Here & Now

“I assure you, I am not given to spiritual fervour or joyous outbursts of any kind. My worship inclines to the thoughtful, quiet, even solemn—I hate drawing attention to myself or being in the midst of enraptured cultists.”

The Window Maker

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“Bye. Take care of yourselves.” Noreen texted.

“You’re going to get fined for distracted driving, Dad,” Karl groused.

I suppose that was as close to an apology as I could have expected from her, Noreen not being a known connoisseur of fresh crow. The word ‘bitch’ presented itself, but I banished it and focused on the road ahead. Karl slumped within the traces of his seatbelt, like a man who’s given up wrestling against the bindings of a straight jacket. A reproachful urge gnawed my innards, the trapped rat of our relationship desperate to get out. I muttered an expletive and drove on.

“She ruins everything,” Karl complained.

Swinging left off Cypress, I accelerated east on Broadway. I could have agreed with him, I suppose. In retrospect, that might have been the thing to do. Form a bond of collusion, making Noreen the lightening rod of our bitter angst. After all, she truly had become a bitch and had earned the epithet in a thousand little snarky ways, which coalesced into a presentiment of infidelity, a predisposition to judgment.

Not that I cared.

Noreen was a smart-looking woman. She still turned heads, most of them grey, belonging to retirement-aged fellows with a penchant for unattainable ‘mature women’. It wasn’t so much her beauty that attracted the geezers in the crowd as that elegant assurance she radiated—that quality you can’t really sum up in a single word, unless it be élan. The thought occurred to me frequently that she still had a chance; she could start over if she left me, build a new life split between Kits and frequent vacations to Mexico with someone who would agree to go there and bake in the equatorial sun like a white-skinned potato.

“Jeez, Dad, watch out!”

The light at Cambie had turned red just before I entered the intersection. A guy trying to make a left turn from the opposite lane honked and glared. I drove on as if his rage was a species beneath my dignity, glanced in the rear-view mirror to make sure he hadn’t pulled a screeching u-ie, bent on chasing me down, smashing my windscreen, hammering the hood of my car with a crowbar, that sort of thing. He rocketed through the intersection, up Cambie, into the oblivion of past irritants and concerns, the flotsam and jetsam clogging my stream of conscience.

Once we merged onto Highway 1, we’d have clear sailing, I figured. I wouldn’t have to worry about testosterone-soaked maniacs racing up Cambie, lurching left onto 10th, left again onto Quebec, then cutting me off to exact their pickled-brain, TV-stoked vengeance. Everything would be okay. I breathed deeply, exhaled the noxious fumes of daily living, inhaled the sweet breath of an imagined Nirvana, and felt consciousness swell inside my head like a pink balloon that might have been lighter than air. I allowed it to tug gently against the constraints of flesh and bone—my here and now.

“I don’t know why I have to come on this stupid expedition,” Karl cut in.

“Your mother needs a break.”

“She could take one without packing me off to the boonies. All she has to do is leave me alone, just shut my bedroom door, and get on with her life. We’d both be okay.”

“We’ve been through all this,” I sighed.

Truth was, I’d wanted Karl to stay at home too. “I need a couple of days to complete my research,” I’d argued. “Just a couple of days, then I can start writing.”

“And I need a couple of days with you two out of my hair!” she snapped. “I need a break, some time to think.”

“About?”

“Some kind of fucking future that works!” she shouted and stormed out of the kitchen.

And that was that. For the next week, up until my departure, we played the avoidance game. Noreen kept busy at work, out showing houses, closing deals, and making money; I spent more time in my office den, or ‘out for a walk’, or at the library doing research. ‘Family time’ became a matter of tactics—asking someone to pass the peas in a tone that wouldn’t trigger an argument.

“You two need to go and see someone,” Karl interrupted.

Suddenly, the road was all that mattered. I longed to be out on the highway, out of the cramped city traffic, and onto a curving stretch of road where the engine could throb and the tires hum. I wanted to feel acceleration, the defiant lurch of a tight turn, motion with no purpose beyond the vanishing point of a driver’s concentration. Wanted Karl’s voice to be outside the focus of what truly mattered, and Noreen’s memory narrowed down to a disappearing point of light, like the signal of an old-time TV tube when you switched it off.

“I need to see the real you Karl,” I said, in spite of myself. “That’s who I need to see.”

That shut him up.

On the Cariboo Trail

I don’t know if Christopher actually read back issues of the Cariboo Sentinel to familiarize himself with the history of the place he had arrived at. But it’s something he might have done, I thought, imagining myself a newly minted and posted priest of the Anglican caste, arriving in the instant town I was supposed to bring to God. So, I scanned every available issue of the Sentinel up to and beyond his arrival and departure, trying always to align myself with Christopher’s point of view.

In the January 22, 1871 edition, he would have read the following item under the headline…

Mark Twain’s mining reminiscences

It was in Sacramento Valley that a deal of the most lucrative of the early gold mining was done, and you may still see, in places, its grassy slopes and levels torn and guttered and disfigured by the avaricious spoilers of fifteen and twenty years ago. You may see such disfigurements far and wide over California—and in some such places where only meadows and forests are visible; not a living creature, not a house, not a stick or stone, or remnant of ruin, and not a sound, not even a whisper to disturb the Sabbath stillness— you will find it hard to believe that there stood at one time a wildly, fiercely-flourishing little city of two thousand or three thousand souls, with its newspaper, fire company, brass band, volunteer militia, bank, hotels, noisy Fourth of July processions and speeches, gambling halls crammed with tobacco smoke, profanity, and rough-bearded men of all nations and colors, with tables heaped with glittering gold dust sufficient for the revenues of a German principality; streets crowded and rife with business; town lots worth $400 a front foot; labor, laughter, music, dancing, swearing, fighting, shooting, stabbing, a bloody inquest and a man for breakfast every morning; everything that goes to make life happy and desirable; all the appointments and appurtenances of a thriving and prosperous and promising young city – and now nothing is left but a lifeless, homeless solitude.

The men are gone, the houses have vanished, and even the name of the place is forgotten. In no other land do the towns so absolutely die and disappear as in the old mining regions of California…

Lest you feel angry at the desecration and sorry for the demise of its perpetrators, however, Twain quickly shifts into what appears to modern eyes a sort of preposterous eulogizing of lust, greed, and violence…

It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those days. It was a curious population. It was the only population of the kind that the world has seen gathered together, and it is not likely that the world will ever see its like again. For, mark you, it was an assemblage of 200,000 young men, not simpering, dainty, kid-gloved weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves, full of push and energy, and royally endowed with every attribute that does to make up a peerless and magnificent manhood—the very pick and choice of the world’s glorious ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans—none but the erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants—the strangest population, the finest population, the most gallant host that ever trooped down the startling solitudes of an unpeopled land.

And where are they now? Scattered to the ends of the earth, or prematurely aged and decrepit; or shot or stabbed in street affrays; or dead of disappointed hopes and broken hearts; all gone or nearly all; victims devoted upon the alter of the golden calf; the noblest holocaust that ever wafted its sacrificial incense heavenward. California has much to answer for in this destruction of the flower of the world’s young chivalry.

It was a splendid population, for all the sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home—you never find that sort of people among pioneers; you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was that population that gave California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring, and a princely recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears to this day—and when she projects a new astonisher, the grave world smiles and admires as usual, and says, “Well, that is California all over.”

I suppose Sentinel Publisher Robert Holloway printed that as a thought-provoking comparison between the boisterous unfolding of history in the gold mining communities of the Cariboo and California. But I find it hard to believe his readers didn’t see a disturbing prognostication in the item, in its strange mixture of eulogy for the rough and tumble 49ers and its descriptions of the despoliation they had wrought and the utter desolation and ruin—oblivion, actually—their towns had fallen into. How could a man of Christopher’s intelligence fail to see the vanishing point of history in that item? The Sentinel itself would go out of business by 1875.

The first report about Christopher Newman I found on its pages appeared in a brief, printed on July 5, 1871:

Barnard’s Express, with mails, arrived at 6 o’clock last evening, bringing the Eastern and Canadian mail, and the following passengers: Mr. Gurham, J. Wadleigh, from Yale; Mr. and Mrs. Parker and Mrs. Michaels from Last Chance; and the Reverend Christopher Newman from Victoria, who was met by a delegation from his congregation. From all accounts, there will be more to tell about the Reverend Newman.

There would indeed be many more Sentinel references to the Rev. Newman. Holloway latched onto Christopher’s story the moment the ‘renegade’ priest arrived in town. I’m not sure if the newspaperman liked or disliked his tormented subject—my guess is he’d simply got hold of a good story, which would boost subscriptions—but he delighted in printing every titillating tidbit of the ‘good reverend’s affairs,’ as he put it. His—I won’t say ‘jaundiced’—prose form a haphazard and distorted chronology of my great-great-grandfather’s and mother’s histories during the time they met and fell in love.

It’s too sparse and skewed a record to really piece together the events of their lives, though, or the overpowering grip of a passion that drew them inexorably into orbit. They were not important enough to have extensive third-party sources available for research. Like most people throughout the ages, the memory of them simply faded, an echo weakening exponentially generation after generation, absorbed in the architecture of history. So I’ve intermingled fact with speculation, completing the story that opened for me with the reading of my great-great-grandparents’ letters. 

After all, available facts rarely amount to anything that approximates truth; it’s only when we connect things in our imagination that we discern the possible meanings of history. Imagination, and in this case, a phenomenon—call it psychotic or psychic—that warped the flow of time for me, intermingling present and past. Is it possible to imagine something so fervently that it actually becomes real? Something you can hear, see, reach out for, and touch? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

Suspension Bridge

Karl and I followed family tradition, stopping at the Home Restaurant in Hope for a late ‘greasy spoon’ breakfast. We hadn’t talked much, not at all since I’d deviated from our familiar route to Hope via the Trans-Canada Highway. I’d decided to take the Lougheed route instead, on the north side of the Fraser. It offers more evocative views of the river and would take us across the mouth of the Harrison, one of the original routes up to the Cariboo. Karl objected to the detour, then pretended to sleep the rest of the way to Hope; I pretended to believe he was sleeping; we both felt the pressure of silence building inside the passenger compartment of the hurtling car.

“Why so glum?” I asked after we’d ordered our food.

“I don’t want to be here, Dad!”

There are different modes of decay: corrosion, which gnaws at the innards of things, gradually rendering them dysfunctional; disintegration, when things fly apart, the tensile strength no longer able to overcome the centripetal force of our torqued lives; collapse, when our inner logic no longer holds and suddenly gives way. I sat opposite Karl in our booth amid the animated buzz of the Home Restaurant, wondering what version of ‘going wrong’ was pulling our family apart?

“Will there even be a Wi-Fi signal at this place we’re going?”

“Can’t you survive offline even for a few days?”

We went back to masticating our scrambled eggs, waffles, and hash browns after that. I’d framed my retort as sympathetically as I could, adopting the pleading tone of a desperate dad. It still came across as criticism, and Karl went sullen on me again. We finished our breakfasts, then headed out in silence.

About 30 minutes up the road from Hope, you pass through Alexandra Bridge Provincial Park. We stopped to take a look, following a remnant of the original Cariboo Wagon Road down from Highway 1, through a mixed forest of Douglas fir, maple, and birch trees, flanked by mossy granite outcroppings. Our boots crunched on the stretches of gravel and crumbling pavement that lead to the bridge, which dates from 1926. It replaced the original suspension bridge, built in 1863, which was washed away by floodwaters. I’d managed to cajole Karl out of the car, but he griped the whole way down about how ’dumb’ it was, hiking to a “stupid suspension bridge in the middle of nowhere on a road that doesn’t go anywhere anymore.”

In fairness, the whole exercise was of questionable sanity, let alone value. My father died; that allowed my mother to carry out the posthumous instructions of my great-great-grandparents concerning the passing on of an old tobacco tin and its revelatory journals, and here I was frog-marching my griping son down a disused trail to a rusting monument of a bygone era. What could Anna Armstrong and Christopher Newman possibly have to do with me? With us? With the 21st century?

Time flows like a river; it doesn’t judder like the flickering images on a movie screen. It’s seamless. Memories live in the here-and-now, not as fragments of some distant past.

“Huh?”

I stopped and looked around to see if this voice I heard was accompanied by some kind of apparition. Fear seeped into me, a tingling sensation like dampness penetrating skin, chills shooting up and down my spine, shivering the neural network. The forest whispered assuringly, unperturbed. Karl glanced back, as if I’d been addressing him, then grumbled and pushed on, eager to get our side trip over with. Mind blip, I told myself. An embarrassing episode of mental incontinence, which I would make sure never happened again, clenching my mind shut against the possibility.

Gravity drew us on, down the snaking path that had once been the main route between Yale and Barkerville, down this capillary end of the industrialized world’s superseded highways. You can see the Alexandra Suspension Bridge from its modern-day successor, a typical wonder of 20th-century engineering, vaulting the muddy, boiling waters of the unnavigable Fraser. It connects Victoria to St. Johns via the ballyhooed Trans-Canada Highway, successor to the Canadian National Railway, successor to the brigade and canoe routes, all of them testaments to human ingenuity, lust, invasiveness, and greed.

“The Stó:lō people have been here for ten thousand years,” I said.

“Yeah?” Karl marvelled with as much enthusiasm as a poked corpse.

Time first travels on paws; even now, it begins its journeys on bare feet, connected to the land and what the Sto:lo people call its Xexá:ls.

“They hunted, foraged, and fished in this territory for thousands of years before Simon Fraser showed up.” I ignored the interruption, hurrying through my narration, cranking my voice up a notch. “They had told their own creation story for millennia before your great-great-great-grandfather arrived with his Bible and robes.”

“Uh-huh.”

We rounded a turn, and the approaches to the Alexandra Bridge came into view, its forlorn grandeur—dedicated to a long-since dead and forgotten princess—still stubbornly resisting the implacable surge of nature, the forests encroaching from every side, the river dashing against its stolid piers.

“Wow!” I said. Karl looked bored.

The first bridge wasn’t so grand.

“Pardon?”

“I didn’t say anything,” Karl protested, looking annoyed.

“No-no,” I apologized. “I wasn’t talking to you, son.”

He stared… Pointedly.

“I was talking to myself. This place, it has a voice,” I pleaded.

“Sure, Dad,” he said, sauntering on ahead, out onto the metal grating of the bridge deck.

I only crossed the predecessor to this bridge twice, the first time heading up to Barkerville; the second, back down in pursuit of my Anna.

This is crazy. Who are you? I demanded, as if I didn’t know.

Light-headed and dizzy, I made my way over to the bridge’s rail, looking down from its concatenation of girders, nuts, and bolts at the roiling river below, then up at the orange span of the new Alexandra Bridge, which arched the Fraser like a gigantic metal bow.

You’ve been searching for me, and here I am, your long-lost ancestor.

I’ve been researching; there is a difference.

I should have thought you’d be happy. Elated, actually.

To be having a conversation with something I don’t believe in—something that can only indicate some kind of psychosis?

Ha, ha! The funny thing is—the superb irony, I suppose—I don’t believe in me either, or you, for that matter. So, we’re in agreement there, and might as well be agreeable in our mutual astonishment.

