Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  A distant thunder, then the drumbeat of rain.

  During these final weeks Ossie has taken to sitting for hours in a chair with his back to an open window. This allows him to hear, smell and sense his garden. A cool breeze caresses him as his head rests sideways against the high back of the chair. I pull up a seat beside him and photograph his face. He looks so fragile and vulnerable that it makes me afraid. His voice has become a whisper. I lean closer to hear him.

  “I’m sorry I’m taking so long to die.”

  Taking so long to die

  A distant drumming comes down the mountain, strides through the trees and crosses the road.

  2014

  During the early morning hours of his last days Ossie frequently calls Somae Claire, his second daughter, to his bedside.

  “We have to make a list. Get a pen and paper.” She does and sits by his side.

  “Okay, Dad, what’s number one?”

  “Shakespeare.”

  She writes it down. “And Dad, what’s number two?”

  “Nothing to worry about.” She writes that down.

  “And number three?”

  “That’s it.” He goes to sleep.

  Rain has fallen like tears for five days on this little Jamaican house. Uninsulated, the wooden roof drums like my other island home. The garden is radiant.

  November 2014

  Sheila’s father’s light is faster dimming. The wear of 91 years is accelerated by the aggressive cancer he has decided not to treat. His children fly repeatedly into Jamaica from Vancouver Island, England and Toronto to succor and assist. Sheila books her fifth trip of the year when she hears that he’s now totally bedridden. She will soon join her sister; both will keep watch for the remaining days until last light. It looks to be a long vigil.

  The sisters Skype daily through November. Their father’s decline is both physical and mental. While he has flashes of lucidity, even humour, he loses track of time, fixates on small details and is frequently confused. His dreams are frightening. I can no longer understand him on the phone.

  Sister Somae Claire sends progressively dire reports. Sheila moves her departure date up and begins working overtime so she can leave. It soon becomes clear that Claire is exhausted, losing her ability to cope alone. Sheila’s departure is moved up yet again. On a mid-November Friday a home hospital bed is ordered — not an easy find on the island. Sheila announces that she has once again changed her departure date. She will fly down two days hence. The next day is spent cancelling future meetings and appointments. She is relinquishing control of a project she has worked very hard setting up. Not easy.

  On the day before her departure the local Jamaican doctor is summoned to set up a drip as Ossie is barely even drinking water. Doctor’s verdict: he probably won’t make it through the night. This message reaches Toronto while we’re both on the ground floor at dusk. Our downstairs lights are not yet on. I listen as Sheila takes in this news on the phone. Her ticket will have her in her father’s house by dusk tomorrow. She’s just been told that he may not be there when she arrives. She hangs up and stands quietly in the dark.

  “I’ve had to make so many decisions and changes in the past weeks. Now I know that my last decision was so wrong.”

  I watch her turn and begin to slowly climb the stairs to the brightly lit second floor. The light ahead and above makes a corona of her big head of curly silver hair — Jamaican hair. I’ve never seen her look so small, so vulnerable, so defeated and so alone.

  The drumming stops.

  This morning four of us began digging a hole in the red earth of the back garden. The lateritic soil is almost like clay. It’s hard work. Our excavation is next to a bougainvillea partially shaded by a couple of banana trees that are in turn guarded by the enormous guango tree topping out far above our heads.

  We take turns. Finally, what is essentially a post-hole, is deemed deep enough. We slide the lid of a small wooden box and withdraw a clear bag of pale powder. One handful at a time we let Ossie stream through our fingers down into the hole. We replace the earth and I cover our disturbance with a large gray rock. Ossie lies only a yard from his sister and barely a foot from his beloved wife Joan. An entire generation has now retired forever.

  We have a plan to end this day with new life. A drive east along Jamaica’s north coast takes us through Runaway Bay, Parsons Gully, Priory, St. Ann’s Bay, Salem, Ocho Rios and Oracabessa. Not far from Golden Eye we slip through the ruined gate of an abandoned resort, skirt it and pick up a small road to the sea. It is almost dusk when we locate the waiting game warden who has taken shelter from the light drizzle in a decaying pavilion by beach. We walk the sands with him until we reach a large tree at the foot of a cliff. No X marks the spot, just a slender white rod planted upright well above the tide line. Under the warden’s watchful eye we dig slowly with our bare hands. A foot or so down we encounter a baby sea turtle, a hawksbill, buried in the sand. His shell is little more than an inch long but already his fore-flippers demonstrate amazing strength when held between finger and thumb. We dig further and find more. Soon we have 163 flailing little hawksbills in a pail.

