The Rain Ascends

by Joy Kogawa

  My mother, my elegant, dignified mother, was herself a motherless child. She was in an orphanage for a while. She did tell me that much. But I never discovered until after she died that she and Uncle Jack were illegitimate children. Father mentioned it in a casual comment as if it was something he thought I knew.

  “Mother’s parents were not married?” I repeated in surprise. I could hardly believe that she would have kept that truth from me. What other secrets, I wondered, were locked away in her lonely grave. Perhaps the stigma of her illegitimacy was what had sent her away from England.

  I met her father, Grandfather Hunter, once when he visited us. I was four years old. Grandfather was a formidable man. He was able to catch sparrows with his bare hands. He cooked stews and baked and sewed and built furniture. He was able to find his way through the trees and over the hills without getting lost.

  Mother was cool and polite towards her father. Uncle Jack was not. Grandfather wanted his offspring to return to England. We didn’t go. Mother said Grandfather had a fierce temper. It’s what had driven her mother away, she said.

  Anger, for Mother, was the unpardonable sin. “You must say you are sorry, Millicent,” she would say softly, bending over and taking my hands if I shouted in frustration. “You must not raise your voice.”

  Mother’s childhood memories were all sad. She was three and Uncle Jack was two when they were left with strangers.

  “You were babies!” I said. “How could your mother do that?”

  “She had no choice,” Mother said.

  Mother’s loneliness was profound. Once, while she was still at the orphanage, her mother came to visit and brought her a gift. Her father, enraged, made her return it.

  Charlie and I always knew that Mother was not a person who could receive gifts—not our drawings from school, or the crafts we made at the Juniper Centre, not birthday cards, not Christmas presents. Everything we ever gave her was unused and wrapped and put away, quietly, without ceremony, without comment.

  Eleanor was baffled by Mother but undeterred. She diligently brought the most thoughtful gifts and could not understand when Mother, who always thanked her formally, would then put the gift away. It was one of the things Mother did that I found embarrassing.

  “I think your mother is quite strange, Charlie,” Eleanor said once. “Quite aggressively strange.”

  About five Christmases ago, when Mother was very feeble, I wanted to use a beautiful casserole dish—one of Eleanor and Charlie’s many gifts hidden away in one of her closets.

  She was surprisingly coherent, sitting up in her bed. “I keep it wrapped that way, Millicent—you may wonder why—but it’s because love is there,” she said. “Love is in that present.” Until that moment, I had not understood that gifts were too precious to touch. They were icons. If I had known, I would have given her the world. I would have given her my heart.

  There were so many things I never understood about Mother. In the year of Father’s fall, she was a ship hit by lightning. But no one told me. The water was pouring in. She had to find a way to stay afloat. She clawed at her daughter. She clung to her son.

  My estrangement from her lasted her entire lifetime. I did not like her—the dead weight of her unhappiness. I do not like the dead weight of my own. Claws, Mother. I still need to claw my way out of the ocean depths. How many of us are down here in the silent waters, curled up into ourselves with our untellable tales? I can barely scrape my way along the ocean floor and over the small bodies strewn about like undecipherable hieroglyphics.

  What are the names, Father? What was killed in each one?

  CHAPTER TEN

  In the end, Mother and Father and I stayed in Juniper. The letter we had awaited, the letter from the bishop that would tell us our fate, came about a month after Charlie left. Father took the envelope into his study, where he had been lying on his cot for weeks, staring at the ceiling, and closed the door. Minutes later, he called for Mother. When they emerged, Mother put her arm around me and said, “Father is going to see the bishop, Millicent.”

  “What for?”

  “To see what God wants us to do.”

  That was all she said. Father drove to Calgary the following week. When he came back, I stood beside Mother as she took his hat from him and hung it on the coat tree in the entrance. She held her thin hands to her throat as she waited for him to speak. He did not look at her. He smiled wanly at me. Then Mother and Father disappeared into the study and the door was closed again.

