by Rudy Wiebe
“And anyway, what right do I have to call myself ‘my self’?”
Yes, I’ve decided. What I want to do in Edmonton is to get myself together (physically, emotionally, financially) for my Personal Oldman River Quest (too obvious for future readers; well since there never will be one except me who gives a flying
Oldman River, south Alberta April 25, 85–May 4, 85
Is this all I live for. I hope not, but it will be my guiding force for the next months in Canada. However I must face it. No physical space/place in this world is what I seek, but, as Nabokov writes: “not an escape (which is only a cleaner cell on a quieter floor of existence), but rather relief from the itch of the mind” (I hope)
DAILY PLANNER 1984: October Wednesday 17
At last at last. 7:30 concert in St. John’s Smith Square, 2nd row aisle seat, baroque church unbelievable as heaven. Bach Mass in B minor, soprano Emma Kirkby, marvellous dignity and natural elegance. She can be full of womanly compassion and also such delicate delight. She immerses herself in the music, she sings with exquisite perfection. What a divine voice, what a lovely person.
Kyrie eleison Christe eleison Dona nobis pacem
Lord have mercy Christ have mercy Grant us peace
October Thursday 18
(England–Netherlands–Arctic Canada) Piccadilly, platform 6 first train 5:55 Heathrow 9:00 KLM Schiphol 13:00 CP 373 to Edmonton 60 p and 13 pds left + $120 Amer. Ah Gabe, you’re going back home—What does that mean?
People behind me speak Spanish, where are you Mir?
Thought: what if I were to have an accident and not wake up for 20 years. What would it be like to wake up 20 years later and feel that no time has passed but everyone else—including me—is actually that much older. Hnnnn how lovely
Lovely indeed. Dearest Gabe, a simple Rip van Winkle hesitation: twenty years en route over Arctic Canada. It is October 2004. Ailsa is thirty-three.
So: after two final weeks of again mostly waiting, waiting in London, a few beers with your Polish friend—no mention of him after the guilty (and still letter-less) embassy—“a few (unnoted) Canadians,” books, maps, records, and movies meticulously noted, at least seventeen movies in fourteen days, Tess and Paris, Texas × 2, The Tenant × 3. And the ultimate Emma Kirkby, beautiful woman and artist, your darling classic Bach soprano, you pay to change your airline ticket home by a day to see and hear her in the sublime four-towered baroque church of St. John’s Smith Square, an architectural magnificence unimaginable for a Canadian grandchild of Russian Mennonite village refugees: in over two hours of baroque Latin prayer she sings either (Soprano 1) three duets or (Soprano 2) one solo and one duet. No matter, even as she sits above you waiting to sing she is all you could desire in a woman, inarticulately all. And of course forever beyond you; untouchable. A great gulf, fixed, and you are completely satisfied. Like Tess; whose place you do not visit in Marnhull, though it is only a brief bus-ride to Dorset. You lie inert—conveniently ill?—in London, you could be lying anywhere wasting in desire, eventually you scrawl in the margin of your planner, “I’ll go with a car one day in the future.” And then, more eventually, you hoist yourself out of bed onto your feet, you walk across the street to a ridiculous movie shed and face 107 minutes of contrived horror to see the electronic shadow of a beautiful woman pass from the screen, again, mere seconds, and then you stay another 125 minutes for the same image of the same woman to, among other acts, seem to sleep with a death-conspiracy haunted man; again.
My haunted son. Twenty unconscious years. Could you not at least dream—act—a few present seconds into beauty? They were there; daily you recorded a foretaste of some of them; why could you not believe, and act?
To wait can be the ultimate act. And you did wait, so much and so often. But then, finally, you would not.
