by Joy Kogawa
In response to my own question about her inner journey, she tried, as I have also tried since, to explain, stumbling over her words and laughing at the failure of this clumsy tool we call language.
“At least start by calling me Kate,” she said as I continued to address her formally as Archdeacon Middleton. She spoke of the primacy of friendship in her life—her friendship with the Source of friendship, her radical friendships with the demonized persons of the day, “who are no more demons than I am.” Friendship, for her, was the most necessary work of our day—not the easy act of engaging with the like-minded, but the arduous, world-altering labour of befriending the enemy.
“And this you take to be an archdeacon’s task? This is your profession?”
She laughed at the term “professional friendship,” calling it an oxymoron.
Father, his eyes closed, leaned back in his armchair as the conversation flowed around him.
“How do you manage to see friends where others see demons?” I asked.
“You’ve heard the phrase ‘They became what they beheld’?”
I had.
“I think we behold what we are,” she said. “We say, ‘They this. They that. They. They devour. They are monsters.’ And all that venting, all that rage, reflects ourselves. We deflect the horror of what we collectively are doing. Devouring the planet. Devouring the children. Devouring the future.”
“We consume because we are consumed? We are consumed by the need to consume?”
“Yes. Yes. But we also love because we are loved.”
I didn’t know if Father was listening or understanding. He almost seemed to be falling asleep. The Comforter was present to me in Kate Middleton’s thoughtful presence. But how the justice-seeking, zero-tolerance church intended to deal with Father, I did not know.
It was as she was preparing to leave that I finally asked, “Could you tell me what we might expect from the church? Father and I?”
She rummaged through her purse for a somewhat worn business card. “Millicent, you must feel free to call me at any time.” She wrote her home phone number on the back of the card and handed it to me. “Any time at all.” Then, looking from me to Father, who was struggling to stand, and back to me again, she assured us that there would be no public flogging, no tar and feathers, no dragging through the streets—at least, not by the church. A letter would go out to the bishops. We would get a copy. His licence would be revoked.
I walked down the front steps with her to her car. Across the street, an elderly woman from the choir at St. John’s glanced over at us. She stopped and waved.
“Lovely day,” she called cheerfully. “How is your father, Millicent?”
“Oh, he’s all right,” I called back a little weakly. “Tired these days, though.”
“We miss him in church. Will you tell him?” She glanced curiously at Kate Middleton, a stranger in a clerical collar, who nodded and smiled her lopsided smile. Our friendly, airy gestures, my nonchalant wave, were keeping the secret securely locked away. There would be no introductions today. Should the imps break loose and leap towards the nice, trusting people of St. John’s, should the mad mobs get a whiff of the scandal, the sky would turn red with blood.
As she crossed the street towards us, I shrank back. All that was needed was one report. “She’s going to find out, isn’t she,” I whispered. “The whole town will know.”
Kate Middleton put a firm hand on my shoulder. “Stand tall, Millicent,” she whispered back. “Hold your head up. You hold your head up high.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I didn’t know it that day, but the seeds of friendship firmly planted would grow over time into a flowering, sheltering tree.
“You hold your head up, Millicent.” I found myself repeating her words like a mantra. At times the parting whisper would take on the tones of a biblical chant. “Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors….”
Kate did not wait for me to call her. She rang before the week was up. She and Eleanor and I talked on a three-way connection for over an hour.
I told them that Father, in his confusion, was starting to call me Meredith from time to time.
“You have to get away from there, Mills,” Eleanor said. “I keep telling you. Come and stay in Cha Cha’s old room.”
Theatrical Cha Cha, with her black-lined Cleopatra eyes and eyelashes thick as spiders’ legs, had moved out years earlier in an orgy of rebellion and was now living a raucous life as an oversized model. The last time I’d seen Cha Cha’s room, the walls had still been painted shiny cinnamon and black.
I knew it was unhealthy to stay with Father, but I could not see myself blown about in the volatile Eleanor–Charlie winds. At mealtimes, in the hallways, I’d been so often trapped in their unpredictable arguments. Then, almost on cue, they’d turn and I’d become Charlie’s avenue of rage. It was habitual, Charlie and I in our old rut and Charlie saying things like “What goes on in that rattletrap of a brain of yours?” Or “The problem with a blabbermouth is a blabbermouth.” And always, with a curl of the lip, the “You and Father” comments.
I stayed at home. I made Father’s meals and left them for him. I cleaned up when he went back to his room. I lived within a dailiness that sometimes felt like normalcy. But there were other moments—moments that I still regret—when I was so sick of Father, literally sick, when the revulsion was so overwhelming, that my mind and body could not contain it. Once, when he’d been unwell and unable to get out of bed, I had left some burnt toast for him—cold and inedible—and that was supper. He did say, feebly, one night, “Perhaps, Millie dear, we should consider my placement in—in—the convalescent home?”
There were forty-seven people ahead of him on the waiting list at Ragland Lodge. In the meantime, I had a lifeline system installed so that I could be away more often. He was to wear a chain necklace with an oval button at all times. “If anything happens when I’m not home,” I told him, “press the button and a phone call will go out to the neighbours.”
