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.
The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course; I admit the truth of this; even our own stories are obscenely distorted; it is a wonder really that we keep faith with the simple container of our existence.
During that twelve-year period it is probable that my father’s morning porridge was sometimes thin and sometimes thick. It is likely, too, that he rubbed up against the particulars of passion, snatched from overheard conversations with his fellow workers or the imperatives of puberty, or caught between the words of popular songs or rare draughts of strong drink. He did attend the annual Bachelors’ Ball, he did shake the hand of Lord Stanley when the old fellow steam-whistled through in 1899. My father was not blind, despite the passivity of his youthful disposition, nor was he stupid. He must have looked about from time to time and observed that even in the dead heart of his parents’ house there existed minor alterations of mood and varying tints of feeling. Nevertheless, twelve working years passed between the time he left school and the day he met and fell in love with Mercy Stone and found his life utterly changed. Miraculously changed.
Stonewall in those days was a town of a mere two thousand souls, but some accident of history or perception had kept the two of them apart, and he had never, as a child and then a man in that town, laid eyes on her, had never heard mention of her name. She grew up, cloistered as any nun, in the Stonewall Orphans Home, an austere, though by no means heartless, establishment at the eastern edge of town. Here at the Stonewall Home, out of an impulse for order or perhaps democratization, all constituents lacking family names of their own, that is to say infants given over to the institution’s care by their unmarried mothers, were called Stone—thus the register ran through the likes of Bertha Stone, Caroline Stone, Gareth Stone, Hyram Stone, Lamartine Stone, and so forth, coming down to my mother, Mercy, whose lineage, like the others, was entirely unknown, though her coloring, her fine hair and hazel eyes, suggested Ukrainian parentage, or perhaps Icelandic. She was left when only a few days old, wrapped in a flannel blanket—for the June nights could be cool—and placed in the old flour barrel that sat close by the back door of the institution. These flourbarrel babies, as they came to be called, were looked after by the township, given an elementary schooling, taught a trade, and sent at fourteen or fifteen into employment—except for my mother, whose housekeeping skills made her too valuable to part with. At the age of sixteen she was assisting the housekeeper on a regular basis; four years later, when the old housekeeper died, she assumed full command.
Her body reflected her diet of bread and porridge, but despite her girth—by age ten she was "heavy," at twenty she was elephantine—despite this she liked to get down on her hands and knees and polish a floor till it shone. Sometimes, bending over to take a rack of pies from the warm oven, she felt herself grow dizzy with pride—the gold of crisp pastry, the bubbling of sweet fruit, the perfection of color and texture. She took only a passing interest in the dozen or so boys and girls who lived in the Home—"Mercy Stone weighs forty stone" was chanted as a skipping rhyme among the foundling girls—but she loved to lay a table, thicken a sauce, set a sleeve, to starch and iron and fold a stack of neat linens. She was gifted. And her gifts were put to use. Worse lives can be imagined.
When she stepped into a room, the girls’ dormitory, for instance, her eyes went round to take in whatever was disorderly or broken or in need of a good buffing, and then she rolled up her sleeves and went straight to work.
On a spring day in her twenty-eighth year, a day of brilliant sunshine and cold breezes, it came to her notice that the door sill at the main entrance of the Home had heaved upward, displaced no doubt by severe frost, so that the door now opened with difficulty, making a wretched screeching sound. A mason was called to reset the stone. He turned out to be my father, Cuyler Goodwill.
He was at once taken with my mother’s gentleness, a certain graciousness in her face, and the way her hands moved distractedly, one circling inside the other as she stood beside him, prompted perhaps by some obscure notion of social obligation—but he was moved beyond anything he had imagined by her sheer somatic presence. Her rippling generosity of flesh and the clean floury look of her bare arms as she pointed out the irregularity in the door framing stirred him deeply, as did her puffed little topknot of hair, her puff of face, her puffed collar and shoulders—framing an innocence that seemed to cry out for protection. He yearned to put his mouth against the inside shadow of her elbow, or touch with his fingertips the hemispheres of silken skin beneath her eyes, their exquisite convexity.
As he worked, she stood close by, keeping him company, speaking in her halting way of the harshness of the winter, the worst in years, bitter winds, deep frosts, and now it seemed there was flooding in the fields south of Tyndall.
Yes, my father replied, looking up at her, studying her solemn mouth, he had heard news of the flooding, the situation was very grave, but then—he lifted his small shoulders—flooding occurred every year at this time.
He noticed that my mother’s corpulence had swallowed up much of her face but had spared her pure, softly fringed eyes.
He refused payment for the work, saying it had taken him less than an hour to set the stone right, that it was work he took pleasure in, a change from the monotony of the quarry, and besides—nodding vaguely in the direction of the door, the roof, the facade of the Home, the cluster of noisy children playing near the road—besides, he said, he felt moved to offer what he was able. She insisted, then, that he come into the big warm kitchen, where she served him coffee and one of her brown sugar slices, just out of the oven. These slices were a miracle of sweetness, of crispness, their pastry layers neat and pretty, and the filling richly satisfying.
He held his cup and saucer on his knee. Later he remembered looking down at his thumbnails and at the dark outline of dirt that defined them. His hands shook, but he managed to say, "May I come again?"