In the last pages of the pocket loose-leaf you took on your Scotland trip you carefully added up—perhaps in the (for you) devastating luxury of the world’s only Ailsa Craig Hotel, already anticipating, dreading, the coming back to Edmonton—plodding backwards over your endured European time of “what pray god am I doing here”:
Days Oct: 18 Sept: 30 Aug: 31 July: 8 = total 87 days
—incl. London 21 Athens 25 Germany only 3 + bits of 2
Below these numbers you add:
Have I screwed up. Have I blown something that might have been. Oh please. I can’t stand it
Early evening April light slanted through the barred basement window, revealing as sunrise. Somewhere a piano was playing, Yo, there were notes but no tune … gradually Hal recognized his own wrinkled skin: hand and arm blotched and hairy and underlaid with vein-worms. Here it was still, his seventy-five-years-of-dying body, still so relentless, feeling itself into its particular, inescapable existence, his prickly right foot, his thinning gut, his
What right do I have to call myself “my self”? If I cut off my head, am I “me and my body” or “me and my head”?
He was alone in his basement. Bent like a question mark on a worn wooden chair, the one Yo salvaged from the college throw-away heap in Winnipeg and he fixed the back of it forever—well, until now—a man-made thing so simple to fix, just glue and two screws. Sitting in the surround he had scrabbled out of Yo’s carefully ordered papers, books, boxes. 4:37 p.m., if she came down the stairs and saw this mess she would be laughing at him. Until she recognized what all it was. The laughter of recognition so different from that of humour, of irony— stupidity. 4:39 p.m. He had to risk his guilt and The Coffee Shack, should have half an hour ago. Blessed be Owl.
“There were four ravens today up there,” Owl said.
“I didn’t look. Up is hard for old people.”
“Four,” Owl said. “Real loud, right across there on top of Ten Thousand Villages, jumping on the front there and yelling at each other.”
Hal said, “What’d they say?”
But Owl chuckled. “Can’t say what they say to you, but you sure had to hear them without looking. They were dancing loud there, along the Ten Thousand sign.”
The only good thing about The Coffee Shack was the fact they played no stupid loudspeaker music. Hal stared into his small paper cup. The sludge in it steamed; it did smell of coffee, faintly.
“What’d they say to you?”
Owl’s grin grew thoughtful. He lifted his paper cup in homage across the street. “No joke, not four ravens. Maybe, ‘Be careful,’ maybe, ‘You don’t know nothing.’ ”
“So, what do you know?”
Owl laughed at his tone. “Police stuff, that’s easy. Some say two fender-benders, not three, one rear-ender too, they had to tow it.”
“People?”
“Some say bruises, some a broken arm cut, sure a few whiplash, maybe one head cut bad. All say they’re looking for the old guy that run into the traffic, the guy started it.”
Clearly in this coffee shop, where they never went, Hal’s guilt was waiting. More than a day and he had done nothing about any of the people hurt because of his running, his—he had not even thought about them, allowed himself to—if Yo were alive the first thing she would have—
Hal raised his cup. His fingers dented it, hot, clutching so hard. He said slowly, “Have the police talked to you? Plenty have seen us together.”
“They haven’t found me yet.”
“What should I do?”
Owl was looking out the tall narrow window; traffic on Whyte Avenue ripped by without end. He said nothing. Finally Hal took a swallow from his cup.
“Ugghh … horse piss.”
Owl drank thoughtfully. “I don’t know. Never was a horse in Fort Good Hope.”
They both tried to laugh, but now there was no fun between them. Hal considered the lean face of his friend. Owl rarely asked questions, but the great lump of what Hal had not explained that morning sat in silence between them. Even more, what he had not done since.
“Orange downfill,” Owl said abruptly, “that’s a real oldstyle jacket.”
“Th
ere’s one in our cabin at Aspen Creek,” Hal said. “It was my son’s, Gabriel’s.”
Owl seemed to be contemplating the circle of his paper cup circled within his powerful hands. His fingers were folded together around it as if in prayer.
“That jacket,” Hal had to push aside those intersection thoughts, tell a story, an easy—“that jacket, Mrs. Golding wore it the last, Mrs. William Golding later that fall in 1985 after Gabriel was gone, when William Golding came to Edmonton. After years of trying we finally got him to come to the university to give a reading in the English department, and the day after we drove them out to the cabin, show them a bit of Alberta parkland, bush, but she hadn’t brought a winter coat, ‘It’s only early November,’ she told me, ‘I don’t need a coat,’ and then the November wind hit her whipping up from the creek and she just about …”
Hal got his run-on voice stopped.