“A phone call, did you say? From that?” He frowned at the new loudspeaker box on the table by his bed.
“A call first goes to Boston. It’s absurd, I know. We used to have a local service.”
Father looked at the device without comprehension.
Kate’s friendship in those trying days was a pure gift. We were both, she said, seekers of the light, hungry for the light. I saw her at first as a representative of the church, a church that housed both healing and harm. But the more we travelled the truth-strewn path, and the more nakedly we walked, the further her role within the institution receded. Her own private demon was a recurring depression.
I can say this: that the friendship of prayer is deeply transformative. The wounded mind refocusses. When our confidence in our friendship faltered, our confidence in our Friend would not. What began for me as an occasional silver lining around storm clouds has become a tenacious light surrounding, challenging, even dispelling the raging dark.
It was several months after Kate’s first visit that the phone call came from a reporter, signalling a new time of trial. My private nightmares were about to leap through the trap door and out into the public world of print.
“Miss Shelby? I’m from The Examiner.” The husky voice on the phone was a sudden gust of sleet.
My stammering sounded shrill. “I’m sorry—he—he’s—not well. He can’t come to the phone.” This was true. Father was deteriorating, physically and otherwise. One bad flu lingered and developed into pneumonia. More than once he’d fallen. He was spending less time at his desk and more in bed. A young couple from St. John’s had begun to bring over the week’s service sheets since Father had stopped going to church. Some mornings I would find him kneeling by his bed, eyes closed, face to heaven, fingers pressed tightly together. Once I saw him clasping Mother’s Bible to his lips, his praying face flooded with tears.
“When should I call back?”
“I’m sorr
y. He’s not taking calls.”
But she did call again, and again I replied that Father was unwell. Then, about a week later, she arrived, a young fit-looking woman with a bulky black bag and camera over her shoulder.
I did not let her in. I called both Kate and Eleanor and we agreed that I should grant no interviews with Father to anyone. I was not going to answer the phone any more. If either of them should call, they could leave word on the answering machine. Courageous lovers of the light though they both were, they understood the appeal of the shadows.
The reporter, Jacqueline Addison, was the most undeterred person I’ve ever met. She left a long message saying she was writing an article on The Juniper Band Its, a “scrub and tub” band that had been spawned years ago at the Juniper Centre. “I couldn’t complete my piece without their famous mentor.”
When I answered the door the next day, she was there with a half-dozen roses, saying she hoped he was feeling better. I smiled wanly and thanked her but, again, did not invite her in.
Then on Wednesday morning, the following week, I returned from the post office and stores to find her in the living room with Father, unshaven, in his bathrobe. She had a tape recorder running on the coffee table and was in full interview mode. I almost dropped the bag of groceries in my panic.
“Peter Bowles?” I heard Father ask as I closed the door. His face was ashen. This was clearly not an interview about The Band Its, or, if so, there was more to the article than music.
“Father, you should be in bed.” I didn’t acknowledge her.
She stood and extended her hand to me, leaving the tape recorder running.
“Father is not well,” I said as I took his arm in my attempt to get him to his feet. As I did so, she jumped to his other side.
“No, no. We’ll manage.” She must think she’s his hired nurse, I thought, as she ignored me and assisted his wobbly walk to his embarrassingly smelly and messy room. Like Mother, he was now quite incontinent, and his cloudy urine sat in its turquoise-coloured container, like a bent plastic milk-bottle vase, on top of his table. Hurriedly I removed it, thinking that the whole house probably reeked of urine.
Her reporter’s eyes took in the evidence from Father’s crowded study, library, bedroom, the wardrobe door open, the coat hooks hung with old belts and suspenders that he hadn’t used in years, the walls covered in photographs—skim skim—an ornate banner from India, several citations. The invader was invading the den of the invader.
Father lay in his bed clutching the afghan up to his chin, his right hand shaking steadily as I ushered Jacqueline Addison out of the room and back to the still-running tape recorder.
“You’re interested in more than The Band Its.”
She shrugged. “They’re well named, don’t you think?”
I pointed to the tape recorder. “Would you please….”
As she pressed the button and the tiny click brought me one tiny step back from a looming brink, I asked, “Peter Bowles?”
“Yes.”
“He spoke with you?”
“Off the record.”
“And you came here to….”
She studied my face, then asked abruptly, “How do you stay with him?”
I studied her back and said nothing. How much did she know?
“How do you live with a person who has no conscience?” she persisted.
The gulf between her experience of life and mine was, I thought, unbridgeable. A complete abyss.
“I believe his—his conscience is—is….” I couldn’t think of any way to convey his humanity to her. I imagined that, in her mind, the filthy old pervert quivering in the other room was altogether subhuman. Her task, her God-given task for all I knew, was to sweep the streets clean of him and his obscene stench. My grey-shaded portrait of a sinner could have no place in her gallery of sharp black and white clarity.
I was floundering my way through her unrelenting questions when we both heard a loud thud from Father’s room.
“What was that?” We rushed to find Father, flat on his face and still as a fallen log, on the floor beside his desk.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Breath breath breath breath….
