The Rain Ascends

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The Rain Ascends Page 4

by Joy Kogawa


  Judgement had come, however, a few years earlier, from the brash new United Church minister, who was eaten up with envy and accused Father of “sheep stealing.” Judge Grantham, the wealthiest and most prominent member in the United Church congregation, had defected to our camp. When he died, it was discovered that he had bequeathed his mansion and his spectacular thirty-acre property on the edge of town to Father’s ministry. And thus began the breathtaking experiment in music from the heart of community, known as the Juniper Centre.

  Father, the church wardens, plus Constance and James Hobbs—two well-known and innovative music therapists—and a few other high-ranking people from the church tramped across the rolling foothills, through the trees, along the stream. They dreamed dreams. Mother too was excited by the possibilities. One evening we had a campfire by a bend in the stream and Father said it was a perfect spot to create a beach and to build cabins. He talked of an auditorium, pointing to the area behind the stables, beside the swimming pool.

  “A centre for Christian music. What do you think? James? Meredith?”

  “Whatever Shelby says shall be,” Mother quipped happily.

  And so it was. The whirlwind toiled and rallied and preached, the women held bake sales and bazaars, the fund-raising committee applied to foundations for grants, the Hobbses organized concerts in which the Shelby family was always featured, and the money rolled in. The new auditorium was built beside the judge’s stone mansion and connected to it by a glazed walkway. The rector’s warden donated a grand piano. The local band led the townspeople in a parade to an all-day picnic which was held on the grounds. In the evening, my best friend, Janice, and I stood in the lobby of the auditorium, handing out song sheets. We both thought Constance and James Hobbs, tall and elegant, were the most beautiful couple we’d ever seen, Constance laughing and dancing. We followed them about, eager to be of use.

  “Make a joyful noise, oh all ye saints,” Father called out to the people. “If you can weep, if you can laugh, if you can shout, you can sing.” And the singing that followed was directed to heaven.

  It was an evening of improvisation and harmony, choral music, pieces by the band. Charlie and Father played a sparkling trumpet duet that brought the crowd roaring to its feet. The United Church minister, who was on the platform along with other dignitaries, made a moving personal and public confession.

  “When I look out at this magnificent accomplishment, I am ashamed of the envy that found its way into my heart. Judge Grantham was right to entrust his land to this visionary in our midst.”

  Father, with tears in his eyes, walked up to the microphone and embraced his former rival. Mother, who was in the wings with Charlie and me, took a handkerchief out of her handbag and dabbed the corners of her eyes.

  In the following months, the ordinary people of Juniper began to discover within themselves extraordinary qualities of musicality. “A community touched by grace,” one commentator said. Father played recordings of “Songs of the People” on his radio programme and announced, “The Juniper Centre of healing through music has opened its doors.”

  One by one, from cities and from other towns, the curious, the tone-deaf, musicians, choir leaders and those in search of spiritual direction came to learn and stayed to serve, attracted by Father and by Constance and James Hobbs. More than one visitor commented, “This is a foretaste of heaven.”

  The theory was that the healing power of music was a two-way street. Lives overflowing with joy would find their most natural expression in communal song. Conversely, the activity of music would result in well-being. Song created health. Health created song. Instead of formal lessons, scales, arpeggios and drills, there was simply singing and singing and singing—playful songs, mournful songs, songs of praise, rounds, ballads, drones, chants. The centre was like a field of bubbles with music, the language of the heart, bursting out of windows and along corridors and in gatherings in the hills.

  The catalogue and brochures advertised programmes that included after-school events, musical therapy sessions and weekend retreats. Within two years, a dormitory was added to meet an increasing demand for space for weekend festivals and conferences. Also within that time a kitchen band and five singers who had begun with rather ordinary voices formed a travelling troupe and toured the country.