“Mrs. Lord of the Flies,” Owl said without looking up.
“You know it?”
“Had to read it, in school. All those boys on a nice warm island. Lots of fruit.”
“Horrible boys … and good boys. That jacket, no one ever wore it after Gabe but it was all we had extra at the cabin. Ann Golding put it on to go to the cliff and look down at the frozen creek, she didn’t know a thing about Alberta November but Golding had a good wool jacket, he walked down the valley trail with me and onto the ice behind the beaver dam, we looked at the big beaver house and their winter cache of trees frozen in the ice and Yo’s brother Dave was so scared the early ice was far too thin and careless me would drown a Nobel Prize novelist; he stood on the cliff when he saw what we were doing and just prayed, please God keep them safe, please, but Ann Golding looked down at us and went back into the cabin with Yo and sat by the wood heater, she never—”
Hal stopped. Owl’s obsidian eyes were contemplating him.
“Okay,” Hal said. And continued slowly, “The Orange Downfill. I saw that walk past Double Cup yesterday—high collar zipped up over half the face, four seams sewn across the back, his body—that’s why I ran out into the street, because that was my son Gabriel wearing it, I saw him.”
Owl didn’t blink. After a moment he said, “Yesterday.”
“Yes, yesterday!” And confession raced through Hal: “On the Whyte sidewalk! Walking past the coffee shop fast, like he walked, it was him, his head and hair and he turned at the corner with the crowd to cross Whyte and I saw the other side of his head, the collar was too high I couldn’t see the moustache but it was him for sure and I just exploded, I ran out to catch him but the light had changed and I was in all the traffic, the cars had to slam on …”
After a moment Owl said gently, “Your son Gabriel.”
“Yes.”
“Did he look like the age he was, or the age he’d be now?”
“What?”
“Did he look like twenty-four, or maybe forty-nine?”
“Wha … what does that matter?”
“What you saw, it matters.”
Hal was remembering, trying to remember everything, remembering, all the human noise in The Coffee Shack spilling off the great riff of Double Cup memory rising in him like a massive rock out of the sea: the fixed-chair plastic table they were leaning over and the sidewalk in the right corner of his eye were all wrong, people just moving past in the middle of a block and no red hand “Don’t Walks,” but unstoppable cars endlessly whipping by with motorcycles blaring up and gone like quick, blurting beasts, and Ten Thousand Villages should not be across there between bare boulevard tree branches, nothing of that, no; he remembered exactly, beyond the full mirror wall of glass reflection where the sudden flash of ORANGE stepped out, and saw instantly the short brown hair flattened by snow on the skull and curling up at the collar, the high forehead and straight nose half-hidden in the zipped up collar and the long body walking, jeans, faded blue jeans and absolutely the body, yes! long bare fingers and the shift of blue legs so fast and lean: that was fixed, immoveable as Ailsa Craig.
“It was him, walking, I’ll never forget that walk, his nose inside the stand-up collar and his forehead, I can never forget how he walked. It was him.”
Owl was studying Hal’s knobbly hands locked into each other on the table. “Sometimes,” he said, “when somebody dies too soon, a baby is born somewhere.”
“What?”
“Yeah. People … they say that.”
“He wasn’t born one of your people.”
“Sure. But, sometimes, something happens anyways. No matter who we’re born.”
“What do you mean, ‘a baby is born’?”
“I never listened much, not enough, those Old People stories …”
“You don’t know?”
“Hard to say … what do I know.”
“And what you know you won’t tell me.”
Owl faced Hal across the tight table eye to eye. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “Not that I shouldn’t tell you, not that it’s forbidden, I can’t because I don’t know. I was young, I was stupid, I never listened enough.”
They considered each other; their hopelessly different worlds: Hare Dene gnarled by Christianity, Mennonite Christianity twisted out of Anabaptism and Catholicism and Pietism. Sitting face to face in a raucous twenty-first-century city of coffee and doughnuts and surveillance cameras staring at them every second. More and more brilliant technology and the same old dead.
