3
She was thinking back to New Years. Outside, the snow was falling as gentle as confetti on a bride’s veil, as it had on that night. She had perched herself on the arm of the Morris chair – Arthur’s own – to survey the couples entering the Oddfellows’ Hall next door, two by two into the ark. The electric lights inside stretched every quadrangle of glass to the limit (she still preferred the hominess of coal-oil or the dazzle of gas), and soon the orchestra struck up the welcoming number, the horns dominating the strings in the modern style. She closed her eyes and pictured them dancing – a whole village in cadenced, concentric motion in the arms of the music, palpable and reassuring. Through the transmuting snow she detected variations of fox trot and waltz, and somewhat later, as a gift to the elders, the polka and a solitary, fiddle-driven reel. No jig, no fling, no hornpipe. Certainly no galop or lancers. Then something strange, something novel: horns and drums only, the beat fevered, truant, edging towards chaos, held fast by some primitive fulcrum between beat and cadence, sound and melody. She could not imagine what sort of dance they would be doing to such rhythms, such raw choristry, but she sensed it would go well before a fire in the dark under starlight. The snow sizzled and she was asleep.
4
Could it be that after all these years of searching and effort she would have a home of her own? I’ll believe it when I’ve got the deed in my hands – in triplicate with the king’s spit on it, Sophie would have added. Not that she hadn’t lived in places where she had felt at home. That was a different matter. A home is something no one can take away from you. Ever. That’s the reason her forebears and thousands after them had come here: to find a place, build a house, and be at home. This shack, as the villagers called it, with is leaking roof, tarpaper skin, sloping porch and rambunctious gardens was Arthur’s gift to her. Thirty-six years ago – installed in the honeymoon suite of the St. Clair Inn – she would not have dreamt such a finale as this. “Life is mainly what happens to you,” she had said to Cap, sure that he would agree to such an unexpected admission. “Nonsense,” he had replied, rather quickly. “I built my own chamber in Hell. And so did you.”
At first she thought the man clearing a path through the yard with his golashes was Sunny Denfield come to tell her about the meeting. Then she remembered dimly that it was far too soon for that. The fire was out and she sat wrapped in shawls by the front window. Too tentative a step for the Reeve. She leaned forward for a better look. The young Reverend Buchan, fresh out of preacher’s college. Granny sighed indulgently. How many times had such a scene as-was-about-to-follow been enacted over the years? She knew every line, every cue, even the sub-texts. Has this one come on his own or been put up to it by his betters? From the tiny rap on the door she knew the answer. His baptism, she thought, feeling the whole range of ironies.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Coote,” he said, his voice barely penetrating the puffs of vapour it generated.
Granny dipped her head as she always did in greeting. Reverend Buchan followed her gaze to his feet where he checked to see if he had put his galoshes on the wrong side, again. Granny pulled the inside door further open.
“I’m sorry to disturb you on such a beautiful winter’s day,” he said, still standing on the porch, “but I’m here on an official mission.”
God’s or your own, said her silent voice. She stepped purposefully back into the kitchen area.
“May I come in?”
She nodded. Not vigourously enough apparently. She grasped his startled arm and hauled him into the rapidly freezing room.
“Ah, yes. Yes, I’m terribly sorry. I forgot. Unforgivable of me. Will you forgive my stupidity?”
Only if it will help, which I doubt. She indicated Arthur’s chair, but either his aim or his eyesight was off because he landed at one end of the chesterfield. Granny placed his galoshes on a mat by the door. She held the tea-kettle up, and he shook his head up and down. She took that for assent and stirred the firebox. Realizing there was no heat in the room, she shook the grates. The gasping of the flame brought the Reverend to his feet, and when she came over with the tea-service, the one Lucien had given her as a wedding gift, he was still erect, as if wondering how he had got into such a posture.
“May I take my coat off?” he said foolishly.
If you prefer to freeze, yes.
He did remove it – with a little last-second boost from Granny – recognized his folly in an icy instant, and sat down with the coat draped around him like a shroud.
