by Joy Kogawa
“She’s so upset, Millicent.” I could hear the TV blaring in the background.
I lay exhausted and sleepless on the couch. The next day was Saturday. Father’s breathing was rapid and laboured. The nurse said it wouldn’t be long. I was thinking I should stay. I could stay. I could line up the chairs and form a bed and rest and watch over him through the night. But I didn’t.
In the early, still dark morning I was in a stupor, struggling in a dream, when I woke with a start, my heart pounding. A moment later, the phone by my bed rang.
“Miss Shelby, it’s the night nurse calling.”
Thanksgiving Sunday. Five-fifteen a.m.
I rose numbly, drove to the hospital, walked quickly quickly through the quiet corridors to his room. Two strangers in white were at his side.
I watched his body being tied and wrapped with white string and white plastic and I thought of Thanksgiving turkeys being trussed for roasting. An irreverent thought. I touched his cheek. Cold. Reached my arm down his back. Still warm. The two strangers, doing their job, waited for me. I didn’t say the words out loud, but I mouthed them. “Goodbye, Father.” When they turned him on his side, his body was stiff. So dead.
I walked with them as they wheeled him away. Down the elevator to a cold room. In the hall outside the closed door, I folded my hands together, my fingertips covering my mouth as I whispered old songs from “Shelby Selects” so softly that no one could hear.
“Godspeed, Father,” I said in my mind. “Thanksgiving Sunday is a good day. You picked a good day to go.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Father was buried almost a week later, on a blustery Friday the thirteenth.
I had delayed the day hoping Eleanor and Charlie might come, but in the end it was just two of us in the funeral chapel, saying our quiet farewells. No sidespersons ushering in lines of mourners. No eulogies. Kate and I stood facing the coffin, a simple unadorned box. I pictured Eleanor and Charlie with us, each standing at a corner, a little rectangular vigil. And I thought of the picture in my childhood bedroom of four angels around the bed of a sleeping child.
Four corners to my bed, four angels round my head,
One to watch and two to pray, and one to keep all fear away.
I wept for the child, Charles Barnabas, Granny Shelby’s genius baby reading a newspaper to astonished passengers on board a ship. I wept for that innocent and wondrous little boy, a hope-shaped light trapped within a criminal’s life.
Father’s old trumpet rested on top of the closed coffin, beside a small cluster of roses from the garden and a cutting from the night-blooming cereus. I picked it up, muted it, opened a window and played “Taps” softly and slowly into the passing traffic.
Day is done
Gone the sun
From the hills
From the lakes
From the sky….
We drove to the cemetery in the customary limousine, with the men from the funeral home, and watched as the plain wooden box was lowered mechanically to his grave beside Mother’s. Flesh and bone to dust and stone.
Looking back these years later, I can see with the eyes in the back of my skull that, as in fairy tales and legends, so in life—the time of the test is a fire that fixes the faith. Day by hour by moment, the Merciful One was present, even as I stood under the lurid glow of The Examiner’s glare.
Father, who was in a coma when the headlines hit, never had to face the public humiliation. That was left to the rest of us.
The streets of Ragland turned overnight to quicksand. The shopkeeper, who used to deliver our groceries, didn’t know what to say and averted his eyes when I dropped by to pay the monthly bill. He whispered to his wife, who awkwardly accepted my cheque, then they both hastily turned to another customer. One of the high school teachers who would often stop to chat crossed the street to avoid me, and resolutely looked away. The neighbour on the next block whose two cherubic little girls I would often watch playing shepherded them towards the house when she saw me coming down the street. I walked past as quickly as I could. When I turned the corner, I glanced back and found her still staring after me, eyes fearful and wide.
“Lift up, oh lift up your head, Millicent,” I said to myself. But I couldn’t.
