by Joy Kogawa
The resolve in Father’s eyes flashed briefly, then was replaced by what looked like sadness and a kind of pain, a kind of loneliness and need. He relinquished his hold.
I had no idea what I needed Jimmy to show me. We walked back downstairs together. He waited politely in the kitchen as I explained to our hostess that Father needed to rest. I called a cab to take us to the hotel.
I didn’t sleep that night. Could I have been mistaken? Perhaps nothing would have happened. But the child could have been in danger. I had acted correctly. What was it that had happened to Jeffrey and Martin? I had to talk to Father. Eleanor was right. I had to. Father’s hands had not willingly let go of the child.
I could imagine him defending himself. “They like what I do. It doesn’t hurt them at all. I don’t cause harm. It’s pleasurable. It’s good.”
The following evening was the banquet. About two hundred people were present. Father, clean-shaven and presentable, basked in the warmth of the attention. The director rose from his seat beside him on the platform and went to the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, it is our great privilege to have with us, as our honoured guest tonight, the founder of the Juniper Centres. Please give our warmest welcome to the Reverend Dr. Charles Barnabas Shelby.”
Father stood up, beaming and waving. The old magic was back. The audience were entranced, their eyes wide with delight.
I endured the evening. It was not an unfamiliar sensation—the pride and the shame, the truth and the lies. I was used to it all. But that evening, I could not shake off the chill of the night before. It was not Father but a corpse on stage, its putrid flesh dressed in fine robes and silks, parading about. I could not stop the stench.
“Wonderful, wasn’t it, Millicent! They loved me.” He babbled happily all the way back to the hotel. He had enchanted the guests with his charm. He had entertained them with a joke and a song. He, the living nightmare in my life, his jaw unhinged, had lapped up the applause. And now that we were alone together, he was expecting me to continue the charade.
I could not do it. I could not look at him. I had needed a different kind of evening. The truth, for once. I needed a repentant man. I needed him to cover himself in sackcloth and ashes and to beat his breast and wail, “Lord, I have sinned against heaven and against Thee and I am not worthy to be called Thy child. I have abused and molested your children. I have betrayed a holy trust.”
But Father had never made such lamentations. Never.
The following week, we were guests at a retreat centre. He was to give the homily that Sunday. On Saturday I could no longer contain the turmoil.
CHAPTER TWENTY
On Saturday afternoon, Father was resting on the couch in the retreat centre’s large common room. We had been driven seventy-five miles over rocky country roads, over hills and streams, to the rough log structures in the woods. A portly, smiling man greeted us and showed us to our rooms. The toilets were outside. The water was cold.
I spent the morning walking among the trees. In that place of peace, I was not at peace. I thought about Jimmy and Jeffrey. And I thought about Father. My hypocritical, repulsive, gentle Father.
He was lying on his back on the couch opposite a huge fireplace, tapping the tips of his fingers together and staring at the dark, beamed ceiling.
“People are so wonderful,” he said to me quietly as I came in. “They are so good to me, so good to me.”
I sat in an armchair opposite him.
“What do you think Jesus meant,” I began, “when he said, ‘Things that were hidden will be shouted from the rooftops’?”
He stopped tapping his fingers and turned his head slightly in my direction.
“ ‘The truth, the way, the life,’ ” I said. “The truth, Father.”
He looked at me enquiringly.
It may have been five more minutes and I didn’t speak. My mind was a cauldron of the unsaid. All my life I had dreaded the explosive power of anger. Like my mother before me, I had learned to fear it.
There had been so much destruction in the world in the name of truth. The Inquisition. The Crusades. Over the years, I had told myself that I would not speak until I knew that Love was speaking. Ours was a gentle house. I would wait for gentleness. But that afternoon, I did not stop for that consideration. I said the words.
“I know about Jeffrey, Father. I know the truth. I know what you did.”
Father looked straight at me and there was not a flicker of recognition in his eyes.