She looked at him not unkindly, waiting as she must.
He seemed genuinely overwhelmed by her silence or by the possibility that some exotic and profane speech might at any moment break out of it and anathematize them both.
“I’ve been asked by the council, by the Reverend Stokes to be precise, representing the council, that is, they wished me as the minister of the church where your late dear husband played the organ, they thought I would be best suited to come and explain the position of the council to you. Do you understand?” He was now shouting as one does when talking at the deaf.
Granny handed him his cup of tea, steaming heartily in the chill air. The heat from the kitchen stove went straight through the old roof.
Reverend Buchan had just found the phrases he had committed to a perilous memory when he spilled his tea on his trousers, and emitted an entirely unrehearsed sequence of expletives.
“Oh, can you ever forgive me,” he blustered, wincing and whisking at his soiled pantleg and managing only to overturn the rest of his tea onto the carpet, necessitating a further string of apologies.
Granny did her best to comfort him, but every time her hand touched him, he flinched, and when she fixed him with her eye and appeared about to say something out loud, he panicked and fell sideways onto the floor, the tea-stain stiffening below his crotch.
Granny went over to the table and returned with her slate. Once he had determined that she was not about to hit him with it, he sat back trembling and profoundly curious. Granny wrote on the slate with a stuttering left hand, then let him read the words: “The Reeve has given me the news. You are forgiven.”
He stared up at her as if she might be the Virgin Mary reincarnate. Then he burst into tears.
Granny, her own heart relenting, mothered him back into his clothes, got his galoshes on in orthodox fashion, and watched him cut a fresh path through the snow towards his ministry.
“If there’s a special spot in Heaven for preachers,” Sophie said many times, drunk and sober, “I’ll take the other place, and a bed-warmer to boot.”
Amen.
35
1
It was snowing again, like ack-ack in a dream, like slow-motion shrapnel. And thick enough to asphyxiate the streetlamps in front of the library, whose eerie rectangle interrupted the blank landscape like a redoubt along the smoky Somme. No wind ruffled this February evening. The snow fell with the absolute illusion of innocence upon the sills, upon the eaves, upon the nervous domesticity of a post-war winter village.
“An’ so to wrap it all up,” the Reeve was saying to the assembled councillors, “she’s an old, old lady who’s lived here for three generations; she’s got legal entitlement to the property if she’s willin’ to pay fair market-value; an’ she definitely wants to live out her days in peace in that rag-taggle shanty, whatever we think of it. I already asked our lawyers to find out a proper price. Any questions on item one?”
The worshipping hand of the junior Miss Robertson came to a breathless halt at the end of the Reeve’s remarks, certain there could be no further question to record. She took advantage of the pause in her note-taking to tilt her calf’s-eye upward in hopeless adoration. Hence she did not, as the Reeve himself did, notice that although there were no questions on the issue, the room was electric with anticipation, with secret understandings on the brink of disclosure. Neither the heat undulating from the floor-register (inconsiderately located beneath the table) nor the imperturbable silence of the snow
fall against the night could distract the council from the matters of state before it. So palpable was the undercurrent that Half-Hitch inadvertently crushed a tailor-made in the trigger of his artificial thumb. Stubby Fielding’s rubber jaw sagged grotesquely. Sandy Redmond felt the Boer’s bayonet strike his thigh like a fish-knife. An improbably icy wind burred along Sunny Denfield’s cheek. Young MacIntosh’s flat feet ached with humiliation and regret. Canon Stokes struggled valiantly with the insurgency of his wife’s roast-beef supper.
“Then I’ll ask Sandy to speak to item two.”
