The Rain Ascends

by Joy Kogawa

  “Who?” Martin wanted to know.

  “Gamaliel. A man who had the decency to doubt. And he said, ‘Wait. Let’s not be too hasty in condemning Christians. Who knows? Maybe God’s on their side.’ Maybe Gamaliel would say, ‘Hold on folks. Why are we in this frenzy about sex and kids?’ ”

  Eleanor was aghast. “You can’t compare pedophiles to the early Christians. Really, Millicent!”

  “Well, I know, but….” I looked up at the sky and the yellowing leaves overhead. Eleanor wasn’t willing to entertain any doubt at all, but what could any mere mortal know with unwavering certainty?

  Eleanor turned to Martin. “Why don’t you tell her what you told me?”

  “What for?”

  “Because”—Eleanor lifted her hands, palms up in a gesture encouraging speech—“she has a right to know.” The look that passed between them as Martin shook his head told me enough.

  “You’re trying to tell me,” I said carefully, “that Father—that he—that he’s the one who….”

  “Yes,” Eleanor said. “He did molest Martin, and not only that…. There’s something else Martin should tell you.”

  Martin looked away. “He can tell her himself,” he said and turned on his heel. Eleanor hesitated, sighed, then stood up wearily and followed him.

  “Tell me what?” I called after them.

  She phoned me later from a motel. “The real harm to Martin was what it did to his mind. Can’t you hear him making a case for cannibalism?”

  “He must wear you out. What is it you wanted him to tell me?”

  Eleanor breathed in sharply. “Millicent, I’ve wondered about this. But I know I…. If it were me….” She was silent for a moment and I could hear Martin’s muffled voice in the background. Then she was back speaking to me, repeating my name, and I could hear her breathing unevenly as if she was trying hard to speak. Once or twice she took a deep gasping breath and I thought she was about to begin, but she didn’t.

  Next day she called me in the early afternoon from Edmonton, as I was in the shower. “When you don’t know something,” she was saying, “it’s like carrying around balls of sticky fuzz. Questions stick to the palms of your hands. But truth is firm. Truth makes all the gooey edges become solid and you can put the matter down and get on with other things. I have to know the truth about….”

  “Is this about Charlie? Are you still thinking that…?”

  “No. It’s about something Martin told me. Martin told me…. Are you sitting down? Sit down, Millie, because…because I….”

  “What is it, Eleanor? What are you trying to say?”

  “Millie. Oh Millicent….”

  As she spoke, sobbing and choking, I slid to the floor. I sat there and sat there and then I started dialling the long fourteen-digit number beginning 0 1 1 then 4 4 for England.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In the faraway island of Dr. Moreau, the years went by and the years went by and the king’s daughter spent her time by the silent stream with the countless gnats that twirled and swirled and spiralled about. She drifted more and more into sleep, into a world of dream and shadow where her father was once again upright, unblemished, lordly and good. But beyond the silent stream was another world of courtiers and minstrels, a forest dripping with gossip and whisperings, full of wild and peaceable beasts. Into such a world, the king’s daughter brought forth a child, a comely, bright-eyed baby boy.

  The morning that he was born, the king’s daughter lay in a pool of exhaustion and light. With her hair still damp from the exertion, she held his small, downy head and body in the cups of her hands. Her fingertips kissed his pink, wrinkled face, his little hands and toes. She cradled her baby to her breast and wept with utter joy. This small new being she loved with the ferocity of all the royal blood to which she was heir. She loved him more than the entire world, more than life.

  Daily she nursed her infant son and sang him lullabies. He cooed, then crawled, then babbled and danced about as he played with the small animals who came to the stream to drink. Lovely and laughing and full of song was he, and as vulnerable as the tiny wildflowers on the damp forest floor.

  These were her days of happiness. The sunlight was gentle, the breezes warm. But into her pastorale, stealthy as a thief, crept mist and cloud, came the sound of muffled weeping and wailing. Now once again and more than ever, a heavy gloom engulfed her, and the daughter of the part-lion king knew no peace.