“That you—that you—touched him.”
There was no change of expression as he turned his face away. His voice was quiet, almost timid. “How old was he?”
“Twelve.”
The words were said. I had picked up the knife. I had plunged it straight down. What was I expecting? The sky to fall? The earth to open up and swallow us?
It appears that the essence of who I am is someone who does not easily bear pain. Whether out of cowardice or misplaced kindness I do not know, but I leapt in at that juncture to rescue him from whatever redemptive work might have been accomplished from his facing the pain in me. I said, “Jeffrey said it didn’t harm him.”
He nodded. He looked relieved. Nothing more was said. The lid was firmly back on Pandora’s box again. But an imp had been released and sat on his chest. He did not speak to me. He closed his eyes. He looked as if he was in prayer. And then he fell asleep. When he wakened, he was not his normal bubbly self.
The next day, he stood in the pulpit of the chapel and delivered a familiar, old-fashioned sermon—the story of his conversion—Jesus as alive, as present, as appearing to him when he was ill. Jesus the healer. Jesus the forgiver. Jesus the comforter, who, even at the moment of greatest extremity, as he hung dying on the Cross, turned to his beloved disciple, John, and asked him to care for Mary, his grieving mother.
“His mother…. Mother,” Father repeated. “Mother…Mother.” His two hands held the sides of the pulpit. He bowed his head. “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.” He turned and stepped down slowly. It was not the usual way he ended that sermon.
After the service, the small congregation went outside onto the lawn to have coffee. A chair was brought for Father. I watched him sitting there quietly, nodding, not speaking, not engaging in the easy banter. I asked if he wanted to go and rest and he nodded.
He slept all afternoon. When he got up I asked if he was all right. He smiled at me and blinked his eyes. “God is telling me I am talking too much,” he said. That was the last thing he said that day.
By noon the next day I knew that something was wrong. The non-stop self-aggrandizing which had become irritating background noise had changed to one-syllable responses to questions. He was pale and weak. He ate his supper mechanically.
“What’s wrong, Father?”
No answer. A smile. A wink.
“We should leave tomorrow. You should see your doctor.”
Another smile.
We were expected to stay the week. I explained the situation to our hosts. I retired early that night to my simple room with its single bed, coat rack, desk and chair, a room with the window open to the moonlight and the pines and the occasional sound of wild animals.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It was while I slept in that austere room in the middle of the wilderness that I had the dream—a dream I do not now remember except for the statement that arose from it: the Goddess of Mercy is the Goddess of Abundance.
Thus, my Goddess, began the journey towards you—the search for the pathway to your throne, the watchfulness for signs of an abundant universe. I looked for you everywhere, in conversations, in connections between generosity and the capacity to forgive.
The doctor said Father had suffered a mild stroke. I asked if it could have been brought on by emotional trauma and he shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. I blamed myself. I blamed the imp. I threw my arms around Father as he lay in his hospital bed and told him I loved him.
&nb
sp; “I’m so sorry,” I whispered as he lay suddenly mute, staring at his hands.
Did I need to be the agent of judgement? I asked myself. The dream had directed me towards mercy, and here was mercy—that I had acted to slay the dearest man in my life, but he was still alive—enfeebled and diminished, but mercifully alive. And I was being taught, through my remorse, that judgement was not required of me. “Vengeance is mine. I will repay,” saith the Lord. The universe would unfold as it would.
I feared there might be another stroke. Flesh was weak. I took Father home. He needed care. I cleaned and shopped and cooked. I shaved him whenever he went out or when there was company, otherwise he shaved himself and bits of stubble were left on his chin and neck. I wiped the food off the floor around his chair after every meal.
As the weeks passed, his speech gradually returned. In the evenings, we watched the news together. Stories on child abuse were erupting across the continent. We didn’t discuss them.