The village grocer, whose own father had come to the Point with the railroad in 1862 and stayed to found a dynasty of shopkeepers (Sandy’s son, Red, now returned a hero from the War, was already a fixture in the business), rose and presented the report of the subcommittee for selecting a designer and builder for the proposed war memorial. As luck would have it – or Providence in the case of the Presbyterian Redmonds – they had been able to locate a man who could both design and build a monument to meet any specifications they wished. It turned out that he had done just that for three villages in Grey, two in Huron and one each in Middlesex and Kent Counties. His specialty, verified by references, was erecting impressive monuments – but simple and noble in design – in small towns at reasonable rates. If the stories told were true, it seems he had a grudge against big cities and ‘government’ types, and had devoted the last three years exclusively to building cenotaphs in underfunded villages that would outshine those overpriced calamities indulged in by the senior municipalities. The man’s name was Sam Stradler. He hailed from a hamlet near London. He had been a stonemason and tombstone carver before serving overseas. Once a site was chosen and the ice broke up, he would begin work – about mid-March or early April – and finish in six to eight weeks.
Approval was audible and unanimous. Miss Robertson recorded the verdict with a proud flourish. Sandy Redmond sat down. A feeling that something significant and abiding had been done suffused the meeting place. The snow emptied itself into the darkness outside.
Half-Hitch clicked his hickory thumb-and-forefinger and rose to speak to item three. Stubby Fielding and young MacIntosh, who had fidgeted and looked embarrassed during the earlier presentation by the Reeve, resumed their fidgeting. Stubby preferred the direct statement of an artillery barrage to all this oblique conniving, but he had been convinced by the devious Hitchcock of the necessity for secrecy. There were times , he allowed, when battle-plans had to be kept under wraps if the strategy itself was not to be jeopardized and the humane goals themselves forever compromised. Stubby had grunted assent and shut up. Horrie MacIntosh, on the other hand, was in no position to argue any side of the matter: he was the recruit, the cadet untested by battle and not yet sanctified by its scarring.
“Our committee’s reached a unanimous decision,” Hitchcock said rigidly from memory. “We explored every angle of the…the issue-at-hand, and we found only one spot – site – that meets all the requirements.” He fished the requirements out of the recall-box: “(1) central location, (2) flat land of at least one-quarter acre in size, (3) property owned by the village or available at nominal cost, and (4) ah –” He flipped the stuck card in his head. “Presence of shade trees.”
“Get on with it, Hitch!” barked the Boer veteran. “This ain’t church! No offense, Mort.”
The Reverend Mort, unaware that high drama was ravelling its sinuous subplots around him, took neither offense nor heed.
Half-Hitch had now irreparably lost his place. He plunged ahead recklessly. “We all agreed, all three of us, there was only one spot to fit the needs we set out here last meetin’. The spot we chose is in the dead-centre of town. It’s on a main street where the city-trolley passes every hour. It’s got a marvellous big shade tree, an’ shrubs an’ hedges to boot. You can see across the marsh to the docks an’ up to the dunes by the Lake from the back-end. An’ best of all, it’s almost owned by the village.”
The Reeve leaned forward in his chair. He now understood the edgy quiet during his earlier speech. His anger, alas, was tempered by the force of the logic in Hitchcock’s report. The only other vacant lot in the middle of town was the one right beside them; but it was the last of the railroad properties: a memorial on its ground would be the ultimate betrayal. Foolishly he had assumed they would choose the original site of the old Anglican Church where the cubscouts pitched their tents. He’d underestimated the opposition.
“I move,” Half-Hitch was saying through his smug smile, “we agree on the Coote property as a site for the monument, an’ begin legal proceedin’s to take back title.”
The motion passed.
2
Granny liked the snow the way it was tonight. Once, with Eddie on her knee and nothing but dark days ahead and only two small presents under the tree, she had watched the Christmas Eve snowfall through the child’s eye, and called it the snow of remembrance. Back then she had thought ‘someday I’ll be sitting in another place with times as bad as these and I’ll remember the wonderful gentleness of this falling without motive or design’. And here I am.
In the Carpenter’s yard she could see the outline of the spruce windbreak, shawled and scarved by the snow – white on green, shape lending shape, all voices hushed inward. This could be any of the snowfalls upon any of the spruces she had lived beside or under in the many seasons of her childhood, girlhood, womanhood, dotage, deathwatch. “Who wants to live to be old?” Cap said to her many times, his flesh wan and shivering after a bad bout. “What would you do with a useless body and all that time on your hands? Sit and remember when your elements used to work and your brain could count to three? How many good times can you re-live anyway before they’re worn out and you come to despise them and despise yourself for staying alive?”
