by Joy Kogawa
“Lurk, lurk,” Charlie snarled. “Always lurking about.”
“Father is feeling very, very badly,” Mother said. “He has a bad heart and we mustn’t make things harder for him. Now, no more questions.”
The day before Charlie was to leave, I was helping him stack his boxes along his empty bookcases when the front doorbell rang again. Charlie and I leapt to the top of the stairs to see who had arrived this time.
The two church wardens, thin Mr. Grasser with his hat in his hands and kindly Mr. Stevenson, entered. Mother, looking flustered and patting her hair into place, led them to the study.
Once again, Charlie’s head was flat against the heating grate. Once again, his hand impatiently waved me away. Then suddenly he scrambled to his feet, bumping into his desk, knocking over a stiff bouquet of yellow pencils in a marmalade jar. He ignored the loud crash. He brought down a box of books and tipped it over, pouncing upon the familiar blue Book of Common Prayer, the chunky version with the hymns at the back.
I followed him as he descended the stairs, riffling through the pages. He marched directly into the study, the book open in his hands.
“Sir.” Charlie nodded to Mr. Stevenson, and said curtly to Mr. Grasser, “Sir, I apologize for interrupting. But I wanted to point out….” He sounded pompous, and I could see the frown of annoyance on Mr. Grasser’s face.
“It’s all right, laddie,” Mr. Stevenson said.
Charlie barely paused. “Article twenty-six,” he said, pointing out the articles of religion at the back of the prayer-book section. He held the book in front of Mr. Grasser, who reluctantly took out his reading glasses.
“The ruling is here.” Charlie’s finger underlined the words as he read. “ ‘Of the unworthiness of ministers which hinders not the effects of the Sacrament.’ ” He looked at Mr. Grasser and repeated triumphantly, “ ‘…hinders not.’ The sacraments are not affected, according to this, do you see?” Charlie’s voice was getting louder and more aggressive as he read on. “ ‘Although in the visible Church, the evil be ever mingled with the good, and sometimes the evil have chief authority in the Ministration of the Word and Sacraments, yet forasmuch as they do not the same in their own name, but in Christ’s’—but in Christ’s—‘and do minister by his commission and authority, we may use their ministry, both in hearing the Word of God, and in receiving the sacraments. Neither is the effect of Christ’s ordinance taken away….’ ”
Father was wincing under Charlie’s pontificating. Both the wardens had always liked our family, dropping in frequently for tea and cookies. They seemed to find the whole display pathetic.
Mr. Stevenson cleared his throat when Charlie was done and said quietly, “It’s in the bishop’s hands now, my boy. I have written a letter asking that our dear priest be permitted to stay on. We’re discussing the matter right now. Your father has confessed. He has repented. And it’s an exercise now in forgiveness that faces us all.”
The people’s warden frowned. “I don’t know, Stevenson, that we can presume upon the mercies of the people….”
I was halfway in the room, expecting at any moment to be asked to leave, embarrassed by Charlie’s tone of voice, and wondering what all this had to do with Father’s heart condition.
Mother was the one who eventually told me about it. She didn’t look at me. I had asked the questions one after the other until she gave the answers in one-word sentences. And then her mouth went small and tight and she sucked her lips in as if she would have taken the words back and swallowed them whole if she could. “It was my fault, my fault.” She straightened herself, then drew back slightly at an angle, like a large tree leaning before it falls.
It was my Mother, I now know, who kept the world from imploding altogether—Mother, down through the years, her golden hair growing silvery, her porcelain skin becoming translucent, her clear blue eyes clouding. She, single-handed, with her unrelenting lifelong dignity, kept the stars from plummeting out of the sky.
I have found my diary entry for the day and it says I will never read the page again, I will never return to that day.