  At night, she hid her child beneath petals and leaves. She guarded him by day, her eyes alert. She shouted at shadows. She was fearful of she knew not what. Every morning dawned, blue sky and blossom, and everywhere there was danger.

  Over the years the boy gradually matured surrounded by his mother’s watchfulness, her fierce and tender love. He grew strong and straight as the trees in the forest where he wandered. His mind was pure and clear as the water from a fountain that cascaded and tumbled in the village square. Each morning the sun continued to rise, and each day the boy continued to be safe.

  She couldn’t quite pinpoint the moment, unlike her son, who in later years remembered exactly what happened—such is the power of our memories about such matters. She recalled later that he had changed rather suddenly from being a somewhat audacious and growingly rambunctious youth to a docile, curiously cautious and somewhat cooperative boy. She remembered being pleasantly surprised.

  Many many years later, when the king’s daughter did finally learn the truth, it all became more than she could bear.

  It is more than I can bear, my Goddess. It has become more than I can bear.

  I asked Jeffrey last year and he told me he thought I knew. He thought I knew. I was asleep in a house of lies, dreaming that I was awake and attentive, that I was a good and careful mother.

  “Perhaps he was not hurt,” whispered the gnat. “Perhaps. Perhaps.”

  “Amen. Oh may it be so,” prayed the king’s daughter. “Let us say he was not hurt.”

  The madness converged in her mind as a wild and heavy grief, a black rain that descended over everything. It covered the entire island, the marketplace and the palace where the king sat on his throne.

  With her hands stretched ahead of her, the king’s daughter began to walk through the rolling mists of space.

  Look little tongue, little dart, little poison arrow, little tattler of tales, go quickly and pray as you fly that your words may be true—to kill what must be killed, to free what cries to be free. What is it that weights your small heart shape? It’s the salt, the too-much weeping as I walk through the day-after-day, carrying the ocean, wearing the ocean, bearing it. Bearing it.

  The cup, when it can no longer contain the rain, overflows. The heart, when it can no longer bear the sadness, breaks. Life, when it sufficiently wearies, ends. I have begun to imagine the end again. Like a crack in the window, the thought spreads across my mind.

  Jeffrey. My dark-haired, brown-eyed, perfect baby boy. My son. Eleanor’s darling. Our child. Jeffrey.

  My baby was born at seven fifty-two on a Sunday morning in the Vancouver General Hospital—Sunday’s child, full of grace. The labour lasted twenty-two hours. He was pulled from me by forceps wielded by an inexperienced young intern. It must have been the strangest anaesthetic that was used because I felt no urge to push; yet, after the baby was pulled out, the sewing up of the tear was excruciating.

  Boy Shelby. Six pounds seven ounces. Mother: Millicent Shelby. Age: nineteen. Address: Rachel House.

  There were six of us unwed mothers among the dozen others in the large ward, in beds side by side and across from each other. One sixteen-year-old was, like me, from Rachel House, a godforsaken home for fallen women. Once a month we had been driven down in a windowless van for checkups at the Vancouver General Hospital outpatients’ clinic. We were all guinea pigs. During one session, the young intern had my feet up in stirrups as he paraded one classmate after another to gawk at my private parts. The times were not kind to young women in
our circumstances.

  We who found ourselves at Rachel House all had our stories, true stories, false stories, wretched stories. We were all to give our babies away. We were counselled to do so.

  “If you really love them, you will want them to be in loving homes with fathers. When the children grow up they’ll be grateful to you. Think of Hannah offering up her son Samuel when she brought him to the temple. Girls, you are Hannah’s daughters.”

  As the baby’s kicking grew in vigour and as the time neared for the delivery, my nightmares increased. I lay with my bulging body stretched out beneath society’s guillotine. My fate had been decreed. I was to be severed in half. The sylvan cord between myself and my child was to be torched and our love and longing for each other crushed. I did not weep. I wrote to Eleanor and Charlie that, God or no God, right or wrong, I couldn’t go through with the plan.