She had no answer, then; neither of them had been old enough to speak from experience. Well, I’ll tell you now, she thought. It’s not the way you imagined. Yes, I live on my memories – what else is there? – but they are not summoned up like individual pearl buttons, like heirlooms, to be turned over in the hand and admired till the eyes water. It doesn’t work that way, Cap. Not for me. Some moments do come back almost whole, like Eddie and me watching the Christmas snow of 1897 with different versions of hope in our hearts. Like the snowy night of 1886 that was like this one except for the wind that blew through it like an invisible beam when Lucien and I rode out to find heaven on a one-horse sled. Or any of a dozen more – from parts of my life you never surmised – full of sweetness and pain of course, but more often marked by the exquisite surge of innocence against experience, by the raw edge of questions which remain more beautiful and durable than the answers we invent merely to stay alive. You would be astonished, Cap, to hear me talk – think – like this, use words in such a way. Then again perhaps you wouldn’t. In any case, you must take the blame for some of it. You maintained, didn’t you, that the world wouldn’t be a safe or sane place to live in if ever women were taught to read and write. But then you didn’t know Eddie, or his father. They taught me that poetry can be gossip made glorious by language. That would shock you. But Sophie knew so, she lived it and died for it. You saw in her only what your prejudices allowed.
And you’ve got no prejudices of course, you silly old coot, she said sharply to herself. Then laughed. You see, old darling, that is how the memory works, that is how I fill these hours before I am overtaken by exhaustion and the dread of the Night-Dream, the one I fear must have shaken you each day of those last years. Forgive me if I failed to acknowledge your anguish. Anyway, you see how the mind refuses to accept the denial of a present or future. I think of Eddie, of snow, of you, of Lucien Burgher, of Sophie’s battered face, of sweet Arthur – separately or together. They have voices, you know, like you; they can be talked to. They can speak with one another in the special existence I lend them, here on a February evening in 1922 with a snow falling that thinks it’s special too but is really the same one whose breathlessness drew a litt
le girl’s wonder to her cabin window miles from this spot more than seventy years ago. You gave it all up too soon, old pessimist. I am alone. I am ready for death’s surprises, if he has any. But I am not lonely. I am still, after all these years, waiting for something to happen.
Like the stove going out, you day-dreaming old fart, she thought, shivering and shuffling over to the Quebec heater. It stared at her, one-eyed and glum. Against the protest of her rheumatism she shook the grates as vigorously as she could manage, but several intractable clinkers had lodged between the flanges. She’d have to get Sunny to clean out the firebox when he came over to tell her about the meeting. He had left her a fine white notepad on which to write out requests and things she needed. She was grateful, though it was very difficult at first to scrawl anything legible there. It wasn’t just the arthritis, she knew. Whatever had afflicted her throat had spread to her writing hand. But it was easier now to list the few supplies she needed for either Sunny or Wilf Underhill to take to Redmond’s or Turnbull’s. It made her feel better about possessing Arthur’s house, at last. They won’t think I’m completely batty. Just old. Maybe I’ll be allowed to die with a little dignity, she mused, trying to recall anyone she loved who had.
Now the good burghers and pewsters of the town would be able to pity her with a clear conscience. However, if they’d been able to observe her wrestling with the paper and kindling in a plugged stove with smoke polluting the chill of her front room, they’d have cried gleefully: “Poor old soul, used to be strong as an ox, you know, scrubbed floors in The Queen’s for years, but then age and arthritis gets the best of us all, don’t it. And of course she never did take care of herself, you know, livin’ in that drafty shack in the Lane all those years, an’ never settin’ foot in a church or a decent body’s house.” I prefer the children, she thought. They only think I’m a witch, an outcast – with status.
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