  The burial

  These little creatures are endangered. In the years before game wardens were appointed the locals would trap and kill the turtles on the beach. When those people were finally persuaded to leave them alone other predators appeared — dogs and the mongoose. One in 300 babies would make it down the beach to the safety of the sea. Our job tonight is to elevate the survival rate to 100 percent. We carefully tip the pail.

  It’s recess rush in a schoolyard. They’re off toward the horizon’s thin light and the sea accompanied by our five-person honour guard. During their dozen-minute scramble to the mother water their precise location will get forever imprinted into their brains. A hundred years from now, those that have survived to become four-foot giants will remember this place. In the meantime they will have swum through the surf, paddled to the edge of the continental shelf, curled into a little ball and ridden the great ocean currents right across the Atlantic and scattered from West Africa all the way to Islay off Scotland. Four years from now they’ll have ridden currents back across and returned to this very spot.

  Does this nursery effort actually work? A decade ago 300 hatchlings made it to the sea. This year the total will exceed 20,000. This is our new life for old.

  Photography is part of death and grief’s procession. It was once a funerary art — think of all those old glass plates of open caskets. During the days following Ossie’s death Sheila’s sister Claire mounts a savage attack on the family albums stacked in the Jamaica living room. Vintage plastic pages crackle as she vaults through various three-ring binders stuffed with sheets of 3x5 inch prints with yellowed paper bases and retiring dyes. Some have blushed magenta, others have surrendered to a deathly cyan. While the few black-and-whites record early childhoods in St. Albans, north of London, life in colour begins in Toronto where Ossie was the first Jamaican consul general. The prints recording the following years as counsul general in the Bahamas demonstrate how heat, light and moisture are the nemesis of photographic dyes. Truer colours return for the retirement years in Jamaica and family visits. Claire ruthlessly excises and reorganizes the pages, purging the stack until finally only a single binder stands. It’s a grief-driven exorcism whose criteria later puzzle even Claire during the calmer days that follow. The final edit of two lives now rests quietly on a little side table. A family’s history has been compressed and packaged for posterity. Many doors have closed.

  We return to Canada but will soon be back.

  2015

  We’ve been in the Jamaica house for a day. The empty strangeness is beginning to slip away as is the shock of seeing how careworn things are. The chairs, sofas, tables and beds; the curtains, dishes, shelves and counters all tell the same story — old people lived here. Now they’re gone — Ossie, the patriarch, now
for almost a year; his wife for several more. Sheila enters the room, sees me looking and reads my thoughts. “They’re gone; Dad’s dead,” she says. “We’re alone. We’re the old people now.”

  We are now in a land of in between. I go; I return. I leave once more.

  ***

  November is lumbering down from the inland headwaters, through the bush toward the river forks. I make a last run before my stream of stories becomes a river stilled by ice. Snow will fall: there will be silence. I will remain inside for months, trying to make words flow like water.

  2016

  It’s late November when the big airbus makes landfall just west of Montego Bay and begins its rapid descent to Sangster Airport. It skims the coast mountains, comes in low over the harbour, clears runway lights at the water’s edge and decelerates down the hot pavement. This will be my last time in Jamaica. The house is for sale.

  Paul is waiting for me outside arrivals, his face coal-black above his neat white cotton turtleneck. We embrace and drag my bags into the dazzling heat of the parking lot. He is first among the many people here that I will miss. I love this island with its many landscapes; however, over the years I’ve developed a sense of community and so it will be the people that I will really miss. As I move through Brown’s Town during the next few days I get many warm greetings. In this intense market town I’m known as Mr. Murray, after my Black Jamaican father-in-law. He was a saintlier man than I am so I take it as a compliment. Only Paul calls me Michael and Hermin, the housekeeper, slyly calls me No. 1. She knows where the butter is. Many ask if I’ll come back once the house is gone.

  I’ve been alone in the Jamaica house for five days and nights. After going to bed shortly after nightfall I quickly fell asleep. Some hours later I wake to footfalls — slow, deliberate and very close. A door protests; a floorboard creaks. I hear low moans. There is a sharp report. My watch says nearly midnight.

  I slowly, soundlessly roll onto my back to better hear and locate the intruder. He keeps walking, directionless. Periodically something rolls. I hear a rattle, then a crash.

  I’m approximately in the middle of the house — the whole building is suddenly alive. Step, roll, rattle, a ring. 12:16 p.m. More footsteps. Woodwork groans, a door creaks. Slow, methodical pacing. 12:32. It’s almost the sound of my northern cabin shuddering in the wind. But this night is very still, dark, overcast and this tropical house is made of concrete. There is only one room with a wooden floor — the bedroom in which Ossie died. I am not in it.

  After lying for an hour in high alert all the sounds suddenly stop. Following a few silent minutes I turn on a light to examine my watch. It’s five after one. The visitation is over. The duppy, this restless spirit of the dead, has gone. The profound silence suffocates.