“What!” I scoffed. “You! Deny me!”

Then, remembering myself, I looked about to make sure Karl hadn’t overheard us.

Oh, get over it, man! Do you want to know my story or not? I can assure you that part of our conversation will be real—the historical aspect, I mean, the continuation of my and Anna’s journals.

I hesitated, not so sure now that I wanted Christopher Newman’s voice to be gone.

The coach I was taking up stopped here en route to Barkerville. A mule train was coming down the other way, and we had to wait for its passage. I can still hear the clatter of hooves, the rattling of harnesses and traces, and the chuffing of the beasts. I had disembarked from the Barnard’s Express and strolled out onto the bridge after asking the driver to catch me up on the other side. I wanted to be in this place—to experience the whispering of needles and leaves, the buzz of insects, and the incorrigible gush of the river becoming part of me, interpenetrating the spiritual essence I had come to believe in. The heat was oppressive; my cleric’s collar chafed. I wanted to rip it off, and my jacket too, shucking the ridiculous effrontery of respectability and authority in this wilderness that was to be my parish.

Christopher laughed. Funny, I’ve come to appreciate the indistinguishable difference between the words ‘parish’, as in the jurisdiction of a priest, and ‘perish’, as in going down with your ship. ‘Homophones’ I believe such pairings are called. Of course ‘synonyms are words that sound different but have a related meaning… Like Christopher Newman and Kyle Welland, perhaps? Is it possible the spirits of you and I are one and the same in many aspects? That we share a common origin and purpose?

But enough with word play. Shall I come again. Haunt your thoughts and dreams?

I felt my head nod in agreement, like a bauble head mounted on a spring, sensitive to the slightest motion—unable to resist, even though I might have been on the tipping point into madness.

Arrival

The Wells Inn is a charming mashup of what looks like Tudor and Spanish influences, flanked on one side by a ‘deluxe junk’ shop, on the other by an old foundation, long since abandoned and concealed by a weather-worn fence. The surrounding town has an aura of defiance about it, with the hotel perhaps being the cornerstone of resistance to decay. Many of the village’s buildings and homes are brightly painted—blue, red, mustard, all sorts of cheerful colours—as if to proclaim a setting vibrant as any street in Bogota, or Cape Town, or St. John’s. But the stalwart good cheer is contrasted by evidence of dilapidation: empty lots, businesses with ‘building for sale’ signs affixed to them, facades curling or worn away by the relentless scrape and rub of time. It’s a place that appeals to a certain frame of mind.

I’d opted for the extravagance of separate rooms. Karl and I would still have plenty of father-son time, but I also wanted a space where I could be alone and escape the withering commentary of a young anarchist whose bitter ennui with the world didn’t exclude me and Noreen. It was, in fact, directed at the two of us. I had to preserve at least a modicum of my original intention in coming to Barkerville—stake out a refuge where I could be alone with the ghosts of Anna Armstrong and Christopher Newman! My having met Christopher that morning, in person, so to speak, only confirmed me in this hope. I needed a place where I could mind-talk freely if he materialized again. Where it would be okay to lapse into… what could I call it? Fantasy?

“We’ll spend tomorrow in Barkerville,” I said, over dinner in the hotel’s Pooley Street Café. “On Wednesday, I’ll be doing some research and writing. You can drop me off at Barkerville, then take the car. Go do some exploring. Maybe check out Quesnel?”

“Oh! That’ll be fun!”

“It’ll get you out, son!” I pleaded. “Away from that god-damned computer, into the real world.”

“This isn’t the real world, in case you hadn’t noticed, and I’m not going to find it in Quesnel, either.”

I clamped my jaw shut.

You shouldn’t let him speak to you like that.

Shut the fuck up!

Oh! Charming! Surely you can respond in a more intelligent manner!

He’s upset, dear. Let him be.

Anna? I said.

“Dad?” Karl was staring at me, waving from the other side of the table. “You okay?”

I took a gulp of water and swallowed hard, trying to dampen the critical massing of my emotions: I bristled at Anna’s brusqueness on the one hand; was confused by Karl’s anxiousness on the other. I’d struck a nerve with my mental lapse. He really does care for me. Deep down.

Don’t get your hopes up. The injunction sprouted like a weed on steroids. “I’m fine, son. Just thinking, that’s all. What about you?”

“Okay, too. Except I don’t like your plan.”

“Oh?”

“I’m not going to spend all day tomorrow drifting around a ghost town. I’m not into it.”

I concealed the sting of disappointment, even as I chided myself for the upwelling of relief that accompanied it, doing my best to look bright-eyed and interested. “What will you do, then?”

He shrugged.

“Please, Karl, tell me you’re not going to sit around the hotel room all day, playing video games.”

“Okay, I won’t tell you, Dad,” he smirked.

“Seriously, Karl, you’ve got to get out, take some chances, piss a few people off, and I don’t mean cartoon characters in a video game.”

“I piss you and Mom off, don’t I?”

“Touché, but you know what I mean, son.”

“Yeah, I think,” he said. “But do you know what you mean, Dad? I mean, really know?”

His challenge puzzled me. “Look,” I sighed. “I love you, Karl. Mom loves you. But you’ve got to take some risks, right? Nothing significant happens in your life unless you put your beliefs on the line, son. I’m not talking about the stupid chances young people take, mostly young men; I’m talking about believing in something, and going for it, and staking the hard work and personal commitment it takes to make your vision real.”

“And if I don’t have a vision?”

“Then look for one,” I urged, my voice constricted by desperation, like steam blowing out the check valve of a pressure cooker. “All the stuff we have, the consumer crap, it’s all designed to distract us, Karl, to make us feel we’re fulfilling our lives by buying nice shiny things: big houses, flashy cars, boats, jewellery, big screen TVs… it’s the new opiate of the masses. And video games! Well, they’re the ultimate pacifier, son. Millions of kids are hooked on them, and they stay hooked even as adults. You’re being manipulated, don’t you see? Just like a salmon attracted to a flasher and a wiggly lure, you’re being played.”

“Uh-huh,” he said.

Drop off

Next morning, Karl dropped me off at the Barkerville visitors’ centre. “Bye. See you at six,” I said, trying hard to infuse the moment with a bit of good humour. The car bucked forward as the door slammed, and Karl careened out of the parking lot. I watched his profile through the driver’s-side window, a feeling of helplessness asserting itself as he sped out of sight. There had been an aura of intensity about him that morning, which disturbed me. It seemed he’d made up his mind about something, but I had no idea what.

I sighed, turned, and trudged off in the direction of the Barkerville reception centre to pay my way in.

By mid-day, the streets of the town would be teeming with tourists, buskers in period costume, horse-drawn carriages, and such. But it was just after opening, and things weren’t in full swing. I made my way up the main street toward the Barnard’s Express office. That’s where Christopher would have disembarked, just a short distance from St. Saviour’s, which he would have seen for the first time on his way into Barkerville. I imagined myself in his place, suddenly rattling up a pioneer thoroughfare after having traversed miles of wilderness. How shocked and amazed I might have been at this tenacious, bustling community—how it had laid hold of the valley like a rash. Or an anthill, its busy citizens plundering the surrounding landscape, sluicing off its water, gouging its soil, hacking down its trees—all for the sake of some shiny metal that, really, had little value other than its lustre.

I was fascinated and appalled.

“And yet, you wanted to be here,” I challenged.

Not quite. I wanted to be out from under the whole superstructure of religion. Until that very moment, I had not seen my posting to Barkerville as any kind of banishment, even though I knew that’s how it was supposed to be seen. That Bishop Hills had been informed of my rebelliousness and instructed as to how I should be treated was quite clear from the outset and didn’t come as a surprise. He was a staunch Anglican, was Bishop Hills, one of the rivets, I dare say, stapling the high church together. For him and the old guard at home, my transportation to Barkerville was no doubt seen as a consequence, if not a punishment, for my obstinacy—perhaps apostasy would be a better word. I won’t say I wasn’t dismayed by that first sight of my parish. Any romantic notions I had entertained about being a wilderness priest were as mangled and blasted as the surrounding landscape. But I rallied as we pulled up to the express office, managing to put on a good face as I stepped out of the carriage into the midst of the little greeting party that had been assembled on my behalf.

I imagined Christopher facing the Barnard’s Express office, the reception coterie gathered on the boardwalk, nervously awaiting the arrival of God’s representative on their earthly frontier. Were they excited? Nervous? Both? Were they prepared, in a metaphorical sense, to throw their jackets on the ground before him? Lay down branches of spruce and fir to carpet his way?

Pooh! It was nothing so grand as that. The group consisted of: Mr. and Mrs. Wilmot, the hardware merchant and his wife—they both sat on the board of St. Saviour’s; that scoundrel of a newspaper man, Robert Holloway, who never took a note in his life because he made everything up anyway; the school teacher, Frances Whitmore; and a photographer, whose name I cannot remember and whose pictures I never saw.

“Louis Blanc?” I suggested.

Yes. That’s the fellow.

“Welcome to Barkerville, Reverend Newman!” Wilmot said, shaking my hand as if he were trying to dislodge berries from a bush. I thanked him, and he stepped aside so I could meet the others. Mrs. Wilmot actually curtsied, but in a stiff, unyielding way, which suggested an edge of resentment. I thought instantly, ‘There’s trouble!’ She seemed a stern, rigid woman, the type I would judge low church rather than high—she had that evangelical smugness about her. I was still chastising myself for that unfavourable impression as I took Frances’ hand, which nestled in my own as softly as a captured dove. She bobbed; my heart actually skipped a beat, and I said, “How do you do, my dear?” in a fatherly tone, even though she was no younger than me, which made the expression wholly inappropriate. I blushed. I could feel Mrs. Wilmot’s eyes on the two of us and knew that I was not the only one in the group being judged harshly. “Very well,” Miss Whitmore said, smiling brightly. Holloway, too, was observing the introductions shrewdly, I thought. We nodded, seeming to have mutually agreed that no other greeting was needed between the two of us.

“Shall we go to our house? We have assembled a few parishioners to greet you, Reverend,” Wilmot said, cutting short the formalities.

“I hope they won’t mind waiting a few minutes more, Mr. Wilmot,” I countered. “I would very much like to see St. Saviour’s from the inside.” He looked startled for a moment, then glanced at his wife and back at me. “Of course!” he said. “Of course!” and off we marched, from the Barnard’s Express office, and down the road to St. Saviour’s, me at the head of our little band.

There’s something ridiculously grand about St. Saviour’s. Its ‘carpenter gothic’ design can’t support anything so sublime as the haughty title ‘architecture’ bestows; you need vaulted stone for that. Its interior doesn’t reverberate the same way a true cathedral does, amplifying the human voice to a godly resonance that seems to boom at you from every direction. St. Saviour’s organ squeaks and groans, accompanying the gaggle of mismatched, off-key voices in a church choir too small to mask its deficiencies with sheer power. These rustic noises leak out through St. Saviour’s seams and cracks, giving the impression that instead of a house of god, the place might be a factory for skinning cats. You need something obdurate, bound together by mortar and steel, to achieve the resounding thunder of a cathedral. And yet, this doughty little building at the foot of the town’s main street has a sanctity all its own.

I rejoiced at the sight of it. Lord, how elated I was to be pastor of this picturesque little shrine—not so much a church as a barn, really, stretched heavenward in its simple design. As we approached, I laughed, for it occurred to me that the front of this tiny cathedral could be construed as a face, with its window-eyes peeping up at the sky and its entrance mouth shaped to sing hosannas that would spill out onto the street.

“Do you find our church worthy of laughter?” Mrs. Wilmot asked.

“Christ was born in a stable,” I replied. “I should like to think the whole universe laughed in chorus at that glorious moment. It’s unbecoming, I think, to always be dour and pompous in our praise of the Lord.”

Miss Whitmore raised her eyebrows at my retort, and we exchanged a smile.

Wilmot fumbled with some keys, unlocked the front door, then stood aside. I believe he was intending to gesture me in but thought better of it, simply moving out of the way instead to let me by. Nave, chancel, pulpit, alter—all the divisions of a proper church were there, of course, but crowded together in so compact a space as to make distinctions between one function and another entirely superfluous. I made my way up the aisle, conscious of the little procession we made, our footsteps clattering on the floorboards. Light poured in at the chancel windows, and I was drawn toward it, floating, as it were, in the direction of the alter. I raised my arms and welcomed that purifying energy—begged it to burn off anything unworthy in me. For a minute or more, I stood like that, aware that the others were becoming uneasy and impatient.

“They will never believe the truth.”

This conviction came to me not so much as a thought as a voice manifesting within the cathedral of consciousness—a pronouncement I might disagree with but could not avoid. It had been formulating for many years, long before I’d decided to become a priest, before I’d even been born. It had only been waiting for me to hear it—to believe it.

Gone Missing

Karl wasn’t at the townsite entrance when I went to meet him. I waited around for half an hour, then set off on foot, angry. One thing! Just one thing! That’s all my wayward son had to remember. And he’d forgotten, or fallen asleep, or got caught up in one of his effing video games. There was no cell signal in the area, so, short of going to the visitor’s centre and explaining my situation, then asking to use the phone, I couldn’t reach him. I decided to walk the six kilometres to Wells instead. Walk and think. The heat of the day was dissipating, but still, it wasn’t long before a film of sweat seeped out of me. I could feel it gleaming on my forehead, making my shirt stick to my back, contributing to my sense of frustration—of stewing in my own juices.

There’s a spur off the Barkerville Highway called Reduction Road. I’d noted it on Google Maps when I was checking out the Wells-Barkerville area. I even explored it in Street View, getting acquainted with the local topography. I decided to go that route. “It’ll serve him right,” I thought. Karl might drive by on Route 26, discover I wasn’t at the Barkerville visitor’s centre, where I was supposed to meet him, and wonder where I could have gotten to and why he hadn’t passed me on the main road.

Maybe he’ll worry. “Yeah, right!”

A grasshopper snapped its wings, launching itself into erratic flight; crickets chirped; their companionship made me feel more alone than ever. What was I to them? A vibration, a chemical tang in the atmosphere, a passing shadow? They cannot know what I am; all they know of me is fear.

My anger settled into the category of ‘spent storm.’ I found myself missing Karl. Not just then and there, but for all those years he’d been disappearing. The world lacks compassion. I didn’t have to remind him of that. A week or so before, he had passed me in the kitchen, hand held out in front of him, palm down. A spider was scurrying around on his skin, desperately seeking a place of refuge—a predator suddenly become prey; a man become a benevolent god. “I found him in my room,” Karl apologized, trundling open the sliding door and shaking his companion off onto the deck. “You’d have done the same,” he challenged, misinterpreting my smile.

I couldn’t have been prouder.

But it’s not enough, is it? Compassion?

“Of course not!” I shouted into the encompassing, uncomprehending wilderness.

Unimpressed, it shimmered in the heat, waiting for a voice that amounted to something more than the insignificant exhalation of an exasperated mortal. Unperturbed, the eternal forest went about its business, sucking life out of stones and soil, surging toward sentience through its patient eons—able to endure tortures because it was life without meaning, without suffering, without even the notion of an end.

