Granny murmured reassurance.
“I wanted, after a lot of wandering about, to come home.”
They listened to the tic toc of the rocker through the room.
“I’m still here,” Granny said.
53
1
When Eddie went off to Victoria College in Toronto to study philosophy and literature in the mellow autumn of 1910, the house was a lot quieter. And they were getting old, of course – Arthur and Granny – overtaken now by sudden naps, drifting into snoozes in the sunlight through the window, into dozes later denied, into lapses of thought or purpose, bickering pleasantly over the imperfections of memory. Whatever the season, Granny went out every day to check the mail for letters from Eddie, to buy the few groceries they pretended to need each day, to nod hello to the few souls she still knew who also could get up and about, and to listen from shy corners to the buzz of gossip among the young who barely remembered her – touched by their enthusiasm and by their sense of having inherited this time and place whole and without obligation. In the winter she pulled Eddie’s sled to Redmond’s – where Sandy now presided – or even up to the coal dock for a bushel of coke. Sometimes she would stand on the wharf and look north at the Great Lake and just wonder, till the chill took her and a brisk walk home warmed her up again. Arthur’s gout kept him indoors much of the time, though he always came out once a day in the growing seasons to offer editorial comment on the flowers or vegetables or the trimming of the hedges Before he would be allowed to go back inside, they would promenade arm-in-arm around the perimeter of their land, admiring the view over the marsh clear to the River before turning homeward. Once, Granny overheard young Ethel Carpenter, who assumed all old people were deaf, whisper loudly to her husband: “Now ain’t they a cute pair!” Granny winced, then smiled inwardly all the way to the stoop.
Eddie wrote them every week while he was in college. In the summers he worked for the Sarnia newspaper, The Observer, and lived at home. He had many friends, in Toronto and here in Lambton. Eddie assumed there was good in the world and spent much of his time searching it out, though Granny could see that the books he studied and the sights he’d seen in the big city had left him with little doubt of the magnitude of his quest. But he was not one to flinch from its pain, she could see that plainly. He had courage, and a winning heart. Friends flocked to him, and many of them, she thought, would remain steadfast in the causes he had persuaded them foolishly to undertake with him. Already he was talking about graduate studies, of being a professor or lawyer or someone who could move the earth an inch or two just by being in it. Arthur and Granny would sit at the kitchen table in the lamplight and jointly compose letters to him, Arthur’s English-schoolboy ‘hand’ flowing across the white page carrying thought and feeling and happening into elegance and some kind of permanence he only vaguely comprehended. She was the one – always – to read back what they had written in a sober cadence that made Arthur laugh till she swatted him with the letter and started over, daring him to intercede. When the return letter arrived faithfully within the week, they sat on the chesterfield taking turns presenting it, re-enacting the best moments many times, constructing lovingly in their minds the unfolding biography and pageant of their grandson’s life. You won’t believe me, Cap Dowling, Granny said to him one day, but I am happy.
Arthur died at 1 a.m. in the morning of April 3, 1912, a month shy of his seventy-seventh birthday. Granny was beside him on the chesterfield where he’d been resting, close to the stove. His recurrent pleurisy had turned to pneumonia. He died peacefully in an interval between dreams. Just before he closed his eyes for the last time around midnight, he smiled wanly at the companion of his latter years and asked her to hold his hand. When she did she found his grip resolute. He was too weak to say anything more but as the lids came down, she saw something in the eyes she interpreted as ‘forgive me’ before it was extinguished by a twinkle. About one o’clock his breathing stopped. She permitted his hand to grow cold in hers.
Of all the deaths and departures she had endured in her seven decades of living, Arthur’s was the most simple and most touching. For the first time in her life Granny found she could mourn with a pure and biding sadness, a sadness uncomplicated by guilt, remorse, rage, helplessness. Arthur lived a long and eventful time on earth, taking little and giving much. Near the end he could talk of heaven as if he believed it was waiting for him. He was one of the lucky ones.
