Also present at my birth is Dr. Horton Spears, aged fifty-five, who had been hurriedly fetched by the old Jew, interrupted while taking a cup of coffee, a mid-afternoon indulgence, with his wife, Rosamund, who had returned, buoyant, from the woods north of the village with a new butterfly specimen for her collection, and who was attempting, with her spectacles sliding down her long, narrow, unlovely nose and her books spread wide on the diningroom table, to find its name and correct classification. Dr. Spears is a man of ardent sanity and tact who possesses a rich, secret, almost feminine sensibility.
And there too is my father, Cuyler Goodwill, young, bravechinned, brimming with health and with gratitude for what life has so unexpectedly given him, hungry for the supper already prepared, eager for whatever tenderness the evening will bring. His small dark face and sinewy body burst through his back door, the tune he has been whistling dying on his lips as he falls upon this scene of chaos, his house with its unanticipated and unbearable human crowding, a strange sharp scent rising to his nostrils, and a high rhythmic cry of lamentation — where is this coming from, where? — these terrifying vowel sounds, iii-yyeeee, spiraling upward and joining the derangement of linen and of air, at the center of which lies his wife — on the blood-drenched kitchen couch, its gathered cretonne cover — my mother, her mountainous body stilled, her eyes closed. “Eclampsia,” Dr. Spears says solemnly, pulling a sheet — no, not a sheet but a tablecloth — up over her face, and staring at my father with severity. “Almost certainly eclampsia.”
Shadows from the open door are printed upon the floor. And there lay I on the kitchen table, dragged wet from my fetal world, tiny, bundled, blind, my heartbeat contingent upon a series of vascular valves which are as fragile as the petals of flowers and not yet, quite, unfolded. Where, you ask, is the Malvern pudding, weighted with its ancient stone? It has been set aside, as has my mother’s cookery book. They will not be seen again in this story. I am swaddled in — what? — a kitchen towel. Or something, perhaps, yanked from Clarentine Flett’s clothesline, a pillowslip dried stiff and sour in the Manitoba sun. My mouth is open, a wrinkled ring of thread, already seeking, demanding, and perhaps knowing at some unconscious level that that filament of matter we struggle to catch hold of at birth is going to be out of reach for me.
Everyone in the tiny, crowded, hot, and evil-smelling kitchen — Mrs. Flett, the old Jew, Dr. Spears, Cuyler Goodwill — has been invited to participate in a moment of history.
History indeed! As though this paltry slice of time deserves such a name. Accident, not history, has called us together, and what an assembly we make. What confusion, what a clamor of inadequacy and portent. Mourners have the power to charge the air with blame, but these are not yet mourners. A delirium of helplessness binds them together, or rather holds them apart.
The adamantine clock chimes six, and on the final stroke these witnesses turn and look at each other, and at me, the uninvited guest. The mysteries, secrets, and lies of their separate selves dance like atoms across a magnetic field so that the room, this simple low-ceilinged country kitchen, is charged with the same kind of vibrancy that precedes a cyclone. I am almost certain that the room offers no suggestion to its inhabitants of what should happen next, what words might be spoken, what comforts are available, tea, whisky, or the jointed, stuttering rhetoric of piety.
These good souls, for that’s what they are, are borne up by an ancient shelf of limestone, gleaming whitely just inches beneath the floorboards, yet each of them at this moment feels unanchored, rattling loose in the world between the clout of death and the squirming foolishness of birth.
Embarrassed, or perhaps ashamed, they cast their gaze one last time on the great white covered form of Mercy Stone Goodwill who lies before them, silent and still as a boat, a stranger in the world for all of her life, who has given her child the last of her breath.
It’s this wing-beat of breath I reach out for. Even now I claim it absolutely. I insist upon its literal volume and vapors, for however hard I try I can be sure of nothing else in the world but this — the fact of her final breath, the merest trace of it lingering in the room like snow or sunlight, burning, freezing against my sealed eyelids and saying: open, open.
CHAPTER TWO
Childhood, 1916
Barker Flett at thirty-three is stooped of shoulder and sad of expression, but women who set their eyes on him think: now here is a man who might easily be made happy.
They yearn to take a pressing cloth to that cheap worsted jacket he wears while lecturing to his students on the life cycle of the cyclamen or the prairie crocus. His shirts could be fresher too, and his collars properly attached, and those scuffed oxfords of his are crying out for a coat of polish, and so forth and so on. All Professor Flett needs is a little womanly attention. Affectionate attention, that is. Don’t laugh at him; pity him, love him.
Distracted, he arrives at the College, five or sometimes ten minutes late for his classes, a look of dazed surprise in his eyes as he peers out at the waiting faces and rummages in his satchel for his lecture notes.
There, he’s found them. He arranges them on the lectern, fussing, frowning. His spectacles, he’s forgotten his spectacles. No, there they are, folded in his breast pocket. He removes them, hooking the wire temples around his nicely shaped ears, first the left, then the right — then, with his middle finger placed firm on the nose bridge, brings them straight. He blinks twice. Clears his throat. And begins.
His voice is beautiful. Its texture is fine-woven wool. If it had a color it would be a warm chestnut. In tone, in fluidity, in resonance, it is all that a man’s voice should be, with just that hint of Scottish burr, thinner than the skin of varnish on his oak lectern, giving necessary hardness. He rides straight up the walls of his sentences. His little pauses are sensuous gateways, without which his listeners would fall into a trance.
As it is, they keep their eyes fixed on him, focusing especially on his handsome, sorrowing, scholarly mouth, bending their heads only when it becomes necessary to write down the lists of words he unspools for them: the parts of a particular flower: pistil, stigma, style, ovary, stamen, anther, filament, petal, sepal, receptacle. Often he uses the blackboard, but today, having forgotten to bring his chalks along, he sketches these shapes in the air. His long fingers open and close around the airy forms. What a pity his shirt cuffs are in such a state, and it looks as though — yes, definitely — there is a button missing from his left sleeve; but he is oblivious to its absence — which is precisely what his female students find so compelling in Professor Barker T. Flett, his fine manly gift for self-forgetfulness.
The time is autumn, 1916, and twelve out of the fourteen students enrolled in Introductory Botany are young women. The men of Wesley College, all except for Edward Wood, an epileptic, and tiny misshapen Clarence Redfield — forty-eight inches high with one foot bent out sideways — have put on the uniform of the Dominion and gone to war. Why is it that Professor Flett is not himself away fighting at the Front?
Rumors abound. It is hinted that he is perhaps a pacifist, but one who has yet to declare himself. Or that he has a weakened heart, as suggested by the near-translucence of his skin. Or else his eyesight has disqualified him; a man who wears spectacles can scarcely be expected to confront the Kaiser, and then there is the diamond-willow walking stick he carries — which might be either an affectation or a necessity. Or possibly his ongoing work on new strains of wheat has been deemed crucial to the war effort. (Back in 1905, when studying for his Master of Science degree, Barker Flett helped perfect the new improved “Marquis” hybrid, a hearty red spring wheat which he is now attempting to cross with the remarkable “Garnet” strain that can be harvested a full ten days earlier, thus avoiding damage wrought by an early frost.) Or perhaps he has been ruled ineligible for active military duty because he is the sole support of his elderly mother and a young niece, a girl of eleven years. (This last is the favored explanation and, moreover, it is true, or almost true.)