by Joy Kogawa
For almost as long as you can remember, you have been here, at the beginning, at the edge of knowing. You are like a racehorse at the starting line, pawing the track, the reins held too tight, too long. Your legs are too tense. A certain paralysis has set in. And now you are hearing the starting gun again, the sharp retort like a dull roar filtered through the background shouting of the crowd.
You are holding the bannister with both hands. Your body is as steady as you can manage. Down and down you are propelled in the greyness of pre-dawn. You are nearing the bottom of the stairs. Your heart is wild with resolve, your dangerous weapon of half-truths clutched tight in your shaking hand. You tell yourself you must use the instrument skilfully, you must make the incision as precisely as a surgeon, cutting carefully so that the nerve is not severed. You have donned your mask, your gloves. What is required is to see the face behind the face, the hideous face of Mr. Hyde that you know is there, but that you have not once, not ever, seen.
However strong your intention, you can only proceed with quaking heart and feeble prayer. You can see the light from the fireplace reflected in the dining-room mirror, dancing yellow and red and orange. He is there in front of the fire, this irreplaceable man whose blood is your blood, whose name is your name. Your reason for approaching him comes from him, your courage and cowardice come from him, your values come from him, and the judgement with which you judge him comes from him. Love comes from him.
The wonder of your father has always existed—the warmth, the tenderness. He was a god. In the beginning was the one who could do no wrong, the maker and keeper of all laws. With a wave of his hand he formed the land. The clinging mist that surrounded the house could not extinguish the light, the bravely flickering light. Now, in his old age, it continues to glow through the mist. You move towards it. You trust it still.
He is sitting by the fireplace, his body shrunken with age, his rounded back to you, his long fingers spread wide to the warmth. The logs are crackling softly in the stillness.
He is a mild and sensitive man, your father, but complex, intelligent and extraordinarily vital. He is larger than life. Even in his mid-eighties, he is larger than life. He weeps more, sings more, prays more, does more, than anyone I know. He is a man of immense appetites and immense contradictions, a man who is greatly admired and equally despised, a man of faith and a man of falsehood. The world has never been big enough for him, this saint and sinner combined. Each precious day was never long enough for all that he crowded into it.
I do not know how this man of great secrecy and great openness, this charismatic communicator and liar, this man who indulges himself, who sacrifices himself, who is utterly selfish and who magnanimously opens his house to strangers, this man who is guilty and seemingly as innocent as a cloud—I do not know how he survives the quicksand of his own paradoxical being.
He is crouched slightly forward on the leather elephant stool, his now stooped and fragile frame wrapped in the old wine velour bathrobe Mother gave him many Christmases ago. His face is roughly shaven, the long white brows untrimmed.
“You’re up early.” His morning voice is slightly rasping and he clears his throat. He reaches over to the coffee table to pick up his cup of tea.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
He doesn’t respond. He may not have heard you. You repeat yourself. He would not want to know why you were up all night. He would want it all to go away. So would you. Yes. So would you. He would want you never to raise the matter again. He may be thinking of that spasm of a conversation yesterday, your failed effort to speak. He may sense that you are about to pounce on him again. His hand shakes as he lifts the cup of tea to his lips. The saucer contains a small brown pool that drips onto the rug.
You are waiting patiently for the right moment. “Patience,” Mother used to say, “is a great virtue.” And she was herself an extraordinarily patient person. About a decade ago, she was given a cutting from a night-blooming cereus, a strange, tropical cactus plant with foot-long narrow leaves. She tended it with great patience, saying that in ten years it would flower. But she died before she saw the fruits of her labour.
Mother was virtuous and stoical. She was good, but she was not fun. Father was the one you loved to be near. He was the one person in the entire world you loved and trusted the most. Years and years ago, when you first learned about the deep fissure in his life, you plastered it over with mud and wordlessness. But Eleanor’s midnight storms have washed away the patchwork and the crack in the foundation of your heart lies deeply exposed.