Eddie felt terrible about having to go straight back to college to write his exams, but he was reassured by the steady look Granny gave him that said, ‘You have to; I’ll be all right’. Though not unexpected, Arthur’s death had dealt Eddie a sideways blow. He was bearing up well, but when he came home again for the summer, she would have to keep a close watch on him.
Arthur’s funeral was attended by most of the village and the outpouring of sorrow was largely genuine. Granny noted that many of the young people, students and choir members under Arthur, who came over to offer their condolences did not seem at all sure exactly who she was, other than Granny Coote. It was an odd sensation and one that disquieted her more than the tedious eulogy by the recently arrived Methodist minister. Arthur’s tombstone stood in a perpetually sunny spot on the south-west side of the little cemetery. Granny noted how much it had filled with graves since the lonely day when Cap was put under the horse-chestnut in the north-east corner. She recognized too many of the names cut in stone. After the interment, she stood apart with Eddie and gazed at the ground that now possessed her husband – body and spirit – thinking that this was a fitting spot for him and most of all for her. I’ll be laid right here, Arthur, she whispered to him, not a yard away. In the meantime, you behave yourself.
As they turned to leave, Granny took a step towards Cap’s grave, acknowledged it, then swept her eyes across the plain tablet a few feet to the south of it. The strange syllables of Bradley’s name hovered on her lips. She moved into the silence and dropped the flowers she had been holding. She felt Eddie’s stare, and for a moment dared not turn to face him. In the carriage all the way back to the reception hall, she waited for his question. If he asks, she thought, I’ll have to tell him. I have no choice.
Eddie said goodbye at the station, clinging to her as he used to with the blind trust of the child he no longer was.
2
“It was good to hear Arthur’s piano played again. Though it had little of Arthur’s sprightly thunder in it, Eddie’s performance was vigorous and high-spirited. Quite often his journalist friends would come down to take him out for the evening – usually dancing at Lake Chipican – and linger for an hour or so to sing along with him, and flirt with Granny in what they took to be an outrageous manner. “Isn’t a gal at Chipican could hold a candle to you, Gran,” one of them invariably proclaimed as he whirled her about carefully to a musical flourish from Eddie. “You must’ve been a ballerina,” they’d tease, “A dance-hall girl in Dawson City!”, “Come on with us, Gran, we won’t tell them how young you are.”
One of them, Ralph Sifton, had an automobile which he lent to Eddie on occasion so that he could take her for drives in the country on Sunday afternoons. She was amazed not only by the mechanical noise-maker they were miraculously seated upon but by the way in which the countryside it roared through had changed since she had grown up in it. She realized, too, how long it had been since she had driven out here on a cutter with Lucien Burgher. The bush was gone. A few strands of timber had been overlooked and left to brood over the wide spaces between them, rolling with wheat and oats and neatly fenced pastureland. Here and there secondary scrub growth nudged upward through swail or lowland; the primary forest, born in the slow surge of millennial time, would not come again. On the way home she had a hard time swallowing.
In the spring of 1914 Eddie graduated with honours from the University of Toronto. He desperately wanted her to come to the convocation and even arranged for Ralph Sifton to accompany her on the train. But she took ill a few days be
fore the event – the doctor diagnosed it as severe grippe – and she had to send Ralph off alone. She was furious with herself. Even now nearing seventy-four, she was rarely sick except for her rheumatism, and that was never disabling. When Eddie came home, though, there was no hint of disappointment in his face. He modelled his cap and gown for her, he hung his framed baccalaureate next to the tintype of Arthur at the piano of the Theatre Royal, and then brought out the photographs Ralph had taken of the ceremony with The Observer’s best camera. He escorted her to supper at the Colonial Hotel in Sarnia – still bustling with its own celebrations as the nation’s newest city – and told her of his plans.
Using the money Arthur had set aside for him in his will, Eddie said he was going to return to Toronto in July to begin studying for his master’s degree in comparative literature. That would take him about eighteen months, after which he would look for a job teaching in one of the small Maritime colleges or right here in Ontario where there was talk of expanding the university in London. He hoped to continue his studies, but for the near future he wanted to find a place where he could be useful and self-supporting, a small town preferably where he could put down roots and where he could bring his granny to live out her days with him.