  Rachel House had been Charlie’s idea. “At least, there, you’ll know you aren’t the only one in your predicament,” he said, slightly caustically. That was true. Eleanor thought I should go as well. Vancouver was far enough away. I didn’t know anyone there. She and Charlie were going to be my baby’s parents. They would adopt him immediately and take him back to Edmonton. I would go later and no one would know. I could be the visiting aunt. It sounded like a good idea at the time. But in the end, my arms won the battle. In no way did I give the baby up. I told the young doctor that I was keeping my child and I would nurse him. The other unwed mothers in the ward looked on with envy as I held my tiny bundle to my engorged and blue-veined breasts. The teenager in the bed beside me said her parents would disown her if she kept her baby.

  The whole saga began the summer after my second year at university. He was from England, a short, intense, older man with receding hair, the author of a book on medieval music. He had been hired to direct the popular and highly successful Juniper camp in Ontario. I was in charge of the younger children.

  “You have quite a name to live up to, Miss Shelby. A remarkable man, your father,” Dr. Jonathan Steele said when we were introduced. His grey eyes searched mine as he removed his dark-rimmed glasses.

  There were a thousand small choices along the way. He was experienced and I wasn’t, but I have never absolved myself of responsibility. When he tapped on my window at night I could have stayed in the cabin. We walked along the beach. He put his arm around my waist. I did not pull back. I should have asked the appropriate questions.

  I first noticed his attentions before the meals, when I would lead the children in the singing of the grace. I caught him beaming in my direction across the hall of tables, and as the rounds ended he would wink and smile. At the evening campfires, he sat on the log beside me. One night, after the children had trooped off for hot chocolate, he whispered, “I could listen to you all night, Camper Songbird. I love your voice. Would you come and sing just for me?”

  “I’d be happy to, Skipper Steele.”

  I knew and didn’t know, as he took my hand and led me into his secluded cabin, that I wasn’t the only one. He lit a candle and brought out a bottle of wine. He asked me if I was afraid.

  “I don’t know,” I mumbled awkwardly. I moved back slightly as his hand inched across the sheepskin throw on his couch.

  He told me he had a favourite sentimental old song. “ ‘In the Gloaming….’ Do you know it?”

  “Mmm. Sort of….”

  “Would you sing it for an old fool?”

  I laughed and hummed the tune.

  “Melissa,” he whispered as the song concluded.

  “Millicent,” I corrected him.

  He asked me if I knew any arias. I was embarrassed as I grinned and shrugged, then let my voice climb an arpeggio to a high, tiny trill. I felt ridiculous and giggled.

  His eyes were wide and intense, almost as if he were afraid. He moved towards me so gradually it was as if he weren’t moving at all. Then suddenly, as I stopped singing and his lips touched the tip of my nose, he drew back. He stood up abruptly and said he was terribly sorry, it was all a mistake and I should leave. “Now. Right now. You must.”

  “But….” I backed up against the couch, both hands over my heaving chest. “Have I done something wrong?”

  “No, no. Not at all. You have done nothing wrong, child. But leave, quickly, quickly.”

  All that week he avoided me. Instead of sitting beside me at the campfire and joining in the skits and stories and songs, he stood in the darkness near the water’s edge, far from the glow of the fire.

  I became obsessed. The more he turned from me, the more I sought him. One night I walked back and forth along the path between our cabins, aching to see him. He told me later that he’d been watching me from behind the wash house, and he’d known then there was no way out for us.

  The first time was late at night, in the thickness of the forest a long way upstream, by the waterfall. All the way down the garden path and up the trail, I made my tiny decisions not to resist. He caressed my neck and his fingers pulled softly, playfully at my ears.

  I did not know who Dr. Jonathan Steele was. I did and I did not trust him. He was the camp director. He was the one who every morning told the morality tales and directed our minds and hearts to purity, to nature, to love, to God.