The house I built from that point on was made of wallpaper and paint. So much veneer. Mother helped. She did not once attempt to blow the walls down. We never ever talked of it again. Not once. And I now see that over the years, following that heart-numbing moment, my life’s energies began to move differently. I no longer truly lived. I had begun to pretend my life. And I was never safe again. Everything I did was an effort to keep the roof from caving in. I feared any hint of inspection. I knew that the townsfolk, the neighbours, whoever might find out, would declare our home unfit. And henceforth and to this day I have lived in a world of fiction, so massively constructed that I have believed it at times to be safe.
It hasn’t been hard to maintain the façade. For over four decades, we, the proud and proper Shelbys, have somehow conspired to keep the closet door tightly shut. When we enter our house of cards, we tiptoe about, not breathing, not whispering, making only the safest whitest sounds, like the happy sounds at Christmas—the jingling of bells, the singing of carols. Carol sweetly carol.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“I couldn’t sleep, Father.”
I have been staying awake for too many nights, listening to the termites nibbling at the paper walls. My brittle arms can no longer hold up the roof. I’ve been trying so hard to speak to Father. With each failed effort the weight of silence grows. Some days I feel I can hardly move at all—one foot in the slough of loathing, the other in the glue of love. I’m stuck. I’m wretched with knowing and not knowing.
It’s strange how difficult it can be to manage a simple direct question. I sometimes come right up to the door. I put the key in the lock but I cannot turn it. The questions are stuck in my throat. I cannot say the words, even to myself. It’s like being afraid of jumping into the water, being afraid of drowning and of choking and being dizzy and ill and never being able to take the words back again.
It must have been the same for Mother, that day after my conversation with Janice. It was months after Charlie had got in his parting shot on behalf of Father and had returned to university. I was in school again. We were, it seemed, not moving. At least, not right away.
After school on the first day back, Janice pounced on me. “What did you have? Measles? Mumps? Chicken pox?”
“What are you talking about? I wasn’t sick.”
“Oh. My mom said you were. I thought that’s why you couldn’t come out.”
“No. I was packing. We’re moving, I think. Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“Is it really awful at your place?”
I frowned. How could Janice know anything? “What do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Mom says there are awful things going on at your place.”
“Like what? What awful things?”
“She didn’t say.”
Then Sonia came up and whispered in Janice’s ear and they went off together. “She’s not your best friend any more,” Sonia called over her shoulder.
“I don’t care,” I shouted back. I walked home as fast as I could. I hated them both.
Sonia and Janice were on their way to the Juniper Centre. I ached to go and see Constance Hobbs and have a groaning session with her. Janice and I used to go sometimes and groan our hearts out until we collapsed in giggles. But Mother said I had to come home immediately after school every single day and help her with chores—her ridiculous chores—cleaning out cupboards, washing an already clean floor.
She must have known I would hear about it eventually from someone at school, someone who would be unkind. Her anxiety must have been severe.
Janice told me one day that she knew Father was sick. “My mother says he’s contagious. I’m not supposed to stand too close to you.”
“What sickness does he have, Mother?” I asked. “It isn’t just his heart, is it? Janice’s mother said—”
“Janice’s mother?”
&
nbsp; “Said that Father has a sickness.”
And Mother, who had her hands in the sink, turned away and said nothing. I persisted.
“Tell me what it is and I’ll look it up in the library at school. I’ll ask the science teacher. If you don’t tell me, Mother, I’ll go and ask Janice’s mother.”
Mother stopped then and her eyes were closed, as if she was praying. Then she took her hands covered with suds out of the sink and wiped them on her apron. She turned to face me but she wouldn’t look in my eyes. She stared at the floor and her face became rigid, her mouth strangely twisted, tight and down. She uttered one word, flinging it from her as if it were a stinging insect.
“Sex.”
“Sex?” I asked, completely nonplussed.
Her face of stone did not change as she kept her eyes averted.
“What do you mean—sex?”
She breathed in sharply and whispered one more word.
“Boys.”
For a second her eyes grew large and there was deep shock in her face as if she could not believe what she had said.