“What’s expected of me?” I laughed because my question mocked me in the form of an imagined cartoon bubble materializing in the perfectly blue, omniscient sky. “So you’ve become a cartoonist now, have you?” I jibed at this latest incarnation of a God.

We cannot become saints until we’ve met the devil.

“Not now!” I groaned.

When?

I trudged on, as if the shuffle of my footsteps amounted to progress of some sort, past the evidence of human occupation: a graveyard, surrounded by a white picket fence; houses visible through the sparse, surrounding forest; a row of cabins in various states of modification or decay; abandoned vehicles; then solitude, with the occasional sign to let me know where there was, indeed, a crook in the road ahead.

“There is no devil,” I grumbled. “There’s only us.”

And evil?

“There’s only us,” I insisted.

And evil?

“Only us!” I yelled at the still-silent forest, crowding up to the verge of the road.

I settled into a steady gait after that, regretting my decision not to stay on the main road to Wells. The detour had only prolonged and intensified the uncertainty of my situation. What if Karl thought I’d gone missing because he couldn’t find me at the Barkerville visitors’ centre or the hotel? What if he went looking for me at the same time as I was looking for him? What a cock-up that would be! Just the kind of thing Noreen could be smug about. Her gloating wouldn’t be visible, of course. It would manifest as a kind of subtle, subcutaneous contempt, like the onset of influenza. An insinuating contagion suspired through her pores into mine, a toxic aura that would sour and sicken the two of us, the symptoms being a propensity to sneer and snarl.

“Stop it!” I checked myself.

I quickened my pace. Not quite to a run, but to a rate that forced my lungs to expand and contract more emphatically than I was accustomed to. Physical exertion always makes me aware of my body as a machine. When I dig in the garden, for instance, I see myself as a sort of excavator with a brain—the mechanics of hands, arms, and legs, swinging shovels of dirt into a barrow, somehow pneumatically driven. Our dog Zorro digs with gusto—that’s the difference; he gets his snout right in there and goes at it with berserk passion, at one with the act of flinging dirt out between his hind legs, barking into the cavities he creates in our yard as if he expects the world to answer. Zorro would have trotted up Reduction Road perfectly unaware of any demarcation between body and mind. His soul would not have recoiled into some corner of his nervous system from which he could contemplate his movements as those of a clumsily built robot, clattering and clanking down a back road, lost to any sense of equanimity or definable purpose.

There’s still four desolate kilometres to Wells from the point where Reduction Road reconnects with Route 26. If I’d been a practitioner of  Zen, I would have breathed deeply, acknowledged I’d done the best I could to resolve my situation, and restored my sense of being to its calm and dignified unity. I’d have accepted the consequences of my actions and the world’s reaction with the same tranquility as a lake absorbing a tossed pebble, its underlying calm reasserting itself even as the unwonted ripples washed up on distant shores. Instead, panic intensified as I joggled up the road, my man-bag slapping my hip and sweat soaking through my shirt as profusely as if I’d just taken a hot shower with my clothes on. I couldn’t possibly make it all the way to the Wells Inn at the pace I was going, but couldn’t allow myself to slow down. All the while, I couldn’t help thinking that from ‘up there’—where it was surmised that a God lurked—I would look like a bug traversing a vast topography, who must inevitably run out of energy, out of life, and die. My progress would seem excruciatingly slow and laborious to such a being, who could arrive at any destination in a blink, because he—or she, or perhaps it—would of course be everywhere, forever, at the same instant.

“Piss off,” I huffed, angry that such an invention should be taunting me.

And at that precise moment, I heard the thrumming of an engine behind me, which I knew, without looking, must have been under the hood of a diesel pickup. I turned and stuck out my thumb, stumbling backward down the road.

Picked Up

“Thanks.”

The woman in the driver’s seat glanced up—she’d been gathering some papers and a backpack, clearing a space for me on the passenger side. “Hi,” she said. “Excuse my mess. Wasn’t expecting company.” The cadence of her rich, round voice penetrated like massage—it was the kind of voice ad firms use to lure people, the meaning of her words coming as an afterthought, an add-on to the texture of their sound. “Where you going?”

“Wells,” I said, resisting the urge to quip, ‘Crazy.’

“I can get you there.”

Hoisting myself into the cab, I pulled the door shut, swinging my satchel into my lap. She jammed the truck into gear and pulled away, accelerating aggressively and upshifting with instinctive competence. “Hope you don’t mind my saying, but you looked a bit… uhm… distraught.” She waited a couple of seconds, then added, “Like you were in a real hurry.”

She was looking straight ahead, but I could feel her sussing me out and couldn’t help looking her way. Athletic, mulatto profile. “My name’s Michelle,” she responded. “Not trying to stick my nose in, just wondering if I can be of help to a fellow traveller.” She smiled at that, as if she liked the idea and might enter it into a journal or something.

I sighed more deeply than I’d intended. “It’s my son,” I said, surprised at the swell of emotion that almost choked me. “He was supposed to pick me up at the Barkerville visitor’s centre; he didn’t show.”

“That out of character?”

“No,” I confessed. “He’s depressed. Me and my wife worry about him… 

Sorry! I’m saying too much.”

We drove on in silence after that, Michelle downshifting, turning off at Pooley Street, then accelerating up the hill, the diesel growling fiercely. She pulled up at the Wells Inn. “Thanks,” I said, climbing down from the cab.

“I’ll wait here.”

“What?”

“If your son’s okay, let me know, and I’ll get out of your hair; if he’s not, or if you can’t make contact, you might need some assistance. Either way, the engine will be warmed up and ready to go.” She patted the dash. “Take your time. Me and the Beast aren’t in a big hurry.”

“Thanks,” I said, confused, grateful, and just a little suspicious.

Michelle smiled. “Have you checked the street?” she asked. Then, seeing my questioning look, added, “Your car. I’m assuming he was picking you up because he’d dropped you off, and that he must have been driving your car or a vehicle you’re sharing.”

“It’s not on the street,” I said, embarrassed that I hadn’t consciously ticked that box on my check list. I’d simply assumed… “I’ll look round the side of the hotel before I go in.”

Karl and I had adjoining rooms. By the time I arrived at his door, my sense of panic was building again. You get an idea into your head, and it balloons and morphs into all sorts of scenarios. All I needed was to hear Karl’s voice, and the demons would evaporate, leaving us with the stark reality we’d grown used to rather than any of their worrisome permutations. I rapped sharply. Waited. Rapped again. No answer. Scuttling back down the hall, I unlocked the door and entered my own room. A note had been slipped under the door: “Sorry, Dad,” it said. “I’ve gone on an adventure. Had to borrow the car. Karl.”

“Shit!” I said. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!”

Free ride

“I’ll take you into Quesnel,” Michelle said. “You can get a signal there and try Karl on your mobile.” The Beast awakened and growled before I could offer a token objection, so I strapped myself in without protest, and we drove on: past the Deluxe Junk shop, down the hill, out of town onto Route 26, around the desolate shores of Jack of Clubs Lake and the Wells Refuse Site, then into a long stretch of dreary wilderness.

“What’s your son’s name?”

“Karl.”

Michelle looked thoughtful, as if the name Karl conveyed some kind of distinct meaning, the same way as ‘chair’ or ‘book’ or ‘or sledgehammer’ might. The Beast rolled on, taking the corners with a competent sense of traction and acceleration, then purring like a lion through the straight sections.

“Mind telling me a bit about him?” She kept her eyes forward while I looked enquiringly her way—as if she didn’t know the road like the back of her hand. “I’m a shrink,” she said after enough pavement had slipped by.

“Don’t get me wrong, but you don’t talk like one.”

She laughed. “Used to be a cop,” she said. “Sort of got tired of busting kids and decided I wanted to try fixing them instead.” We laughed. I knew it was a line she’d probably used a thousand times, but it was a good one, delivered fresh, and I liked her—really liked her. “Cashed in my RRSPs and went back to university. Best decision I ever made.”

“Sorry if all this is taking you out of your way,” I said. “But I appreciate what you’re doing.”

“My Mama used to say, ‘Never go out of your way, Midge; just make sure whatever direction you’re pointed is the way’.”

“Midge?” I queried, curious about how Michelle ended up being contracted into a variant of biting fly.

“Don’t ask me; ask my mama!”

“Mind if I call you Michelle?”

Midge glanced at me, grinned, then laughed. This time, a huge man-laugh that filled the cab, leaving no room for doubt. “You can call me whatever you want, Mister,” she said, slapping the wheel. “And I can pretty well assure you, I’ve been called worse.”

She liked me! Those clear, brown eyes of hers looked right into me and saw something to smile about, to admire, maybe even love in a daughterly way. Well, not daughterly, exactly, because I couldn’t imagine Midge as anyone’s daughter, really. Not in the typical sense of the word. I could see her in a pink dress at somebody’s birthday party, being schooled in proper etiquette, but even then, she would have been irrepressible, it seemed to me.

I couldn’t not love her.

“So?”

“Huh?”

“Karl. Tell me something about him.”

“Does this seat recline far enough to become a couch?”

“Stop putting me off. Tell me something about him.”

I told her the story of the spider on the back of his hand and how proud that made me feel.

Making Contact

West on Highway 26, left on 97 back into Quesnel, left onto St. Laurent Avenue, then parked—perhaps an hour out of Midge’s way. “I’ll leave you here,” she said. “When you’ve had your one-on-one with Karl, I’ll be in Granville’s coffee shop just round the corner. Take your time.”

She slammed the door before I could answer and strode off.

I switched on my mobile and watched it go through its launch sequence. There were a bunch of messages, one from Karl, one from Noreen. “Shit!” I grouched, skipping through to Karl’s: “Hi Dad. Guess you know I’ve taken off with your wheels. Sorry. I’ll understand if you sic the cops on me. I’m okay. My mobile’s on. I’ll be back in time to pick you up for the drive home, all right? I just got bored hanging around Wells. Couldn’t hack the thought of being there two more days.” There were traffic sounds in the background, mingling with Karl’s words, like he was in a city somewhere, walking… Vancouver? No, not possible. Quesnel?

My first instinct was to call him right away, but I checked the impulse. Noreen? Shouldn’t I get in touch with her first? I cringed, then skipped down to her message. “Hi hon, I hope you’re all right. Karl called and told me what’s going on. If you haven’t made contact yet, he’s okay. I guess you’re out of range or something. Call me…” then the audio menu cut in. “To replay this message, press 1; to leave a callback number you can be reached at…” I jabbed the big red ‘End’ button on my mobile’s screen hard, as if the action might actually, in some phenomenological sleight of mind, erase even the memory of the message.

Noreen hadn’t used that tone of voice since? I couldn’t remember when. She sounded concerned. For me! Which rankled “What the fuck is going on?” I punched in Karl’s number. “Hi,” his answering service chirped. “Karl’s not here. Leave a message, and he’ll get back at you when he’s around.” I waited for the beep. “Hi Karl. It’s Dad. I’m going to stay in Quesnel tonight, so I’ll be in range. I won’t leave town until I’ve heard from you, okay? I’m not mad, son—in any sense of the word. Just want to talk and make sure you’re okay. Love you.”

The message sounded phony—a desperate dad trying to sound chatty, not wanting to ramp up the tension and destabilize his weirdo son. Karl would see through that, of course, and understand. Surely he would understand?

There’s not much traffic on St. Laurent Street, human or vehicular. So a guy could sit slumped, thinking, in the passenger side of a parked pickup for quite a while without being noticed. You might even croak there and rest in peace for a day or two before someone called the cops—which suited me fine. After a couple of minutes, though, I remembered Midge and, with a twinge of guilt, hurriedly punched in Noreen’s number.

“Hi, Hon,” she answered. “You okay?”

“Aside from feeling like shit, yeah, I’m alright.”

“Did you get in touch with Karl?

“I left a message.”

“He’s okay. He called this morning and told me what was going on—sort of. I think he’s en route to Vancouver.”

“He left a note saying he was going on some kind of adventure? Scared the crap out of me.”

For a second, dead air. “He didn’t say anything about that to me, Kyle. Just that he didn’t want to hang around Wells for the next couple of days.”

“Did he say he was headed home?”

“No. I just assumed…”

“He said in his phone message that he’d be back in Wells to pick me up by check-out time. If he’s headed down to Vancouver, that means he’s going to have to turn around almost as soon as he gets there and drive straight back up here—it’s eight hours each way, more like ten if you stop for a coffee.”

More dead air. Get a grip, I admonished, wiping the accusatory tone from my voice. Okay, so she had forced Karl to accompany me to a place where we all knew he’d be bored stiff. So what?

“Sorry,” I said. “Not helpful.”

“It’s okay. We’re both upset.”

“Yeah, I know.” I paused, gritted my teeth and swallowed. “Look, someone’s waiting for me, so I’m going to have to ring off Noreen, but…”

“Who’s waiting for you?”

“I got a lift from Wells into Quesnel. I’m hoping I can rent a car here—if not tonight, I’ll have to book a room and rent something in the morning. Point is, if Karl is headed out to the coast, tell him not to worry about picking me up; I’ll make my own way back. If he’s in the general vicinity of Quesnel, then I’d like to ride back with him. If he gets in touch with you first, let him know that, please. Tell him to call me. I won’t leave Quesnel until we make contact.”

“Okay.”

“I love you. I know things have gone sideways for us, but I do love you.”

“I know. Bye,” Noreen answered, her voice gone flat.

The conversation left me feeling as deflated as a used airbag. I sagged in the seat for a moment, rallied, then shoved the door open and clambered out of Midge’s pickup. A slow drift of vertigo set in, as if I’d become overly sensitive to the ponderous spin of the world. “Midge,” I refocused, following her imagined scent around the corner, into Granville’s café.

She looked up from a book she’d been reading, The Confessions of St. Augustine. “Tormented soul,” she said, seeing my surprise. “But I suppose he did find a version of grace, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

“Why read him if it’s not what you’re looking for?”

She flipped the book shut and glanced at its cover—a bowed and bearded middle-aged man, robed in what appeared to be a blanket, with what might have been a crozier or staff resting on his shoulder. “I try to understand where people come from,” she said, shoving St. Augustine into her bag. “That man’s words still resonate in a lot of heads.” She gestured for me to join her at the window table. The light slanting in from outside emphasized her sharp, angular features and the strange beauty of her penetrating eyes. I forced myself into the opposite chair.

“So, what are you going to do?” she said.

“I’ve got to rent a room, for starters. Then tomorrow I’m going to have to rent a car.” Midge stared, uncompromising. “I didn’t get through to him. His phone sent me to voice mail, but Noreen—that’s my wife—said he connected with her. She thinks he’s en route to Vancouver.”

“But you’re not sure?”

I shook my head. “I’m not leaving Quesnel until I’ve talked to him. Noreen said he plans on picking me up Monday—that’s when my booking at the Wells Inn ends, and we were planning on heading home.”

“So where do you want to stay?” She looked amused when I shrugged like a lost dog. “I’ll make you a deal. My mobile cabin is parked just up the road.”

“Mobile cabin?”

“I hate calling it a trailer park home.”

We laughed, and for an instant, Midge’s smile was the only thing that mattered—that big, triumphant smile of hers. “There’s a sofa, if you want it.”