  I learned later that day that the bishop, in his wisdom, had decided that Father was to go on a retreat for a month to the mountains. After that, Father saw the bishop once more and we were permitted to remain at Juniper.

  “We are in a time of testing,” Mother said. “In such times, we are to cling to God. The more punishing life is, the more we must cling.”

  Mother ascended to a life of prayer. I would come home from school to find her at the kitchen table, the Bible open and passages underlined in red beside her. More often she was in church, kneeling at the railing, hands across her chest, eyes lifted to the empty gold cross in the centre of the altar. She read devotional books. She became a devotee of the Christian mystic Sadhu Sundar Singh.

  As soon as Father was back from his month of solitude and prayer, Sunday services resumed, but the people, except for loyal Mr. Stevenson, no longer came. Most of the congregation joined the United Church. The Anglican stalwarts drove thirty miles to the Anglican church at Cuthberton. Where once our church had been bouncing with a choir, Sunday school and a constant stream of people, there were now times when only Mother and I were in the pews, walking up to the dark oak railing, kneeling to receive the wafer and the wine. Father, attired in his black and white robes, would stand at the lectern or in the pulpit against the dark walls beneath the stained-glass window, reading the prayers and lessons, giving the sermon, announcing the hymns, his voice ringing out over the absent choir, the absent congregation. Mother played the organ, singing as loudly as she could. I chanted the responses. Together, we three were imposing the order of sound, a sound order, over our abandoned lives. The Lord’s Prayer. The Magnificat. The Nicene Creed.

  “ ‘The peace of the Lord be always with you.’ ”

  “ ‘And with thy spirit.’ ”

  Every Sunday began with early morning holy communion at eight, then morning prayer at ten-thirty, evensong at seven. My knees were sore from too much kneeling.

  Mrs. Stevenson, the wife of the rector’s warden, attended services a few times with her husband, but during Father’s sermons she would take out her Bible and ostentatiously read to herself, her lips moving silently. She had stopped her ears.

  One Sunday Mr. Stevenson brought Mrs. Parker, an elderly widow who couldn’t keep driving to Cuthberton. Father wept when he saw her. “God bless you, Mavis,” he said, taking her arthritic hands in his.

  Father gradually came back to himself. He read Norman Vincent Peale. He dwelt on the positive. Occasionally we received visitors from out of town who knew nothing about the scandal and his full-bodied laughter was there again, warm as sunshine. But we never went back to the Juniper Centre. The “community touched by grace” no longer included us.

  Father and Mother found their new ministry elsewhere, among the sick and the old and the destitute. They visited “the fatherless and widows in their affliction.” Mother was practical in her compassion. She took food. She swept floors. Father went to court with criminals and stood by their families. He wrote letters on their behalf. Our home became a hostel for the homeless and travellers, and people were coming and going in the halls once more.

  “It is well, it is well with my soul,” Father and Mother sang.

  I believed them. But Charlie did not. Charlie, whose defence of Father had been so forthright and vocal that terrible summer, turned from him the following year. He walked away from Juniper, from us and from the church. He switched his entire allegiance to Eleanor, truthful, courageous Eleanor, w
ho was three years older and a decade more mature than he was. If Eleanor had not been such a strong believer in family ties, we might have lost Charlie altogether.

  They were married in a small brick church in Eleanor’s home parish of St. Chad’s. All of Eleanor’s Edmonton relatives came out in force—her parents, an aunt, her two brothers and their wives and children. Her younger sister, Stephannie, came all the way back from Sweden to be the bridesmaid. Throughout the ceremony, Stephannie’s mischievous little toddler, Martin, was prancing about making a nuisance of himself. Father caught him as he ran past down the aisle and carried him outside. Stephannie glanced back gratefully.

  Mother’s tight smile throughout the wedding was a mask. Charlie, the light of her life, was now taking all his cues from Eleanor.

