Authors: Bill Rowe
After what did seem like an unusual length of time talking to the widow, the
man turned and surprised us by coming straight over to Rosie as if he knew
exactly where she was without even looking. He bowed slightly and held out his
hand. “How do you do, Miss O’Dell,” he said in an English accent. “My name is
Dr. Heathcliff Rothesay. You don’t know me—in fact, none of your family does—but
I have been a great admirer of your father and his magnificent work ever since I
arrived in Newfoundland and I’ve come to offer you and your mother and your
sister my deepest sympathy in your time of grief.”
“Thank you very much, Dr. Rothesay. This is my friend, Tom.”
“How do you do, Tom.” He shook my hand firmly with a smooth palm and strong
fingers, looking me directly in the eye. “Friends are an exceedingly important
comfort in times of bereavement.” I was very impressed by
the
man, having no inkling then of his nature. “Miss O’Dell, I had the honour of
meeting your great father—Rosie—May I presume so far on your kindness as to call
you Rosie?”
“Please do,” said Rosie with a smile, bending a little at the knees.
“Thank you, Rosie, and my enormous regret is that I did not have the
opportunity to become good friends with him. I had hoped to, but I had not been
here long enough before… alas.”
“Are you originally from England, Dr. Rothesay?”
“You identified my accent.” His face took on a look of frank astonishment. “How
extraordinarily observant and knowledgeable of you, Rosie.”
I looked at Rosie sidelong for her reaction. I half-expected her to turn to me
and say, “How stupid does this guy think we are over here! What does he figure,
we’ve never seen a J. Arthur Rank movie or something?”
But Rosie didn’t glance my way. “Thank you, Dr. Rothesay,” she was saying.
“How long have you been here in Newfoundland?”
“Oh, please call me Heathcliff, if you would be so generous, Rosie. Just over
two years. And I have been preoccupied during most of that time establishing my
medical practice here in St. John’s. Fortunately, soon after I arrived someone
brought me to the poetry reading at the university commemorating your father’s
winning of the Governor General’s award for poetry. That’s where I met him and
where I had the pleasure of seeing you and your mother and sister all together
having your picture taken with him. I remember thinking at the time, ‘What an
intellectually stimulating, aesthetically pleasing family!’ I am most honoured
that we have finally had occasion to meet, Rosie, albeit under circumstances I
should have wished less tragic. I trust I shall have the opportunity to meet you
and your family again.”
Rosie’s eyes were glistening. “Thank you, Heathcliff. I hope so too.”
“Now I must tear myself away and offer your sister my condolences and leave
without intruding on your grieving any further. It was a pleasure to have met
you, Tom. Goodbye for now, Rosie. I do hope I shall have occasion to become
better acquainted with Joyce O’Dell’s wonderful family.”
I was wrong. Rosie’s eyes were not glistening. They were sparkling. “Yes,
goodbye for now, Heathcliff,” she said. “I hope so too.”
We watched him walk directly to where Pagan was standing next to my mother,
speak to them both for a few minutes and go right out the door. For someone who
held the dead poet in such high esteem, he didn’t spend much time contemplating
over his mortal remains. I hadn’t seen him go
near the coffin
once. I felt undefined dislike, which I quickly pushed out of my mind as
unfitting.
The only other exception to the weep-and-laugh sequence of emotions I observed
among the grievers was my own father. Dad had come in solemn-faced, remained so
as he observed the corpse and extended his hand to Nina and to old Gram O’Dell,
and stood solemn-faced now near the door with Gram O’Dell chatting at him as he
waited for his chance to slip out without giving the appearance of indecent
haste. But instead of the “ten minutes only” he’d told Mom and me he’d be
staying, he stood rooted there for over half an hour, constrained by utter
disbelief, he would say during supper that evening, at the competition of
bizarre eulogies that started up around the coffin.