“But you hardly know me, Michelle.”

“I know you,” she said, “and I like you, and won’t bill by the hour for the couch… unless, perhaps, you want me to take you on as a certified nut case.”

There are moments you want the world to stop, when you want to freeze frame a feeling and make it last forever. I blinked, knowing she’d been thinking the same, sitting there in the window of Granville’s café.

The Errand

Do you remember how we first met?

Of course, dearest!

We could hardly call it a meeting, though. Could we?

Spirits seeing each other through each other’s’ eyes… even for an instant… there cannot be a meeting more meaningful, can there?

Madame Blavinsky had sent you on a mission, no?

Oh! She was such a deliciously devious creature, Madame was.

Tell him about it.

I’ll tell you, dearest, and he can listen in if he chooses. I don’t think he believes in me, which makes conversation awkward. 

My eyes blinked open, but the paralysis of sleep numbed the muscles swaddling my bones. I could not move, not even if I’d wanted to raise my head from the pillow to look about Midge’s trailer. But I could hear the hum of the refrigerator, a dog barking somewhere off in the distance, the hush of leaves in the canopy overhead.

As you like, love.

You could hardly call it daytime when Madame and I awoke that morning. Everyone else in the house was sleeping still, but we were up, as was our wont. We’d made ourselves coffee and were seated opposite each other at the kitchen table. “I have something I’d like you to do for me today,” she said. “I’d like you to deliver a letter from me to that new priest at St. Saviour’s.”

“What’s the letter about?” I asked, for I’d never known Madame to be a religious sort. Spiritual, in a haphazard way, yes—a few candles burning on her bureau, occasional prayers to vaguely defined spirits that dwelt somewhere in the East, wind chimes, and such—but never religious in the proper sense. Certainly not in the hellfire and brimstone tradition of my father, nor in the ghostly ascetic mode of your mother.”

We needn’t bring Mother into this, my sweet, surely.

Why ever not? He knows all about your mother anyway. It’s not as if I’m opening the door and brushing aside the cobwebs in any of your darkest, secret closets.

As you wish.

Well, to be honest, I don’t wish. It was merely a passing reference, which you’ve raised to higher prominence through your objection. Had you simply let it pass, he probably wouldn’t even have made note of it.

That’s why I never became a politician, my dear. I must point things out—even little things—when they don’t seem right.

As it turned out, you might have made a better politician than a priest, my love. They laughed, and I sensed they might have touched cheeks in a perfunctory, loving way as a means of concluding their cajoling.

I had no idea where you lived and assumed Madame meant me to deliver her letter to the church, but she corrected me, prefacing her directions by remarking what an ‘unusual man’ she thought you to be.

Christopher guffawed, obviously entertained and somewhat flattered by the notion of eccentricity, when the accusation came from her. I strongly suspected the remark was meant for my hearing as much as his amusement, though.

She told me about your cabin, Christopher. And I must say, her description didn’t fill me with admiration for its new owner. “It’s not much more than a shack, really, on the road to Richfield, dearest,” Miss B. said. How she knew so much about you and your abode, I cannot say; what I do know, however, is that she must have made a point of finding out. By her description, I was certain she had been gathering intelligence for some purpose.”

Pooh! What reason could she possibly have had for spying on me? You’re just trying to make things more intriguing for our eavesdropping descendant here. I’m sure he’s got enough to take in without you adding fanciful twists to the story, eh?

She’d probably sent Cleaver around to snoop. I never looked, but I’m sure if I had, your name would have turned up in her diary. She was fascinated by you, you know.

They paused for a few seconds. Thoughtfully. Then Anna started up again.

As I was saying, I asked Madame what might be in a note a businesswoman such as herself was sending to a priest.

She waved me off. “You will know when the time comes; if the time comes.”

“Some kind of confession?” I persisted.

“Enough, now! You must go before the town is fully roused.”

With that, she shooed me from the kitchen, down the hall, and out the front door, leaving barely enough time for me to throw a cloak over my shoulders to keep off the morning chill. “You are beautiful, my dearest,” she soothed, running her hand over my cheek when I complained that I had not even had time to complete my morning toilette!

I hurried down Front Street, ignoring the glances of the few people who were up and about, clutching Madame’s letter in my left hand as if it were a passport granting free passage and might be demanded of me at any moment. The boardwalks ended, and I carried on through China Town, then beyond, into the pillaged wilderness of blackened sticks and stumps south of town, and farther yet, into a zone that hadn’t yet been ransacked for its ore. And there, I came across a simple wooden sign welcoming me to ‘The New Man’s Grove.’ I had to laugh.

Madame had described the place to me, and I’d heard others talk of it, too. None of that tainted or diminished my sense of… delight, I suppose… at your humble lodgings, my dear.

Don’t ask how, but I knew Christopher was blushing, and I sensed his coy-pride, even though he’d almost certainly heard Anna’s description of his wilderness manse a hundred times before.

I think ‘cabin’ might be too grand a word for the rough-hewn, wilderness shack you had bartered for, yet there was something pleasing about the place and the little clearing it occupied—a clearing sheltered by that fringe of forest, which had somehow survived the general desecration of the land all round. And the brook! What a joyful babble it added to the setting, ceaselessly talking, never stopping for an instant to listen. From the moment I stepped off the Cariboo Road and into that whispering, babbling copse, I felt at peace yet in conflict, if such a mood were possible, and the farther in I went, the more I felt a pampered intruder. Does that make sense, dearest?

If we were alone, I would concur with your every word, my love, but I feel it might sound maudlin in mixed company, so I shall let the echoes of my past affirmations speak for me on this occasion.

They laughed, and if I’d had mastery over the muscles that hoist lips into smiles, I would have joined in their delight; as it was, I felt frustrated and incapacitated—that I was incapable of anything but an intellectual grasp of their delight.

Do go on!

Daises, dandelions, fireweed, blue lupine—there were daubs of colour everywhere I looked, as if the wildflowers had been coaxed into this little clearing of yours, which still lay in the shade but would soon enough be touched by the late-summer sun.

The previous owner was entirely responsible for the state of the property… Christopher interjected.

Then he must have been a man like you, dearest, a man who appreciates every living thing, who draws life in from the surrounding forests and even up from the soil… Don’t object. We both know it’s true.

My inclination was to lean the note against your door and simply leave without disturbing you. But as I was stooping to do so, I thought, “No!” Why shouldn’t I place the note in your hand? So, I rapped firmly at the plank door and listened for signs of life within. It never occurred to me that you might have been sleeping or otherwise occupied, so I rapped again, more insistently, and when you did not answer my second summons, I peered in at the window.

Through the rippled glass, I could hardly make out anything in the interior gloom. But now I was determined to put the note inside if I could not actually place it in your hand. So, I lifted the wooden latch and entered your hermit’s cabin. The first thing that struck me as my eyes adjusted to the dark, was the tidiness. An ordered space equates to an ordered mind in my thinking, and I wondered if there was any room at all for spontaneity in your meticulous world. Every book was on its shelf, your bed was neatly made, the plank table wiped clean, and your kitchen, such as it was, fit for inspection.

But then my attention was drawn to a spray of wildflowers in a vase and next to that a medallion of stained glass in the upper pane of the window, which I hadn’t noticed looking in. It depicted what I took to be the Virgin Mary with child. On the opposite side of the window, a miniature painting of a perfect red rose, blossoming like a sacred stain on your rough-hewn wall.

“This,” I thought, “is a room open to visions.”

I was leaning the note against the vase on your table when you entered the cabin, and I froze in the act, looking at your figure, framed in the doorway.

“Hello!” you said, and I realized in an instant that there was absolutely no need for me to explain myself—that my being in your cabin was as natural an occurrence to you as the fireweed growing in the meadow outside, or the ceaseless chattering of your brook, or deer nibbling at the fringes of shrubbery surrounding your property. “I’m Reverend Newman,” you said, stepping forward with your hand outstretched in greeting.

Still, I couldn’t help feeling as if I’d been caught in the act of something untoward! That you should have been suspicious and should have asked some pointed questions, which I would have felt relieved to answer. So, after a few pleasantries, I explained I had been sent on my errand by Madame Blavinsky and that the note I had been placing on your table was from none other than her. Then I said my farewell.

“I do hope there is an invitation inside to visit Madame,” you said.

Our eyes had met already, of course, but there is a focus within focus that occurs when you are truly smitten, and in that instant I was overwhelmed by a passion I still have no words to describe. In that heartbeat, I knew completely the germ of everything I would ever be able to learn about you, Christopher Newman, and I virtually fled that knowledge, for I didn’t feel worthy of it.

And I was too stupid to perceive what had transpired between us, my love, too wrapped up in the theory of human passion to recognize the lightening flash for what it was—a burst that would permeate every corner of consciousness and inform all my dull philosophies with its brilliance.

Oh, for goodness sake, we should write an opera!

They laughed; I awakened.

Ignition

The phone buzzed on the coffee table like some species of mechanical insect stuck on its back. I grabbed it and accepted the call.

“Hi,” Karl said.

“How you doing?”

“I’m okay, Dad! You don’t have to worry, alright?”

“I’m your dad, son. It’s my job to worry.”

“And to feel proud, and confident, and happy, and all that shit.”

We laughed, the tension eased, like a Geiger counter moving out of a hot zone.

“Sorry ‘bout the car,” he said.

“We can talk about the car later, Karl. I’m just glad to hear your voice.” I paused, an incapacitating confluence of love and fear commingling into something like grief, tightening in my chest, making it difficult to speak.

“We love you son,” I croaked. “Your mother and I. That’s all that need be said. We love you and want to know you’re okay.”

“I’m okay,” he repeated. “And if you ask a third time, I’ll still be okay. Okay?”

“Okay!” I laughed. “I guess it’s my own state of mind that needs tending.”

“Where are you?” I asked when he didn’t bite.

“A little ways outside Prince Rupert. Slept in a rest area, but there was no signal there, so I couldn’t call, and I couldn’t reach you yesterday when I got to Quesnel, so I called Mum.”

“She thinks you’re headed to Vancouver, Karl.”

“Don’t know why she’d think that. I’ll set her straight this morning and let her know my whereabouts.”

“Good. She’s worried.”

“I’m going to sign off now, Dad. I just wanted to let you know everything’s alright. I’ll pick you up Monday, then we’ll be back on plan.”

“Meet me in Quesnel, son. I’ll have to drop off the rented car there anyway. There’s a coffee shop called Granville’s where we can rendezvous.”

“I know the place. See you there, Dad.”

Then he was gone.

Relief took hold, like morphine. Stupefied, I sat there, hunched, hands dangling between my knees for what might have been a full minute, wondering what I could do between the now and then of our situation. How could I prepare for what amounted to my reunion with Karl? Nothing came to me. I would call Noreen, of course, and compare notes. Which meant waiting until she’d had enough time to connect with Karl, too. Beyond that, nada, a void that could only be filled by him, being in the same space as me.

The door to Midge’s bedroom slid open. “Hi?” she said.

I smiled ruefully, aware that it was a piteous smile but not able to help it.

“I’m a light sleeper. The walls are thin.”

I nodded.

“Mind if I say something?”

She waited until I nodded again.

“You handled that well, Kyle. Lovingly, tenderly…”

“But?”

“You have to follow through.”

“What do you mean?”

“You said you could talk later about Karl’s decision to… uhm… take your wheels and leave you stranded. You need to follow through with that, not as a threat fulfilled but as an obligation between the two of you to work things out. Don’t let stuff like that go; use it as an opportunity to understand each other better.”

How could someone so excruciatingly beautiful be so wise? Someone who could almost be my daughter offer such sound advice? Midge read me like a book and smiled, making matters infinitely worse. She was wearing a T-shirt and pyjama bottoms, the cotton garments softening the contours of her wiry frame. Padding across the room, she stood before me for a second or two, exploring with her perfect brown eyes and taking me in.

Then she sat down beside me, the sofa cushions tilting in her direction. For a moment longer, we stared into each other’s eyes, then she stroked the nape of my neck with her slender fingers, eliciting a deep sigh from the very centre of me, almost a gasp.

“No commitments, okay?” she said.

I shook my head. “I can’t commit to that, Michelle.”

Her smile could have been meant for a child; it was a strangely grateful, pitying smile, which would have annoyed me coming from anyone but her. I reached up and did what I’d longed to from the moment we’d met—gently stroked her taught cheek with the very tips of my fingers, touching for the first time her smooth, dark skin. The tentative gestures of love accelerated after that, lips, hands, and tongues groping toward the inevitable, the necessary, something neither of us could avoid—the collision of love-making.

We awoke in Midge’s bed, in each other’s arms.

“I didn’t mean for that to happen,” she said.

“I couldn’t help it, Michelle, any more than I can escape the pull of gravity. I love you.”

“You have a wife and a son who’s got issues.”

“I love Noreen, but our marriage is beyond fixing. That’s got nothing to do with you and me. And I won’t just walk away from her; like you say, we have to ‘work things out.’ We’re not doing a very good job of it so far, but I think we can both read the signs.”

“And infidelity’s going to help with that? Make it less complicated?”

“Do you love me?”

Midge frowned, annoyed. Her body tensed against mine. I stroked her arm and shoulder, ran my fingers up the nape of her neck into her black, wiry hair. “It’s not that simple,” she sighed unhappily. “I’m not alone, either.”

I leaned away slightly to take her in, my brows arched in an exaggerated display of surprise. Midge had to smile.

“I have a daughter, Angela. Long story short, I’m a single, divorced mom, and she’s the centre of my world.”

Nodding, I held her close, and we lapsed into silence, letting this new knowledge settle between us, content for the time being with the uncertainty of our affairs.

“You know what gives me hope, Michelle?” She waited. “Neither of us has changed; there is no morning after that’s separate from the night before. We’re the same people we were when you stopped to pick me up yesterday. What I’m trying to say is, if you do love me, I’ll accept your love on any terms, but don’t ask me not to be your friend and, if we let ourselves give in to it, your lover.”

She drew me to her, and we kissed—a long, sensuous communion of lips and tongues that reignited the circuitry of our souls.

Loves me; loves me not

We couldn’t find a car rental place in Quesnel, so I hitched a ride with Midge up to Prince George, where she was headed en route to Prince Rupert, then by ferry to Port Hardy, and on to Strathcona Provincial Park west of Campbell River. “Buttle Lake,” she said. “It’s beautiful. You should go there sometime.” She’d mapped a detour that would take us to a car rental place in PG, where she could drop me off without having to park the beast and its tow.

“See yuh,” she said, as I gathered my things.

That’s how she wanted it. Curt. No concessions. No commitments. “I’ll call,” I promised, then shoved the door open and got out. I watched the beast lumber out of sight. No regrets, I told myself. No matter what, there would be no regrets or expectations. Only more desire and—perhaps, perhaps—a smidgen of hope, episodes of consummation.

But for now, she was gone; I had a car to rent; a meeting with Karl to rearrange (now that I’d be returning the car to PG instead of Quesnel); a call to Noreen that needed making; research to complete; a two-hour drive back to Barkerville.

I directed my steps toward the car rental office, where a young man greeted me from behind the counter.