If Father could have publicly confessed, if he could have faced the consequences and quit the church, you might have been able to walk down the road with him, with pity, with love. But that never happened.
It is your intention now to ask him what you were unable to yesterday, and to try again to broach the impossible subject. You, like Eleanor, need answers. You both need desperately to know.
“I couldn’t sleep,” you repeat a third time. You wait for a comment, but he says nothing. You can feel the pressure, a visceral force within you as you prepare to leap. You clear your throat. In that instant he shifts. His head turns slightly. The lines beneath his eyes are dark and puffy—a heavy sadness. He begins to stand, faltering slightly. His hand shakes as he pushes himself off the stool, then he steadies himself on the arm of the chesterfield. One slippered step to the side and he totters upright. He begins his slow shuffling race away from you, towards the dining room, his study/bedroom, past the much tethered night-blooming cereus, which now reaches the ceiling.
You watch his retreat. The first opportunity of the morning is disappearing. You will have to wait, you tell yourself. He won’t die between now and noon. You will wait until lunchtime. When you sit down to eat, you will try again.
You stay in the living room, leaning back on the couch, watching the sky grow light. Then you notice, on the fireplace hearth and in the ashes, the bits of paper, corners of envelopes, one red ribbon curled like a comma, a half-burnt punctuation mark. It doesn’t occur to you until later that he may have been destroying the evidence.
CHAPTER THREE
You can sometimes go for days without thinking about it. Or if you do, briefly, you sweep the thought aside, quietly under the carpet with the undisturbed dust of other imponderables, other better forgotten small burials, insect wings.
But then the TV is turned on and the news report tells another story. V, these media-mangled days, is for victim and, yes, sweet vengeance.
There was a time when the sky was so full of geese flying north, or geese flying south, that they stretched in the longest V from one end of the earth to the other. V for victory. Remember those days? Remember the time when people loved him, followed him, flocked to him? V today is for vortex in a sky of non-existent birds. The ghosts of tiny songbirds fly through fields sprayed with pesticides.
I can imagine another kind of V—a jagged V with Father at the head of a long descent, leading us all downwards, and we’re tied together on either side of him by long ropes knotted around our waists as we follow him into the caverns, into lightlessness, into the slippery, cold underground. Somewhere in the sunlight the rope is strapped around the base of a merciful tree. Somewhere in the air birds are flying to a warm country. V is for velocity.
V is also for voracious, which is the most accurate word for Father. He was born that way.
“Oh yes, he was a hungry one,” Grandmother Shelby said of Father.
I was fourteen years old when I first visited Grandmother Shelby in that beautiful “sceptred isle” of my ancestors, land of hope and glory, Buckingham Palace and “Turn again Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London.” It was like walking into my nursery rhymes, and dear old Granny Shelby was Mother Goose, lacy in shawls, her ample arms smelling of ginger cookies.
On her crowded mantelpiece lived her far-flung family, Charlie and me as babies, Father as a child with his two older brothers, all three in cloth caps and darned stockings and boots and k
nickerbockers, and my assorted cousins and great-grandparents, an uncle who was at Dunkirk. I loved the photographs and Father’s first trumpet that belonged to Granny’s brother and the stream in the village and the woods and the pub with its dartboard, and the graveyard at the church—all the names and the stories, all the centuries of who we have been.
“I’d say, Millicent, child, that you take after the Shelby side,” Granny said one day. I was blissfully unaware of any imperfections in the Shelby side and was pleased. She showed me a small sepia photograph of herself as a young woman in a bonnet and told me we both had her father’s cheekbones—rather prominent cheekbones.
That photograph sits these days in its silver frame on the top, right-hand corner of Father’s holy of holies, his rolltop desk. One of the rules in our house was that Father was not to be disturbed when he was at his desk. Mother told me years ago that she never even touched the handle of the study door when it was closed. I have wondered in recent years whether the desk is Father’s shrine to midnight, whether somewhere, behind the shelf of diaries, he keeps his portrait of Dorian Gray or his potion for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I don’t know, of course, since I’ve never seen inside the desk.