“People mourn,” Owl continued. “That’s the way it is, but they remember too, and sometimes a baby is born, later, and laughs or walks or yells and then somebody will remember, something.”
And then they will do something, too?
Suddenly Owl smiled and Hal realized, as he had so often, that he had never met this warm, beautiful man before they found themselves sitting side by side at Double Cup on Whyte. And they both looked up, and their gazes met. Deo gratias.
“You poured his ashes into running water, Aspen Creek?”
“Yes.”
“Could be that orange downfill is in the river valley.”
“The river valley?”
“Your creek runs into the river.”
“Yeah …”
“And that jacket’s real old style, but good shape. Something warm you could find in a thrift store.”
The Edmonton North Saskatchewan River valley. Mostly long narrow parks and small clusters of houses, but also age and winter-broken trees, tangled brush, deadfall, homeless, down-and-out, vagabond, bum, loner, handicapped, drifter, pan-handler, free spirit, alcoholic, misfit, disabled, mentally challenged, drug addict, mental defective, crazy, outsider, nut, outcast, beggar, deranged, insane, screw loose, unemployable, brain-damaged, cracked, addicted, homeless, free … insane … loner …
“That’s impossible.”
Owl had twisted his head and was looking out the narrow window over his shoulder; backwards, as if he saw coming on the street what Hal was thinking.
“Maybe a start,” he said, and faced Hal again. “If we want to hunt. Whyte’s no good, too many police.”
“Acch … police. Those rear-enders were my fault, I should …”
“You want them police to help you look?”
“No! They’re looking for me, sure they …”
“Okay. So when they find you, you tell them why you run into the street?”
“Maybe … yeah, maybe I should do that … just go tell them.”
“Tell what? He hasn’t done anything, why would they help you look for him?”
“I saw him!”
“And you run after him into the street.”
“And some people got hurt.”
“Yeah, they say some.”
“But if I told them I was overwhelmed, my son after twenty-five years, cops would understand, they have to, every day they know people do crazy things because they’re overwhelmed.”
“Yeah, cops can understand, sometimes.”
“I mean, twenty-five years.”
“For sure. But first I thou
ght you wanted to hunt, first.”
“I do. But if we could, maybe …”
Owl laughed his quiet Dene laugh. “Okay, maybe. The cops we have always with us. We can always find them, they’ll always find us. They’re hunters too, so leave them for now, first we hunt what we want to find.”
The North Saskatchewan twisting its shifty channels down from Rocky Mountain glaciers through mountains and foothills and forests and farmland toward Edmonton glowering high on its banks, and on, rapids and lakes and forests and dams and cities and swamps and countless creeks and rivers to Hudson Bay, to the polar ocean. But not the streets and parks manicured into the deep bends and flood plains of the river in Edmonton, not the trails groomed smooth for joggers and skateboards and dog walkers and bikes. Police cruisers. No; the natural bush chaos of the valley cliffs; of forgotten, avoided, loners.
“Better not before noon,” Owl said. “After they go to Recycles and get their money and buy stuff. And maybe wear boots, lots of wet snow down in there.”
Hal edged himself out of the bolted chair. With Owl talking he was tremendously awake, suddenly rushing energy. Almost an explosion like joy—tomorrow, yes. The river valley he had known all his adult life.
RIVER: always ambivalent; it corresponds to the creative power both of nature and of time. On the one hand it signifies fertility and life, the progressive irrigation of the soil; and on the other hand it stands for the irreversible passage of time and, in consequence, for a sense of gathering loss …
North Saskatchewan, Oldman—no boots yet; it was still today, settling into the long northern spring evening. And all that Gabriel wrote after he came home, October 18, 1984, was still waiting.
DAILY PLANNER 1984: October Saturday 20
2nd day back. As always I drive pickup, help Dad, Uncle Dave, Big Ed move heavy kitchen stove from Edmonton to Aspen Creek cabin. I feel like dying. Everything is exactly like before, including me on my basement bed, gobbling Mom’s great food, staring at the same ceiling. What did I expect. Why did I return. I hate myself
