Did you hear that, Sal? she said. Another prodigal.
The custodian waved her off gruffly. The cat was wending between his feet and he took it in both hands and walked to one side and pitched it unceremoniously into shadow. But you're back here now, he said. Perhaps it's not a coincidence.
The old man smiled. He felt the big sadness welling up in him again.
You think I'm joking, the custodian said.
I don't think you're joking.
Sal doesn't believe in coincidence, the organist said.
The custodian came over and sat across from the old man. Coincidence is just another word for providence, he said. Except it is not so frightening.
The tobacconist shuddering in her stained bedsheets. The weird bandaged stumps of her arms twitching. I feel like I haven't slept in days, he said. Do you have some water?
Of course.
The organist leaned forward conspiratorially. His wife's cool wrist on his shoulder, the steady rise of her breathing. The bite of her rings in his neck.
What is the matter with you? Hold it together
, he thought.
Sal's a great one for his faith, she was saying. My father was very religious too. I've had a harder time of it.
That seems to be how it works, the custodian said. Faith breeds uncertainty.
She nodded. I remember when I turned eighteen my father gave me a bible for my birthday. Not much of a present for a young woman. I found it a few years ago in a box in the attic and when I opened it up what do you think fell out? A hundred-dollar bill. It must have been in there all those years and I never knew about it and he never mentioned it. It would've been a lot of money back then.
Yes.
Imagine. I'd had it all those years and never even opened it once. He must have known.
A hundred dollars. That's quite a reward for opening a bible.
She laughed. Well it seemed pretty miraculous at the time.
The little girl looked up at her grandmother. I saw a miracle once, she said.
I know you did.
I saw Jesus in a piece of toast. Remember?
I remember. What did you do with the toast?
The girl smiled shyly.
You don't want to tell them?
I ate it.
The organist nodded and smiled. That's right. You ate it.
She shifted her granddaughter in her lap and the old man peered at the two, at the shadow of the one in the skin of the other. What he did not ever have. As he did not ever think the hour. The kettle was warbling a low pained warble from the stove and he looked away.
The custodian leaned back in his chair. God's hand is in more than we know, he said.
Well. For those who believe it.
Which is not you?
I can't accept any god who would allow this to happen.
The custodian studied him from behind his wire spectacles. You mean the earthquake?
Yes.
Well. There is agency even in that.
Sal, the organist interjected. Leave it alone. No one did this to us.
The custodian lifted his dry bony shoulders. His dusty green sweater, his leathery skin. Of course not, he said. But how much good has come out of this, how much charity? God is more visible in what's taken from us than in what is given.
The old man was thinking of his wife in the small kitchen of their house those long years ago. The
chunt-chunt-chunt
of her chopping vegetables, the throaty low hum as she sang along to the radio. A wash of traffic in the street outside. How long ago was that. For how many years had he tried not to remember. The kettle began to whistle and then to shriek.
The custodian got to his feet. Mr Lear doesn't agree, he said.
I don't. I'm sorry.
We call the evil within us sin and the evil outside us suffering. But it's all one.
Suffering is evil?
The organist was murmuring to her granddaughter and then looked up as the custodian picked up the kettle. The shrieking fell away into silence. All at once the church felt immense and quiet above them.
I can't accept that, the old man said softly. The boy's eyes were closed in the half-light and the old man saw him again as he was on that first night, climbing out of the ruins. Thinking of that and then not thinking of it. I don't think evil has anything to do with it, he said. Sometimes we just confuse the thing. Sometimes there's just no sense to be made of it.
It is what it is?
I suppose so.
The custodian drew his thorny brows in tight as if weighing the old man's doubt. Evil is the suffering which afflicts us, he said. All of us. It is manifest in us, it is a part of what we are.
The old man shifted in his chair.
God frightens me, he went on. Without such fear I don't think faith is possible. Fear and love are very close. Many people claim to love their God but they don't fear Him and I don't see how this is possible. To know God is to see how unlike us true holiness is. It's overwhelming. It is what it is and we are what we are. There's no apology for it.