“Could it have been caused by stress?” I asked the doctor.
“It’s possible. Anything’s possible.”
Father’s eyes were closed in a frown. His head was propped up and his hospital bed was rolled up in a reclining position. Tubes were in his nostrils and another was on his hand.
I cupped my mouth to his ear. “Father, it’s Millicent.”
He groaned one long, last agonizing attempt at speech. It ended in a final sound of utter weariness as his head, a heavy weight on his neck, rolled across the pillow. And then it lay still. A stone.
“Can you hear me, Father?”
No answer. No sound ever again.
I moistened the gauze in a tray of water and wiped his closed eyelids.
“Is he in pain?” I asked the doctor the next day.
“We don’t know. With such a massive stroke—we don’t know.”
Father struggling to breathe, phlegm in throat, in lungs, the spirit riding riding above the yellow hospital sheets and the slow drip drip through plastic tubing into the back of his right hand.
Eleanor and Charlie, on tour in France, did not feel compelled to return. “He could be like that for months,” Eleanor said.
“No. I know it won’t be long. I know.”
She said they’d discuss it. In the end they chose their tour. They chose life.
“We have to take care of ourselves,” Eleanor said. “You don’t understand….”
“Mills, you don’t understand,” Charlie shouted into the mouthpiece, echoing Eleanor just the way he used to echo Mother.
“You’re right, Charlie,” I shouted back. “I don’t understand. I’m like Father. He didn’t understand either. You’re the only one who understands. You and Eleanor. You….”
They hung up.
The following day, while I was at the hospital, Eleanor called back and left a message. “It’s harder for Charlie, Millicent. It’s much harder for him. You’ve no idea.”
When I called the hotel, I was told they’d checked out. I thought they might call the next day and stayed at home for the phone. It didn’t ring.
I didn’t know what form of consciousness remained for Father. I didn’t know how long things would last. I summoned St. Michael and all his angels to do battle across the field of my mind. I called for the forces of human compassion to stand in their glory, fine and clear, strong as fire, vast as ocean, red and glowing as sea and sunset, flaming forth from every bud and bush and shrub on the battlefield. Called upon our limitless connectedness one to another, our limitless capacity to encompass our many desolations. Called upon the wisdom beyond my knowing. “Assist this man,” I prayed, “even now, to the right road, the right direction, the right thought.”
The phlegm wormed its way down the side of his mouth. I put the suction tube there to draw it, whitish-grey slime, down the piping, gurgling into the plastic jug on the wall, where it sat like sludge.
Like sludge I too sat, in my own puddle of slime, my eagerness for his departure mixed with regret. Regret that we had not said goodbye. Regret that the last days were not ones of kindness. Regret, the currency of poverty.
I waited by his hospital bed. He seemed to be at peace. How could one tell?
“I’m ready for you to go, Father,” I whispered. “Charlie and I are both ready. Any time you want to go is all right. Are you still eager to stay?”
For days, there was no change. “Peaceful, isn’t he,” the priest from St. John’s said when he dropped by. “He’s a good man, your father.”
“He’s dying,” I said.
Father’s left leg jerked as I said this. One motion. I wondered then whether he was conscious and trying to communicate that he was still alive, that he could hear, that he wasn’t ready to die.
“What are the chances of his
recovery?” I asked the doctor on his rounds that afternoon.
He shook his head. “In cases like this—at his age—if he does survive, he’ll simply vegetate.”
“He’d wanted to go suddenly.”
“It was sudden for him,” the doctor said.
I indicated the needle in his hand. “And that…?”
“It’s up to you.”
“What would you do?”
“If it were me—I wouldn’t want to linger. Not like that.”
“No.”
We agreed. I learned later that one of the parishioners, a former nurse, had visited and criticized my decision. She had known of other stroke victims who had been able to recover.
There were five more days of waiting. Five long days. Parishioners dropped by with cards and flowers. A beautiful young woman with a guitar arrived from out of town one afternoon. “He’s been a hero of mine for years,” she told me. There was a tear in Father’s eye as her lilting sweet voice sang English folk songs.
On another day, I told him again of my dream. “Father, it’s understanding…. You have to have understanding. Even now. And afterwards. Can you understand what I’m trying to say? It’s after you hear all the stories, after that, after you understand, and the boys have all had their say—that’s when heaven opens its doors. At least, that’s what my dream said. Father, can you hear me?” I could not tell. His brow was furrowed as I was speaking, as if in pain.
Nurses came by to check his pulse, to wash his inert body, his arms and legs no longer volitional, the lump of his form rolled onto his side. I turned my eyes away from his nakedness.
In the TV lounge, a thin old man, his blue hospital gown open at the back, was standing, facing but not watching the television. There was a story of a bear cub at a zoo. Nine months old. It had been found lost in the Arctic, orphaned. Its paws held its head.
Lostness.
Infants. Mute. Lonely beyond description in concrete cages.
That night when I got home, there was a message. Eleanor had called. They were on their way to Morocco. Cha Cha had called them. The story was on page four of The Examiner. “Founder of Juniper Centres Accused of Abuse.”
