The Rain Ascends

by Joy Kogawa

  In the crucible of this hour, ashes are blowing. Through the prism of prayer, the rain ascends.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  My father, we have lived for too long under the domination of the Father of Lies. In choosing to satisfy your lust you did not choose understanding. In choosing to be your defender, I chose not to see your villainy. You defiled the most fragile, most precious treasures entrusted to your care—the not-yet-formed minds of the young. You altered forever the rich and beautiful patterns of their thoughts. You took the pastel shadings of their dreams and splashed crimson and dung across the canvas of their innocent days. You swooped upon the sheltered nests of infant birds, their beaks open, their heads awkwardly angled upwards in a trust as large as the sky. With your unseeing hunger, you plucked the trust from their upturned faces and fed yourself till you could eat no more. Thirty children, Father? There must have been hundreds.

  You were no ordinary wolf in sheep’s clothing. You dressed yourself in the robes of the Good Shepherd and stole God’s lambs. In the sacred soil of their young lives you planted moral confusion, the world as not safe, symbols as untrustworthy, God as betrayer. You made them to lie down in green pastures, you led them by still waters and devoured their souls.

  It’s the mothers that I hear, scratching at the soil, screaming to know where their little boys lie. It’s their broken hearts and their self-recrimination that they trusted blindly and did not protect their sons. And here Father lies in his old age, in his rocking bed, as the wind blows, as the bough bends, and down comes the house at last, Father, with Charlie and Mother and me and cradle and all.

  Spirit of holiness, “…we have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, we have offended against Thy holy laws, we have left undone those things which we ought to have done and we have done those things which we ought not to have done”—perpetrators and bystanders that we are—“and there is no health in us.”

  I fed the monster on the flesh of my child. I turned aside as he engorged himself on other children. Deliver me from the nightmare of my life.

  There are so many stories of betrayal in the world. This is one. There are so many hells. This is one. I have been brought down to this particular hell, into the liquid fire, into judgement and despair.

  To whom and to what did those children turn after my father tossed their small bodies aside? To castles like mine, made of wind and dust, to bottles, to needles, to many forms of speechlessness, to the quick thrust of their loins into the unloved bodies of other children without history.

  All my life I have been asleep, rocking among stones full of groans too deep for uttering. I am heaving myself awake, filled now with the drumbeat of murderous thoughts. I wish him to be dead. Release me, oh, from this cauldron of his crimes.

  It is your feet, dear Father, that have danced on the grave of God the Father. You trampled the faith of the faithful. You silenced the children. But Father, truth, like the water level, rises and floods the basement while you sleep. You say you did not think you were doing harm. Indeed, you did not think at all of the boys, of their parents. You did not think of the community of the faithful or of the ability to trust, which is the foundation of health. You did not think of Mother or Charlie or me, Father Judas, as you betrayed the innocent with your unholy kisses.

  You have made the white dog-collar uniform a sign of the abhorred. You belong to the army of child molesters, of pederasts and pedophiles, of the perverted and the deceitful. We see a priest rounding the corner of the street and we shudder. We see him at an airport or in a taxi or entering a building and a cloud of suspicion and disgust descends over us. We are made ill by your presence.

  As I stone you, dear Father, I am stoning your Father, and I am stoning my love, and here lies an unholy trinity, dead and dead and dead.

  Until you acknowledge the depths of your depravity, you will not waken to the cleansing flames. Until you walk into the field of fire, you will find no angel of mercy.

  Not in the love of his daughter is mercy to be found for my father. I will not be applying to join the company of angels, mere mortal that I am. Nor will I any longer this day mewl for the defence. I am flung weeping from that once-upon-a-time when I loved the idea of my father, when I tried to create the idol I adored, when I worshipped a lie. That is finished. It is finished. I am leaving the courtroom now. But as I rush headlong out the door, stumbling in my haste to get away, I am followed by the long shadow of his life.

  Who is to pay the impossible debt my parent has incurred? Unto the third and fourth generation, I am told, the children’s children are in chains. Behold your legacy, Father. You have sold us into bondage.

  Have mercy, oh Goddess, on the innocents.

  On the innocents, oh Goddess, have mercy.

  The way of truth is the way of the light. I am seeking the light after my lifelong night. I am telling the untellable to myself, to others, in whispers, in intimate conversation. And with every breath in my body I am striving to be free, that the child of my child may be strong and truthful and unashamed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  And so, Eleanor, I have come stumbling and exhausted to the altar of telling. The long silence has seeped out of my fingernails, out of my dried tear ducts. I am wrung dry.

  Morning after morning, I have been waking to a spiralling journey, down into the whirlpool of revulsion and out and around and down again. I have sought the Goddess the way a starving beast seeks food. Madly. Faster than the speed of light, she has been hastening my way, catching me even as I tumble and fall. She has required of me only this: to seek her face.

  After Father’s disclosure I went to see Charlie and Eleanor. “Put him in a seniors’ home,” Eleanor said, “and move back here. If you don’t want to live with us I’ll help you find an apartment. You’ve got more friends here than in Ragland.”