Who knows what secrets from its dark corners he may have been burning in the fireplace this morning. While I was talking with Eleanor last night again, Father could have been furtively sorting through papers, destroying letters, trying to conceal the small bones, bones, all those little bones scratching about in the night, keeping me awake.
How many men there must be, like Father, who have become heroes by excising their villainies from their stories. How many autobiographies are monuments to half-truths, masking the multifaceted bundles of imperfection that we all are? Ah Father, we live in a world where criminals are in the pulpits and saints are in prison and the children of the future live in boxes on the streets. You have been walking for so long in a light so bright it fills me with awe and in darkness so deep it makes me gasp. I don’t know how you live with yourself, or what made you this way.
People are inclined to blame parents for their children’s misdemeanours. But it has never occurred to me to think of Granny Shelby as the source of Father’s troubles. She was warmth and laughter, her rolling chuckles as comforting as England’s mild summer air.
“Come feed the scraps to the birds, my love. Come see the birds in their bath.”
I loved Granny and her little house from which we could watch the small robins and the rabbits hopping across the moist green fields, and the sheep rounding the corner of the village street. What little I know of Father’s infancy has come from late-afternoon conversations with Granny Shelby. We sat with our tea and sandwiches in trays while the sun silently climbed the walls and the old dog lolled in front of the fire.
“You mustn’t tell anyone this,” she confided once, leaning towards me conspiratorially, “but your father was my favourite child.”
The planet, she said, had a habit of spewing forth its prize babies every so often. In a litter of pups there is always one that is larger and more energetic than the rest, its eyes opening first, its tail wagging faster. And so too, among humans, there are special children. One finds them in unexpected places—in slums among garbage-eaters or dressed in silks or floating in baskets among reeds. “It’s random. Like winning the football pools. And your father was dropped down, my lovely jackpot baby, out of that beautiful southern sky and into my arms.”
They were in India at the time he was born. She held a photograph of him in a white frilly dress, a toddler in his mother’s arms, his curly blond head against her bosom. For Grandmother Shelby, Charles Barnabas was the perfect child, the one who could do no wrong.
Baby boys dressed as girls do not grow up confused, I’ve read. On the contrary, the more tenderly they are treated the stronger they become. I have searched and sifted through Granny’s stories but find no clues, unless it was that Granny Shelby needed Father to be more special than he was, unless the ordinary rules did not apply.
“He was eager from the beginning,” she said. “His eyes. Oh my. Deep and dark and hungry as the jungle. You could see right away—this one was a personage.”
He was the third of her three boys, and the only one to be born in India, where Grandfather Shelby was teaching. “My youngest hatched naked in the tropics and feathered in England.” Little Charles Barnabas was barely toilet-trained when the fourth Shelby baby was stillborn, and Father, at the age of three, suckled the extra breast milk on board the ship that took the family back to the old country.
“What a sailing!” Granny’s eyes were twinkling. “Our Charles Barnabas and the ladies holding their parasols over him while he read….” The story spread among the passengers that here, from the Shelby household, was a bright young ’un. Before they docked in Southampton, he had succeeded in enthralling the entire ship by reading aloud from old copies of Punch and the London Illustrated News. “Not that he could understand all the words, mind you, but he could read better than the bigger boys.”
He was always in the “A” stream and at the top of his form. He could act, sing, write, and he won every essay contest in the school. It can’t have been easy for Father, always the youngest and brightest and therefore a target for bullying. It can’t have been easy for any of the /Shelbys after their return to England. Grandfather, who had been ill, died. The family was destitute.
