The Stone Diaries Read online

  Never was happiness more firmly in his grasp as in the summer of 1905, his twenty-second year, living alone in two back rooms at the top of a Simcoe Street boarding establishment, bent over his small student desk and completing his dissertation on the western lady’s-slipper, genus Cypripedium.

  He loved this flower. (The “lady,” of course, was Venus.) He could have drawn its sensuous shape even in his dreams. Dorsal sepal, column, lateral sepal, sheath, sheathing bract, eye, and root. A common plant, yes, but belonging to the exotic orchid family. This delicate, frilled blossom was his. He had worked on it (her) for months, and now he possessed the whole of its folded silken parts and the pure, classic regenerative mechanics that lift it out of the humble midcontinental clay and open its full beauty to the eye of mankind—and to his eye in particular. (He believed this without vanity.)

  The intensity of his gaze on this single living thing awakened in him other complex longings. He ached anew for release from his body—those ladies of Higgens Avenue—and the obliteration of all he had found brutal in his life thus far, beginning with the dumb, blunted angers of his parents and brothers, a family from whom the supports of education, culture, and even language had been withdrawn. He longed to separate himself from the mean unpaved streets of Tyndall, Manitoba, where he spent his boyhood, and from the crude groping for salvation and sex he apprehended everywhere around him. Bliss lay in the structure of this simple flower he was attempting to reproduce on a sheet of white rag paper: a petalled organism, complete in itself, obedient to its own rhythms and laws and to none other. Years later, looking back, he remembers how tenderly he held the watercolor brush in his hand, how the sun falling through the windowpane struck the top of his wrist and the edge of the water glass, and how the whole of his existence lightened correspondingly.

  His euphoria was to be short-lived. Principal MacIntosh at the College asked him to redirect his research toward the development of hardier grains, reminding him that Methodism was a social, as well as spiritual, religion and thus concerned with the quality of human life—and here the old man underlined his words with fervor—human life on this earth. For the enlightenment of young, impressionable Barker Flett, he quoted the words of Jonathan Swift: “Whoever could make two ears of corn grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”

  Young Flett was obliged to give up his dabbling in lady’sslippers and to concentrate on hybrid grains. Moreover, as if that were not sacrifice enough, he was to be burdened with the teaching of introductory chemistry and physics as well as botany, and one year later, after poor Blaser was discharged (having been found to be a “user of alcohol”), he was assigned to teach the elementary zoology course as well. Overnight, it seemed, the singleness of his concentration had been shattered.

  Worse, he returned to his rooms on Simcoe Street one evening in late September to find his mother installed. On her lap lay a tiny infant, arms thrashing, legs kicking, stomach arching, its lungs inflated, howling out against the injustice of the world.

  Have I said that Clarentine Flett deserted her husband Magnus in the year 1905? Have I mentioned that she took with her the small infant who was in her charge, the young child of Mercy Goodwill, her neighbor who had died while giving birth?

  The month of Mrs. Flett’s departure was September; a series of night frosts had turned the air chilly, and the infant—a little girl of placid disposition—was clothed in a tucked nainsook day-slip topped by a plain flannel barrowcoat, which in turn was topped by a buttoned vest in fine white wool, and all these many layers were wrapped and securely pinned inside a commodious knitted shawl.

  It was a sparkling morning, 9:07 by the clock when Mrs. Flett stepped aboard the Imperial Limited at the Tyndall station, certain that her life was ruined, but managing, through an effort of will, to hold herself erect and to affect an air of preoccupation and liveliness. Those who saw her purchase her ticket for Winnipeg—with a dollar bill taken the night before from her husband’s collar-box—failed utterly to mark the fact that she paid for one-way accommodation only. These witnesses may, if they were standing close by, have sniffed about her person a sharp but not unpleasant scent, which emanated from the wad of cotton wool she had soaked in oil-of-cloves and packed tight against her throbbing molar. Her hat was not worth a second glance, trimmed as it was with ordinary mercerized satin and Japanese braid, but it was pinned nevertheless at a becoming angle on her small, stern head, giving her the jaunty look of a much younger woman; in fact, she was forty-five.

