by Joy Kogawa
“But praise God,” Father cried. “Praise God. He knew what had to be done. He came out and rubbed my hands and face with snow and saved my life.”
As a child, I listened to his endless personal stories of a loving, protecting, healing God. He was the Great Fisherman’s own fisherman. I witnessed his faithful devotions. I accompanied him on his hospital rounds and saw the old and the sick weeping in his arms. He brought peace to the dying, his eyes raised in petition.
His love of people and his service continue to this very hour. Yesterday, for example, around three in the afternoon, he suddenly felt compelled to pick up the phone and call old Mrs. Jensen who had been seriously ill. He told me he was anxious to visit her. He insisted it had to be right away. It was quite a long way out in the country, but I got directions from her son and we went. That was our second visit with the sick yesterday. Earlier we’d gone to the hospital.
Mrs. Jensen’s eyes were closed when we came in, her mouth open in a rapid laboured breathing. Father sat beside her, held her hands and wept silently.
“Oh God, you have given us eternal life. Bless your dear child, Viola Jensen….”
His prayer was a direct and clear communication with the God of love, in whom my father trusts.
“Thank you, my dear dear friend,” she managed to gasp between breaths.
We returned home. A few hours later the phone call came saying she had died peacefully.
“Yes,” Father whispered, his face infinitely gentle.
It’s gentleness that most defines him now in his old age, and it’s gentleness, I’m told, that marks the presence of a saint. All the forces of darkness cannot rob him of an essential kindness. All the judgement of people cannot blot out his deeds of love. His faith is genuine. Two of us in this world have known the truth of this in great detail. And now that Mother is gone, I may be the only one left to bear witness, the only one left to serve and protect him in his vulnerable and fragile old age.
CHAPTER FOUR
“A good man,” Mother used to say in her increasingly senile years. “Barnabas is a good man.” Those were the last words she said to Father before she died. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that she loved him faithfully, unswervingly, down the tortuous path of many betrayals to the very end.
It was late in the Advent season last year, during a heavy snowfall, that the steadfast tin soldier with her permanent lean was finally swept away. Father and I had been out Christmas shopping. We came in to find her asleep on the couch, the TV on, a children’s choir singing “O Holy Night.” It wasn’t until he tried to waken her for a cup of tea that we discovered she was gone.
She left us surrounded by the sounds and sights of the most family-centred season. The tree, not to be decorated until Christmas Eve, was still naked and fragrant by the piano. Early in December, she’d watched the gradual arrival of the annual deluge of cards. Hundreds, literally hundreds, of Christmas cards had been arriving, as they did every year, and were standing in increasingly tight formation along the mantelpiece, hiding the crystal vase and the three bronze monkeys who see, hear and speak no evil. As Advent proceeded, the cards spilled onto the bookcases, the buffet, the sideboard, the window ledges, and finally they dangled as rows of streamers tacked around the dining room. A somewhat gaudy display but proof enough that the Shelby family was well loved.
At Easter there would still be as many as usual—cards with long personal letters from Father’s still active network of friends, colleagues, devotees. “My dear Shelby.” “Dear Father Charles Barnabas.” And a few late sympathy cards. “We’re so sorry to hear that Mrs. Shelby is no longer with us.” “May you be comforted in your loneliness at this holy Easter season.”
Mother’s last words were spoken as she held Father’s hands. “Barnabas is a good man.” She was paraphrasing Scripture, referring to the Book of Acts, where Barnabas, “son of consolation,” is tersely described in chapter eleven, verse twenty-four. “Barnabas was a good man.”
That is all we are told of Barnabas. That is all Mother allowed herself to know about Father. He was good. And so amen and amen—let it not be denied, and let the simple words be engraved on his tombstone when the time comes that his grandchildren’s grandchildren may know that whatever else is remembered of the Reverend Dr. Charles B. Shelby, servant of God, he was also a good man.
I can hear Eleanor’s impatience as I align myself with Mother and continue to paint him in perfect pastel. But to focus solely on “the evil that men do” is surely equally flawed as a way of perceiving reality. As Hitler’s cat, am I not entitled to say that Hitler was human too, that he had some moments of kindness?
One request, Eleanor—that I may stay for a while in the light, his brilliant light—that I may drink once more from our fountain of song and linger a few moments longer in a happiness I once knew. Then after that, I will come softly into the darkness. I will see with my night blindness, with my body turned to acid, I will see then what I cannot yet see. Something grotesque. Something to be removed, violently if necessary, from our midst.
“Defend O Lord, this Thy child with Thy heavenly grace.”
The bishop’s hands rested on my head as they did on the head of each child presented for confirmation. But I could feel the special pressure on my temples as I knelt before him, and the warmth as he pressed down and intoned the words in a rich deep voice that filled the church, “…that she may continue Thine forever….” At this moment the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit were being poured into my life.
There were about ten of us, aged twelve to fourteen, walking up one by one to the railing, the girls in white dresses. But only I was the rector’s daughter, only I was known personally by the bishop. His hand had a large ruby ring. Everything about the bishop was large, his voice, his oversized head with its wobbly jowls. He had a round, protruding belly that you could see under his cassock.