The Alberta Juniper Centre’s silence was a thick concrete wall when I enquired, more than once, if they would like Father’s archival material. Charlie and Eleanor too wanted nothing, nothing, nothing at all from the house. “Burn the stuff. Do anything you want. Just don’t bug us,” Charlie said. Cha Cha at first wanted the family silver, some albums and the gifts that had never been used. Thank heavens, I thought. But she changed her mind. The fallout of The Examiner’s story was affecting more than their social calendars. Cha Cha lost her job and moved back home. In one raving phone call she screamed at me. It was all my fault. I had ruined their lives.
“Dad says you’re just as selfish and pig-headed and sick as Grandad. You were wrong to be on his side. It’s so sick. You make me so sick I could puke. You had no business speaking to that reporter.”
“Cha Cha, I didn’t tell her….”
“Don’t call here. Don’t ever call here again. We’ve got nothing to do with you or your sickening old filthy old disgusting….” I could hear Eleanor in the background. And then she hung up. Eleanor phoned back to say that, for now, it was better if I didn’t phone.
I called Kate. I wept. We prayed. She told me all this was typical. Families of the demonized devour one another. I should look away. I tried. But I couldn’t bear it. I reached out more than once.
“You think the whole world revolves around you, Mills? Get a life. Leave us alone!” The words from my brother hit me in the face like lye.
Over time, I have had so many body blows from Father’s hidden past that I know by now I am in the ring for life. But I am not alone in my corner. My coach is the great Shadow Boxer, who takes the punches with me. More than once I’ve been knocked out by passing remarks. “I always thought you weren’t normal. You couldn’t be normal living with somebody like that.” People, even strangers, have phoned, they’ve sent e-mails. “It’s not true, is it? It can’t be true.” I’ve run into a few of his victims by chance—once at a wedding, once in a café, once in the middle of the road as we were walking in opposite directions. I’ve heard from almost a dozen people. I wonder about the hundreds of others. What I’ve learned is that the story of an abuser is not a story of an individual. It’s a story of a web.
About two weeks after the article by Jacqueline Addison, an old classmate from Juniper High, now living in Regina, called to tell me that her daughter needed to talk. “Kelly Ann put two and two together,” she said.
Kelly Ann’s high tiny voice was that of a child. “I didn’t believe it. I would never, never, have believed. My sister told me when Brad and I got engaged. But I said she was just jealous. Brad would never do anything like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like take her into the woods.”
“Was that so bad?”
“But she was six. He was sixteen.”
“Oh.”
Kelly Ann had lived in denial. She’d seen the evidence and dismissed it—the locked bathroom door, the baby’s reddened genital area. She’d seen Brad with his hands jiggling under Jilly’s blanket. He’d said, “I was just seeing if she was wetting herself.” She had begun to wonder about her sister’s story for the first time.
The day after her mother showed her the article, she began questioning Brad. He was not a talker. He denied everything at first. Then the story, only part of the story, emerged. Something had happened with Father. Once? Twice? Often? He wouldn’t say. She started to watch him closely. He refused to go for therapy.
“I can’t believe anything he says. Anything. I can’t leave him in the house with Jilly. It’s crazy. I’m going crazy. Should I get a divorce? Do I want a divorce? The priest says I can’t get a divorce anyway. God doesn’t allow it. I’m just going crazy.”
&n
bsp; “Oh, Kelly Ann. There are other priests.”
She called several times over the following days. She saw the Lutheran minister who encouraged her to see a lawyer. Brad claimed she was making everything up. He said he was going to move out and sue for custody. Over the phone I held Kelly Ann’s hand. “We’re going to come out of this, Kelly Ann,” I told her. “He can’t take Jilly. I’ll come if it will help. I’ll testify.”
Brad was just one of Father’s many boys. Three others phoned, and one came to visit to tell me of his relief when the story was out. As young boys they had tried to hide from him, one had tried to protect a younger brother. None of them had told their parents. One woman I could hardly remember called to say that her brother would kill her if he knew she was speaking to me, so deep was his rage.
“If you knew what the creep was up to, why didn’t you turn him in? What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with your whole family?”