And then, one night, there was a short item about Mother Teresa. I sat and watched steadily as the champion of the poorest of the poor assailed me. She had done so before. The other time had been when Father and I were at the retreat centre in Ontario. Mother Teresa had arrived on the cover of a magazine, her stern unsmiling face sharp with judgement. It was the night following Father’s stroke and I was unable to sleep. I was in the lounge, sitting in a big leather armchair by the fireplace, looking through a pile of magazines. I carried a few of them to my room and put them on the floor. As I turned the pages, I was thinking of the words I’d spoken to Father, how I’d tried so ineffectually to lance the festering wound in my heart, and how, almost immediately, he had been stricken.
As I wandered down the labyrinthine ways of sleeplessness and anxiety, there staring up at me from the floor in that bare room was Mother Teresa. And for the first time in years, I thought about my abortion and the baby who had not been born.
Mother Teresa. Gatekeeper of the dying. Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Paragon of virtue.
I knew that I, Millicent Shelby, stood judged by her to be a greater criminal than my father. I was a destroyer of the most innocent holy charge entrusted to my flesh, a murderer of my own sacred child. The punishment for this most heinous crime was death. Had she not herself said as much on Parliament Hill in Ottawa? And was she not as potent an authority on good and evil as the world had to offer? She surely had access to verities hidden from moral degenerates like me. To be subject to her world view was to dwell in the most paralyzing judgement, was to be crushed alive under a mountain of guilt. All night long, her disembodied head pronounced the death penalty over me: I had desecrated the holiest of holies, the safest inner sanctum. I had uprooted the seed and the seedling, the growing shoot of a human soul. Small wonder that my dreaming mind fled from the banner of her Lord and King and sought instead the Goddess of Mercy, ancient assuager of suffering.
At the time of the abortion, I did not name the rapidly organizing cells within me. To my eyes they were human cells, akin to other living human cells, wondrously alive with genetic coding. But I did not weight their existence with consciousness. For me, human tissue was sacred only in the way that all life was sacred. I did not elevate the non-sentient above the sentient. Far greater, to my mind, was the suffering of a drowning mouse than the dissembling of an embryo that had no pathways of pain. Suffering was my starting point in questions of good and evil. In a universe beyond the reaches of the human imagination I could not guess what torments there might be beyond death, before birth, in other forms of consciousness. The charge that abortion was murder lay for me in a world of abstraction, and in theories of sacredness. On that Thursday afternoon in Toronto, after the call from the doctor, the dread of delay was so great that I did not even think.
If I had to, I would do it again. I would take the leap of faith out of the edifice of the patriarchs and into the blessed company of pro-choice.
We are a planet of mortals who stumble about with our murderous convictions. In the name of the weak, for the sake of the weak, we murder the weak. Look, Mother Teresa, upon this prison cell where I hide among pedophiles and other uncomprehending criminals. I am placing my case beside that of my father’s, and wait for the judgement of mercy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The days have been grey, neither dark nor bright. Grey, it seems to me, is the colour of mercy. A grey sky, grey trees, grey mountains, all bleeding into one another. A glimmer of filtered light at both midnight and noon. Blessed sufficiency.
Often, in the afternoons, we sit on the front porch in wicker chairs with our cups of tea, noting the new blooms in the garden and watching the passing parade—Boots, our black and white cat, and the neighbour’s tabby cat chasing each other, chasing the squirrels and the birds. We love the birds, the robins, the jays, but most especially we love the barn swallows.
I didn’t measure their days. I didn’t note the first day we saw the first barn swallow bringing the twig to the porch, but we congratulated ourselves on our good luck.
“Look, they’re building a nest right here on the porch!” I exclaimed to Father. “How wonderful.”
He said he had noticed them already from the living-room window early one morning, as they flew swooping and diving back and forth across the front lawn.
“Let’s not use the front door,” I suggested, “until they’re established. Let’s not sit outside for a while.”
And so every day—was it in late June or early July that they began, darting back and forth like the swallows they were, brown and black and small and sleekly beautiful with their pointed tails and their swift, silent flight day after day, swoosh up to their pinpoint landing on the corner at the top of the pillar beneath the porch roof.