Increasingly, it seemed, I was unconsciously appending that phrase ‘young man’ or ‘young woman’ to my descriptions of waiters, bank tellers, car rental clerks… The young man in the rental office went through his check list, asked politely the obligatory questions about insurance, provided details about rates and return procedures, and then directed me to Books & Company when I inquired about the nearest ‘funky coffee hangout.’ He’d smirked at my description of what I wanted, letting me know in not-so-subtle fashion that he’d pegged me as a retired boomer trying to resurrect his rebellious hippie consciousness.

“It’s up on Third, four or five blocks over.” He pointed in the general direction.

“Thanks.”

As we made our way across the lot to my set of rented wheels, I had to wonder if his stereotype fit, and then what Midge saw in me… And what she might see in the car rental clerk? He was intelligent, not unhandsome, fit, and—above all—young. Probably virile in ways I could hardly remember.

No commitments, I remembered. But the injunction rankled as I drove off the lot, following the rental guy’s directions. What did she mean? Had her love-making been a species of sympathy…

“Shut the fuck up!” I grumbled, angling the car into a spot across the street from Books & Company. A stuccoed box of cinderblock architecture circa the neo-brutalist 70s, it had been painted purple and given character by a cartoonish tromp-l’oeil wall of cracking plaster and urban decay. Perhaps a little overstated, I thought, but the motif suited my mood.

After ordering my latté, I chose a table close to the window. I wanted to be in a place penetrated by natural light but invisible from the street, a place where shadows had a lateral dimension and were cast by parallel rays that had traversed 93 million miles of vacuous space, not by the reworked light emitted by neon tubes fastened to a plastered ceiling. My desire for a sunlit table was moderated somewhat because I didn’t want to be seen by people walking by on the sidewalk. I wanted to be alone in an intimate, public space, not exposed to the instant judgments of every glancing tradesman, shambling derelict, or curious office worker.

Had to rent a car in PG. Meet me there at Books & Company Monday, 11 a.m., not in Quesnel. I texted Karl.

Made contact with Karl. He’s OK. Heading up to Prince Rupert. Will meet me in Prince George Monday AM, and we’ll drive down. I texted Noreen.

There, I thought. Done.

I prayed—in my existentialist mode—that neither of them would respond before I could get the hell out of mobile range.

The letter

Do you remember our second encounter, dearest?

Anna’s query, an almost coquettish challenge, caught me off guard. “No! Not now,” I pleaded. I had been reading the August 26, 1871, edition of the Cariboo Sentinel, downloaded from the UBC Historical Newspapers archive. I needed to refocus: zoom in on the past and put aside my awareness of Karl’s adjoining empty room; Midge at Buttle Lake, gazing at the same stars I could see out the hotel window; Noreen, scheming lord knew what back in Vancouver… What I didn’t need was another episode of my ancestors’ ghostly soap opera.

Of course! How could I forget? Christopher responded.

I sighed.

It was a week or so after I’d delivered Madame’s letter.

That got my attention.

They laughed, fully aware they were teasing their audience with their mysterious, reminiscing banter.

I knew by then what her missive was all about. Madame told me. Well, as you know, she couldn’t not tell me. After all, I was to be her representative, wasn’t I?

And I was looking forward to our next meeting, my love. Fervently!

Hmm? Judging by the company you were keeping, perhaps not as fervently as a future bride might have expected.

Christopher made to object, but she prattled on, obviously enjoying his feigned discomfiture.

Imagine our surprise when we spotted you at the Theatre Royal in the company of Miss Whitmore! Madame seemed amused. I wasn’t alarmed or jealous, of course. That would have been ridiculous! Just because I had been smitten at the first sight of you didn’t mean you had to put any constraints on your gadding about with the town’s school marm on your arm.

We were merely out for an evening’s entertainment.

Faugh!

 I cannot deny there was an understanding between the two of us—you know that—but it was nothing that would bring dishonour on either party if we decided not to pursue our relationship. Had things gone farther, I would never have allowed myself to fall in love with another.

Such discipline! Such restraint!

Well, I must confess, my sweet, there would have been one exception. After meeting you, dearest—I mean truly meeting you and understanding what I felt for you—I’ve never had to exercise restraint; there’s simply never been another who could take your place. Snap! The trap had me by the leg, or the heart, or whatever part of my anatomy you wish to name.

They laughed, having forgotten me entirely, lost in their repartee. I imagined them looking fondly at one another, holding hands, perhaps hugging in that stiff, formal way apropos the 19th century.

So, what did you think of me in that precise moment at the Royal?

You know the answer, my dear. I thought I had a duty toward you, Madame, and the other girls in her establishment. To muddle that duty with anything … uhm… more personal would have been an abuse, a dereliction. My mind couldn’t comprehend the signs, dearest, so intent was I on my priestly responsibilities. I couldn’t see anything beyond that.

I was a project then; one of your good works?

Madam’s offer to install the stained glass at Saint Saviour’s was the project, dearest. I saw possibilities in that. The prospect of bringing a new light into the church, if you will. Working with Madam, even if behind the scenes anonymously, as she insisted, offered me a chance to build a relationship of trust, perhaps to change things for the better.

And me?

You were the only person in that theatre, really. I had to force myself to watch that silly play, to laugh at the right moments for Miss Whitmore’s sake, and to meld that vision of you back into the larger purpose at hand. It was all hopeless, of course, but I was too stupid to accept the reality of my situation. I was aware of you every second. But I thought I could will myself into obedience and could willfully transubstantiate love into infatuation. In retrospect, of course, I realize things had to turn out the way they did, but at that moment, I believed—truly believed—that my duty as a priest was to overrule the intense desires of my heart.

Transubstantiate!

A deliberate twist, my dear. A purposeful provocation.

What, exactly, had Madame written in her note?

You know what she wrote!”

Humour me, my love, for our friend, Mr. Welland’s sake.

I’m paraphrasing here, as you will know, but I can recite the gist of her letter…

‘Dear Reverend Newman,

‘It has come to my attention that the parish of St. Saviour’s is hoping to install a stained-glass window behind the alter, but that efforts to raise funds are falling far short of the mark. An article to that effect appeared in the Cariboo Sentinel just the other day. Far be it for me to doubt the reports of that irrepressible journalist, Mr. Holloway, but, just to be certain, I have confirmed his report from other sources.

‘Although I am not a member of your church, I am—or at least believe I am—spiritually motivated in everything I do. It hardly matters to me how people come to recognize the spiritual aspect within themselves; what matters is that they do attune to some higher purpose than the crass materialism of our times. To that extent, I am a supporter of the Anglican Church and, as is my will, wish to demonstrate my support in a tangible manner.

‘I am prepared to fully fund the cost of a stained-glass window for St. Saviour’s without imposing any constraints whatsoever upon your choice of themes or styles for the work, although I do believe a representation of Saint Mary Magdalene would be most appropriate.

‘It is my intention to remain entirely anonymous in this venture, it being highly likely that any mention of my name in connection with the project would be controversial. All I ask is to be kept apprised of progress on the planning and execution of your sacred undertaking through my intermediary, Miss Anna Armstrong, who will be able to meet with you without drawing the kind of attention my presence would surely give rise to. You could easily explain Miss Armstrong’s approaches as an edifying example of wayward spirit seeking guidance and renewal—if not forgiveness!

‘If you meet Anna, whom I am dispatching with this note, I am sure you will find her a most charming, thoughtful, and mature young woman. She is more than capable of representing my interests in this matter and conveying news to me about how the project is going.

‘I do hope you will consider my humble offer and not let the dictates of false propriety and puffed-up sanctimoniousness determine the outcome. After all, I am not asking for any say in the matter, only offering a means for Saint Saviour’s to admit natural light, filtered through sublime intentions, if I may speak so grandly.

‘Your sincere admirer,

‘Madam P. Blavinsky
          August 20, 1871

That was Madam B’s offer, to the best of my recollection. And if we continue reading the scurrilous epistles of that scoundrel, Holloway, it will not be long before you come across a distorted reference to her generosity and my implied ecclesiastical authoritarianism.

Now, dearest, you mustn’t let your temper get the better of you.

Harrumph, Christopher grumped.

Then the two of them dissolved.

Delayed Reactions

“Got your text. Tried to phone, but you didn’t answer. Assume you were out of range or otherwise occupied. Can you give me a call or respond by email when you get this? Noreen.”

The beauty of email is the sender doesn’t know when or even if you have opened their message. You can dally, delay, think, or even choose not to reply, as if their communication has somehow evaporated into the digital ionosphere between you and them. In that sense, there’s a 19th-century quality to emails; they are the descendants of Victorian letters, working their ways through the mechanisms of the post—except they do arrive instantaneously, and their language is more often the clipped pastiche of hyped 21st-century chatter than anything that has an air of elegance or dignity to it.

Noreen’s summons arrived with a startling ding and a tab sliding into the top-right side of my computer screen that said: Noreen Welland, “Where are you?” Sent from my iPhone. If it had been a message from Midge, I would have smiled, remembering her scent, the feel of her, the rich undertones of her voice…

“Sorry Nor,” I typed. “Rented a car, drove back to Wells. Lost most of the day and have been frantically trying to catch up. I’m in my hotel room, working.” I hit send, and the message took off with a dramatic whoosh, like a car hurtling past on a highway—me left standing on the shoulder.

I went back to scanning the late summer of 1871 editions of the Cariboo Sentinel, negotiating the dense columns of type on the digitized pages awkwardly, using my laptop’s finger pad instead of my mouse, which wouldn’t work on the bedspread. PREVENTION BETTER THAN CURE… Moses’ Hair Invigorator; Albion Iron Works… MINING AND PUMPING MACHINERY; FLORENCE… The best sewing machine for family use…

Ding! Noreen Welland, “Have you connected with Karl again?” Sent from my iPhone.

Frustration and anger, more than any other emotions, burn themselves into the circuitry of human consciousness. Their acidic quality etches channels through the neural network directly to its primitive core—that kill or be killed zone where our struggle for survival is rooted. At what point do you admit to yourself that a lover has become, in some confusing sense of the word, an enemy? That there is no way you can be together in a room, especially not a bedroom, without the bristling sensations of impending conflict churning in your gut. Antipathy is such a useful word when we finally admit to it.

“No,” I replied to Noreen. “I haven’t. He needs space right now. It’s bloody inconvenient that he left me stranded, but I think it’s good he’s made a clear statement—that he’s said by his actions he needs to be on his own to make up his mind about things.”

Ding! Noreen Welland, “What things?” Sent from my iPhone.

Why, suddenly, did I imagine myself a gopher in a minefield? In some kind of 3-D video game concocted on that bizarre premise? I actually laughed out loud and found myself calculating the sensitivity of land mines to scrabbling claws. The notion amused me for a moment.

“Things, period. I don’t know what’s going on inside Karl’s head, Noreen. I do know he’s an angry young man who’s likely going to need some support ‘working things out’. That he took my car is a shout, a statement made through action rather than words. Instead of being pissed off about that, I have to see it as an opportunity. It’ll give us something to talk about on the way home tomorrow, at least.” Whoosh!

Ding! Noreen Welland, “Maybe I should steal your car someday.” Sent from my iPhone.

I smiled, remembering for a moment how Noreen and I used to be, then delved back into the archival issues of the Cariboo Sentinel, flipping to the front page of August 26, 1871…

Mystery donor to fund church window

It has come to our attention that an anonymous donor will pay for the installation of a stained-glass window at St. Saviour’s Church. Perhaps it’s not surprising in a town productive of so many instant plutocrats, that there should be one amongst them to step forward and make this little contribution, which looms so large in everyone else’s estimation. Nevertheless, heartfelt thanks are due.

The announcement, which was made at the regular meeting of St. Saviour’s board Tuesday last, will bring joy to the hearts of those many who have devoutly wished for an altered light to shine in on St. Saviour’s but whose pecuniary means have not been sufficient to achieve their devout ends in this regard. If more miners, and specifically more of that species who have ‘struck it rich’, were to attend St. Saviour’s of a Sunday morning and give up the debilitating habit of carousing into the wee hours of Saturday night, a philanthropist might have been identified sooner.

Nevertheless, the contribution will lend a wonderful adornment to the recently completed miracle of our little church, and I’m sure the Reverend Reynard, who sacrificed so much to see our wooden cathedral built (only to move on to Nanaimo soon after its completion), will be pleased when he receives news of this delightful embellishment.

I have been informed that consideration is being given to the image of Mary Magdalene and that Rev. Newman, who announced the anonymous donation, is championing this particular vision in glass. Whether or not the motif is in accordance with the wishes of the church’s benefactor or is a more personal preference seems unclear. But, given that St. Saviour’s has so few suitable windows and that another benefactor is not likely to be found any time soon, it is a matter of some considerable importance as to which biblical scene is chosen for this adornment.

Up to now, I am told, there has been discussion of depicting Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem, or his glorious ascension. So, it would appear Rev. Newman is asserting his ecclesiastical authority in the matter—not that we want to introduce an element of controversy into the choice of scenes or otherwise add an unpleasant tint to what should be an occasion for untarnished celebration.

As for the design and execution of this sacerdotal work, I am given to understand that Victoria is the nearest centre where the requisite materials, skills, and talent can be found, and that it will likely be some months at the very least before what is envisaged can be ceremoniously installed to shed its transformed and transforming light onto our little alter.

Robert Holloway, Editor

You can take it with you

The sun had risen high enough and swung far enough southward to make sitting outside tolerable. So, I took my coffee at one of the little tables on the Wells Inn veranda, absorbing the warmth and quiet, punctuated by the cry of a raven somewhere off in the distance, the occasional whine of tires from the direction of Highway 26, and the inhale-exhale of my own breathing, which seemed a necessary annoyance. Everything that mattered was wrecked; the single common denominator in the littered landscape, me.

“What a fucking mess!”

Indeed, you have gotten yourself into a pickle.

“Who invited you?” I bristled.

Did you invite the hummingbirds that nested in your apple tree last summer? I thought not. Or the crows that threatened their young? No. They simply arrived, and their story unfolded, and you learned from it, didn’t you? Then they were gone. You collected the hummers’ nest, remember, and keep it now on a little platter under a glass lid on the mantel over your fireplace.

“How poetic.”

He’s impossible, dearest. I think we should leave him to his frumpy misery.

Patience, my sweet. He might come around. Remember how long it took me to come to my senses? What if you’d given up then, eh? Think what we’d have missed.

Anna made no answer.

“Sorry,” I said, fearing they’d left me alone.

After reading that article of Holloway’s, I almost wanted to give up the whole business, Anna continued, tentatively. His insinuations, the snide undertone—it all made me sick—seemed part of that world I had shunned. Why did Madame now want me to re-enter it as a trespasser, or at best, an emissary from an enemy state? If I hadn’t met you already and liked you, I never would have done it—become her go-between. And even so, when Madame informed me that you felt it ‘improper’ for our meetings to take place at your cabin but preferred to meet at St. Saviour’s! Well, I can tell you, the thought of crossing that threshold did not sit well with me.

But you did agree to the arrangement. You did see reason! Imagine, love, the consequences of your being seen coming to me at my cabin, and appreciate the certainty that you would have been seen. Think of the tattling tongues and the inevitable conclusions people would have drawn. Even in this promiscuous age, such behaviour would stir up corrosive, small-minded innuendo, but then, at the height of our Victorian era, I was convinced beyond appearances of the impropriety of such an arrangement. How could a priest, even the most liberal of priests, possibly feel otherwise?