I listened to her and my first impulse was to run away somewhere, anywhere. I wanted to hang up the phone, get an unlisted number. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t my fault. But as her choking anger turned to tears, I found myself condemning my complicity, the cowardice of silence. How could I have been so blind? How could I not have seen her brother, her family?
“What can I—is there anything I can do? Anything?” My question was to the Great Healer as much as to her.
The bitterness exploded in my ear. “Nothing. There’s not a damn thing you can do. Your family wrecked my family and you can live with that. You can eat shit is what you can do. You can go to hell!”
“I’m so—I am so sorry,” I whispered.
“You think just because you say you’re sorry that makes everything all right?”
“No—no. Of course it doesn’t.” Words were so cheap, I thought. Nothing I could say would help. If Father had been publicly hounded, sent to jail, castrated in public, if he had suffered and she had been able to see the suffering, that might have eased her pain. Was it now left to me, to Charlie, to carry that load?
There is a time to speak and a time not to speak. This was a time when neither speech nor silence would suffice.
When I finally hung up the phone, I was too full of weeping to do anything except put my head on the desk and heave with sobs. The tidal wave of pain was never going to end. Where in all the world was a happier place? I called Kate, but she was out. Eventually I crawled into bed, fully clothed, too tired to undress.
Somewhere in the night, Mercy attended me. In the morning I woke with the old Beatles’ song “Let It Be” running through my mind. “Let It Be.” Though I was branded the enemy, even my accusers were likewise branded. Humanity was replete with crimes—crimes of leaders, of ancestors, crimes in the name of God, crimes of action and countless crimes of inaction. We were all members of tribes and nations and families, none of which could claim either pure innocence or pure guilt.
I prayed through the following days that Father’s victims and their families would find the help they needed, would find a measure of relief and ease. I prayed to the Maker of Hope, whose rainlight arcs towards heaven and bows again to earth in that gentle greeting of colour and light, “Send hope. Rain down hope, oh Author of hope. Send hope.” I clung to Kate. I clung to Eleanor.
Then late one Saturday night Cha Cha called and her voice was subdued. “Auntie, I’m really worried about you. You’ve got to go and see a doctor.”
“A what?”
“Mom just told me about Jeffrey. Why didn’t you call the police? It’s unbelievable, Aunt Mills. Unbelievable! Don’t you know there’s something really wrong with this picture? Didn’t you care about your own child? What if he’d killed Jeff?”
“I’d do anything for Jeffrey, Cha Cha. But putting Grandad in jail—that wouldn’t have helped Jeff at all. Not at all.”
“But you know why Grandad got away with it, don’t you. It’s because you protected him. You put the gun in his filthy hand and you said, “Okay, Daddy darling, go and kill my little baby….”
“Cha Cha, I can’t hear this.”
“No. That’s what Mom and Dad both told me. You can’t face the truth. And you know what? Here’s something else you can chew on. Either you go and get help for yourself, or you don’t ever ever ever see us again. Have you got that? It’s just too too nauseating.”
“Let me speak to your mother.”
“No, this is my call. I’m paying for this. They’re right here and they say it’s my call. And they support me because they love me. That’s the difference. My parents care about me. You just didn’t care enough about Jeff. All you and Grandad ever thought about was yourselves, and that time you just left Jeff….”
I couldn’t speak. My heart was being bludgeoned. I hung up.
I was ill with doubt. Did I damage my son? Dear Goddess, what was the truth inside the poison?
There were no answers. There was no clarity. At three in the morning, I called Jeffrey and talked about nothing at all. A movie he’d seen. A friend who was visiting. My voice was high and bright and false. He couldn’t know that tears were soaking through the sheets to the mattress.
“You sure it’s just a cold, Mom? You sound different.”
“I do?” I demonstrated my okayness with a little laugh and blew my nose. I tried to get my wavery voice under control.
Eleanor didn’t call back when I left messages. “I’ve seen a doctor. Is that really what you wanted? All he’s done is prescribe medication—which I’m not taking.”
Charlie answered the phone one morning and hung up.
“This is too hard,” I told Kate. “It’s too unfair.”