“You can’t say no, Gran. Arthur would have wanted it to be that way.”
What could she say?
Eddie began to write to her as soon as he had returned to school, every two weeks as he had done since Arthur’s death. But Arthur was no longer here to write out the words for her or tease and cajole in his special way so that what she ended up saying to Eddie was always lively, witty and charged with good humour. But seated alone at their table with her own thoughts and the elusive words to pin them on, with a shaky pen unaccustomed to writing of any kind let alone the free-fall of her inner speech, she found she could not in any way recapture the verve of those joint letters. Moreover, she had little to narrate in the way of current events; indeed, as she told him in one letter that first winter, “the word ‘current’ and your granny aren’t to be seen in the same dictionary.” She had lots of thoughts – she’d never been short on that score – but discovered that it took so long to scratch and blot them on paper they soon tumbled over one another and came up nonsense. “Try to picture yourself talking to someone,” Eddie wrote back, “Arthur or me or a friend on the street corner.” She occasionally had some success when Cap was in the room visiting, until he started to chip in too many of his own silly ideas. Gradually the task got easier, and though her replies were stilted and not newsy enough, she did manage her four pages a month.
In fact, during the unusual quiet of the summer of 1914, she came to the realization that what remained of her life was in Eddie’s hands. Less and less did she attend to the daily traffic of human affairs she had spent a lifetime observing and recording. The great events of the world beyond her own township – elections and reciprocity fights and skirmishes in Africa and the Sea of Japan, which had never been able to hold her attention for long – now receded almost completely from the foreground of her existence. She lived for Eddie’s letters and for the essence of him they conveyed minute by minute for her appraisal and concern. We have lived past our three-score-and-ten, old man, she said to Arthur who had been called in at the last second to help with the wording of a sentence. And we haven’t got a lot to show for it. We tried. I know I did. I bore four children. I stayed put for seventy years, hoping to have planted here in this barren place something permanent, some memorial to my much-vaunted suffering. Nothing took hold. Nothing but Eddie out of all that. Eddie was a gift of the near-sighted gods, an oversight perhaps in the frenzy of their careless blundering – but we took him and fostered him, and let him be. Already I am learning to live through his eyes. May he prosper, may he love and marry and father a dozen children, each of them obsessed with living; may the roots of that tree be numerous and strong and deep as the underground rivers that feed them.
There, Arthur. Now, if only you could write that down for me.
In October Eddie wrote to say that he had decided to ‘join up’, that he hoped to complete his course work before he was sent overseas, that he would start in on his dissertation as soon as he got back, and that in any case he would come home for a few days before leaving. She wrote and begged him not to come home. But this time he could not bring himself to do what she wished.
54
1
Granny Coote sat at the window of her new house and kept a faithful watch on the workmen across the street. Mr. Stadler had brought along two helpers to assist him in unloading the rough slabs of limestone he would smooth and shape into a memorial pillar over the weeks to come. Sunny Denfield had shown her the drawings – deft pencil sketches on brown paper – and so she was able to speculate not unpleasantly about how these raw-cut stones might be teased into the elegant promise she’d seen on paper. The stones were very heavy. They had to be eased down ramps from the back of the truck – as dented and dusty as the old man’s face – and then skidded over to a spot near the site itself. The young men appeared to be sons or nephews of the builder; they were as lithe and wiry as he, and moved with animal ease. Their skin was tanned and roughened, the mark of men who spend much of their life outdoors. The old man, who came almost every day, was a delight to watch: he hopped about like a rabbit on a griddle, firing off instructions (in a strange, jabbering tongue) that were respectfully ignored, lending a hand when it was least required, then unexpectedly lapsing into a state of deep repose from which he observed and blessed the intricate actions of his son (surely he must be Stadler’s father) as if from a dream. When they sat down on one of the stone for a brief rest, the old fellow seemed to dominate the conversation, speaking in a low voice and gesturing as if he were telling long, thoroughly-weathered stories. There is something very familiar about the Stadler family, Granny thought, but then I’ve lived so long and seen so much around these parts, everything looks familiar to me.
