A Quality of Light (14 page)

And as I prepared to land at the Toronto airport that day I thought of myself prowling those hills, watching the sky and becoming aware that I know certain things. I know there is a dance going on all around us all the time — a cosmic dance directed and choreographed by the patient hand of an anonymous God — and that we are partners in that dance. I know that magic exists. I know
that the boys we were and the men we became are inextricably tied to that magic working in our lives. I know that love is the most powerful force in the universe. I know that hills can sing and that a trick of the light can make them breathe in the distance. I know that light is the promise of the Lord through the darkness. And I know that one day when the light of my life grows dim and fades, I will be encouraged by the voice of a reed-thin boy who could punch holes in the sky with a baseball, yelling at me from heaven, “Come on, Kane, it’s the bottom of the ninth and we need you home!”

I
had a three-hour wait for my connecting flight to Calgary. The scurry of the airport was irritating after my reverie and I felt compelled to flag a taxi so I could be alone with my thoughts.

“Where to, bub?” the cabbie asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Anywhere. Take me to the Parkdale area, I guess.”

“Sure thing. You a tourist?” he asked, eyeing me in the rearview mirror.

“No. Well, yes. Sort of.”

“Thought maybe. Parkdale really ain’t much of what you might call a tourist mecca. Sure you wouldn’t rather see the CN Tower? SkyDome? Yonge Street?”

“No,” I said. “Parkdale’s fine.”

Johnny had mentioned Parkdale once and I felt a need just then to have some physical connection to his life, however vague it might be. I wanted to see the schools he might have attended, doorways he may have walked through, parks he might have sat and read in, the streets he walked. There is, I believe, a part of all of us, born in our wounding, that wants to believe that there are answers to be found in the hollow faces of the buildings and places our loved ones once inhabited. We arrive expectant as pilgrims, believing that something real will emanate from those
surroundings and touch us with the fabric of the life we seek to reclaim. We want to walk across the territories they navigated, carrying a need like longing across the floorboards, gardens and pavement, our desperation making it holy ground, awaiting the consolations of a reticent earth. It never happens, of course, because they are only buildings, streets and cities, and they speak only of the anonymous passage of time with no voice to soothe our melancholy. Still, we are pilgrims.

We moved through the hodgepodge of the city. Neighborhoods melted into neighborhoods and there were no lines to distinguish one from the other. I wondered how children grew up here, their sense of land and sky limited to irregular patches of green and blue caught between the sprawl of concrete, their sense of time escalated to the pitch of the city. There was something of Johnny in all of it. This was the first world he saw. This interplay of lives, constant and unyielding, was his first taste of community. The random familiarity with which those lives passed through and around each other became his first sense of security. He’d arrived in Mildmay educated in the proper use of distance, aloofness and a forced politeness. The city was a maze he’d learned to travel well and safely, and as I thought of that I remembered another maze he’d proven proficient at.

We were thirteen, just about to enter Grade Eight and our final year of elementary school. We’d taken to playing in the hay mow on rainy afternoons. We played daring games of tag along the beams, leaping across the yawning chasm between our feet and the floorboards, or performed Tarzan swings from ropes secured to the upper rafters, sailing across the wide expanse of the barn with a yell and then letting go to fly into a pile of straw at the far end, totally alive and bursting with adrenaline. And then, one afternoon, bored with the regular games, we invented the Maze. We took turns building tunnels through the stacks of hay bales. Long, elaborate tunnels complete with dead-ends, double switches, drop-offs and elevations. The point was to erect a tunnel system so elaborate that the Spelunker, as we dubbed the one who would crawl through the system, would be forced to push up the bale overhead and
admit defeat. At the end of the tunnel was a loosely fitted bale that fell away with a light push.