“Yes,” she said. “It is too hard. It is unfair. But we don’t know what they’re going through. Don’t call them. Call me.”
After Charlie’s hang-up, I didn’t reach out again. I haven’t spoken to Charlie or Eleanor or Cha Cha in five years. Cha Cha moved with a new partner to Los Angeles. Charlie and Eleanor followed. I wouldn’t have known except for Kate, who heard indirectly through another friend. There are cards at Christmas from Eleanor, who signs Charlie’s name, but there’s nothing from Cha Cha.
Kate and I have talked about all this with less frequency over time, but the sadness never completely goes away. And so I cannot say that my life’s great storm is ended, or that the story of Father is behind me. I cannot even say that the rainbow is a constant in my skies. But these days I experience friendship as life’s great signature of hope, the pot at the end of the rainbow, the coinage of the abundant way. I do cherish my friends. Old friends, new friends. Kate. Lee Armitage. Constance Hobbs. As the familiar round goes,
Make new friends but keep the old
One is silver and the other gold.
Constance Hobbs’s message of condolences one day was a warm embrace in a cold, dark season. Dear old Constance. She, who knew the closets and cupboards of my childhood home in a way that new friends could not, reconnected me to a magical childhood. She told me in our first conversation in decades, her voice still amazingly young, that she had moved back to Toronto when James became ill. He had died about three years earlier. Since then, she was back in demand at the Juniper Centres. What was I going to do? she asked. I didn’t know.
In the end, thanks to Constance, it was the Juniper Centre here in Ontario that opened its northern woodsy sweet-smelling arms. The director, Dr. Lee Armitage, was a close friend of Kate’s. She remembered me as Camper Songbird. “We have the space,” Lee Armitage said, and welcomed not just me but the photographs, records, books, papers and “anything you’d like to bring.” The entire staff signed a welcome card—Lee Armitage, Constance, Jane in the office, Doug who kept the grounds, Cookie who drove up from Chester Park every day. I looked steadfastly in the direction of welcome.
Kate laughed when I told her. “I know. I’ve been talking to Lee,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you, more things are wrought by friendship than this world dreams of?”
There was no time for careful sorting. The
fireplace worked overtime. I packed Father’s entire desk and contents, including the alabaster statue of Socrates. The piano, Lee Armitage said, they would particularly cherish. “It’s an important part of our story.” All the original songbooks went, the mountains of tapes from “Shelby Selects,” some recorded workshops with the Hobbses.
The house was bought before it went in the listings, while the real estate man was arguing that the price was too low. I was in a hurry, I said, to sell.
The morning I left, the sky was dramatically black and white and blue. The crows leaned into the winds, sideways, backwards. Tree branches, wildly acrobatic, leapt in a thousand directions, the last few leaves flung loose in the chilly striptease.
Boots, in her carrying case in the back seat of the car, cowered, hissing and growling her displeasure.
“Okay, Boots, okay. We’re off.”
I drove up to Juniper for one last goodbye—down the newly paved Main Street. The rectory was still there, hidden in the shadows behind pine trees now thick and higher than the roof. The old willow tree was gone. I parked in the alley, and looked up at my room, remembering the days when I would listen by the window for the sound of a car.
“Are you there, Stewart? Are you in the sound of the static?”
I know now that, although Stewart’s love was a fiction in my adolescent mind, the Love that walks among us is more real than we are. In spite of all that happened when the scandal broke—the mudslinging, the family breakdown, the sadness of all the Brads and the Kelly Anns and the Jillys—throughout the long darkening I held to my hope. The Goddess of Mercy was the Goddess of Abundance. How triumphantly, how softly on the gentle feet of prayer, the declaration came to me that I was held, I was forgiven, I was being made whole, I was becoming free. I rested in this and I knew it to be sure. Now, today, I can say with the words of my clear trust that, even when utterly weak and lost and rejected, I was safe in the hands of the One who sees what I could not. This much, by faith, I do know. And to have come thus far is exhilarating.