  “I’d like to—but—but—I can’t just throw him to the dogs. Can you imagine if people found out?” I asked.

  I was back within a week. The dishes were unwashed and the kitchen floor was sticky with spilled milk around the cat’s bowl. The house smelled foul. Father didn’t say a word to me about having gone. I followed him out to the garden in the afternoon and waited for him to be finished watering. My need to know more was now greater than Eleanor’s.

  “Can you tell me other things about what happened to you when you were a child?” I asked as he sat to rest on the bench. “When you were just eight. Did you know it was wrong?”

  “Yes. I did know that.” His voice was meek, submissive.

  “It must have been the year Granny sent you and your brothers to live with that aunt? She was not a nice woman, Granny told me.”

  “No. She was—quite—quite unkind, really. She wouldn’t let me have any milk and she’d give some to the older boys instead. I had to get up at five every morning and do all the chores while the others slept. I’d be so hungry.”

  “What a nightmare! She must have been demented. And you so young! But that other person who harmed you—in that other way….”

  “A neighbour.”

  “And he…? Did he…?” I suspected there was more than fondling.

  “Yes.”

  “He penetrated you?”

  “Yes.” This was contrary to his first admission.

  “You were so little. Poor Father. So very little.”

  I called Eleanor that night and told her his story. She agreed that it was all very sad. “But don’t try to make excuses for him,” she said. “You’re not here in the world to absolve him. Who hasn’t had trauma? There are no excuses. He had choices. So do you, Millicent.”

  Father and I were in the garden again the next day and I asked him about his victims—what their names were and where they now lived and whether he was in touch with them.

  “You don’t remember?”

  He shook his head as he bent over to pull at weeds.

  “Not anyone? What
about the boys in the North?”

  Father shook the earth from the roots of a thick clump. I thought he was ignoring me, but after a long pause, his voice between a whisper and a rasp, he said, “Rheimer.”

  “Was that his last name?”

  “And Tobias.”

  “And they were? Tell me—were they Native children?”

  “It was—it was all—a—a—terrible mistake. A terrible thing….”

  “What happened with Tobias?”

  “He—he said he loved me. He forgave me. I had a letter….”

  “And you said there were others. How many others? You said there were thirty up north. But elsewhere—if you counted them all—the ones during your travels?” He was silent but I persisted. “Including everything—the fondling just one time, and whatever else. Were there—let’s say—five hundred?” I knew it was an absurd figure. I expected he might laugh.

  He started to go back towards the house. “No, not that many,” he said. He reached the bottom of the front steps.

  “Four hundred?”

  His hands were holding the railing as he began to climb. I stood behind, ready to catch him in case he should fall. “A number have passed on.”

  “Were there four hundred?”

  “No.” He rested on the middle step as he said, “Three hundred, perhaps.”

  It was like the time I got in the car and drove over the mountains and into the prairies, blindly seeking anonymity. I left him to climb the rest of the way alone. I ran up to my room and closed the door. I fell onto my bed, trembling. I reached over to the phone and dialled long-distance information, got the number of the diocesan headquarters and called. I told the secretary that I needed to see the bishop, the newly elected bishop, whom I’d never met. I told her it was urgent. The earliest I could see him was the following Wednesday. I said that wasn’t soon enough. Then I ran back outside, passing Father in the hall. This time too I went without having packed, without thinking, without a single idea in my head about what I would say or how the bishop would react or what might happen. I drove into the evening and through the night, not trusting myself, not trusting anything. The Goddess was my conceit. The dream of mercy was a conceit. I cried into the darkness for Mother.

  “You are such an impulsive child,” I could hear her say. “So like your father.”

  “No, Mother,” I wept. “I am not like my father.”

  I got lost entering the city. I asked at three gas stations for directions. I finally found a parking lot and sat watching the sun come up.

  At nine o’clock, with my eyes covered in dark glasses, my face puffy from sleeplessness, I walked into the bishop’s third-floor office. His secretary said he was in the middle of a meeting. He might be free at noon. I waited.

  He was laughing when he came into the reception area. I was surprised by his youthful appearance and his casualness. Authority figures look so young to me these days. He was wearing a sport shirt and sweater. He was friendly, affable. “And what brings you here? What can I do for you?”

  We sat in his large corner office, out of earshot of the receptionist. I started to speak. Then I stopped. He waited. I took the dark glasses off and covered my red eyes with my hands. “It’s my father. I have to tell you about my father.”

  “Dr. Shelby. Ah yes. The founding saint of the Juniper Centres. A dear old gentleman. Is he all right?”

  I waited until the uproar within me had subsided and then I began to speak. The words came at first haltingly, then in sudden spurts, small cloudbursts of words. His phone rang and he ignored it as the deluge broke within me in a long unstoppable telling. I brought forth the whole unmitigated story. The hard, hard stones of judgement, the dense and heavy weight that my frail love could not melt, were cast upwards into the blazing furnace of truth-telling.

  When I was through, the bishop searched my face and said nothing. He looked stunned. It occurred to me that he might think I was insane.