Father in contrast was thinner and taller. Instead of jowls, he had hollow cheeks and a slightly scraggly dark beard. But his voice was as strong as the bishop’s. The two together were louder than the entire choir.
The day of my confirmation was only one of many magical days, the congregation babbling, dainty sandwiches being passed around on silver trays and Mother, regal as usual in her wide-brimmed white hat, pouring tea at the long table on the lawn in front of the church. But always it was Father who drew the crowds—Father with his head flung back, slapping his thigh as he shouted at some joke.
In all my life I experienced no rudeness or coarseness of any kind between Father and Mother. I was raised so carefully, so piously, so properly, raised not to swear or to think unseemly thoughts.
“There are two kinds of people in the world,” Father used to say to Charlie and me. “Those who belong to royalty and those who do not. ‘Cast not your pearls before swine,’ children. Be careful when you speak, not to trample on what people say, and don’t belittle others. Above all, be kind. That is the sign of royalty. Look for pearls in whatever is being said. Royalty has the power to turn dung into pearls. Swine turn pearls into dung.” Father had the capacity to turn the world’s many small unkindnesses into lessons and gifts from God.
“He has such a generous heart,” Mother would say admiringly.
Father truly was a much loved and popular priest and, as a result, our family had a great deal of prestige. His use of the word “royalty” had the added and perverse effect of making me feel above it all. We were the perfect, the model family in communities of people not quite our peers. We were, after all, the Shelby family—as in the Shelby Family Quartet, heard every Sunday singing the theme for Father’s Sunday broadcast.
On the air and off the air, Father was a total communicator. Was, I say, in the past tense, when in fact he still is one of the most connected people I know. His daily correspondence even today confounds the postman.
“That’s quite a load you get, sir.”
“Fish need water,” I told the postman, “birds need air
, Father needs people. He breathes people.”
Father’s appetite for conversation is immense. His white priestly collar catches the eyes of strangers who sometimes seek him out hoping for a word of comfort. They are not often disappointed. He listens. He advises.
“If you weep with those who weep,” he says, “you diminish their burdens by half. If you rejoice with those who rejoice, you double their joy.” He practises this creed and he has more visitors than anyone I know.
Back in my childhood Father was connected to people from as far away as Australia. Their voices arrived in pocketbook-size boxes of wire which Father played on his Webster Chicago wire recorder, that imperfect machine with its wavery sound and its nest of wires becoming unsprung. Wire gave way eventually to tape. We had broadcast-quality tape recorders, all sizes of tape recorders. Father indulged himself in the latest communication technology—movie cameras, still cameras, projectors, duplicating machines. Charlie and I were the envy of our chums as we paraded them into the crowded studio library to watch home movies, to record plays. We rigged up a microphone and pretended to be radio broadcasters. I was frequently the sound person, slamming doors, pouring water into glasses, stamping my feet to announce arrivals.
Once Father brought home a heavy rectangular beige case which he said was a Wilcox Gay contraption for making records—thin, bendable, shiny black records. The Shelby family found their singing way in a package of records to a real radio station and Father’s life as a broadcaster followed not long after.
The day of Father’s first programme, I stood on one leg after the other in my excitement, glowing in the glory of our new-found fame. Mother and Charlie too, their faces bright, stood in front of our fancy black radio as we added our soprano, alto and tenor voices to our radio voices and sang our proud hearts out.
I love to tell the story
Of unseen things above….
Mother said it was the music that first attracted her to Father. They were two singing pilgrims from England who had followed their destinies to meet on the Salvation Army snowy streets beneath the magical northern lights. Meredith Hunter, Anglican deaconess, stood in her parka under a flickering sky on the edge of a small northern crowd, enchanted by the trumpet-playing street preacher. He caught a glimpse of her golden hair and heard her clear soprano voice.
“I thought she was an angel from heaven.”
They were married after a long and tortuous engagement that spanned nearly a decade while they wrestled their way through denominational differences. Eventually Father bowed to Mother’s convictions. He studied for the high calling—the Anglican variety.
My brother, Charlie Junior, the golden boy, was their first child. Six long years and one miscarriage later came me, the not-very-pretty sister with stick-out teeth, slightly tan-toned skin and thick, dark, curly hair. It seems that somewhere back in my father’s line there had been a “Black Norwegian.”
Except for my teeth, I was proud to be who I was, a well-mannered daughter of a Church of England clergyman and his wife—his perfect wife. That was the one thing everyone could agree on. Mother was perfect. She was dignity and elegance and reserve, the quintessential clergy wife, keeping the exact balance between kindness and distance that commanded complete respect. She did not engage in small talk or gossip, either at home or in company. She was as faultless a person as I have ever known—too faultless perhaps for regular folks. She had no confidantes among her friends.
For most of my childhood we lived in and around Juniper, Alberta, not far from Mother’s younger brother, Uncle Jack, who like many other European pioneers had come from the old country, lured by the CPR’S offer of free land. Uncle Jack was completely different from Mother—a rather rowdy man. Apart from ourselves, there were a few other English families, some Germans and Poles, a large contingent of Ukrainians, some Mennonites from Russia, some Americans. One girl’s austere father had come from Iceland. A boy who wore suspenders had parents who grew up in Wales.