You have a hard view of it Sal.
Maybe. But there's adoration in the man who trembles before the Lord. He stood with his ropy hands on the metal seatback. I know what you'd ask, he said. How can anyone believe in a God who permits such suffering. What could be the purpose. He shook his wispy head with great seriousness. Fear is a lesson we don't learn easily. God's a stranger to all of us, believers and unbelievers alike. Which is as it ought to be. There's no answer to it beyond faith. You wonder how can God love us and still cause us pain? It's a meaningless question. God does not love us.
You don't think God loves us?
What is there to love?
The old man frowned. But a god like that? Capable of such brutality?
God is not an elected official. He does not act to please us.
You sound so sure.
I am sure. It is called faith.
That kind of faith is blind faith.
The organist turned her brown eyes upon the old man. Faith is seeing without sight, she said quietly. If you're looking too hard for it, Mr Lear, you won't find it.
I'm not looking for it.
Of course you are.
The old man was quiet for a long while. At last he said, I don't know. It seems to me faith is nothing or it's everything. There's no middle to it.
It's all middle, said the custodian. That's why it's so difficult.
It's as real to me as air or water, the organist said.
But not to me. Not without proof.
Faith is a kind of proof.
But only to those who have it. That's the problem with it.
Which is not you.
The old man sighed. Which is not me.
When did you lose it?
My faith?
Yes.
He lifted his big hands. The dry rasp of ropes as her coffin settled into the earth. The black overcoats under that whitening sky. The slow cold dap of the rain. I don't know, he said. I just one day looked inside myself and didn't see any resemblance. There was no echo.
The custodian studied him gravely. I will pray for you, Mr Lear.
He smiled a sad smile but he said nothing.
The custodian returned to the heatstove and wrapped his left hand in a towel and he took up the boiled kettle in his right and with his left hand supporting the base he bore it smoking to the counter. His spectral figure soundless in the grey light. He clapped the ornate lid onto the teapot and set this down onto the table and he sat. The string tags of the tea bags dangling out of the pot. The rising steam luminous in the fallen light.
The old man peered back at the boy curled up on a mat on the floor, his small ribs rising and falling in time. He leaned forward on the table.
I keep thinking about his mother, he said quietly.
The organist studied him. She's your daughter?
He looked up. No, he said. No, I didn't know them from before. She lost her daughter during the quake. We didn't find any sign of her at the hospital and she wasn't at her school and when she went home the girl hadn't been there either. A teacher at her school thought he saw her after it hit. But he didn't. The old man passed a hand across his eyes. He could see the woman's bruised yellow mouth and her sorrowful eyes and he thought of her weeping in the ruins of that school and he looked up. You tell me, he said. What did she do to deserve that?
The custodian held his spectacles loosely in his fingers and pinched the bridge of his nose and closed and opened his eyes. That's a terrible thing, he said.
Yes.
He slid back on his spectacles and weighed the old man. I don't know, he said.
But you think there's a reason for it.
The custodian went to the stove and unhooked the charcoal poker from a low nail behind the stovepipe. I think there's a shape to it, he murmured. It's not the same thing. You said a teacher saw the girl?
The old man nodded.
Then I trust she will be found. You should have faith.
She'll find her daughter, the organist said. I know she will.
When she said this he looked across at her and he was struck again by the overwhelming presence of his wife. He could not explain it. There was no way to explain it. He sat in silence feeling an enormous gentleness come up in him. The boards above creaked and went still as if someone walked over their heads. The old man looked up and the little girl took his hand gently and touched his wrist and he thought of his wife. No one spoke and he thought of his wife. Her soft fingers cool on his skin and him light-headed and warm in that warm dark.
He glanced across. The boy slept on.