And what should you have been accused of, my love?

He paused. Of feeling for you, in truth, the way I did feel!

So, you contrived to have me come to you in the only guise that could be construed as forgivable, as a penitent seeking some sort of absolution!

You know it wasn’t quite so calculating as all that, dearest!

No, not quite. But there is at least a tincture of truth to the charge?

Yes,Christopher conceded with a sigh.Perhaps so.

And even your diversion set tongues a-waggling, didn’t it?

Indeed, it did, my love, and fingers a-pointing, too, you will remember. But I ignored all that, didn’t I? Pushed their sordid suspicions aside because I had a duty to perform, a sacred trust, and refused to let their insinuations prevent me from arousing your spirit and inciting your soul.

She laughed as if she had teased him about it a thousand times before. Arouse me you did, my sweet. Incite me? Most certainly!

For his part, Christopher resisted her mockery, the very air stiffening with indignation.

I laughed. It seemed to me that theirs was a marriage balanced around convergent points of argument. Keystones, where the pressures of a loving union came together in perfect equipoise.

What’s so funny? Anna snapped.

“You!” I said.

In the nix of time

Ding, Noreen Welland, “Neither of us is to blame,” Sent from my iPhone.

Again, a notification from my wife protruded into the right-hand side of my laptop’s screen for several seconds, then, like a stiletto being withdrawn from a wound, slipped out of sight before I could make up my mind to open the message. I had been packing my things, getting ready to check out. I’d left the computer until last for just such an exigency—an urgent email from somewhere.

“Shit!” What now?

Before I could change my mind, I closed the laptop’s lid and stuffed the infernal machine into its case. Prince George. Read the message there. I shouldered the case, grabbed my overnight bag, and left. Ten minutes later, I was on the road.

Sometimes, while driving, I become aware that we occupy a queasy middle ground where past and future mix. This sensation comes as a sort of trance: the car stationary, the traction of its tires making the world spin, the curved surface of a perfectly gimballed sphere, weightless, a mercurial dreamscape. That’s the present tense.

Neither of us is to blame? What the hell was that supposed to mean? That we are both to blame? For what? Our failed marriage? The sickening lurch of awakening periodically to the truth, snarling, then attenuating our hopes to our bad dream? Recoiling from the possibility of being honest, resorting to any sleight of mind, any wormhole we could stumble into, to avoid the truth…

Every time we met, I loved you more and struggled not to show it. Christopher intruded.

Please! Not now, I pleaded.

Not show it! Ha, ha! Catechisms indeed! A peacock is still a peacock, even when it isn’t fanning its plumage, my dear.

Was it quite so obvious as that?

She let his question expire without answer.

All those weeks Madame Blavinsky insisted we meet, when there was really nothing to report… We now know what she was up to, but I was too thick-headed to see through her stratagem at the time.

She counted on it, dearest. You men! There’s nothing subtle about your thought processes. You blunder about like proverbial bulls in china shops, then do worse damage trying to repair or cover things up. As a species, you were well suited to a world where clubs and stone hammers were the only implements to hand, but now you are only fit for extinction, with some few exceptions.

They laughed.

And this fellow here is the great-great-grandson of her conniving?

Hmmm?

A prolonged silence followed, given dimension by the hum of tires and the slipstream buffeting my rented car. I gripped the wheel and concentrated on the vanishing points where the road curved out of sight, or dipped behind a hill, or simply narrowed down to its meaningless convergence.

Well, sir, what do you have to say for yourself?

I clamped my jaw shut, hoping they would go away.

What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?

Stubbornness more like. He looks just like Alvin, don’t you think? Remember how that boy would pout and refuse to talk or even listen? Why, he used to clap his hands to his ears like the hear-no-evil monkey, squeeze his eyes shut tight, and defy anyone to engage him in conversation.

There is a certain likeness, I will admit…

Admit?

Well, Allee must have emerged more from my side of the gene pool, as Mr. Darwin would have it, and there are some inherited traits we’d rather downplay. Even you, my angel, are prone to some very minor behaviours, which I’m sure you’d rather not have pointed out.

Such as?

Well, Christopher paused. Your, uhm, forthrightness…

That’s a flaw!

Rudeness, then. Call it that, shall we? Or perhaps brusqueness is the word? Bluntness?

And if I’m so rude, brusque, and blunt, how have you managed to put up with me all these years now that you’re describing me as a positive shrew?

As I said, my sweet, we’re talking minor imperfections here.

It doesn’t sound so minor to me, you brute.

Well, by comparison to the thick catalogue of your virtues, my love, this little paragraph hardly bears mentioning. Why! It’s no more than a footnote cast in the tiniest font. You are the most magnificent, lovable, intelligent shrew a man could choose to worship!

“Shut up!” I shouted. “Please!”

For a second or two, they stopped chattering.

That’s something, I suppose, Christopher tendered at last. A response of sorts.

We’re not dealing with a corpse. Hooray!

I veered off the pavement, pulling up hard onto the shoulder where a gravel road entered Highway 26. I had to get out of the car. Escape their ceaseless, inane barrage.

“You’re driving me insane,” I said.

Quite the opposite, my man. Christopher whispered, become an eddy in the breeze ruffling the branches of the silent, surrounding forest. We’re actually driving you toward some version of sanity.

“What makes you think I need to be driven sane, as you put it?”

Why do you think your mother gave you our tobacco tin in the first place?

“Because I’m a journalist, a writer. She wanted me to tell your stories—to fulfill the intentions you, yourselves, placed into that tin pot almost a hundred and fifty years ago.

There was no explicit request that you research and write our stories or do anything at all with the contents of that tin. Neither Anna nor I wanted to burden our descendants with that sort of undertaking, especially since we had no idea who our descendants might turn out to be!

“Who are you?” I shouted. “What do you want?”

The mute forest answered, absorbing my outburst without offering so much as an echo—in the same way it had enveloped the tortured screechings and yowlings of a million anonymous beings before me, thrashing and fighting to the last, aware in that brilliant, desperate, defining moment that this life was all they’d ever have, that eternity could only be grasped for those remaining seconds they struggled to survive.

We are lucid droplets squeezed out of the very atmosphere, Christopher rhapsodized.

Distorting transparencies that fall into life and out again, Anna corrected.

Each, a lens refracting refracted light.

“What the fuck are you talking about!”

We’re merely being poetic, my good man, to help you understand the significance of the convergence you are feeling in the depths of your romantic soul. Truly, we’re nothing more than what you make of us, eh?

We are your imagination, tricking you. And yet, at the same time, we are history in the making.

I laughed, shaken by something important in the tone of their nonsense.

Now you’ve got it! Christopher encouraged.

“I believe I do!”

Then we got back into the rented car and set off once more for Prince George.

The quality of light

There’s only one trail I can think of that could have led Holloway to his discovery of Madame Blavinsky’s role in funding St. Saviour’s stained glass, Christopher mused, a few kilometres down the road. Only one person vixenish and narrow-minded enough to have ferreted out the ‘truth’ and used our intrepid journalist as a screen for her revelation: Gwendolyn Wilmot.

Being the wife of a prominent businessman, both members of the church board, she of course moved in the upper echelon of Barkerville society, such as it was, which meant she was good friends with Harriet Paulson, who was, of course, the wife of Gregory Paulson, Manager of the Bank of British North America, where Madame Blavinsky deposited the earnings from her business and where her cheque would have been drawn.

There could be no other way for the details of the transaction to have been made public unless Madame herself, you, my sweet, or I had snitched. Regardless of how the information did get leaked, it was not the kind of intelligence Holloway was about to let slip by unpublished, so an article appeared in the June 1, 1872 edition of the Sentinel, almost 10 months after the donation was made.

I had read the item…

Benefactor of St. Saviour’s Revealed

It has come to our attention that the anonymous donor of funds needed to install a stained-glass window behind the alter in St. Saviour’s was none other than Madame P. Blavinsky, a name no doubt familiar to some gentlemen about town who seek female companionship on negotiable terms. 

Madame Blavinsky has long been proprietor of what is commonly referred to as a ‘house of ill-repute’, a fact my informant tells me that will most certainly raise questions within St. Saviour’s congregation as to the appropriateness of having accepted funds from such a source for an undertaking of such sanctity.

We must remember that this embellishment will affect the quality of light streaming into the little cathedral built by Rev. Christopher Newman’s predecessor, Rev. James Reynard, a cleric of unblemished character and inexhaustible devotion.

You may recall, too, that there was some controversy over the selection of the theme for this window, with Rev. Newman insisting on an image of Mary Magdalene. Now there will most certainly be questions as to why he was so ardent and how he might have been influenced in his choice. Stained glass indeed!

The weasel was most certainly in amongst the chickens, Christopher said.

Madame laughed when she read it. Anna chimed in. ’Well,’ she said. ‘I suppose this will make things interesting. Of course, two can play at her game.’ I would only learn later what she intended—too late to make a difference in how things turned out.

There was to be a board meeting the Thursday after the article appeared, and I had no illusions as to what might transpire, Christopher resumed. At Sunday service, hardly a word was said to me directly, except by Thomas Wilmot, who wanted to know afterward what I was going to do about ‘the situation.’ I told him there was nothing to do, that as far as I was concerned, Madame Blavinsky had been impelled to make her donation by feelings of genuine religious sentiment, and that I was not going to be the one who judged her and spurned an expression of faith. ‘Faith!’ Wilmot objected. ‘Why, the woman keeps a house of ill-fame. She corrupts the morals of the girls who work for her and of the men who pay for their services. Where’s there room for ‘faith’ in all that?’

Although he was the only one to speak to me directly, I had no doubt he was expressing the sentiments of many in the congregation. I had felt their eyes upon me during service that day—eyes that seemed to regard me with a patient, predatory gaze, like a flock of vultures watching the death-throes of a wounded animal.

The nix of time—take two

From: Noreen Welland, “Neither of us is to blame.” Sent from my iPhone…

I stared at the subject line for a long time before clicking open the email. Christopher and Anna had distracted me during the drive up from Wells to Prince George. But the closer I got to Books & Company, the more insistent her summons became, the digitized ding of its initial arrival ricocheting inside the folds of my brain. As I dropped off the car, walked the short distance to the café, ordered my latté, and took my seat, it resonated like a pending migraine. I flipped open my laptop’s lid, sighed, then clicked…

Kyle, she began. We both know our marriage is beyond repair. We haven’t had the courage to deal with that… I suppose, because there’s still a memory of love between us and we’ve been fearful that, moribund as our relationship has become, it’s perhaps better than the void of a lonely middle age. In such situations—and we’ve both seen this—a sort of perverse pleasure begins to manifest where the delight of love morphs into the tortured pleasures of bickering and backbiting. I don’t want to go there. Don’t want Karl exposed to that either.

There’s no point trying to determine when things began to break down and what we could have done to renew our vows. If we both wanted to start over, see a counsellor, and do the hard work of restoring a marriage that was falling apart, that kind of introspection would be necessary, and the vision of a renewed love might have sustained us. I don’t want to do that anymore, and neither do you. The corrosion has penetrated too deep. There’s nothing left holding us together.

Sorry to be so blunt, but any lingering hopes of resuscitation need to be quashed so we can each get on with our lives. One of us had to say that first: I am impelled to do so because I have met someone else and will be moved in with her by the time you return from Barkerville. Jolene was a client of mine. During our search for a condominium that suited her needs, we found ourselves talking more and more about each other and less and less about her needs as a single woman, looking for a place in the West End with a view. Before we knew it, we were looking for a unit suitable for two. It all happened that quickly.

This is totally outside my range of experience—in every dimension—and I know any sensible person—including sensible-me—looking in at my situation from the outside will think I’ve lost my marbles. But sometimes you know what you want to do, and you know it has to be done on the spur of the moment. Think about it and it’s gone.

I’m giving myself permission to be who I really am.

I sincerely hope that kind of release happens for you, too. 

Love, Noreen.

Careful as a man with a bomb in his hands, I got up, made my way out the door, around the side of the café, and into the back alley. I got as far down the lane as possible, then leaned my forehead into the brick wall and puked, then wept, the sobs heaving out of me, waves of anguish making for a distant shore. Exhausted, I let remorse settle into sadness. Noreen, who should have known the depths of my sorrow, never would. Not after all that had been said and done between us, I vowed.

I coughed, spat, straightened up, and walked back round to the front of the building.

Karl was there, waiting, when I got back to my table. “You shouldn’t leave your stuff sitting around unattended, Dad. It’s going to get ripped off.” We hugged, hard, each not fully comprehending the other’s need, then sat down.

“Had to get some fresh air,” I said.

“Are you okay?” His features bunched with concern. “You look kind of pasty.”

“I’m okay. But there’ll be lots to talk about on the way down.”

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“So, you know?”

He nodded.

“And you’re okay?”

“I’m okay with it. Yes.” He reached across the table and wrapped his hand around mine, squeezing gently. “To tell you the truth, Dad, I’m relieved. For all of us.”

“And you don’t feel you have to choose, that we can still be a family in that sense?”

The musical cadence of Karl’s laughter soothed me, as if my frayed nerves were in harmonic sympathy with his ready acceptance. “You’re both lunatics as far as I’m concerned. I can’t choose between you.”

“Can you give an old lunatic a couple of minutes, son, before we head back?”

“I’ll be in the car, Dad. It’s parked just up the street.”

“Stay in the driver’s seat,” I said. “I’m tired.”

He nodded, then left, his gangly frame moving cat-like, toward the door. There are moments when fatherly pride surges. Watching Karl leave the café, I knew I’d never see my boy again; he’d become a memory and a man in the same instant.

To: Noreen Welland, Re: Neither of us is to blame…

Dear Noreen. Congratulations. I sincerely wish you and your new partner, Jolene, all the best. Congratulations, too, on your courage in making this decision. I won’t say your announcement hasn’t come as a shock, but who’s to say how a marriage of over 25 years should be ended? It’s not something we get to rehearse.

My hope now is we can become friends, and one day—perhaps soon—I will be able to meet Jolene. I don’t want you to think I am saying these things glibly or that I am not sad. The difficult years have not wiped beyond recovery all the wonderful memories we’ve shared, and I hope neither of us feels the urge to remove the other from their family album. What I do want you to understand is that I totally agree when you say, Neither of us is to blame. I talked to Karl. He doesn’t seem too fazed about our reconfigured family. If anything, he’s relieved. So perhaps a bad ending can, at the same instant, be a good beginning.

That is my wish.

      Love, Kyle.

You can’t ever go home again

Tip: If you want to talk to your son about anything serious and personal, go for a drive and put him behind the wheel. Then your incoming words arrive as distractions, melding into consciousness like audible medicine dissolved in the stream of consciousness, rather than a staccato of bullet points.

“I want to go home via Penticton,” I told Karl as we headed out of PG.

“But Dad, that will add hours to the trip.”

“An overnight stay, actually,” I informed him. “I have to break the news about Mom and me to your grandmother, and I don’t want to do it over the phone.”

