about it. “Like a Broadway play.”
“Bigger than a Broadway play.”
I stopped the car. “You got that lunch, partner?”
Adam banged his fist on the cooler on the seat beside him. Then he looked out at the picnic areas.
“I’m hungry.”
“Me, too,” he said.
I looked at Jeanne. She laughed.
“All cave tours are walking trips. There’s seven to choose from. From half a mile to five miles, from one and a half hours to a half day.”
“Jesus.” Jeanne swallowed the bite of her ham-on-rye before continuing. “You’re not going to make us walk five miles, are you?”
“No.” I chuckled. “Sounds a bit much even for someone as incredibly fit as I am.”
Adam giggled.
“Medium tour. Don’t want the kid to strain himself.”
He poked me in the ribs, still giggling.
Cave temperature was always fifty-four degrees, we were told. Most in the group of more than a hundred put on coats. Then we strolled through the entranceway, disappeared beneath the earth.
We went through huge rooms, winding passageways, saw towering formations, delicate onyx flowers, waterfalls, streams, pools. We went down ramps, up stairways, entered soaring caverns, inspected milky stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone, limestone pendants, sparkling geological snowdrifts, rainbow coral.
Ever downward.
At the bottom, we entered the Mammoth Cave, the biggest, the best known.
It took my breath away.
Peering upward, I could not see its roof.
Darkness in every direction, in spite of the lighting system.
It was an opening in the earth that staggered the imagination, a space left behind millions of years ago by some dark, vanished sea, dwarfing us all.
I felt humbled, lost. I tried to imagine the first ancient discoverers of the cave, the fear, the awe.
The voice of the tour guide brought me back. “I’m going to turn the lights off,” she said, “for just one minute. Don’t move and don’t speak. We want you to experience absolute darkness, just to see what it’s like. You won’t be able to see your hand in front of your face.”
There was some nervous laughter.
“Ready?”
Jeanne stood on my left, Adam on my right. I placed my hand on her shoulder, left my right hand dangling.
The lights went out, and we stood there in total darkness. The seconds stretched out. Time stopped.
I could hear my heart hammering loudly in my blood. I thought of my mother. I thought of Jack, sitting in hotel rooms across America, softening his perception of his father. I thought of my grandmother, of her last years, of my brothers and sisters, of my own father, his hair impossibly white, sitting at the green arborite kitchen table with his hand in his belt, of the ancient money order made out to my mother, that I would carry in my wallet from now on. I thought of Ashland, where dreams die and are born again.
In the dark
ness.
There were decisions to make. I had my life to live.
Toronto. Ashland. Toronto. Ashland.
Jeanne. Jeanne.
Adam. Adam. Aidan.
Then, in the lightless space of that vanished sea below the earth, in the darkness, faced with the same terror and beauty, hope and loss, as those first ancient explorers, I felt small fingers slide into my right hand, seeking comfort from the void, and for a moment, just a moment, I thought it was my stillborn son.
My life to live.
The lights came on, my hand tightened on his, and he smiled up at me, eyes dancing with wonder.
Through new tunnels of dark beauty, the light filtering through prisms of mist, wary of precipices and footing, we began the ascent up out of the earth and rock, to new places that we could only know by arriving in them, feeling the warm wind trickling down from the surface ahead of us, just ahead of us.
A Witness to Life
For
David Danladi Luginbühl
Always remembered, always loved
Music forever
1974–1997
ONE
The door swings out upon a vast sea of darkness and of prayer. Will it come like this, the moment of my death? Will You open a door upon the great forest and set my feet upon a ladder under the moon, and take me out among the stars?
—Thomas Merton
The Sign of Jonas
It breaks my heart to see her lying there, worn out, dying. But she is so happy to see me, and to see Jack, and this elates me.
And I am more than glad to see Jack too. I am renewed. It has been so long, so very long. And I have searched so far.
But Margaret. Oh, Marg. My princess. That this should happen to you. That I can do nothing about it.
My daughter. My first.
It is 1984. I am in the Women’s College Hospital, Toronto. She is seventy-four. I look around, at the beds, the curtains, the tubes. The wrong place to die: a waiting game without dignity.
And yet she is older than I was when I died. I had the good fortune to die of a heart attack on the streetcar. But I was only seventy.
We are both too young. Everybody is too young.
I reach out, touch her face.
So does Jack, my son, whom I have not seen for more than fifty years. I do not understand how it is that he is here with me, nor why he is still a young man in his twenties, but I accept it as one of death’s gifts. I understand very little anymore. Death has not taught me what I thought it might.
Margaret smiles, her eyes smile, knowing, understanding, and I think I might die again, just by seeing this. I know, suddenly, that there is not much more time. I do not know how I know this, nor what it means. And I have no idea what will come next.
One’s life is supposed to flash before one’s eyes when death comes. This is not true. It is no mere flash. It is much more complex. At least, it was for me. There is reflection. There is travel along the arc of space and time, back to source, ahead to destiny. I have been traveling for thirty-four years. I do not know how long it will last.
Something awaits me. Something. I know it. I feel it.
I am close. So close. Finally. Jack. Margaret. Here with me now.
It is part of the wonder.
Part of the mystery.
It was Christmas Day, 1950, a Monday—back before the subway was built, when the streetcars still ran up Yonge Street in Toronto and snaked on rails around the city everywhere, clanging, methodical. I was sitting in an eastbound car, on Dundas near Bloor, looking out the window, thinking about the eventual walk along Eglinton Avenue, about the icy wind that would burrow through layers of clothing—thinking about Dennis, my newest grandson, who would be two years old in March, and how much he would enjoy Christmas.