  It may have been around this time that Father began to create his own publicity. As the applause he craved no longer rained down upon him, he began his own campaign of confetti, paper praises, self-congratulations. Boasting increasingly dominated his conversations. He wrote articles trumpeting his past glories and successes which I had to take down to the local paper, the Juniper Sentinel. I dropped them off hurriedly at the counter, but Mrs. Paulie, the publisher’s wife, was almost always there and I thought she looked at me with pity.

  The items were usually printed and Father would read them and seem satisfied.

  “Oh, people are so good to me. So good to me,” he’d chuckle to any and all who would listen. He’d invite strangers to dinner and prattle on endlessly. He may have been egocentric before, but I had never noticed.

  In Charlie’s presence, however, Father became a submissive, ghostly man. Even the most innocent thing he might say was greeted by Charlie with sarcasm and scorn. One Christmas we were at Charlie and Eleanor’s place and Eleanor’s father offered him a glass of wine.

  “Oh, that would be wasted on me, I’m afraid,” he said. “I don’t drink. I’ve never imbibed alcohol, you know. Never smoked. Not once.”

  “Oh sure,” Charlie scoffed. “You’re so pure, Father.”

  Eleanor’s father coughed with embarrassment. When Father tried to change the subject and talk about one of his trips, Charlie cut him short again. “The travels of the prodigal father,” he jeered.

  Father offered no defence. He was always on Charlie’s side, even when it was against himself.

  “Charlie is right. I am a weak man.”

  I saw Father as King David, crying out after his traitorous son. “Oh Absalom, my son, my son.”

  He was always giving Charlie gifts, large and generous gifts beyond anything he ever gave Mother or me, including the down payment for a car and his tuition at university. He offered to publish Charlie’s thesis on sects and cults in Western Canada. One time when Father was still in recovery from an appendectomy he went to Charlie—King David on his knees, crawling to his favourite child, the beautiful one, his hardhearted son. I wept for Father. I railed against my brother. I accused him of not being able to forgive.

  “Forgiveness is everything,” I said. “It’s what we’re here for.”

  “If you want to be biblical about that,” Charlie replied in his churchy voice, “it’s the powerful who are enjoined to forgive the weak. It’s not the other way around. The rich forgive the poor. The poor have debts. The king’s subjects don’t forgive the king. It’s not your place to forgive Father.”

  “Well I don’t care what you say. I do forgive him.”

  “That’s not forgiveness. You’re his child. It’s bondage.”

  “No it isn’t. It’s love.”

  “Love without truth,” Eleanor shot back, “is a cheap sentiment.”

  “But what I feel isn’t cheap!” I cried. “And anyway, Father isn’t the king. He’s the weak one. You’re the king, Charlie. Can’t you see that? You’re stronger.”

  As Father became more and more servile to Charlie, I worked harder. I bought cards full of extravagant praises. “Happy Birthday to the world’s most wonderful father.” I pleaded with Charlie to be more kind. I reasoned. I begged. “Think about what the Juniper Centre means. All that music. All that fun. Think about how many kids and whole families have been brought alive.”

  Never once did Father say a negative word to or about his son. When I criticized Charlie, Father would say, quietly, “He has your mother’s soul, dear,” or “Charlie is the light of my life.” I didn’t stop to wonder what that made me. I just wanted the happiness back.

  In spite of my best efforts, I watched Father deteriorate. His bragging betrayed the storyteller within who told him opposite truths. He wanted to drown out Charlie’s voice. So did I.

  Charlie and Eleanor increasingly absented themselves from our family gatherings and rarely drove down to Juniper. When on occasion they did come, the tension was unrelieved—Charlie scorning Father, Mother fawning over Charlie, Eleanor enduring it all.

  Mother was also deteriorating. At times she was quite odd. During one of their visits, Charlie and Eleanor came down with Stephannie and her rambunctious little Martin. Stephannie, who was getting a divorce, wanted to be a free spirit and travel all over the world. It seemed she was trying to bring up her son to be at home anywhere.