He drove on. I watched his profile as we rolled through the commercial outskirts of the city into its hinterland. Karl drove faster than I would, my reflexes and ability to process incoming data having slowed to the point where I could no longer keep up with him. Wisdom. That’s my strong suit now, I thought. Then I laughed out loud.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. Just had a stupid thought, too embarrassing to say out loud.”

“About me?”

“No! About me, son, and how I’m turning into an old man.”

“You’re not so old, Dad.”

“Old enough to be rethinking my retirement.” I paused a second, then pushed forward. “Old enough to take the news of my wife’s leaving me and moving in with another woman as if I’d been reading about someone else’s life in a magazine article—like a feature about a movie star, or someone like that, whose last film I can’t even remember.”

“You didn’t take it that way, Dad.” Kyle hesitated. “I saw you out back of that coffee shop where we met.” Stifling a reflexive groan, I glanced out the window. “I just happened to be driving by.”

“It’s okay, son,” I said, the words coming out sideways. “It’s okay. I’m just not great at public displays, that’s all.” Then I added, “It’s good that you know. I still care for your mother, and she cares for me, and we both care about you. Now maybe we’ll be able to show it better.”

He glanced at me with what I took to be admiration—or was it pity? I squeezed his shoulder gratefully. “We’ll get through this,” I said. “We’re still family.”

We drove on in silence for a few seconds as he rounded a clover leaf onto the bridge over the muddy Fraser, where PG’s Queensway hooks up with Highway 97 southbound. Once we were up to speed again, I asked Karl about his trip to Prince Rupert. “Did you find what you were looking for, son?”

He snorted dismissively. “Don’t really know what I was looking for, Dad, or even if I was looking for anything. I needed to get away, that’s all.”

“Can we talk about it?”

“Nothing to talk about. I just didn’t want to spend two days cooped up in a hotel room while you tromped around the tourist version of a gold-rush town. So, I did something stupid—acted out, I think you might call it—and probably ruined your weekend, which was destined to be ruined anyway, without my help.”

“Not at all!” I countered, surprised at my own vehemence. “What you did has changed our lives! You may not have consciously had that in mind, and I wouldn’t recommend stealing somebody’s car as a means of effecting change, generally, but what you did had its own logic—an emotional logic, let’s say, and leave it at that.”

He focused on the road ahead, my remarks blending in with the hum of tires and the flash of lane markers rolling under the hood. “I don’t know what you mean,” Karl said.

“You should have been the focus of our trip up to Barkerville, not my great-great-grandparents, Karl.”

“But you didn’t even know I was coming until a few days before.”

“And I needed to get over being miffed, son, and embrace an opportunity for you and me to be together for a couple of days. It’s as simple as that. Instead of seizing an opportunity, I clung to a stupid agenda. You had a right to be angry.”

“I wasn’t angry, Dad!”

“Yes, you were!”

“No, I wasn’t!”

On the brink, we teetered for a moment, then laughed. He drove on.

“You’re changed.” Karl didn’t respond; he kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead. “What happened?”

He sighed, annoyed.

“When I talked to Mom,” he began, “when she told me about her and Jolene, I wasn’t angry. I should have been, I thought, but it was like that part of me didn’t have a spark plug anymore. You know what I mean?”

I waited him out.

“What I felt was relieved… No! Happy for Mom, and a bit concerned about her future. Maybe she’s overcompensating for the shit you two have been going through?”

We drove on, letting that sink in.

“Then I knew everything was okay with her, that I should have been celebrating. But I couldn’t…”

“Why?”

“Because I’m worried about you! I couldn’t help thinking: Christ, how’s Dad going to take this? Then I saw how you take things—in the alley behind the coffee shop. And when you came back in, you made as if nothing had happened, as if you didn’t even know what we were headed home to.

“That said all I needed to know, Dad. There’s plenty of time for a man-to-man, a whole next phase of getting to know who I am and who I want to be. You and Mom have got me to the start line in your own fucked-up ways; you’ve made something of me. That’s all there is to say.”

We exchanged a glance, I squeezed his shoulder again, and then we looked forward through the windshield.

“You should turn the wipers on.”

“What?” Karl gave me a puzzled look.

“I think I’m gonna cry.”

He laughed. “Jeez, Dad, I’m supposed to be the goofy teen.”

I was happy. Happy to be content. “Mind if I catch a little kip?”

“No, Dad,” Karl said. “I’m good.

Falling into grace

The Thursday afternoon of the board meeting, I met Christopher as usual. We sat angled toward each other in the front pew, below the alter. We didn’t often talk about the window, nor did we usually talk directly about my state of grace, the purported reason for our weekly meetings. He didn’t know then about my past—at least nothing more than where I was born and some of the places I had been. And I knew nothing of his family and history. What I did know was I loved him… Irreparably. Incorrigibly.

I had confessed this to Madame Blavinsky that very morning, and she shocked me with her reply. ‘Of course you love him, my dear!’ she cried, hugging me. ’I knew you would, so it could not have turned out otherwise, could it?’ 

When Madame was truly pleased, her laughter took on the quality of a songbird fluting from a high branch. There was an innocence to it, an unselfconsciousness that made her radiant and invincible for a moment, rather than merely graceful and formidable.

When I tried to express my amazement, she sealed my lips, offering benediction with a gentle touch of her index finger. ‘You know the time has come for you to leave me.’

Of course I knew no such thing. But once said, the thought instantly began to take root, her permission reinforcing and binding my unconscious resolve. The pretence of my meetings with Christopher as some sort of catechism had to end, I determined. As did the pretext of them having anything at all to do with St. Saviour’s stained glass.

‘Why?’ I demanded. Madame raised her eyebrows in surprise, as if regarding a petulant child. ‘Why must I leave you?’

She laughed again. ‘Every mother wants grandchildren, my dear; I am no exception.’

Speechless, I stared at her. Never before had she offered so much as a whisper of this type of sentiment between us. I knew she regarded me as her ‘special girl,’ of course, and so did everyone else in the house. No one resented it. The others teased me, as you would expect, but not, for the most part, in a mean-spirited or envious way. None had any reason to complain about Madame’s love for them, or her generosity, or of my genuine friendship.

‘Besides,” she added. ‘I will soon be ‘selling up’ as they say, and moving on. I have put aside enough to enter into a very comfortable retirement, and prospects here are in decline. The time to sell is now, dearest, while there will be enough to provide something for my girls, with a moiety left over for me to augment my savings, make some ‘reputable’ investments, and extend my leisure and travels.”

‘How long have you known?’

‘That the time has come to settle my affairs here?’

‘No,’ I said, annoyed with her cat-and-mouse. ‘That I would fall in love with Christopher.’

This time, she pressed her finger to her own lips. ‘Some things I cannot say,’ she replied. ‘Because I don’t know the answers and don’t really want to know.’ She looked pensive for a moment, then continued: ‘Our thoughts on the most important things come together much like a stained-glass window—a brightly coloured piece here, another there, all floating in our imagination with only the vaguest conception as to how the collection is going to fit together—then, in an almost audible moment, with a sound I imagine to be something like wind chimes, all those bits and pieces coalesce into something with meaning, something with glory in it. Do you understand?’

I shook my head from side to side. “No!” I said, like an obstinate child.

‘That’s good,’ Madame said cheerfully. ‘Because if you knew why you were my special girl, it would take some of the magic out of it, you see. All we need is to know that it is so, and we will do anything to protect that relationship and extend it.’ She ended the conversation after that with an earnest hug—a hug so long and fierce that I began to feel trapped in her embrace. ‘There, you see,’ Madame said, her eyes moist. ‘Our time is not coming to an end; it has only just begun.’

Charged with the emotional flux of that conversation, I marched down the boardwalk toward St. Saviour’s, determined not to show any signs of confusion or doubt.

‘You know about this evening’s meeting?’ Christopher said soon after our greetings.

I nodded.

‘It may prove to be the beginning of the end for me,’ he continued with some difficulty, as if he were short of breath. ‘Since the item in the Sentinel, there has been a growing sentiment on the board against going ahead with the installation. Mrs. Wilmot has been hard at work, rallying her forces. If the opposition is strong enough, and if I assert my authority in the matter, there will almost certainly be an appeal to the bishop, in which case I will be overruled.’

‘How can you know that?’ I protested.

He smiled grimly. ‘If I am overruled, I will resign.’

‘You believe that strongly in this project?’

‘I have come to believe in you, Anna, and Madame Blavinsky, and what that window will stand for.’

‘Which is?’

‘Reaching out,’ he said, almost in a whisper. And in the same moment, he did reach out and enfold my hand in his. ‘And loving, without judgement, without anything between the person you are appealing to, and you, except love…’

‘And if she reaches out to you at the same time?’

I placed my free hand on his cheek.

‘Then you have come as close to earthly bliss as any human being can possibly expect or hope for, my love.’

We leaned toward each other, and our lips touched. We lingered in the most delicate kiss I had ever known. Exquisite is the only word for it. Not only for its sensuality, for the tingle of it in every nerve and fibre of our beings, but for its sacred promise. For I knew in that instant there would never be a reasonable vow this man would not make and that any vow I asked would have to be for our sakes, not just mine, because he was prepared to give up everything for me—that I must not take more of him than what I truly needed, the rest I would have to share with the world.

Getting over it

Snippets of the river that once wended its way between Okanagan and Skaha lakes meander through the suburbs of Penticton, detached bits of cut ribbon, stagnating in back yards and farm fields on either side of the Channel Parkway. Seen on a map, they remind me of DNA fragments, bits of code whose meaning has become irrelevant.

Karl swung east off the Parkway onto Warren Road, then quick right onto Baskin, rolling through the curving network of collector streets toward our final destination, my mother’s place. He pulled up across the street and cut the engine. We sat there a moment.

“You okay?” he asked.

Nodding, I shoved open the passenger door.

“Why do you ask?”

He shrugged. “I guess you were dreaming. You were twitching around in your sleep like some guy getting electroshock therapy.”

We got out, and Karl waited while I walked around the car. Then I did something I hadn’t ever done—draped my hand over his left shoulder as we crossed the road. It was a casual gesture and only lasted until we got to Mom’s drive, but it said something that needed saying, something that couldn’t be shaped into words. I’d been meaning to do that for years but had never had the confidence. I had always felt unworthy—that my expression of masculine love would somehow be seen as fake, a lie. It still felt a little forced, but sincere.

“Look at you two!” Mom said, opening the front door and shuffling down the steps into the drive. She and Karl hugged. “Oh!” she fussed. “I miss seeing you. Every time you visit, you’ve changed. Now you’re all grown up!” She set her eyes on me. “Hi Mom,” I smiled. We pecked each other’s cheeks and hugged briefly. “Come in!” she beckoned. “You must be exhausted, the both of you, from your long drive.”

Twisted and bowed as she was by arthritis, her enthusiasm never waned. She nattered on about her yoga, how fine the weather had been for walking, how the beans in her garden were feeding the entire neighbourhood, about the great special on coffee at Save-On-Foods… I let her go on for a few minutes, until she’d laid out some snacks and coffee on the table and Karl had made his exit, ‘to unload our stuff from the car.’

“Mom,” I interrupted her patter. She looked startled.

“I have something to tell you.”

“Yes, dear?”

“Noreen and I have split up.”

She frowned, as if what I’d said didn’t make any sense, and busied herself rearranging things on the table, her hands flitting like butterflies, here to there, not knowing where to land. “Is that so?” she said at last. “And you drove all the way up here to tell me that? With Karl?”

“I didn’t find out myself until yesterday. Karl and I were in Barkerville, so I decided we should stop in and let you know on our way down.”

“Barkerville?”

“Yes, I was doing some research on your great-grandfather and grandmother, Christopher Newman and Anna Armstrong.”

“Why do you call her that?”

“What?”

“Anna Armstrong. She was Anna Newman in the end.”

“I don’t know, Mom. That’s how I got to know her, I guess. That’s who the woman in the tobacco tin was when you handed her over to me, and even if she consented to change her name, I don’t think either she or Christopher ever thought of her otherwise.”

“Your father and I shared the same last name for 70 years. It wasn’t such a bad thing, was it?”

“Of course not!”

Until that moment, I hadn’t been aware of the change in Mother. I hadn’t seen the fear behind her eyes or recognized that her conversations were as much about hanging onto all the things around her as sharing news, the words a sort of connecting glue holding her cracked and fracturing world together.

“I liked Noreen,” she said sadly. “She could be a bit abrupt, almost rude at times, but I liked her just the same. She was some of the things I wish I could have been in my life.”

“You’ve had a great life, Mom, haven’t you?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, annoyed. “I’m not complaining. But it was lived in a different era. I would have liked to have done some of the things she did.”

“Can I tell her that? Would you mind?”

“Please,” she agreed. “I hope you will.”

“And that you’d like her to keep in touch, that she’s still your daughter-in-law, even if she’s not exactly my wife?

“That would be nice.”

I rounded the island and wrapped my arms around her. She seemed more frail than I remembered, her bones light and delicate as a bird’s.

“I have one more thing to tell you Mom.”

“Oh? Is it about Noreen?”

“Yes,” I sighed, prepping myself. “She moved in with another woman.”

“What do you mean ‘moved in,’ Kyle?”

“I’m not sure myself, Mom. Like you said, it’s a different era. Perhaps I’ve been left behind, too. Maybe I’ve given up chasing the wagon, if you know what I mean.”

“I didn’t know you’d fallen off the wagon,” she quipped, and we laughed.

“How is Karl taking all this?”

“He’ll be fine. I’m really proud of him, I have to say. He’s grown up to be a ‘fine young man’.”

We paused a moment, wondering if the conversation had petered out or if there was something more to say. Mom smiled thoughtfully. “I have to wonder what Christopher and Anna would have thought of all this.”

“Hmm,” I agreed. And it felt to me like we were talking to them in that moment, as if our words resonated back through history and evolution, connecting their world to ours in a continuum that arced from the forgotten past into the unforeseeable future… That we were a point on a circumference so vast that we could not see the curve of space and time or even begin to comprehend everything summed up in our here-and-now.

“Kyle?” Mother said, sharply. “Kyle!”

Jolted from my reverie, I focused back on her. “You always were a dreamer,” she laughed. “That’s why I gave you that tobacco tin in the first place. I knew you would be able to discover things inside it no one else would ever see. Perhaps things that were never even there, really, but have a history of their own in your imagination.”

“Is that the wisdom of age speaking, Mom?” I teased.

She laughed. “If we do get wiser as we get older, it’s only because we’ve forgotten all the stupid things we ever did in our lives and can hold up the few smart choices that got us out of trouble as examples.”

For a moment, the fear burned off, and her eyes glittered, and we both felt happier than we deserved.

Called to order

I walked from Mom’s place to the bench on Skaha Lake, where she, Robert, and Beth had watched me tip Dad’s ashes into the deep. Sitting there, I stared out toward the little beacon along the ley-line that intersected the exact spot where I had performed the final rite. But it occurred to me that having exact coordinates can’t really get you to the same place as anybody else—that we each inhabit a unique universe and must talk to one another across vast distances, even when we are seated at opposite sides of the same table.

Perhaps especially when we are seated at the same table.