I stared at her, waiting, trying to understand. Then I turned and walked away. I was bewildered. I went into the living room, where everything was just a bit tidier than it usually was, the big leather armchair where Father read the Bible, and the record player and the music albums against the wall, his trumpet on top of the upright piano, the long coffee table that had often been covered with his books and magazines. I went past the velvet drapes into the dining room and glanced into the crowded study-library-studio where Father lay on a cot covered in a quilt and a red and green afghan. He looked at me as if he knew that I knew. His face was tormented.
I couldn’t think. I didn’t really know what the two words together meant.
Sex.
Boys.
I tiptoed upstairs to my room and closed the door softly. I took my diary, my confidante, out of the desk drawer, unlocked it with the tiny key and opened to the blank page. I filled my Parker 51 pen that Charlie had given me with blue-black Waterman’s ink. My handwriting was erratic, the tall letters spiked and craggy, the round letters cramped.
Dear Diary. Dearest, dearest Diary. Here is a page I will never again peruse….
There, Eleanor, I have said the words now. I have remembered what Mother told me and what Charlie said the following year—that Father was found out by two priests at the new northern Juniper Centre. I have written it all down in plain words here today in a way that I was unable to do then. I have lifted the lid of Pandora’s box. Look at all the imps jumping with the tension of forty years’ silence. They are mad with energy. Let us out! Let us out! Now that you have taken this tiny step, find out more and more. Learn, by the fly on the wall, what exactly he did. Find out, if you can, what happened to the boys. Exorcise the demon. Talk about it. Tell your friends. Declare out loud from the rooftops these things that were hidden.
Your father, say it Millicent, say it out loud—your father is a child molester. Your father is a pedophile or a pederast. Your father, your beloved father, whom you have loved more than life, is an utterly hypocritical degenerate.
In the days of his faithful ministry your dear father lusted after boys. “Boys,” Mother said. They were children, then. He violated them. He silenced them. He lied to them. He betrayed them. In the secret of his days and nights, he stole the souls of the unsuspecting young and devoured them. Then boldly, in the clear light of the new day, with his white cleric’s collar under his black priest’s shirt, with his sign of holiness visible for all to see, he got in his car, on the train, on the plane and travelled on to other Juniper Centres, to small churches hidden in the hinterlands, to countries far away, preaching the Word of God, blowing his trumpet, as trusted servant, as priest, as visionary, as glutton, whose God was his belly. How often, Father? How many boys? How old were they?
Across the landscape the clamorous shouting puts the birds to flight. “Away with him! Away with him!” The people versus Barnabas Shelby. Here he lies, exposed to the skies, my father, my lamb, my Isaac. And over there beside him stands ancient Abraham at the impossible altar, frozen as in a painting, his eyes to heaven, his obedient pen raised in his foreverness of faith.
I can no more proclaim this truth than a stone can weep. Father is not Isaac and I am not Abraham at all but another biblical character, light-footed Jonah the coward, in flight from the task, leaping onto the ship bound for Tarshish—Jonah on the run, warning his shipmates he is hiding from God, hiding from the truth, terrified of he knows not what. He is crawling down to the belly of the boat. Oh, let him rather sleep. Let us return to the days when we proud Shelbys lived in the light, when we walked down the streets with our heads unbowed, when there was respect, sweet respect.
The density of the fog makes me dizzy. Everywhere around the ship, the nightmare is storming. In the middle of the tossing comes Eleanor, in the middle of the daily news is yet another story, in the middle of the uproar, so the Bible story goes, Jonah’s shipmates come to wake him.
“What meanest thou, O sleeper? Arise, call upon thy God….”
The facts give us no choice. Jonah himself knows it’s the only way. For the sake of our shipmates, for the safety of society, in the name of truth we are thrown willy-nilly overboard where the large fish of mythology comes swimming along, swimming along to swallow us whole. The truth must be served, the truth must be endured, the truth must be told.