At first we watched them through the peephole in the front door, and we could see them as if far away at the end of a long telescope, the two tiny dark shapes, one after the other, packing their grey nest into shape. Sometimes we’d see the two of them sitting together. Then bit by bit we got them used to us standing motionless in the doorway. We noted that there was one particular spot on a telephone wire where one swallow would sit keeping guard.
And then came the day when, the nest completed, we began using the front door again and the birds did not fly away. For how many days did they sit there? A week maybe. I didn’t want to disturb them by climbing up on a chair to see if there were eggs inside. A bird was almost always in residence. The white sloping pillar began showing signs of their presence. Besides the twigs on the porch floor, there were now round and curled bird droppings on the bench and along the pillar, which, on the rare occasion when the birds were not there, I would sweep away.
One afternoon we saw them sitting by turn on the edge of the nest, peering in, fussing, their heads turning this way and that. And the next day, or the day after, there were whitish shells on the ground. And we knew the babies had been born, but so as not to frighten them we stood watch from our safe distance.
A short while later, we saw the most idiotic little grey tufts and furry little wobbly things moving. It was amazing how fast they grew. They looked so wonderfully ugly—tiny aliens, their funny yellow beaks big as all creation, yawning open soundlessly. That’s all we could see at the top of the nest—beaks, beaks and no feathers. I wasn’t sure how many there were.
All work stopped as we spent the days watching and admiring the tireless parents zooming in for the endless day-long feedings. I followed their outbound flight as they sped high and low along the treetops and lawns towards a soccer field two blocks away. There, with other swallows, they hunted for flying insects.
For a few days we thought there were four babies, but one day I counted five. It was all miraculous and joyful. I knew we’d get up one morning and we’d see them doing their practice flight. We saw the beaks starting to change, the tips getting darker. The grey tufts began to show some brown. And then the funny things began to preen themselves, lifting their stubby, featherless wings.
At first, when the babies were nothing but yellow beaks, they’d open them at any sound. A cough, a footstep, the door closing. Gradually they learned to discriminate. It was their parents’ cheeps as they landed on the nest that made them respond with their own chirps. Every few seconds or minutes they were fed and the racket increased.
“What a wonder it all is,” I said to Father. We were both enthralled. We kept Boots indoors.
Then one morning when we looked up, we saw that three of the babies were gone. Out in the garden we saw the evidence—two dead on the lawn, one in the jaws of the neighbour’s tabby cat.
We were desperate. Two babies were still left. I thought of creating a chicken-wire structure around the base of the pillar so that the tabby would not be able to approach. I thought of hanging cloth and tacking it in an arc beneath the nest. Eventually I settled for an intricate series of booby traps for the cat, balancing concrete blocks delicately along the bench beneath the pillar so that, if the cat leapt up in an effort to launch itself up to the two remaining babies, it would find itself clawing air.
It worked. The first night I heard a block thud to the porch. I ran out and saw the wretched beast on the other side of the street, its tail twitching nervously. I improved the traps, the next day adding trays of water. The following night there was another thud. Out I rushed again in my nightie. No cat in sight.
Father sat guard over the front porch, his broom beside him, ready to shoo away the predator. I brought his lunch and tea out for him on a tray. The cat was lurking about, eyeing the nest, eyeing the broom and Father.
“A good thing you’re standing guard,” I said.
The following afternoon, when I got back from the drugstore, one bird was down on the porch floor. Father was standing with broom in hand, frightening both parent birds and cat.
I picked up the baby and lifted it back into the nest with the other survivor. That may have been a mistake. The birds and their nest were infested with hordes of tiny, tiny lice that moved faster than the fastest spiders I have ever seen. When I placed a stick near the nest, it was immediately swarmed. My hands and arms and neck and shoulders felt a maddening itch. I rushed upstairs and showered.