  The great armful of fall flowers she carried would have seemed to onlookers a mere womanly fancy, and anyone peeking inside her small valise would have found only a folded woolen coat for herself, a dozen napkinettes in fine canton flannel for the infant, and a baby’s feeding bottle with three black rubber teats. An awkward armload, to be sure—bag, bouquet, and baby—but she took her seat by the window with an air of assurance.

  The journey was short, a mere fifty-three minutes over flat stubbled fields and through a series of sunlit villages—Garson, East Selkirk, Gonor, Birds Hill, Whittier Junction—and during that time, with the infant asleep on her breast, Clarentine Flett began making plans for her survival. Her breakfast of oatmeal porridge lay heavy in her stomach, but her imagination soared. She saw that her old life was behind her, as cleanly cut off as though she had taken a knife to it (that note for her husband tucked under her handkerchief press, a single scratched word, goodbye). Ahead waited chance and opportunity of her own making. She would step from the train into the busy street in front of the Canadian Pacific Station in Winnipeg and offer her flowers to passers-by; city folks were fools for fresh flowers, even flowers as common as these that grew wild in every wasteland of the region, though you had to know where to look; she would make four separate sprays of them—these deep blue asters, or Michaelmas daisies as they were frequently called—then add a few thin leathery leaves and tie them prettily with some ribbon she’d brought along and sell each one for ten cents, earning enough to hire a cab to take her and the child to the rooming house on Simcoe Street where her son, Barker, lived.

  Once there, she would ascend the half-dozen wooden steps, knock on his door, and gain admittance. After that she would wait, watchful and alert, to see what came her way.

  “My dear Mr. Goodwill,” Clarentine Flett wrote in her large, loopy, uneducated hand, “I thank you for your message, and I am writing at once to assure you that Daisy, as I have taken to calling her, is well looked after and in excellent health. I am happy that you are in agreement with me that such a small infant will thrive more readily under female care, at least for the time being, and I am only sorry that my distracted state of mind last Tuesday morning prevented me from leaving you a note of explanation. You need have no worry about your dear child, since our situation in my son’s household is very comfortable and hygienic. Your present state of bereavement touches me deeply, for, as you know, I loved your dear wife Mercy with all my heart. I have enclosed with this letter a lock of the child’s hair which I trust will bring you some measure of comfort. It is, I fear, a very small lock, only a half-dozen hairs in plain truth, for she has as yet little to spare.”

  Barker Flett, that tall, gaunt, badly clothed student of botany, sat hunched over his cluttered desk, the angle of his bent head signaling misery. Sighing with vexation, he picked up a steel-nibbed pen, dipped it in the inkwell, and scratched: “My dear Father, I thank you for your letter, though it grieves me to learn of your unwillingness to write to my Mother directly, since I can’t help believing that an appeal on your part, if sincerely expressed and softly worded, might encourage her to reflect on her situation and eventually return home.” (Here he paused for a moment, staring out at the rain which was rattling against the window.) “In the meantime, I beg you to find it in your heart to make her some small allowance, perhaps one or two dollars a week. As you know, I hav
e had to engage an additional room to accommodate her and the child, and my scholarship income from the College scarcely covers these new and totally unforeseen expenses. There have been a number of doctor’s bills also, as Mother has suffered from severe infection following the extraction of her teeth, and the infant has been troubled day and night with what Dr. Sterling calls a tight chest. Perhaps you are aware that your neighbor, Mr. Goodwill, has agreed to provide the sum of eight dollars a month for the child’s maintenance. Generous as this is, it barely suffices. I send you, and to my dear brothers as well, my affectionate regards. Barker Flett”

  My dear Mr. Goodwill, Your monthly letter is always welcome, and I thank you most warmly for your Express Money Order, which is much appreciated.