Here, now, we are crouching for three days and three nights in the belly of a cold fish. This is a place of waiting where there is no light on the topic at hand. Here in the world of the damned, by the dead desk, by the dead pen, there is only one word that can save us. Mercy. Mercy, dear God, in this cold and static place. Where Mercy dwells, there my heart’s safety lies. Therefore do I seek her. Justice you can keep for a world that turns in time. For the sake of the saint that resides within him, let there yet be mercy for the criminal.
Did not Abraham bargain with God over Sodom and Gomorrah? “Wilt Thou really sweep away good and bad together?” Abraham dared to ask. “Far be it from Thee to do this—to kill good and bad together. Suppose there are fifty good men in the city? May I presume to speak to the Lord, dust and ashes that I am: suppose there are five short of the fifty—suppose thirty—suppose ten?” Suppose, dear God, that only ten per cent of Father is good?
Time is, as they say, running out. Time runs out of the mouth of the fish and the air in the belly grows thin. You have to get to the island before he dies. You have to obtain the sentence before it’s too late.
As you sit begging in the dampness by the white bones of this large fish, you can hear a faint rustling sound, a bleating, a twig snapping. The ram, the sacrificial, ever-present ram, is stirring in the thicket of your mind and beckoning you to turn away from the harshness of a blood hungry sky.
“Blessed and timely ram, what is your name?”
“My name is Fiction. I am your fiction.”
Thus is the name of the ram revealed by the Merciful One. Where the will to truth meets the will not to harm, a struggling fiction is found, trapped in the thicket and the brambles and the dense underbrush. By the sword of your pen, you are to slay your lifelong lies, your necessary deceptions, your subterfuge and inventions. You will grope among small white stones and through a house of bones, until you find your way to Mercy’s throne.
And so, faint-heartedly, blindly, your body crawls across the floor, up to the desk, your hand crawls across the page, your white cane waves in the air, you tap your way a letter at a time in little blue luminous words on your portable computer, line by line onto the slippery screen, onto the blank paper walls.
CHAPTER NINE
There is a story of mercy that has come out of South America in recent years—a story of a good man and his torturer.
Torture. One hears that word screaming down through the ages. We are a species that does strange things.
The story is that the tables were turned and the tortured and his to
rturer exchanged places. The evil man was imprisoned. The good man he had tormented became his captor. Newly in power, the good and righteous man ordered the torturer to be brought forth. And here is the difference between depravity and glory. As the cowering prisoner was dragged terrified from his cell, his former victim embraced him, he kissed him, he freed him and he said these memorable words: “Thus do I take my revenge.”
This is a story writ large in two men’s lives. How much greater than the labour of the pen is the writing that is done on the parchment of our beings, on blood and bone and thought. While the foot still stays in the air, while the hand remains holding the knife, before the evil rides wildly over the streets, before it lurches over the hills and hangs itself from many trees, in the moment that goodness challenges wickedness, the telling word is written.
I do not recall the name of the merciful man. But I remember who told the story. It was Eleanor’s much-travelled sister, Stephannie, who had returned from a trip to South America. As she spoke, her lips trembled, her eyes filled with tears. She had brought blessed news from the south. Good news. Mercy was still in the world.
Once upon a time, so another story goes, a dying man looked upon his killers and said, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” The man in South America was following a tradition.
In spite of these stories, it is not the God of the patriarchs I am seeking today. The God of my father has been made manifest in too much deception. I am looking instead upon the faces of women, in their strong or haunted eyes, in their rage and sorrow. It is not Abraham’s but Sarah’s deeper love that draws me. Her hand is that of stronger memory. Old, old Sarah carries the children still to come through the long red cry.
The power of the feminine, at some point around the eighth to tenth centuries, I’m told, overtook the masculine, and Kuan Yin, the male deity of mercy, became commonly known as Kuan Yin or Kannon, the Goddess. How or why this happened, I can only guess. Perhaps it was recognized that mercy visits us poor, naked beasts most often in the faces of our mothers, imperfect though they too are—our mothers who look upon us with pity when we fall, our mothers who themselves, like the waif at the Juniper Centre, are so often in need of mothering.