Christopher joined me—an old friend now who materialized on a whim, out of thin air. He and Anna had become the voices of visions and dreams. Their story had to be finished. I had come to understand that. They could not rest until I had listened to the end. Perhaps then we could all find peace. So I asked, What happens next?

As we went through the routine blather at Saint Saviour’s board meeting—approval of the agenda, approval of last month’s minutes, and so on—Gwendolyn Wilmot glared at me with unconcealed hatred. Ours had been a difficult relationship from the start. She was such a stern, unyielding woman. I had come to think of her as some sort of vicious insect, programmed to attack anything approaching her colony that didn’t exactly match her parameters of Christian virtue. She had become for me ‘that horrid woman’—a  type newly coined in my lexicon, Gwendolyn being the archetype and sole specimen.

When we got to the item she had been waiting for, the update on the stained-glass window, she attacked. ‘I should like to know where the funding for this project came from, Rev. Newman, and if the recent report in The Cariboo Sentinel—which I assure you has become the talk of Front Street—is true.’ As if to make her point tangible, she slapped a clipping from Holloway’s June 1 edition on the table and shoved it in my direction.

There are times when you must feel rage but not show it. I call those instances ‘stroking the tiger.’ Instinct urged me to leap over the table and throttle that woman. Instead, I looked upon her with utter disdain, forgiving her for being the despicable creature she couldn’t help being. The only adequate definition of evil I have ever been able to come up with in my long, sometimes wretched life is ‘a delight in torture.’ Gwendolyn Wilmot delighted in her smug, righteous destruction of those she considered lesser beings. I summoned every ounce of will I could to keep from becoming the beast she wanted to antagonize and then slay.

‘The report is accurate with regard to the funding,’ I began. ‘Miss Blavinsky…’

‘It’s Madame Blavinsky, is it not, sir?’

‘Miss Blavinsky generously donated the funds we needed to install the stained glass. She did so anonymously.’

‘Little wonder,’ Gwendolyn sneered. ‘And you didn’t think to refuse her offer, or at the very least, insist it be brought before this board for consideration?’

‘I did not.’

Gwendolyn raised her eyebrows in a show of astonishment. At the same time, her cheeks reddened. The tiger purred dangerously inside my chest. I stroked its fury. ‘You took it upon yourself to decide such a thing when we must all be exposed to the tainted light that glass will admit into our church, sir.’

’Nothing can taint God’s light, madam, except the mind perceiving it.’

‘What!’ she choked. ‘How dare you!’

God’s light is not tainted by bits of glass, Mrs. Wilmot, or by the metaphors people employ to cast aspersions and stir animosities. Words, Gwendolyn, can be sharpened into barbs that wound. Words don’t injure God’s air; they do injure His creatures when they hit their marks. Mr. Holloway is well aware of that and is always very keen to generate controversies for the pages of the Sentinel, which he has succeeded in doing by publishing this article. We should be mindful of that before going to him with information he can misrepresent.’

‘What are you talking about!’ she snapped.

‘I am making inquiries as to how it came to Mr. Holloway’s attention that Madame Blavinsky was the anonymous donor, Miss Wilmot, and if I determine that a legal confidence was broken, I assure you steps shall be taken.’

‘What has that to do with me?’ she shouted.

‘Order,’ Thomas Wilmot interjected firmly, rapping his knuckles on the table.

‘I’m not sure it has anything to do with you, but a legal confidence was broken. Someone revealed to Mr. Holloway information that should not have been made public. I can assure you that someone was not me, nor was it Miss Blavatsky.’

The tiger licked its claws.

‘What about that woman you see here, in the church, that strumpet Anna? Anna Armstrong, I believe her name is.’

I glared at her with unmitigated fury, but could not stare her down. ‘That woman, as you put it, is a parishioner with as much right to God’s grace as you, Mrs. Wilmot,’ I said coolly. ‘Do you honestly think God makes the same kind of petty distinctions we do when it comes to loving his creation?’

‘And what kind of distinctions do you make when loving God’s creation, may I ask?”

‘Order!’ Her husband thundered, banging the table with his fist. ‘Enough!’

‘That window will not be installed,’ Gwendolyn vowed. ‘I shall write to the bishop.’

‘It will be,’ I informed her. ‘It arrives tomorrow, and I have contracted to have it put in immediately, in time to celebrate the installation this coming Sunday.’

‘This is outrageous!’

‘I am simply carrying out the will of the congregation, Mrs. Wilmot. You can go back through the minutes if you wish to find my authority for doing so, although I don’t believe it’s necessary for me, as God’s representative, to have approval for such a decision.’

Without another word, she shot out of her chair, turned, and stormed out of the meeting, which was hastily adjourned.

Shattered visions

A boat motored out of Skaha Lake Marina, its wake spreading behind, unzipping the perfectly smooth, transparent surface. I watched from the bench as it shrank into the distance, wondering about the relevance of such random observations.

We look for meaning in everything, Christopher said. That’s what makes us human.

And do you think that somehow makes us better? Special?

I used to think so. Mine was a naive era when we thought anything could be accomplished by human ingenuity and will. I suppose we needed to go through that adolescent stage to discover who and what we really are.

Which is?

The species that invented God so we could have something beyond our limitations to aspire to and usurp.

“But you’re a priest!”

Long before Gwendolyn Wilmot brought things to a head, I knew deep down I was a fraud. I became a priest so I could turn my back on the crass materialism of my age—on the looming inheritance of my father’s factory. I turned my face to the altar instead. The decision wasn’t quite so cut-and-dry as that, of course, as you know from my confession to Anna in the letters you inherited. I believed that I believed, if I may express it so. And I tried very hard to hold onto my faith upon taking my vows—to shut the truth, as I would come to know it, out. But in the end, I had to place my faith in meiosis, I suppose. I had to believe that the Life Force, or spirit, if you will, works at the cellular, molecular, and even atomic level. It’s a force as eternal and pervasive as gravity and thermodynamics, one that links me inextricably to the minutest particles of life that vibrate in a drop of water, but it’s not one you can take out of that drop of water. There is no God, and there is no heaven. The only beings who can hear and understand our prayers are our fellow humans, as far as I know.

“And yet, you remained a priest?”

Good works are never out of fashion, and I could never in my life see a place better suited for me than the church to do good works, so I remained to the very end a ‘fraud in a frock’ as Anna sometimes chided.

“You joked about it!”

In private, yes. Anna was not one to be bound by convention. It was as much as she could do to play her role in public; she refused to be bound to it in private. She raised eyebrows, I can tell you, but always managed to get away with it. She was always seen as the minister’s somewhat eccentric, rebellious wife, a role that, in a way, endeared her to our community. We both knew what we were about, and if it had ever come to a choice between the church and her, I can tell you, I would never have left my Anna. Never!

So, tell me what happened after that tumultuous meeting at St. Saviour’s.

As I’d said, the stained glass was installed before the next Sunday, and it was announced that the window would be dedicated after the service.

To make things official, I sent word to Bishop Hills in Victoria. Of course, my letter would not have reached him before the deed was done, and I deserved a righteous rebuke for that bit of chicanery. I also sent him a letter from the artisan who had created the glass, just to give him a sense of the passion that had gone into it.

“A letter! From the man who designed the window?”

 Woman, actually.

It was a woman?

Yes. And appropriately so, don’t you think? Serena Carson was her name, and her studio was in Victoria.

And did you keep a copy of this letter?

You, sir, are an anachronism! Christopher teased. I also sent to Bishop Hills the artist’s sketch of the design—a little miniature, if you will, of the window and Mary Magdalene.

Really!

By the standards of Christ Church or St. Paul’s, our window was not much more than a trinket, he continued. But it was beautiful! It depicted Mary Magdalene before Christ, looking up at him lovingly, a brilliant light shining through them both from the upper left. The pane pulsed with a sense of adoration. That was its power—a pervasive sense of sanctity that flowed into and out of and between everything. There was no sense of separateness in the scene. No sense—and I’m sure the designer intended this—that anyone needed forgiving.

I raised my hands to it in dedication and was about to thank the Lord for this vision, animating the light of our sanctuary, when the window exploded, shattered glass spewing from the frame and cascading onto the alter, flecks of the image landing in the folds of my robe and splaying out on the dais. Someone in the congregation shrieked. Another blast took out what remained of the window, precipitating an exodus from St. Saviour’s onto Front Street. Then I heard Gwendolyn yelling imprecations through the gaping wound she had inflicted on our church. ‘Sinner!’ she hollered. ‘Hell-bound priest!’ And more of the same.

Without thinking about the danger, I marched out of the church, around to the back, and there she stood, armed with a shotgun, which she pointed at me. I should have been afraid, I suppose, but wasn’t. The tiger would not be stroked; he lunged. ‘Do you think this is how God speaks,’ I shouted, then marched right up to her and snatched the gun away. ‘Is this how you get your way when people won’t listen to your narrow-minded edicts!’  She collapsed into a sobbing heap, there on the ground.

Thomas Wilmot showed up, then, along with a crowd from the church and the town. He walked past me to her, bending to help her to her feet. ‘Get away!’ she shrieked. ‘Get away from me, you whoremonger!’ She slapped and scratched at him. He shrank from her fury, helpless and defeated. ‘I hate you!’ she glared at him. ‘I hate you all,’ she shouted at the circle of faces. Then she straightened her shoulders and marched off, like a proud prisoner defying her executioners. Thomas slunk after his wife, a broken man, weighed down by an unsupportable burden.

‘Go home,’ I said, when things had settled. ‘Please, everyone, just go home.’

The crowd dispersed until only a few remained. It was then that I saw Anna. ‘I can’t stay here any longer,’ she said, as I approached. ‘Because I can’t be near you and conceal my feelings. It’s a lie to live this way. A sin without the benefit of sinning.’  We both allowed a hint of a smile at that. ‘I won’t be long following you, my dear. Wherever you go, that is where I shall find happiness. Will you marry me?’

Her answer was the brightest smile ever inflicted on the heart of a hapless lover. ‘On one condition,’ she said. I waited, eyebrows raised. ‘I shall let you know what it is in a letter after I have left Barkerville. In the meantime, I can make this pledge: No-one else will ever take your place in my heart, Reverend Newman.’

To those terms, I agreed with a curt nod. I saw her off two days later, ignoring the curious looks from passersby.

Madam Blavinsky was there too, and she preempted my show of affection with her own. ‘You will write, my sweet, from wherever you are?’ she pleaded.

Anna agreed. ‘Of course, and you will answer?’

‘But of course! How could I dream of losing contact with my favourite?’ 

They embraced. A long, heartfelt hug shared between dearest friends, who had in fact fallen into the roles of mother and daughter. When Madame stepped aside, I took Anna’s hands in my own and kissed her—a brief touching of lips that might have passed between husband and wife. Then she got into the coach and was gone.

‘You love her, then,’ Madam Blavinsky said, watching the coach rattle out of town.

‘More than anyone or anything,’ I said. ‘We intend to marry.’

This announcement passed without comment, which I took to mean it was not really news to her.

‘Then I suppose we shall be relations in a manner of speaking,’ Madame speculated after a while. ‘Anna is a daughter to me.’

‘I’m sorry about your window,’ I said, belatedly. ‘It was a magnificent gift to the church.’

Madame shrugged. ‘I never even got to see it, except in that little drawing. Anna said it was beautiful.’ Her conversation trailed off, as if her sentence hadn’t been completed. ‘Did you ever find out who divulged the information about the funding for the glass?’ she asked at last.

‘I have my suspicions, but no proof.’

‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘By their actions, you shall know them, Reverend. Sometimes a quiet word of truth is punishment enough for the proud, don’t you think?’

‘What do you mean by that?’

She winked, smiled, and went her way.

A week later, I received a letter from Anna:

Dearest Christopher,

I love you, and you me. But we don’t know each other, really, and there are things about me you have to know if I am to be your wife—things that might make such a commitment impossible, even if you do love me. For, though I don’t believe in God, I do believe in our capacity to sin against each other.

So here is what I propose: I will set down as many of the events in my life as I can think of, and which I feel you should know about before we marry—as a sort of running diary, which I will share with you. Then, you will set down the important details of your life for me.

These journals we shall share before we take our final vows. In the meantime, consider me engaged, and I shall do the same with regard to you, for I pray there’s nothing either of us can say that will diminish our love for each other or our desire to be joined in marriage.

    Love, Anna

I, of course, accepted her wise suggestion, and you have read the resulting documents, which were stored in the rather inauspicious vessel of a tobacco tin. So, our history is revealed after all these years, and it has become yours to do with as you please.

Such sweet sorrow

“Will you come to me anymore?”

We are always here in your imagination, my dear.

But do you exist anywhere else?

What does it matter? Do you even exist anywhere but in your own imagination?

I couldn’t say.

Christopher and I debated questions like that continually and never really came to any resolution. In time, we realized what was important was not the answer but the questions themselves—the eternal questions. Anyone who says they have the answers is really either self-delusional, a liar, a tyrant, or all three.

She laughed.

What about Darwin? And Einstein?

They were brilliant proponents of new theories, my sweet, just like Newton, Copernicus, and Mendel before them—the theories that we elevate to the status of laws because some of us can’t bear to live in a world where there is even the slightest lacuna of doubt.

And is that such a bad thing—laws that help us understand how the universe works and how we can shape our own environments to work for us?

It’s not a ‘bad’ thing to live according to a theory. Not at all. But we overreach when we say our theory is a universal law that must be believed for all time by everyone. And that it must be obeyed, even when it comes to the realms of ethics and morals. When we insist on that, we are simply replacing one version of God with another. Science is our new religion, my dear, and like all religions, it can be usurped, perverted, and used to stifle imagination.

But look what science has achieved…

Look what religion achieved! Science would not have been possible without religion as its antecedent.

“Is there nothing we can really believe in, then?”

I can believe in science without making a religion of it. Belief, when it is alive, is a matter of willing, my dear, not accepting mere facts—especially proclaimed eternal facts. I, for instance, believe there is a spiritual aspect to our universe that can never be understood. Do you see the irony in that? The eternal quest? Consciousness is our experience and expression of that mystery, and without it, the universe becomes a machine—an unfolding of necessary consequences that has no purpose whatsoever.

Again, I had no answer to her challenge. So I waited.

Let me ask another question, then, and I’ll leave it with you. Can you imagine a scientist, or even a team of scientists from around the world, ever building a machine that will be conscious of itself, that will have consciousness and a conscience, and that will be capable of what I believe to be the pinnacle of animal spirit: loving another animal? Being humble? Is that a conceivable outcome of any human invention? And then, could a universe even exist, or possibly matter, without such a consciousness?

I haven’t figured that one out yet; but when I think of Karl, and Midge, and Noreen, and Mum, and Dad, I think I have my answer.

Epilogue >

Chapter 4 Episodes: Chapter Header | On the Cariboo Trail | Suspension Bridge | Arrival |Drop off |Gone Missing | Picked Up | Free ride | Making Contact | The Errand | Ignition | Loves me; loves me not | The letter | Delayed Reactions | You can take it with you | In the nix of time | The quality of light | The nix of time—take two | You can’t ever go home again | Falling into grace | Getting over it | Called to order |Shattered visions | Such sweet sorrow