  Once his hands touched my abdomen I was lost. At that point, it was beyond my control. My hands gripped the sides of the rough tree bark as he thrust against me. Out of the pushpull confusion of desire and dread, I wept and cried out. He wrenched me from the tree. Half clothed and struggling, I was brought down to the earth, to pine cones and needles that scratched my limbs. I lay bruised and bleeding under the camp’s captain and the waterfall’s cool spray.

  After that, nothing mattered. I was doomed. He was a married man. I was indeed not the only one. But the great cloud of unreality that clothed my life told me he would love me and only me. He would leave his wife. And night after night I returned to his arms, to his cabin, to the woods, to the wash house, to the beach, to the struggle and the pine trees overhead and the distant distant stars, farther away than anyone could imagine.

  I had written him three letters before I knew for certain that I was pregnant. In my panic that day, I walked out of the doctor’s office, went to the bus station and waited three hours for the bus that would take me to Charlie and Eleanor.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Merciful Goddess, it is a lifetime later and I am still waiting at the station, trapped in distress, curled into myself like the half-burnt red ribbon I discovered in the fireplace this morning. Tonight I offer you my wretchedness. I bring you the busy streets along which I stumble and the corners where I fall, the vomit spewing forth, the passersby walking in quick and kindly anonymity, the gentle fireman at the fire station to which I drag myself, who takes my pulse and asks if he should call for an ambulance, and the garbage pail with cigarette butts that he brings and the green bile I spit as I shiver and weep. And in the midst of it, I want Father. I want his warm hand on my head and his eyes to heaven, praying….

  Goosey, goosey gander,

  Whither shall I wander?

  Upstairs and downstairs

  And in my lady’s chambers.

  There I met an old man

  Who would not say his prayers,

  I took him by the left leg….

  I watched him saying prayers with a young couple today. He comforted them. He comforted me when I was weak. I am still weak. And in my weakness and bondage, my body rejects its undigestible knowledge. I take him by the left leg. I throw him down the stairs. I fling myself into the gutter beside him….

  Like a crack in the window-pane, didn’t I say, the thought spreads….

  Gentle people of the jury, I, Millicent Shelby, the daughter of the Reverend Dr. Charles Barnabas and Meredith Shelby, I, the unwed mother of the beautiful young man Jeffrey Charles, yes, Charles—Jeffrey Charles Shelby—I, my father’s daughter, am sick with a sickness I cannot name, and I want my father dead, I want him dead.

 
I am told that unless I enter my grief and rage, I will in no way walk through the gates of the beautiful city. You see my body shouting its revulsion on the sidewalks and pavements of Ragland, on the corner of Main and Second, on a noisy Tuesday-cheap-movie-night, in the middle of cars and trucks and the people promenading to and fro. You see me as I lurch about and stumble with my grey leather boots covered in what I cannot deny and you hear the young cowboy hooting because he thinks I am drunk. “Can’t hold it down, eh?” he laughs, and rolls on past as a taxi arrives and I am driven back here, to the house of lies.

  I sit in the house of lies, I am looking into the abyss. From out of the darkness, as I peer over the edge, I hear the one impossible command. I am to declare the truth.

  The truth is, I cannot endure the truth.

  One word at a time, Millicent. One step, one step. As we walk, we are the way. We are born as tiny specks of hope to glow and fade, forming ribbons of light that wend their way through this tortured world. Each choice makes the next one easier. With each deception, each moment of courage, we define who we are, for good or for ill. Are we not ourselves the way the truth and the life?

  I am taking time out now to run a bath and wash my hair. I will soak in the hot water and the perfume and foamy suds and bubbles and listen to some harp duets. And after that I will try to sleep.

  One does grow weary.

  It is past midnight, and I am weak and restless and lonely as I wander out the kitchen door into the garden and down the empty back lane looking for you—on past the cenotaph, past the lakeside hotels with their all-night restaurants and up Main Street again. Merciful Spirit, where are you?