  2016

  Now that I’m past my three score and ten I’ve entered a valley of ghosts. My grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and some cousins along with an entire alphabet of friends and colleagues have slipped under the waves. Several more are drowning. Life is as unstable as water. I’m now in my little ship’s pilothouse at midnight. No one is on watch. The radar shows a blank sea, the chart plotter reveals no course. My vessel plunges forward, rising and falling on unseen swells. I have no memory of booking this passage. We all stand alone.

  Epilogue

  And what of Daniel Ortega, the man at the beginning of this book?

  After a hiatus of 16 years he has been clinging to power for the past decade. For many of his people he has become Somoza, the dictator he replaced almost 40 years ago. He now has his own National Guard, a brutal coalition of paramilitary thugs, death squads, the police and the army. They race Toyota pickups through the streets of Masaya and the capital Managua waving guns and shooting protesters. Three hundred Nicaraguans have been shot dead in the four months since April of 2018. There have been summary executions.

  Presidente Ortega himself hunkers behind the skirts of his looney wife, Rosario Murillo, who daily gives risible rants on the TV stations and in the press that she and her husband own and control. She has had government buildings painted in her “good vibes” colours — blue, yellow, purple and fushia. She has erected over a hundred twinkly 50 foot high “Tree of Life” sculptures along Managua’s main avenues. Despite these measures the country remains broken and poor. The fires of the Revolution have gone out.

  July 2018. 3:20 a.m.

  Night of the Blood Moon

  Alone in the cabin I’ve just gone through this little book one last time, finally making peace with its leaks and stumbles. Command S. The moon is full, strange backlit clouds scud and a powerful west wind roils the waters and scatters the moon’s light. There’s a veil of smoke as 10,000 hectares of pine forest burn just a few miles north. This furious fire long ago jumped the Key River making the hard rock land smoke like a great volcano. The world heats and burns. Devastation and someday, perhaps, renewal.

  END

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to Ken Straiton for his generous work on my picture files and for once again supplying the author photograph. The late Doug Clark’s son Anton, Geoffrey James and Elizabeth Willing also made contributions to the photo files. At ECW Jack David encouraged me to write this book, Michael Holmes supported it, and Jen Knoch patiently saw it through a protracted process. Thanks to you all. I’m also very grateful to the advance copyreaders. And, as always, thanks to Sheila and Bill the Cat for putting up with me and the chaos. Bill’s pal Ziggy refused to move to Hamilton and won’t acknowledge me so he gets no mention. I won’t talk to him either but I do miss him. He’s a very special cat.

  About the Author

  A graduate of the University of Toronto and Ryerson, Michael Mitchell returned to Toronto after working in Mexico as an archeologist. Mitchell’s work has appeared in many national magazines, including Weekend, Saturday Night, Descant and Canadian Art. As well as working as a teacher, he was on the curatorial and acquisitions committee for prints, drawings, and photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario and a founder of several enduring arts organizations. Mitchell’s photographs are in the collections of Sweden’s Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the Portrait Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario as well as many private and corporate collections.

  DISCOVER ONLINE

  Molly, an eighty-year-old artist, drowns in her bath while living alone on Vancouver Island. When her son, Toronto writer and photographer Michael Mitchell, arrives from the east the next day he finds a studio full of her paintings and a treasure trove of family papers that take him on a romantic journey to the far corners of the world and back as far as the early 18th century. Illustrated with Molly’s art and her son’s evocative photographs of her empty house and studio, The Molly Fire collages dance cards, war diaries, menus, naval dispatches, and news reports to create a vivid and moving memoir as well as a poignant meditation on loss and identity.

  Shortlisted for the 2005 Governor General’s Award, the 2005 Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize, and a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of 2005.

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  Copyright

  Copyright © Michael Mitchell, 2019

  Published by ECW Press

  665 Gerrard Street EastToronto, Ontario, Canada M4M 1Y2

  416-694-3348 / info@ecwpress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do
not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Cover design: David A. Gee

  Author photo: Ken Straiton

  Cover photograph: Michael Mitchell

  Fire raft: John McEwen with installation assistance by Kerry Mews

  The publication of Final Fire has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and by the Government of Canada. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. Ce livre est financé en partie par le gouvernement du Canada. We also acknowledge the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  Several of the following chapters first appeared, in somewhat different form, in Descant and Canadian Art. The section on photographer Douglas Clark is adapted from a catalogue essay written for his posthumous exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which is reproduced with permission from the Art Gallery of Ontario. First published in the exhibition catalogue Sweet Immortality: Douglas Clark, © 2005 Art Gallery of Ontario. Several camera-related incidents told in The Molly Fire are retold here as this is a book about life as a photographer.