Crawling through those switchbacks and dead-ends in the heat, humidity, dust and darkness, pushing on the unmoving bales at their ends, was a challenge. Chaff stuck to the skin and reduced the eyes to itching, seeping vessels, knees were scratched, and the one above could follow the Spelunker’s progress by his rooting, snuffling and hacking. But a challenge was a challenge and neither of us had ever surrendered to the parching swelter of those caverns and exploded through the baled ceiling to gasp in relief for fresh air. Every rain-soaked afternoon found us in that hay mow erecting more complicated, harrowing versions of the Maze for each other. I know that I sketched tunnel systems on paper in preparation for the next set of expeditions and I’m sure, given the complex nature of his tunnels, that Johnny did the same.

One day he looked at me with eyes sparkling as the rain fell in sheets, slapping hard against the ground like a thousand horses were cantering past. “Give me an hour, then come out to the barn,” he said and pulled on his slicker.

When I got to the hay mow Johnny was sitting on a bale that sat above a dark opening. The black slot seemed to glower at me, and for the first time in all the times we’d played the Maze, I felt a chill along my spine. Grinning, he gestured broadly towards the opening. “It’s all yours, Mr. Spelunker. Good luck!”

Now the thing about the Maze was that the moment you entered the murky depths of the tunnels, the world you knew disappeared completely. As the architect dropped the bale over that opening, silence and darkness filled the universe. Combined with the sense of isolation was the discomfort and the disorientation you felt worming your way through that hay mow. There was no east or west, nor was there an up or a down. It was life in the absence of light — spooky, eerie and infinitely exhilarating. The reward of pushing against that loose bale at the end of it all and seeing the architect’s beaming face framed against a world of light, color and sound was magical. We never minded that we defeated each other’s dastardly designs. Rather, we celebrated each other’s
aplomb and courage. The Maze was just another test of fortitude, another passage in the journey to manhood, and we reveled in our blood brother’s ability to navigate the darkness and difficulty.

But entering Johnny’s tunnel that afternoon, I felt apprehensive. I took one last gulp of fresh air and disappeared into it, the darkness folding around me like a sarcophagus.

At first the going was easy. The tunnel swept forward in a straight line for what I guessed was about twenty feet. Then a sudden cut to the right was followed by an immediate cut left. A zigzagging series of switchbacks had me disoriented in no time. When I fell into a drop-off and my breath was knocked out of me, I felt fear, deep tremulous fear for the first time in my life. The sweat seeped into the corners of my eyes while the heat plastered the hair to my scalp. My palms and my kneecaps itched crazily. My lungs felt clogged and wizened from the chaff and dust. Still, I prowled onward. Each time I discovered a dead-end I lowered my head in frustration, squirmed through a turn-around and crawled on. Deadend after dead-end, switchback after switchback, drop-off after drop-off, I meandered my way through the darkness. I was coughing, wheezing and now and then felt the pressure of Johnny’s footfalls against the sides of that tunnel. It wasn’t a comforting pressure.

I lost track of time.

When you spend enough time peering through darkness your eyes begin to play tricks on you. They start to tell you that you can see shapes in the nothingness. That there are spinning, wheeling, cavorting pinwheels of energy in front of your face with definite shape and texture. Minuscule cyclones of movement. Darkness alive. The pitch blackness becomes your enemy, fear and alienation gnaw at your spirit, and your heart, a driven thing, pounds madly against your ribs. The farther I crawled, the more the fear mounted. I wanted out. I wanted to be anywhere except in that tunnel. I wanted light, air and color and I wanted coolness on my brow.

The darkness grew thicker as the hay scraped against my forearms and legs like coarse sandpaper. I wheezed. Finally, after heaving my shoulders against the end of a shaft of tunnel and finding no release, I could handle no more. With a groan I pushed against the
ceiling and was flooded with a welcome rush of air and light. I collapsed against the edges of the tunnel, heaving deep wet dollops of air into my lungs and trying to focus on Johnny’s sneakered feet in front of me. The world drifted slowly into focus.

“Man, you were in there forever!” he said. “Are you okay?”