2
Eddie began writing to her as soon as the troops reached Valcartier camp for the second phase of their training. Eddie had joined up in the new year when recruiting for the Second Canadian Division began in earnest. Five of his college friends joined with him as part of one of the university companies who would form replacements for Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry already overseas and in combat. Such students were given permission to carry on with their studies during the local training period, which ended in March, after which they entrained for Valcartier. Granny knew Ralph Sifton well and though she had not met them, she felt she knew the other four because they had been part of Eddie’s conversation for two or three summers. As she read over each name of ‘the Vic platoon’ in Eddie’s letter, a picture of past exploits – college-boy derring do and hijinks and irresistible good humour – instantly formed in her mind. Besides young Ralph from Sarnia (studying law as his father had), the platoon included Cliff Strangways from British Columbia (graduate history); Sandy Lecker from Waterloo County (biological science), the first of his family ever to attend university; Bart Ramsay (graduate philosophy) whose Toronto family had enough money to protect him from the temptations of academia, but couldn’t; and Henry Potter, raw-boned prairie lad who was studying French in hopes of joining the foreign service and seeing parts of the world that weren’t flat. Although they didn’t all get into the same platoon, they were part of a single company, an inseparable fraternity.
In April Eddie started writing once a week, his letter arriving on Tuesday morning where she was waiting in the Post Office on Michigan Ave. to pick it up. She never opened one before she got back home, nodding obscurely to friendly or anxious faces on the street and once there making herself a cup of tea to sip on as she read the words aloud at first, then silently – many times.
“Valcartier is a pleasant surprise considering the rumours we were foolish enough to believe in advance. It’s a hug complex of barracks, drilling grounds, rifle ranges and mock battlefields – all cut right out of
primeval bush. I get the strangest sensation firing my Ross .303 at a painted target two hundred yards across a scraped pasture and looking up at the evergreens behind them which roll unbroken and impassive for a thousand miles north of us, north of anywhere. Do you know what I mean?
Yes, Eddie, I do, though I haven’t got the words you have to describe it.
“Bart, our city-boy, went for a stroll in the woods last night, as if he were off to High Park in pursuit of pretty girls – of which there are none, pretty or girlish, within twenty miles – and promptly got himself lost. The Vic-platoon volunteered for the search party, and it was Cliff, who grew up in the Kootenays, who found him on the second tallest branch of a spruce tree, where he claimed a black bear had driven him out of spite. Cliff is of the opinion that it was a sasquatch, abetted by the shadows and on overheated imagination.”
Granny found it a daunting task to respond to these weekly outpourings – four or five pages of elegant script capturing a side of Eddie she knew she would not see if he were at home – closer, safer. But there was nothing else to do but sit at the kitchen table in the afternoon sun or the evening lamplight and try to make the pen say the thousand things racing through her. By the time the Second Division was ready to embark for England in May of 1915, she was able to write several pages of stilted prose, sweating laboriously over it for two days. In part Eddie made it a bit easier by asking questions about his chums in the village or about local events she herself had long ago excluded from her sphere of concern: “Who’s joined up lately? Did they finally get Hitch? Or Sandy Redmond? Who’s to replace MacPherson on the council? Will you be sure to clip the theatre items from The Observer?” And so on. Though replying to these and making an occasional comment herself helped to fill up some of the weekly quota of two pages, she was not pleased with the results. Her first letters were choppy, disconnected pieces; she felt she was not conveying anything of herself in them, and every instinct she possessed told her that Eddie was waiting out there, and listening with his heart for some force behind her words more tender and more compelling than the voices he was hearing daily inside him and all around. I can’t do it, Eddie, she thought sadly. I never learned. I’m too old, too stubborn, too stupid.
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