And it happened. I imagine that it has happened, and will happen like this, to millions, to billions, before and after my time—that it was happening to others even as it was happening to me. A complete surprise. So much surprises us, and yet so little should.
It was my turn to die.
I was coming to see you Marg, coming to spend the day. We hadn’t spent enough days like this.
The pain filled my chest, but it didn’t last long. Not really. I understand more now about time than I did then, and in reality it was merely a cosmic eye blink. I looked at the woman seated beside me, a stranger, said, “I can’t breathe.” My left hand clutched the chrome rail on the back of the seat in front of me, while my right hand instinctively squeezed the stone in my jacket pocket, the one given to me that day in the garden by the monk—that day in the sunlight. This stone is life, he had said.
I squeezed it fiercely. I thought of Joan, Margaret, Jack, then died.
Death has not been what I expected.
Not that I knew what to expect. I did have some concrete images in my head once, images that had blurred to vague concepts over the years, of a God, an afterlife—from being taken to church as a child, from my parents, from catechism lessons so many years ago. Nor would I have been terribly astonished if nothing at all had awaited me—a leaf fallen from a tree, becoming soil.
The streetcar shuddered to a stop, the woman next to me clutching my arm in fear and real concern. I heard a muffled hollering, knew confusion, as all that made sense slid away, like a morning dream. The conductor appeared beside me, and within seconds the car was being cleared of passengers. From far off, I heard him announce that the trolley was out of service and was proceeding directly, with all haste, to Western Hospital.
I remember looking out the window, from deep within me, through whirling, dying eyes, watching a flock of starlings rise up in widening circles from the pavement in a floating wave, a current toward the heavens. And as I watched, as I died, I became one of them, leaving my body behind, spiraling high above the street, the winter sky crisp, clear, seeing the interstices of streets below with an acuity of vision that I had never had before.
And then a kind of sense returned, a new order. This is what happens, I thought: a new clarity, a new vantage point.
I saw ahead to Yonge Street, north to St. Clair, farther to Eglinton. I tried to see Maxwell Avenue, running south off Eglinton, and the semidetached house that held much of what was left of my family, waiting for me.
Where you were, Marg.
Then I climbed higher, swooping with the flock, wondering where we were going, where I was going.
My name is Martin John Radey. I was born in Elora, a village some sixty miles northwest of Toronto, in 1880. I have been dead, as I stated, for thirty-four years. I accept what has happened to me, but I do not understand it. Perhaps acceptance is the beginning. Maybe understanding never comes.
I am the youngest of thirteen children who lived—eleven sisters and a brother. There were sixteen of us, if you count the three babies who died. We were all born in Elora.
Now we are all dead.
Back in 1950, as I soared high on the winds, the winter air searing the new, tiny lungs, I wondered, with a burst of incredulity and exhilaration, if I would see my two brothers, who died as infants, or any of my sisters—my big sister, Sarah, who died before my fifth birthday, or little Loretta, five months old, who died later that same summer of 1885—my mother, my father, here in my new existence.
And Gert. Maybe Gert. Maybe Maggie. The thought startled me, exploding a rainbow of memories.
The flock circling me leaned in unison into an updraft, left wings tilted downward, and as one we barreled north and west. My heart, stopped forever in the body below us on Dundas Avenue, had been replaced by one beating wildly with wonder.
Ahead, the horizon arced and rolled as we left the city behind, and below us the calm, brown and white winter landscape spread far and wide in soft refuge. And then I realized that I knew where we were going. We were going to Elora. I was heading home.
Flying low over the fields around Elora, the snow disappeared. Time vanished. The past was here, to be felt, viewed, examined.
I could see
the old house on McNab, the post office in Godfrey’s shoe store on Metcalfe Street, the carpet factory, the old bridge across the Grand. The Tooth of Time was there, the stone fang jutting from the rapids beside the mill, as always.
Suddenly: summer. Gardens with flowers, vegetables. Elms, oaks, maples. The tannery, the brewery. The town hall, the Dalby House, the sawmill. Cords of hardwood, piled high. Horses.
And Father’s shop, right beside Mundell’s furniture factory. Where it used to be.
Through piercing avian eyes, above the earth, free, in death, I saw things and places that I had forgotten, and a past I never knew.
And above us, a single, hawk, wings motionless, circling, entered a cloud. With new instincts, I watched for it, waited. It did not come out.
Father and Mother were Irish Catholics. They had liked to tell the story of how they’d come as children on one of the coffin ships—so-called because famine, cholera, typhus, diphtheria, and every other sort of blight sailed with them—that slid from Cobh, which the English then called Queenstown, in Cork Harbour. My mother, Ann Whalen, was one year old when she left Ireland in 1846. John Radey, my father, was three. The ships destined for North America docked at New York or Boston if they were headed to the United States; the cheaper passage was to British North America, up the St. Lawrence to Quebec City, then Montreal, before turning about and heading back across the Atlantic for another raft of human flotsam.
My father and his brother Dennis were in the arms of Peter Radey and his wife Julia, themselves twenty-one and nineteen. As with one-year-old Ann Whalen, her brother Mártain, and her mother, they took the cheaper passage; after the ordained quarantine at Grosse Isle in the St. Lawrence, all disembarked at Montreal, from whence they made their ways, along with so many others, by barge, steamboat, and lake boat, to Toronto. There was the special landing wharf, then the fever sheds at King Street West and John Street. That summer, more than eight hundred died in the sheds. Catholics mostly, they were buried in trenches in the graveyard at St. Paul’s Church on Power Street. Even the bishop himself, ministering to them, died of cholera.
Shadow of Ashland, A Witness to Life, and St. Patrick's Bed Page 15
