The old Jew hangs on to her, and with his other hand gestures wildly in the direction of Mercy Goodwill’s kitchen door. “Meesus sick,” he manages, “sick, sick,” and finally she understands.
The ground between the two houses is uneven, full of rocks and roots and tufted grass. They run together toward the open doorway, awkwardly, bumping up against each other, the old Jew’s fingers never once letting go of the woman’s wrist.
It is a temptation to rush to the bloodied bundle pushing out between my mother’s legs, and to place my hand on my own beating heart, my flattened head and infant arms amid the mess of glistening pulp. There lies my mother, Mercy Stone Goodwill, panting on the kitchen couch with its cheap, neat floral cover; she’s on her side, as though someone has toppled her over, her large soft trunky knees drawn up, and her woman’s parts exposed.
Like seashells or a kind of squashed fruit.
Her blood-smeared drawers lie where she’s thrown them, on the floor probably, just out of sight.
There’s nothing ugly about this scene, whatever you may think, nothing unnatural that is, so why am I unable to look at it calmly?
Because I long to bring symmetry to the various discordant elements, though I know before I begin that my efforts will seem a form of pleading. Blood and ignorance, what can be shaped from blood and ignorance? — and the pulsing, mindless, leaking jelly of my own just-hatched flesh, which I feel compelled to transform into something clean and whole with a line of scripture running beneath it or possibly a Latin motto.
And there is my father to consider, for here he comes now, walking home down the Quarry Road. He’s whistling, slapping at the sandflies, kicking up dust with his work boots. He is exhausted.
Who wouldn’t be exhausted after nine hours of hacking at the rock shelf, fourteen cents an hour, which is less than the cost of the pound of Vestizza currants his wife, Mercy, put in her Christmas pudding last winter? But he’s whistling some merry tune, “Little Cotton Dolly” or perhaps “Zizzy Zum, Zum.” At Pike’s Road, which leads to the graveyard, he stops and empties his bladder.
The distance between Garson and Tyndall is two miles. The other quarry workers, after a day in the lime kilns or working with their picks at the stone face, ride home to Tyndall in the company wagons, their boots hanging over the side. Sturdy teams of horses — those beautiful, thick-muscled, ark-worthy beasts scarcely seen nowadays — pull them homeward. But not my father.
He prefers to walk. He’s an odd sort, that’s what’s said of him in these parts. A loner. Daft-looking. Goes his own way. A runt. A quick worker though, no flies on him. Smart with machinery. Has a touch. Quiet, sober, comes from Stonewall Township, himself and his wife too. As for his wife, well (this said with a wink, a poke of the elbow), there’s enough woman there to keep two or three fellows busy all the night long.
He likes to stretch his legs after a day spent bending over the limestone face or peering into the innards of the cantankerous old steam channeler. The quarry is only a few years old, discovered in 1896 by a farmer digging a well behind his house, and sold four years later (a steal, an outright swindle, some say) to one William Garson, owner and proprietor. Already 100,000 tons of stone have been cut and carried away, and already the landscape has been transformed so that the earth steps down in tiers like an open air arena, the shelves measuring some 12 to 36 inches in height. There is controversy about how much stone actually lies beneath the ground. Some say, the way things are going, the place will be quarried out in five or ten years; others, more optimistic, and more knowledgeable, estimate the seam to be half a mile wide and to run all the way to Winnipeg and beyond.
The stone itself, a dolomitic limestone, is more beautiful and easier to handle than that which my father knew growing up in Stonewall, Manitoba. Natural chemical alterations give it its unique lacy look. It comes in two colors, a light buff mixed with brown, and (my favorite) a pale gray with darker gray mottles.
Some folks call it tapestry stone, and they prize, especially, its random fossils: gastropods, brachiopods, trilobites, corals and snails.
As the flesh of these once-living creatures decayed, a limey mud filled the casings and hardened to rock. My father has had only limited schooling, but he’s blessed with a naturalist’s curiosity and not long ago he hacked out a few of the more interesting fossil pieces and carried them home to show to his wife, Mercy. (The stone with which she weighted her Malvern pudding on the day of my birth contained three fused fossils of an extremely rare type, so rare that they have never to this day been properly classified.)
What is it that makes Cuyler Goodwill walk home at the end of the day with the sun still hot and yellow overhead, what makes him whistle the way he does? I’ve already said he likes to stretch his cramped muscles after his hours of toil, and I imagine — this is a particular fancy of mine — that he likes to extend his very limbs, to feel himself grow taller, bigger, stronger as he moves closer to home, closer to the man he is about to become. A husband. A lover.
He is awaited. This is an unlooked-for gift of happiness — to be awaited. He possesses a roof (rented to be sure but a roof none the less), and a supper table already set, and a wife he worships. Body and soul, he worships her.
Nothing in his life has prepared him for the notion of love.
Some early damage — a needle-faced father, a dishevelled stick of a mother, the absence of brothers and sisters — had persuaded him he would remain all his life a child, with a child’s stunted appetite.
His family, the Goodwills, seemed left in the wake of the stern, old, untidy century that conceived them, and they give off, all three of them, father, mother, child, an aroma of impotence, spindly in spirit and puny of body. The house they lived in faced directly on to the lime kilns of Stonewall. It sat at the end of a dirty road, its porch askew. The windows, flecked with yellow ash from the kilns, went unwashed from one year to the next, and the kitchen roof leaked; it had always leaked. In rainy weather the chimney smoked. Bread baked in this house was heavy, uneven, scarce.
Wages that might have been spent on repairs or small luxuries were kept in an old jam pot, the dollar bills heaped up there like crushed leaves, soiled, aromatic. In the summer time the men of the town might gather at the corner of Jackson and Maria for a game of horseshoes, but the Goodwill men, father and son, were seldom asked to take part. The reasons for their exclusion are not clear.
Perhaps it was assumed that they were indifferent to forms of recreation or that they lacked essential skills, or that they might contaminate the others with their peculiar joyless depletion.
Sharp-eyed Mrs. Goodwill, on the other hand, out of some worn Christian persuasion, pinned a felt hat to her head each Sunday morning and attended services at the Presbyterian Church, but no one suggested that Cuyler come along.
No inquiries, in fact, were ever made as to his spiritual or physical health. His opinion was not sought on any issue. His growing skill as a stone worker was seldom remarked on. Until the day of his marriage, not one person had given thought to taking his photograph. No mention was made of his birthdays (November 26) — there were no gifts forthcoming, no cakes, no bustle of ceremony, though when he turned fourteen his father looked up from a plate of fried pork and potatoes and mumbled that the time had come to leave school and begin work in the Stonewall Quarries where he himself was employed. After that Cuyler’s wages, too, went into the jam pot. This went on for twelve years.
It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity. Even the sentence parts seize on the tongue, so that to say “Twelve years passed” is to deny the fact of biographical logic. How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced — and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation. For twelve years, from age fourteen to twenty-six, my father, young Cuyler Goodwill, rose early, ate a bowl of oatmeal porridge, walked across the road to the quarry where he worked a nine-and-a-half-hour day, then returned to the chill and meagerness of his parents’ house and prepared for an early bed.