  “And none of the victims have come forward?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Out of three hundred? Is that correct? I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

  “Do you not believe me?”

  “It is hard to believe, Millicent.” He was speaking softly in a flat monotone, his face expressionless.

  “You can ask Peter Bowles at St. Chad’s in Edmonton.”

  “I don’t know him.” He took a notebook from his desk and wrote down the name. He was shaking his head steadily. After a while, he said quietly, “What would Jesus do?”

  I didn’t know. What indeed would Jesus do—he, the Christ, the ancient one whose name today has become a curse? I imagined that, like the Goddess of Mercy, Jesus would stand with each of us. That is what love does. Was he not the one who stretched himself between heaven and earth without letting either go?

  “Would he forgive? Are we to forgive endlessly, ‘as to an idiot in the house’?” I asked.

  The bishop was deep in thought for several more moments, his fingers moving back and forth across his forehead. Then, in a firm and deliberate voice, he said, “Millicent, you have to do whatever a daughter has to do. But I must do what a bishop has to do.”

  “And what is that?”

  “The word that comes to my mind, as I think about your father, is tragedy. There are tragedies that are beyond our control. And beyond your control, Millicent. In a sense, this is out of your hands now, if I can help you by taking it out of your hands….”

  I phoned Father from the hotel that night. I told him I’d gone to see the bishop. There was no response. I repeated myself.

  “What was that, Millicent? The bishop?” His voice quivered. “The new bishop?”

  “Yes. I had to tell him.”

  I hung up the phone. I didn’t sleep again. The following afternoon I saw the bishop once more.

  “If it were known—you understand this,” he said. “If it were known that the church knew about this, and that we did nothing, the church would be liable.”

  I frowned. Liable? What did that word have to do with me? The bishop had taken off his pastoral hat of the day before and donned the hat of the administrator. “His victims must know that we stand with them and that we do not condone your father’s behaviour. So if it was decided—you know that I must act on this information—that is, with your permission of course, and I assume I have your permission—and I’d need to consult with a few people first—”

  “Consult? With?”

  “We have a new policy in the diocese, a zero-tolerance policy. And a clear guide of disciplinary actions. We will need to have your story verified, of course, because all I have right now is your word. Then, if it was decided”—the bishop was speaking carefully, evenly. He was beginning to sound like a lawyer—“if it was felt that there should be deprivation of ministry or deposition from the exercise of ministry, all the metropolitans would have to be informed, all the clergy in the diocese. He would need his own legal counsel.”

  Whether it was the bishop’s new tone of voice, or the mention of lawyers, or the spectre of a media spectacle, I felt a sudden chill. I clutched my throat in my mother’s gesture of alarm, willing my hands to choke back a rising fear. “You’re going to tell everyone? You’re going to make this public? You mean all this—all this that I’ve told you in confidence—as in a confessional…?” What could I possibly have been thinking in coming to see the bishop? I was just as mad as my father. Charlie and Mother were right. I never thought things through.

  “Too much has been hidden for too long under the rubric of the confessional. And offences of this nature…. How many, Millicent?” He looked as if he seriously doubted the whole matter. Perhaps he was trying to shock me into withdrawing my outrageous allegations.

  “You’re going to—to expose Father and our family and—and unravel our lives for the sake of—for the sake of your institution?”

  He breathed in deeply, looking up at the ceiling. Then he leaned forward. “We have to think of the victims
first. The victims first. Justice demands that. We have to do whatever we can for them. And yes, I do think of the church—that she may face these matters forthrightly. Twenty years ago this would have been a private matter between the bishop and the priest. But not today. And of course, of course we must think of your family and your father. He has to be made to understand what he’s done. He can’t truly repent unless he first understands.”

  “But I was the one to bring this to you. No one else. And I’m not asking for public disgrace. How can it no longer be in my hands? I will have brought all this upon us with my own hands! My hands! Making this public will not help me. Or Jeffrey.”

  The panic within me was now full-blown. Was there not a promise when this journey began? I had walked in the way of Abraham, had I not? I had told the truth. Where was the safety now? “I’ve turned my father in,” I said, my voice shaking. “He’ll die. So will I.” I knew that my words sounded calamitous and extreme and that I was trying to blackmail him into silence. I knew too that I was screaming as loudly as I could for help, for protection, for human mercy. “I will not live,” I whispered, “as my father’s betrayer.”

  The bishop looked sad and tired and old as he sat back in his chair. “The silence all these years, Millicent, that silent collusion, was a far, far greater betrayal.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Have I indeed betrayed you, Father? Do you feel I have betrayed you?” I leaned forward, searching his face with my whispered question.

  He seemed not to understand for a moment, then he shook his head. “No. You are not at fault, Millie dear. Not at all. I am the culprit.” There was not a touch of anger or blame in his quiet reply. “The wrong was my doing.” After a while, he added, “I can only hope that you can feel some ease now, some peace.”

  Whatever unimaginable crimes he has committed, I thought, there is still worth within him. A human being, simply by being human, retains dignity. And whatever all the world may say about Father, he is not a totally evil man. It is not in me to turn utterly against him.