Granny had little to tell me about their years of poverty or the way Father as a youth suddenly disappeared from her life. “Oh I don’t know,” she said and her voice trailed away. “It wasn’t an easy time.” Three years after Grandfather’s death she herself became ill and the boys were cared for by a spinster aunt. “She didn’t understand children,” Granny said. “I should not have let her take them.” “How old was Father?” I asked. She had a faraway look as she rubbed her abdomen and her cup of tea grew cold. “Oh about seven or eight.”
Father was barely fourteen when he left for India with a magistrate who had become from time to time the family benefactor. As Granny described it, her Charlie B. fell from poverty through the looking glass into wonderland. “It was all very posh on board,” Granny said. Posh stood for “port outbound, starboard homebound.” Coming or going, the wealthy sailed on the shady side of the ship.
Father was hired to tutor a diplomat’s child for the summer. He was expected to return home for the school term, but he was captured by India, land of his birth and pampered infancy. He followed mystics, gurus and storytellers, he sang, danced, walked, talked and wandered throughout the east, returning to the magistrate’s home for refuelling and at other times working as office clerk and shipper in a British trading company, until his restless feet felt the lure of the North.
It was in Alaska, land of the long sub-zero nights, that Father first encountered the Light of Life. Father has told this story from the pulpit so many times I can remember it almost word for word. It was the major turning point of his life. “There was I in the snows and the cold, romancing the north and prancing about with a heart that wouldn’t keep an old dog alive, when I was brought face to face with my Conqueror.” He was by nature, he said, a spiritual man, but he was not religious in the conventional sense. When it came to Christianity, he’d had an open mind. Unlike the writer C.S. Lewis, who was dragged kicking into Christianity, Father was wafted in through a sea of delirium.
Late one constantly twilight night, Father collapsed and was taken to hospital. He realized with a certain luminous clarity that he was facing the ultimate crisis. As his final conscious act, he moved to locate himself in relation to the Unfathomable. As he lay a heartbeat away from death, he forced himself to sit up and pray. He remained in an attitude of prayer for the next three months, focussing his attention on a painting on the opposite wall of Jesus as a twelve-year-old in prayer. During this entire time, his faulty heart was expected to stop at any moment.
One late afternoon, as he prayed, the wall was no longer there. Instead he looked out onto a vast fie
ld. He became aware of a tiny dot in the distance. Almost at the instant of that awareness, almost as a flash of lightning, the dot sped towards him and there, in a burst of incandescent light, with his arms loosely at his sides, palms up, his head gently inclined, was the Christ.
Father tried to cry out, “My Lord.” He tried to lift his arms. But he could do nothing and the vision vanished. He was suffused with an awe and a rapture beyond words—an overwhelming joy, a great rushing fire and wind in his mind. The following day his heartbeat was normal. He was the talk of the hospital. “A miracle,” the doctors said.
From the moment of his healing, Father was seized with a sense of divine mission. “I, who had fled to the ends of the earth, to the south and to the east, to the west and to the north, I was caught and gently thereafter held in the loving jaws of the Hound of Heaven.” His life, he said, no longer belonged to him.
That story was the first of several miracle tales. As a child, I did not then, nor do I now, doubt the authenticity of his experiences. They were the signs of his authority. Like St. Paul, who encountered the Lord on the road to Damascus, Father too had met the One who saves.
Over his decades of ministry, Father has been showered with rare spiritual blessings. He has been cured of numerous illnesses, rescued from many dangers.
One winter he was driving alone on a country road and was caught in the middle of wildly swirling snow, the worst blizzard of the year. As he told it later, the road disappeared. There were no other cars at all and, with the wind-chill factor, the temperature was about forty below. He knew he couldn’t survive for long, stuck in the ditch in a stalled car that was rapidly being buried.
Once more he had been brought to death’s door. He sat for a while in the growing numbness, praying, handing himself over to the peace and guidance of God. From within the peace, he began to sing with increasing joy a hymn of praise. Then, once more, in the distance, a tiny light. He followed it and came upon a hut where a man peered out at him from a frosty window and would not let him in.