I was coming back from a quick Pepsi downstairs with Rosie to stand by her side
again when a man with a wispy beard, his head-hair long in some places and
entirely absent from his skull in others, began the phenomenon. Leaning with his
elbow on the gleaming casket wood, he declaimed, “In ascending order of peril,
Joyce O’Dell was a wild-river canoeist—a relatively safe pastime—and a
university professor—somewhat more dangerous—and finally and most hazardous of
all, a love poet. Hence I never expected him to snuff it like this.” He chuckled
between sniffs and reached out to touch the cosmetically peaceful face of the
cadaver: “Drowned! Good God, the only question I ever had about how our beloved
comrade and poet Joyce O’Dell would shuffle off this mortal coil was whether
he’d be
hanged
or
shot
. Hegh-hegh-hegh-hegh.” Others made their
own peculiar sounds of amusement.
I wasn’t sure how to react to this. I glanced at Rosie. She was already looking
at me sideways and gave an indulgent shake of her head.
“It was delightful to see,” another man now orated semi-comprehensibly between
what could be sniffles or chortles, “that our departed poet betrayed his readers
utterly by the manner of his dying. For whereas Joyce O’Dell’s verse celebrated
the positive life force of erotic desire, his mode of death on the other
hand—that is to say, falling into a river while performing a crude bodily
function in the dark—is a clear metaphor for the victory of dross over emotional
refinement. Hence, no poet could have found a better way to raise his readers
into a higher level of aesthetic consciousness and to honour their intellectual
integrity than by stabbing them all in the back like that at the end.”
I was by no means getting all of this but the drift was clear enough, and I
began to be mortified for Rosie’s sake. I pushed closer to her.
Now someone else opened up. I recognized him as a man I’d seen
with Mr. O’Dell many times years before in his home. As a personal friend of the
deceased, maybe this guy would say something sensible. For the first minute his
words did sound appropriate as he spoke of the freshness and vigour of language
that the late poet prided himself on. But then he broke down in snorts of
laughter over what he described as “the charming irony of Joyce O’Dell, the poet
of fresh and vigorous language, dying from the one and only cliché in his life:
the wild Celtic bard who drank the odd drop too much.”
Amid the general laughter, I could not look at Rosie in my embarrassment for
her. On the radio news that morning, I’d heard the police confirm that, though
no foul play was suspected in the drowning death of Professor Joyce O’Dell, they
felt obliged to caution users of lakes and streams about the role of alcohol in
fatalities on the water. Now I felt Rosie’s hair graze mine as she bent from her
superior height to whisper words of comfort in my ear: “It’s okay, Tom, they’re
all just heartsick, that’s all.”
“
FOR ME, JOE
,”
S A I D
my mother behind
the closed door of the master bedroom that evening. “You’ve got to do it for
me.”
“I haven’t been in a Catholic church for years,” my father answered. “I
wouldn’t know when to flop down on my knees, when to hop up again, or what to
bawl out. I wouldn’t mind being back a bit in the church hidden among the crowd,
but no, Gladys, not in the front pew with everyone watching me make a complete
idiot of myself.”
Listening in my bed, I expected Mom to answer, as she had done one time last
year, “Why the sudden change, Joe? Making a complete idiot of yourself never
stopped you before.” She’d even forced a laugh out of Dad with that one then,
but tonight she said, sounding extremely earnest, “Well, I’ve got to be there
with her. She asked me to, asked us to, and she needs the support. I can’t leave
her up there all by herself with two young girls and old Mrs. O’Dell.”
“What? Old Mrs. O’Dell? In the same pew? That clinches it for me. I’m not going
near that. She’s liable to say or do anything, for the love of… Hasn’t Nina got
any family who can be there with her? What about that sister from Corner Brook
who came in with Rosie? And what about that crowd from the university? There
must be one sensible person in the whole lot.”
“Joe. Nina asked me and you to be there with her. She has always ad
mired your steadiness. I think she needs a strong, firm arm she
can lean on going in and out of the church and at the cemetery. And Tom wants to
be there with Rosie, too.”
“Wait now. I had in mind for Tom to sit back in the church with me.” There was
a pause and I waited in my bed. Dad was awful stubborn when he didn’t want to do
something. But he loved Mom a lot too. Then he burst out, “What the hell are
they doing, having the funeral in a church, anyway? I thought Joyce O’Dell was
supposed to be an atheist. He spent half his time raving on about being a bloody
atheist and now here he is having holy water fired at him and magic spells
chanted over him in the Basilica Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, of all
bloody places. No. I will not join him in his final hypocrisy.”