  One summer a journalist and photographer from a national magazine arrived. Charlie, puffed up with self-importance, was the official tour guide. Much of the article centred on an infant who had been found abandoned, and on the young waif of a mother, herself in need of mothering, who spent her days in therapy shouting and chanting and groaning. The photographer, who seemed to be in ten places at once, captured the large open play area populated by toddlers, volunteers and elderly people, two in wheelchairs, all playing drums and other rhythm-band instruments. There was also a shot of an agile grandmother who had climbed a rope ladder into an indoor “tree house” and was strumming a guitar while the infant rocked in a hammock beside her. The largest picture was of the round, recessed kitchen in the centre of the new dormitory with the cook who was quoted as saying she didn’t have a musical bone in her body, but she knew about food.

  It was almost half a year later that the story was published, but when it was out even the bishop called to congratulate Father. Uncle Jack brought over ten copies of the magazine.

  “You can’t deny that hundreds of people have been brought back to life. He’s been wonderful to people. Wonderful,” I said to Charlie and Eleanor during one of our many arguments.

  “He may be wonderful but ‘flowers that fester smell far worse than weeds,’ ” Eleanor said, misquoting Shakespeare. “Both healing and harm from the same pair of hands. It makes me crazy thinking about it.”

  “And what about Mother?” Charlie added. “Think about what it was like for her.”

  Yes. Mother was always there. And she stayed there at the very heart of the torment. At the time, when I first found out, I blamed her. So, also, did she.

  “It was my fault, my fault,” she said. Mother, sweet Mother, was as sensitive as a snail’s horns, and as unseeing. I now know that her cry was one of grief and madness.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Mother was lost that spring and I hadn’t understood. The Hobbses were in charge of the Centre. Charlie was away at university. Father was also, as usual those days, away, away—travelling to India and other countries in the Far East, travelling to Europe, with his trumpet and slides. He was on lecture tours. When he returned, he stayed home less than a month, then he was off again, visiting the newest Juniper Centre in the North.

  “Gypsies are gypsies,” Mother said wistfully. “It’s in his blood.”

  I’d see Mother going in and out of Charlie’s room, straightening it out, puffing up his pillows. Once I caught her at his door saying, “You didn’t turn off the light, Charlie.”

  “That was me, Mother,” I said.

  She looked startled. “Oh, how silly of me. Of course I know he’s not here, dear. I do miss our menfolk. Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said, but I was beginning to get used to it.

  Another time I heard her say, “You’re well and happy, aren’t you, Charlie? That’s all that matters, that’s all.”

  After school one afternoon, Mother told me a letter had come. The North needed Father. “Meredith, I cannot tell you how small and undernourished some children here are,” the letter said. “I am opening a public kitchen in the Centre.” Father would be staying away for half a year.

  “Six months! Oh Mother, how awful!”

  Uncharacte​ristically, she clutched me tight. “We’ll be all right, darling. We’ll manage.” Her voice broke as if she might cry but I dismissed the thought. Mother never cried.

  I wrote letters to Charlie and Father. I told them about high school and how different it was from junior high and about events at the Juniper Centre. I told them I wished they were home. I asked Father to send pictures. I wrote to my grandmother in England as well—the last
of my grandparents—telling her how much I missed Father.

  Charlie rarely wrote back. One time his girlfriend, Eleanor, sent a copy of the university magazine with a picture of Charlie, tall and blond and handsome, under a flowering tree. The caption read, “Rare Juniper Songbird Serenades Our Spring.” Mother laughed with delight.

  Father sent postcards with cryptic notes. “The tundra is bursting with wildflowers.” “Hope Paul and Terry [the visiting curate and deacon, who were in charge of the church in Father’s absence] are managing.”

  My friend Janice and I spent most of our time after school and on weekends at the Centre. We’d get on our bikes and pedal out to run errands for the Hobbses or to take care of the small children or to listen to the band practising or simply to join in some group singing. There were always four or five people experimenting with instruments and new songs and harmonies. And there were always, of course, the boys we’d bump into. We’d rank them on the basis of intelligence and talent and looks. Janice and I didn’t have much on our minds except boys and trying to look pretty and experimenting with orangeish lipstick and smearing gobs of Noxzema on our faces to fight our pimples, the deadliest enemies of all time. We’d talk about sex and where babies came from and what Janice’s mother told her about the facts of life. My mother said sex was something the animals did.