I nodded. I lay there with my head lolled against the hay bales, shivering, mouth agape and eyes wandering along each beam and rafter of that barn.

“Tough maze,” I said finally, weakly.

“The toughest,” he said.

“Couldn’t beat it.”

“Yeah, but Josh, you were in there for way over an hour!”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s warrior stuff, man! Warrior stuff!”

“Don’t feel much like a warrior right now.”

“You will, Josh. You will.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Johnny?”

“Yeah?”

“I was scared.”

“Really?”

“Terrified. Can warriors be scared?”

“I guess.”

“Good. ’cause I sure was. Tough maze.”

“Not as tough as you, Josh.”

“Thanks, Johnny. Thanks.”

We never designed another maze. Our lives moved forward into the jet-propelled world of teenagers and we became lost in the new look and sound of the world. That summer passed in the high heat and sunshine that makes for thick fields and crowded hay mows. As we heaved and piled bales that summer and watched the hay mow grow higher and higher towards the rafters, a part of us vanished. We’d met and challenged fear in that barn and we’d discovered that it was the Minotaur that inhabited our creations. We’d
tasted its bitter breath in the chaff and dust and saw its face in those pinwheels of energy spinning away in the darkness. Together we learned that the successful navigation of life and living demands the presence of fear. Johnny sprouted courage and bravado in those tunnels. I developed a deeper and more profound faith, the interplay of darkness and light becoming a metaphor for a life built on the premise of salvation and grace. As we moved out of the adolescence and into our youth, we took the lessons of the Maze with us as we plied our way into a newer teenage world, a cosmography that would challenge us wholly.

I
never told you about Timmy Parks. I never told anybody. Maybe because some people are so special and their presence in your life so valuable that when they leave it you think it’s impossible to describe them fully, so you leave their names and their lives unspoken forever. Like you can preserve them and their memory more honorably by your silence. Some Indian tribes are like that. It’s considered disrespectful to speak of the dead. Like it defiles their spirit, and I guess in a way it does. I mean, who can really define a life except the one who lived it? We’re only ever given hints of the motions beneath the flesh and bone we see every day. You know, like I could tell you how a warm spring rain makes me feel when I catch it on my tongue and you might have an idea, might relate to the sensation and the reaction, but only I know how it really feels to me, how it flicks all those little lights on inside my belly and makes my world come alive. Only I will ever know how it electrifies my spirit, makes me feel like more, like I’m bigger for it. When you speak of the departed you speak only of hints and indications, and as broad as some of those might be, only the dead can speak rightly of the dead.

I never spoke much about Toronto. Some things you’d just rather forget and that first period of my life is one of the erasable parts. My dad was always on the move from one job to another. He’d get into some shit or the other, yell at somebody because he was hung-over or be drunk on
the job and screw something up and we’d be on the road to welfare again while he scouted around for another position. My mom and I got used to never having much. Even when he worked we were lucky if he even made it home on pay nights. Yet he’d never let my mother work. Too proud in that old school way that says the man has to be the bread-and-butter winner. Or maybe he was just too scared that she’d find some backbone by making her way in the world and wake up to the realization that he wasn’t an anchor so much as a burden. All her life she never fought back against any of it. She took the slaps, the empty bed at night, the lack of any kind of real security, the death of any dreams she might have had as a young girl, everything.

Instead, she defended him, lied for him, covered up. And suffered. I’ve hated cowards ever since. She even drank with him for a while. That was charming, coming home to two drunk parents instead of just one. Luckily, she didn’t have the constitution for it and she quit. No one could keep up with my father. People would say “Let’s go out for a couple” and they’d be thinking a couple of beers and my father would be thinking a couple of weeks. Anyway, we got used to living on next to nothing and moving around from flea-bag house to flea-bag house. A city the size of Toronto is perfect for men like my father. You can live as anonymously as you need to, pull the hustle and bustle around you like a cloak and lose yourself in the traffic jam of lives. I must have gone to eight different schools by the time I hit Mildmay.