IN THE FRONT PEW
at the funeral mass in the Basilica,
Mom sat on Nina O’Dell’s left and on her right sat Dad. To Mom’s left sat Nina’s
sister and Pagan and Rosie and Gram O’Dell, and on the outside, me. I had
originally felt proud about taking my place at the front of the overfull,
awe-inspiring cathedral, although my unexpected job assignment of escorting old
Gram O’Dell was unnerving. As I’d walked alongside her to the pew she’d muttered
out loud: “They’d better tell the truth about that boy or, by Judas, they’ll
hear something.” And during the mass, as I was trying to figure out how the
priest could regard dying at the age of forty-two, nearly four times as old as
me, as dying
very young,
Gram frightened the wits out of me by leaning on
my arm as if she was about to push herself to her feet. But then she expelled a
big breath and settled back again. Rosie looked at her and smiled and covered
her grandmother’s hand with her own.
After we’d followed the coffin outside the Basilica, Dad sneaked a look at his
watch and offered to spare old Mrs. O’Dell the long walk and the standing about
in the cemetery by driving her directly home. With a furious shake of her head
and a scrunched-up face, she muttered, “Listen, buster, I’m goin’. I’m not
finished yet.” Dad and Mom exchanged a glance as the cars revved up to pull into
line and snake through town to the cemetery. Gram had her mind set on doing
something by the grave.
At the graveside, Gram O’Dell took the closest position to the hole in the
ground, and the rest of us stretched out from her. I stood next to Rosie. The
immense crowd of mourners pressed behind and around us. I saw the doctor guy
from the funeral home standing on the other side of the grave in plain view. The
day was sunny and still. The priest’s voice was low and
integrated into the quietness. I was drifting into a meditation of sadness
over Rosie’s loss of her father when, as the casket began its descent into the
earth, I heard Rosie’s voice shattering the stillness like glass. But Rosie was
standing right there beside me, not making a sound. Yesterday, I’d told her,
“Your grandmother sounds just like you sometimes.” And she’d replied, “Daddy
always said that our voices were identical except that mine was a violin and
Gram’s was a viola.” And that was what I was hearing now, an old viola, clear,
loud and querulous. I leaned forward a little to look.
“I begged the young rascal,” the old lady sang out, shaking her gnarled,
arthritic fingers at the disappearing box, “not to name his second daughter
Pagan. Call her Sheila or Colleen or Deirdre or something that would go good
with O’Dell, I said. What next, a name like Pagan in front of a name like
O’Dell? Haven’t you got any religion in you, at all, my son? The Catholics
and
the Protestants will take turns throwing their bombs at you if
you call her that. But did he listen to me? Oh yes, watch out now! He slews
around and says to me, ‘But it’s your name, Mom, your own maiden name, Payne.
They’re the same word. Payne is just a modern corruption of the old
pronunciation Pagan, that’s all.’ I ask you all here today assembled, is there a
son among you who would drag his own mother’s maiden name down in the dirt like
that?
I think not
. And that was on top of naming his first daughter
Rosie. Not Rosemary like her mother Nina wanted to but never had the backbone,
as usual, to put her foot down about.”
Here the widow Nina O’Dell let out a moan of profound suffering, though whether
from grief or mortification was not clear to me. Mom gave Dad her heart-melting
“Do something” gaze. Dad returned his best “Are you mad? I’m not going near
that!” glower.
Old Mrs. O’Dell turned at the moan from her daughter-in-law and smiled benignly
as if she had just bestowed the highest compliment on her and spoke on, “And
then he had to go ahead and give Rosie the second name Gudrid after some Viking
slattern who was supposed to be the mother of the first European born in North
America, some little brat of a boy by the name of Snorri, up there in L’Anse aux
Meadows.
Snorri
! It was a good thing my son never had a son of his own to
name, that’s all I can say, because this would’ve really sounded good, wouldn’t
it:
Snorri
O’Dell?”