  In the summer, Granny Shelby gave me a ticket to England to visit her. It was the most exciting present I’d ever been given. “Wish I could go with you,” Janice said. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” we said in unison when we parted.

  England was good for my skin. It must have been the climate and the water and the slippery goo from Granny Shelby’s aloe plant. I returned in the middle of the summer holidays with pink cheeks and two jars of homemade aloe cream. Charlie and Mother were at the airport—Mother in her white summer hat, willowy and tall, and Charlie, even taller, beside her. As I walked towards them I thought how elegant they looked in contrast to the other people.

  Mother smiled and held out her arms. Charlie squeezed my shoulder and said, “How’s my high-flying kid sister?” Charlie was still Charlie although it was Christmas since I’d last seen him. The only difference was that his face looked cleaner now that he was shaving every day. He told me there was a surprise waiting at home and I played twenty questions all the way back and never guessed.

  When I walked in and saw Father, he didn’t get up. He didn’t move at all. He was sitting on a cot in his study. He seemed thinner and shrunken and older. My body’s first response was to jump up and rush to him, but the shock of seeing him so subdued stopped me.

  “You’re home!” I cried and stayed where I was.

  Father’s eyes met mine for the briefest moment. His smile was weak and forced. Then he looked to Mother as if asking permission to speak.

  “Are you staying?” I asked, bewildered.

  His eyes blinked rapidly.

  “Yes, he is,” Charlie said. Charlie was standing in the doorway, arms folded tightly across his chest, feet astride, nostrils flaring slightly the way they did when he had something difficult on his mind.

  “Father’s not well,” Mother said softly. “We mustn’t tire him, Millicent.” She took my hand and tried to lead me out of the room. I resisted.

  “You’re ill?” I had never seen him so downtrodden, so not in charge.

  Charlie cleared his throat and walked out to the hall. Mother put her arm around my shoulder. “No questions, Millicent. Not today.” She was strangely intense as she pulled me forcefully from the room.

  Before I went to sleep that first night home, she sat on the edge of my bed for a long time, holding my hand, patting my hand. “You’re all right, darling, aren’t you? You’re all right.” She told me that Father had come back suddenly. He’d sent a telegram, but he’d arrived before she’d received it. He was suffering from an enlarged heart. He’d been working too hard.

  “You mean he had a heart attack? Why isn’t he in the hospital?”

  Mother glanced away and didn’t reply.

  Father was definitely and deeply changed. But he was still the person I loved more than anyone else on earth. I would go beyond world’s end for him. I would do anything. But it seemed that in Father’s eyes I had become a non-person.

  “I wish I could think of important things to say to Father,” I wrote in my diary. “Maybe then he’d talk to me.”

  The Juniper Centre had been a second home for all of us but now we no longer went there. In just one month my world had completely altered. It was as if I’d left an evergreen forest of brooks and wildflowers and happiness and while I was away some raging fire had destroyed it all. Day had become night. At home, I felt a steady unseen rain of ashes. Father hardly left the study.

  “Is he going to get better, Mother? Will he be like he used to be?”

  “We hope so.”

  Mother was, as always but more so now, showering her attentions on my big brother Charlie, my newly unbearable big brother Charlie. They were together all that summer, Mother and Charlie, Charlie and Mother, huddled with their whisperings, their sudden silences when I appeared. They had always been close. Now they were inseparable. Whatever Charlie said, whatever Mother said, the other would repeat like an echo.

  “It isn’t too much, Millicent, to expect you to clean up after yourself,” Mother would say. And Charlie would say mockingly, “Yes, Millicent, you could clean up after yourself.”

  “Make sure there are no stains on the glasses.”