  I am pleased to write that Daisy continues plump and happy, and her legs are grown strong indeed. My son and I are of the opinion that she will be walking before the month is out. I enclose the photograph you requested. (And again I thank you for sending the necessary money.) You will be able to see for yourself that the photographer has captured the exceptional curliness of her hair, which is of a very pretty color that I have heard described as “strawberry.” I am anxious to assure you that, contrary to what you may have heard, the air in Winnipeg is fresh and healthful. In addition, we are fortunate in having a fine big garden next to our house where little Daisy will be able to run about when the summer weather arrives.

  With kind regards, Clarentine Flett

  My dear Father, I have spoken to my Mother as you requested, but I am afraid she is firm in her refusal to return to Tyndall, despite your generous offer to accept her back into the household, even forbearing mention of her sudden leave-taking and long absence from home.

  As to your other question, I must regretfully answer in the negative, for I think it would only excite her nerves to receive you here.

  Her state of mind is relatively tranquil at the moment, and she is much occupied with the garden and with running after young Daisy.

  We must not, however, give up hope of a future reconciliation.

  I regret, also, your decision in the matter of money, which has become, for me, a never-ending source of distress.

  Your son, Barker My dear Mr. Goodwill, You will scarcely believe that Daisy is to start her first level at school in a mere ten days. Already she has her alphabet by heart, also Our Lord’s Prayer, the Twenty-third Psalm, and a number of simple hymns. She is, moreover, able to recite the common names of all the flower varieties in our garden, of which there are some twenty-five. I am happy to say that these two months of fine weather have improved her chest, as has the regular application of a mullein-leaf poultice at bedtime. As for myself, I keep very well.

  Yours faithfully, Clarentine Flett Dear Mr. Goodwill, I thank you for yours of the 28th, and assure you that Daisy is in excellent health. Her school recitation, “A Sailor’s Lament,” was given with the greatest feeling and enthusiasm.

  We were most interested to read of you and your famous tower in last week’s Tribune. My son, Professor Flett, regarding the tower’s rather blurred likeness on the page, grew most curious to see it as it really is, but as you know he never travels anymore to Tyndall since his brothers have gone West.

  Yours most sincerely, Clarentine Flett My dear Father, It gives me pain that I must once again apply to you for money. I do beseech you to search your conscience and give a thought to the many years in which you and my Mother lived in harmony, during which time she served most dutifully and lovingly with never any thought of compensation. Our day-to-day situation here is exceptionally insecure at the moment, and I now fear that my decision to purchase the Simcoe Street house, as well as the land that adjoins it, was premature, particularly with the city moving southward, and now talk of war. My actions, I assure you, proceeded from the wish to provide Daisy, who is growing into a fine young girl, with a reliable and respectable home of which she need never feel ashamed. It is true that my Mother does earn some income from the sale of plants and herbs, but the cost of constructing a greenhouse has been considerable. It is also true, as you say, that my own earnings have been augmented by the licensing of the “Marquis” wheat hybrid, but fully three-quarters of these earnings remain the property of the College. I look forward, with hope, to your favorable reply.

  You may be interested to know that “Goodwill Tower,” as it is known in the city, is much talked of these days, and I am told it draws visitors from all over the region, and even from the United States.

  Your son, Barker Dear Mr. Goodwill, This little note will, I hope, bring you the assurance that Daisy is now fully recovered from the attack of measles. It has been a most distressing time, and very tiresome indeed for her to remain so many weeks in a darkened room, particularly as she is by nature an active and healthy child. She was much cheered, however, to discover a photograph of you in the pages of last week’s Family Herald, standing in front of your tower. “Is that truly my father?” she demanded of me, and I assured her that indeed it was. She became most anxious to pay you a visit, and would talk of nothing else for days, but we believe, Professor Flett as much as myself, that such a visit would cause too much excitation in one so recently recovered from a serious illness.