  “He’s quite comfortable sleeping on buses or planes. He’s quite well adjusted,” she said, smiling and kissing his nose. “Isn’t he, my little Marchinsky?”

  I had my doubts. He was the most demanding child I’d ever seen, the only four-year-old I knew who constantly asked to be carried.

  We had barely sat down for dinner—Martin was picking out all the carrots from the vegetable soup—when Mother suddenly said, “Let them go home now, Father. Isn’t it time they returned home? We should let them go, dear.” And she began clearing the table, her mouth wrinkled shut.

  Eleanor flushed red. Stephannie looked at Mother curiously.

  “Please sit down, Mother,” I said.

  Charlie grimaced and kept eating. Charlie and I had been arguing about Father, who was planning to go off again on another trip—back to India and the Far East, the Philippines, Indonesia. Father was under the bishop’s orders to travel with Mother but, bishop’s orders or no bishop’s orders, Father intended to travel alone. I urged him to do so. I knew that was what he wanted. I was the only one to support him.

  “Slay the fiction,” my Goddess has said.

  Once upon a time my mother was the perfect clergy-wife. I believe what broke her spirit in the end, more than anything Father did, was Charlie’s rejection. Perhaps her two main fictions of a devoted son and her husband, “a good man,” could no longer be maintained.

  Once upon a time I believed that Father, in his travels, was serving God. That was what he said he had to do. And since I did not have in my possession God’s Book of Days, I could not know what terrible harm was being done by him in the North or in the Far East, or how many boys there were or what he did to them.

  We walk through life having to slay so many of our cherished beliefs. Too often our truths turn out to be lies, the evidence does not stand, facts no longer support our stories, and we find ourselves adrift, without guidance, without comfort and searching for stars in a starless night.

  The Goddess herself may be just another fiction, arising out of dream and desperation. Or she may be beyond fiction. I cannot say. But I shall not slay the hope that lies within me that I may find the power of mercy and the pathway to the abundant life. Along the way I am to sweep aside the temporary structures where I have lived for too long. My old house of lies is to perish, that a new and better house may be built.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The new and better house of my adolescence was a house made of clouds. Reading back in my diaries, I can trace my frantic efforts to keep from crashing on the rocks below as the Shelbys fell from grace. I had been flung from a place of high regard, from a right and wrong, clearly marked world, and was floundering in outer space. I was scraping the skies. I had few tools with which to construct a shelter of reality in that sudden coldness. Out
of the ether and the airwaves I manufactured my secret house of solace. I lit my fictive light and warmed my heart. Blessed fantasy, blessed fiction, blessed denial that enabled me to survive.

  I was barely fifteen when the lightning and earthquake first struck and the crack in my foundation walls appeared. I was sickly that year. I finally understood the snickering. I missed weeks of school. I developed the habit of walking rapidly, books clutched to my chest, eyes on the ground. I did poorly in my grades. I was then and still am today terrified of the aftershock that could bring our entire house down.

  “Don’t talk about it,” a voice within me still says. “It’s too dangerous.” If the hatred, if the atavistic rage that is out there in the world erupts, if the hounds are set loose, Father will not survive. Neither will I. As I watch the news these days, I shudder at the media spectacle as one old man after another is dragged from the safety of his anonymity to face the stoning. No one is more loathed today, inside or outside of prison, than the pedophile.

  Once upon a time I discovered a beam of moondust and followed its pale light to a make-believe world so compelling that it took me years to emerge from its spell.

  It began with the utmost subtlety—with the sounds of coughing or throat clearing, with the slide of a desk or chair or shoes on the classroom floor, with the colours of shirts and blouses, with a piece of paper crumpled into a ball and tossed into a wastebasket. Every tiny bit of evidence became the stuff of secret communication.

  He was real. His name was Stewart Barton. He was the smartest student in the grade ten class. He sat three rows across and two seats in front of me. He wasn’t handsome but he was brilliant. He wore glasses and his small round ears stuck out of the sides of his head like little toadstools. From the back I knew when he was embarrassed because his ears would grow red.