The tablecloth glowed with a soft lustre as if some lamp burned below it and the dark tea smoking in their china cups burned also with a strange light and the old man poured a dollop of milk and watched it bell murkily up out of the depths pale and cloudlike. The organist across the table was stirring her own tea and she tapped her spoon in a flare of steeled light against her saucer and the ringing was dazzling and clear and pure. She held out the spoon to the old man and bent her head down to her granddaughter's cheek as the heatstove smouldered on. The old man waited. The spoon was shining in that light. He reached out his hand.
Go on, she said. Take it.
I told her I didn't know if anything of us goes on afterward. I said I
wished I believed differently. I guess death never seemed to me half the
mystery that life is. She said when you look back on your life what do you
see and I said I know that what I lived is not what I recall having lived.
Is that any kind of answer? I don't know. I guess you build something
out of it that seems true whether it happened that way or not.
I didn't tell her about that day. She asked but I wasn't going to tell
her. I remember it was a Sunday. This was April
1964
. I was in my
studio at the back of the house and didn't hear the knocking for some
minutes. When I opened the front door it was Aza. She was standing
with her bony arms folded and then she held them down at her sides and
then she folded them again. She was looking at me. She told me Callie
had been killed in a car accident the day before. Her taxi had hit a
streetcar. I stood there looking at her for a long moment. I didn't understand.
Callie? I said. She nodded. A bus went slowly past in the street
behind her. Yesterday? I said. I still had one hand on the door handle and
then I let it go. I sort of shook my head. Callie's boxes were still stacked in
the hall and I wondered if Aza had known Callie had left me. I suppose
now she probably did. I screwed my face up and it seemed I could feel
every muscle in my cheeks, in my expression. I didn't cry. For many
years I was ashamed of that. But I guess there's no sense in it. We are
what we are.
Then Aza stepped forward and reached up and put her narrow arms
around me and she started to cry. And what seemed strangest to me right
then was the reality of this second person, this second flesh, touching me.
The feel of her knit sweater under my fingertips. That we could be there
at all.
Some things you just can't talk about. Faith is like that. The words
just aren't there. My grandfather didn't go to church though he believed
in God. He didn't talk about it. When I asked him he said heaven
seemed unlikely but hell was a very real possibility. A few years back, out
at Esquimalt lagoon, city crews had to halt some excavations on the
headland when they found the burial site of a native woman. It was a
thousand years old at least. I didn't know they buried their dead in places
like that. Maybe they didn't usually. Her bones were being exhumed
and moved to reserve land. I don't know what I believe but I guess if
there's any kind of an afterlife, it's like that. What you were goes on in
the world. You just don't go with it.
She drifted along the high-planked fence of Henderson Field in that slow crowd and she did not speak and the daylight was very pale. The air bloomed with a terrible sweetness. She could see the corners of a scoreboard standing forlornly beyond the tall fence and there were wreaths and photographs tacked to the boards and she observed the lonely and bereaved and otherdead through the afternoon light. The sky ahead was a storm of screeching crows and when she looked back the telephone wires swayed heavy with them.
The crowd poured and poured itself forward. Towards the iron gates.
She passed her hand across her eyes. She was watching a group of children at the fence with their eyes pressed to the knotholes. She listened to the valves of her heart shunting, the moist cumulous sacs of the lungs. As if an act of salvage were at work within her. She did not feel what she thought she would feel and she wondered when it would hit her.
The fug of unwashed flesh, of rags and filth and sour blood, hung over the crowd in a low mist and she pushed on through it. She could hear a bulldozer somewhere near, its heavy treads scraping and hauling down wreckage. She breathed and it hurt. She breathed and it hurt, sorrow stitching itself in her side like a cracked rib. Her son's face. When he was small the ropy dark arms thrown about her neck in the morning kitchen, the warm pall of breath on her throat whispering
I love you a hundred and a
hundred and a hundred and a penny and a penny and a penny.
The shriek of high laughter, that flour-dusted roller in her fist, then her daughter hiding in the kitchen curtain. Wrapped and mummified and giggling in silhouette. Oh she did not love them enough.