  We remain grateful for your monthly contribution to our household. We manage the best we can on a limited purse, and happily my little garden enterprise is beginning to thrive. It is as if all the world has discovered the happiness that simple flowers can bring to an otherwise dreary wartime existence.

  Yours, Clarentine Flett Dear Mr. Goodwill, I thank you most sincerely for your prayers and for your words of condolence. I can tell you truthfully that my dear Mother did not suffer in her final days, having entered into a state of unconsciousness the moment the dreadful accident occurred. Those friends and acquaintances who kept vigil at her bedside found in her repose a source of strength and inspiration. She was laid to rest, finally, amid friends and family, both my brothers arriving from the West in time to pay their respects. Our Father, as you know, remained hardened in his heart to the end, and it is for him we must now direct our prayers. Regarding the young cyclist who struck my Mother down, he has been fined the sum of twenty-five dollars, and I am told the poor fellow is fairly ill with remorse.

  I have been thinking much these last days about the question of Daisy, whom my Mother has loved as dearly all these years as if she were her own child—doted on her, in fact. You will agree, I am sure, that it is not in any way desirable for a young girl of eleven years to share a household with a man of my circumstances who has neither a wife nor the means to engage a person who would look after her needs. In any case, it seems I must leave Winnipeg very soon in order to pursue my work with the Dominion Cerealist and his committee in Ottawa. Will you be kind enough to write me the full expression of your thoughts on the subject of Daisy and what we can arrange between us to ensure her future accommodation and happiness.

  Yours faithfully, Barker Flett Having known rapture, my father, Cuyler Goodwill, could not live without it.

  Once awakened, he was susceptible. It might have been poetry he embraced after the untimely death of his wife—or whisky or the bodies of other women—but instead, like many young working men of his time, he found God. In his case, God was waiting in the form of a rainbow east of the Quarry Road, not far from the plot where my mother lay buried.

  This event occurred in the month of October, an early morning following a night of heavy rain.

  In a cloth sack slung over his shoulder he carries an octagonalshaped piece of limestone (about the size, say, of a cantaloupe) which he intends to place on his dead wife’s grave. He climbs the fence at Taylor’s Corners, taking a shortcut through a field of stubble, over the soaked uneven ground, when suddenly the sun bursts through, weakly yellow at first, but quickly strengthening so that the heat reaches through the fibers of his gray cotton shirt. He looks up, and there it is: the rainbow.

  Of course he has seen rainbows before in his life, always stopping, i
n the way of country people, to admire the show of watery iridescence. Rainbows, after all, do not occur so frequently in southern Manitoba that they go unremarked. “Look at that,” someone or other is always sure to exclaim, pointing skyward, and then a wishful thought might rise up, a vague notion of impending good fortune or at least an alteration of mood.

  At this time in his life Cuyler Goodwill had not yet begun his long immersion in Bible study, and could not have quoted, had you asked him, God’s post-flood declaration to Noah: “I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a Covenant between me and the earth.”

  At the same time, he is not by any means an ignorant or superstitious man (though limited in formal schooling), and he understands the general principles of rainbows, that the prismatic effect is caused by the refraction, reflection, and dispersion of light through droplets of water. He understands, too, the evanescence of the phenomenon, its insubstantiality—he is, after all, a man who works with stone, with hard edges and verifiable volume. The arc of a rainbow cannot be touched; its dimensions are not measurable, and its colors fade even as they are apprehended. There is a belief, for that matter, widely subscribed to by simple people, that a rainbow cannot be photographed, that its fugitive and transitory composition resists the piercing lens and the final proof of chemically treated paper.

  But the rainbow that appears before my father on that October morning in 1905, a mere three months after his wife’s demise, is different, its colors more vibrantly distinct, its shape as insistent as a child’s crayon drawing. This rainbow seems made of glass or a kind of translucent marble, material that is hard, purposeful, pressing, and directed. Directed at him, for him. He has not observed the bands of color taking shape; he knows only that it is suddenly there, solid and perfect, and through its clean gateway shines a radiant slice of paradise.