  “Or the plates.”

  “Or the plates. And do not raise your voice, young lady. You are a child of God.”

  “Remember that.”

  These bits of soot floated about in an atmosphere of nagging, of unpleasantness, of criticism.

  Mealtimes were utterly cheerless. I would take Father’s dinner on a tray to his study, then Mother and Charlie and I would eat in the kitchen as we had been so used to doing in Father’s absences. Now, as always, the old alliances were being forged in petty domestic wars and kitchen chores. I was a sloppy, slaphappy Shelby. Charlie was a Hunter. Charlie belonged with Mother and Uncle Jack. Brusque Uncle Jack said this quite openly and Mother, rather than rebuking him, seemed pleased. “I do agree he takes after us, Jack. He’s quite like you in some ways.”

  More than once I grew faint at the table. More than once I fled to my room. Charlie Jr. was obviously perfect. Millicent had to be perfected. Even the cherished realm of music suffered under the new regime. Where once I had played for the sheer joy of it, I was now required to practise the boring Hanon exercises, endless scales, chords, arpeggios. Technique became all-important and an end in itself. It was a complete reversal of the Juniper Centre model. If I complained, Mother would sit me down in the living room, open the Bible and make me read. Then she would begin her lectures on the sins of anger and impatience and disobedience.

  It’s only now that it occurs to me that Mother, with her unrelenting disapproval, may have been expressing to me what she could not express to Father. The praying and Bible reading and instructions in humility were interminable. She would not release me unless I apologized to Charlie and to herself. I would run weeping with rage to my room and stay until I felt somewhat restored. But when at last I reappeared, the lectures would begin again.

  I was thoroughly wretched. I desperately needed Father, my old ally. I needed my friends. But inexplicably, Janice was now not welcome and I was not to go out.

  “Why not, Mother?”

  “Because we may be moving, Millicent. You’ll need to sort out your things.”

  “Yes, sort out all your crazy things.”

  “Moving? Really? Where to?”

  “We don’t know yet. We’re waiting for a letter.”

  “What letter? From whom?”

  “You ask too many questions, Millicent.”

  “Millicent, stop asking so many questions.”

  I would not stop asking questions. “Why can’t I see Janice? What’s wrong with
it? It’s not fair.” I hounded Charlie through the house. “What are you and Mother always whispering about?” I became the phantom of the hallways. I pretended to fall asleep on the couch hoping to eavesdrop. But the house was eerily quiet and for the first time in my life it was songless—no gathering around the piano, no choir members humming through the coming-and-going hallways.

  Charlie, more bookish than he used to be, stayed in his room much of the time, reading, writing, sorting through papers, packing his books and trophies. Occasionally I’d hear him blasting a few notes on his trumpet and then he’d stop.

  I was alarmed by the mysteriousness of it all. I tried to ask Father what it was about but he mumbled non-answers. “Go and help your mother, dear.” He looked strangely injured and vacant, and at times he seemed cowed like a beaten dog, his eyes so oddly beseeching I could not bear it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  And then one afternoon, about a week before Charlie was to go back to university, the front doorbell rang as it seldom did those days. A delegation stood there—Mr. Grasser, the church warden, Mr. Stevenson, the rector’s warden, the Hobbses from the Juniper Centre. Charlie, his head high and defiant, ushered them into the study where Father and Mother waited, their eyes glancing nervously at each other.

  I tried to listen at the door. Charlie crept upstairs to his room, which was directly over the study. I tiptoed after him. He opened the damper of the heating grate and put his head flat against it. I wanted the corner of the grate but he waved me aside.

  “Blasted lies,” he hissed at one point.

  “Let me listen.”

  “Get lost, Millicent.”

  The next day I was about to come into the kitchen and I heard Mother say, “But he is your father, Charlie. Please don’t blame him. For my sake. If you love me—”

  “But they were saying such heinous things.”

  “What is it about Father?” I asked coming into the room.

 

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