One time in grade four, the teacher asked each child about the work our fathers did. I counted one mechanic, one grain elevator worker, the postmaster, the lumberyard manager. Almost all the others were farmers or farm workers or ranch hands. The most defiant boy in the class said, “I don’t got a dad.”
When it was my turn to stand and speak, the whole class, even the prettiest and most popular girl, looked up at me enviously. My father was the best educated and the best known and we, the singing Shelbys, were clearly at the top of the Juniper social heap. Our home, the Anglican rectory, had an Encyclopedia Britannica set, Life magazines, a piano, lace curtains and everything one could dream of. We set the standards. Even the notes Charlie and I brought to the teachers were properly sealed in envelopes, unlike the folded pieces of paper other children clutched in their fists.
Charlie and I together won so many awards and badges and certificates that we hardly had enough space on our walls to display them. Music awards, scholastic awards. Mother was never excessive in her approval, simply smiling, or more often nodding, when we’d return from school in triumph with some show of honour. Father however was more jubilant than either Charlie or me.
“That’s my girl,” he’d say proudly, admiring my prize. I lived for those moments of praise. I tried to outdo Charlie, my only competitor. One year Charlie won the all-round student award. I thought he was insufferable, removing all the ornaments over the fireplace and placing his trophy in the centre.
As older brothers go, however, Charlie was not bad. He was a bit pompous and wordy, but he was well liked by the teachers. “So like his father,” they would say. Charlie walked like Father. He talked and laughed like him, throwing his head back and opening his mouth wide to the sky. But at home the lines were drawn differently. Charlie was Mother’s child. I aligned myself with Father. Like him, I got things done quickly. Charlie and Mother were slow and methodical. Father and I were always in the car first and waiting for the dawdlers.
“You two are the ‘leap-before-you-look’ types,” Mother would say. “It will get you both into trouble.”
Charlie was not just temperamentally like Mother, he also had her fair skin and blue eyes. “Blue as the prairie sky,” one parishioner said. Father and I were darker. Although she never said it outright, I felt Mother thought it a pity that my colouring was what it was. Uncle Jack once mumbled something about “a touch of the tar” but Mother turned quickly aside and said, “She has beautiful eyes, Jack, beautiful dark eyes like her father. She’s so much like him.” That was fine by me.
I worshipped Father. He was funny and enthusiastic as a puppy. He joked easily. He cried easily. All the rich and colourful stuff of life flowed through him. He would come into a gloomy room with his buoyant good humour and the shadows would vanish. Mother said, “He carries problems as if they’re sunbeams.”
Life was one ongoing special event from Easter morning egg-hunts to summer camps, Christmas pageants, young people’s parties, picnics, concerts, fund-raising dinners, teas and bazaars. And our home was a turbulent river, overflowing with stories, songs, feastings. There were always people around—people with their triumphs and tragedies and intimacies, coming and going to meetings, counselling sessions, in and out of one crisis or another—people getting married or buried or just dropping in for tea. During the busy Juniper Centre years when Father was also rural dean, Mother, Charlie and I would get in the Austin A40 with Father and drive to the several outlying hamlets where services were held on alternate Sunday afternoons and evenings in tiny little churches with pot-bellied stoves. In summer, Mother wore her white hat or her blue hat, always at an angle. People would come to hear the Shelby Family Quartet and on special occasions, like the Mayor’s wedding, Mother and I would wear long black skirts.
I loved our family, my mother, my brother. But most of all, most especially, I loved, I adored, my completely wonderful father. He brought laughter into the house. He made everything happen. He delighted in our constant dinner parties with our best d
ishes and napkins in their silver napkin rings and the silver teapot and the little square sugar lumps in the silver sugar bowl. He was a happy man. I wanted to be like him.
CHAPTER FIVE
My Lord, how I loved him, child that I was. And how I do love him still. He is so alive, alive-o. You can see the vitality and the curiosity and the delight in his eyes. Last month we drove out to the lake and watched the sun descending gold and deep royal purple and red through the clouds. His face shone and his breath caught as he whispered, “Glorious. How glorious. Oh, if Meredith were still here. Do you see the glory, Mother? Are you in that glory, my dear?”
I held his arm and we walked slowly along the stones and the damp sand. Peace, I thought. Let there be this blessed peace forever. Let this be the final truth.
The seeds of peace were planted in my early childhood, in the storybooks and my teddy bears and Plasticine and crayons. The voices were soft. There was tenderness in the midst of our busy lives. Day by day, the laughter and the gentility were there.
The only area of tension that I can remember surrounded Father’s constant travelling after he left the “radio ministry” and before the era of the Ontario Juniper Centre.
“I must be about the Lord’s business,” Father would say.
“There is that, and then there is the adventurer,” Mother said with a turn of her head. Her voice, when she said this, had a bright edge to it which might have been admiration or envy, I didn’t know which. I didn’t think, at the time, that there was any judgement in the words.
