Already the walls of the tower have risen to shoulder-height.
Some of the stones he sets are no bigger than his thumb or his fist, some measure eight or ten inches across or more. This morning, in the rainbow’s garish light, their surfaces seem to dance in rhythm with the clusters of goldenrod that had opened up everywhere in recent days. Sun and rain, cloud and light, flower and stone — they are each so closely bound together, so almost prophetically joined, that he experiences a spasm of joy to find himself at the heart of such a holy convergence. His chest fills up with his own noisy relief, a cry of ecstasy, a wild howl of joy.
He had thought himself alone in the world, but in fact he is a child of this solid staring rainbow, and of the persevering forms of light and shadow, of substance and ephemera. A child of the earth.
Only later, walking home across the rutted fields, does he recall and give honor to the author of his happiness, uttering God’s blameless name aloud.
For days at a time he is able to forget that he is the father of a child, a little girl named Daisy, and then something will jangle a bell to remind him. He might glance at the calendar on the kitchen wall and observe that the fourth Tuesday of the month is fast approaching, the day he sends off a money order to Mrs. Clarentine Flett in Winnipeg. Or he will observe, when the weather turns warm, how young children from the village bring lunches to their fathers at the quarry, lingering there to play for an hour or two with polly-wogs or with chips of waste stone, and always this sight will set him wondering what manner of child his daughter might be.
Or Mrs. Flett might send a photograph of the girl along with a letter describing her steady growth, her genial disposition, or her cleverness at school. Daisy in her pictures appears an obedient child, careful of her dress, and possessed of a spare, neat body — and for this he supposes he should feel grateful. Her smile is neither forward nor timid, but something in between. (For some reason he is unable to determine whether or not she is pretty.
Probably she is not.) The most recent photograph includes Mrs.
Flett and Professor Barker Flett as well, one sitting on either side of Daisy on what looks like a grassy stretch of river bank, the three of them colored into character by soft gray tones, the family at ease, the family in love with itself, no trace of disharmony.
Occasionally he will wake from sleep with his body trembling and his head soaked with the sweat of memory. There, dancing in the darkness, as plain as life, are the walls of the resurrected kitchen with its tumult and confusion, its circle of shocked faces, and the silent, sheeted body of his dear Mercy. The clock is striking the hour, and the striking seems to go on and on without ceasing, clanging behind his eyes, and muffling with its clamor the distance between that which is dreamed and what is remembered.
While the others stand and stare like statues, he runs out the kitchen door and throws himself on the ground, rolling over and over, shouting and weeping and pounding his fists on the baked earth. “She didn’t tell me,” he roars to the vacant sky, “she never told me.”
This is what he is unable to comprehend: why his Mercy had seen fit to guard her momentous secret.
He supposes he must look upon her silence as a kind of betrayal, or even an act of hostility, but he is reminded, always, of her old helplessness with words and with the difficult forms the real world imposes. He tries to imagine what she felt while this ball of human matter was growing inside her, how she accommodated its collapsed arms and legs and beating heart, whether she feared its intrusion or if she perhaps loved it so deeply she was unable to speak its name, to share its existence or plan for its arrival.
He admits to himself that his love for his dead wife has been altered by the fact of her silence. More and more her lapse seems not just a withholding, but a punishment, a means of humbling him before others who see him now, he imagines, as an ignorant or else careless man. What manner of husband does not know his wife is to bear a child?
Yes, it must be confessed — years later this is clear to me — that my father’s love for my mother had been damaged, and sometimes, especially when waking from one of his vivid dreams, he wonders if he is capable of loving the child. Daisy Goodwill, eleven years old, frozen in a camera’s eye. A little girl in a straw hat. A child perched on a river bank, solid, stiff, an unreadable smile playing on her lips. It would be unnatural if a father did not love his child, but what Cuyler Goodwill feels is only a pygmy love produced by the ether of custom. He has responsibilities. He sends money for her keep. He writes Mrs. Flett letters in which he expresses his concern for the child’s health and happiness, but, in fact, he seldom thinks in such terms. Who is this being, flesh of his flesh?
(Daisy is not a name he would have chosen, but the child had to be called something, and he was in no fit state after my birth to turn his mind to names.) He studies her photograph. He thinks of her at odd times of the day. He is mildly, intermittently curious about her, and a little afraid, and lately, learning that she has suffered from the scourge of measles, he has wondered if it might not be expected of him to take the train into Winnipeg one Sunday morning and reassure himself as to her condition.
But he shrinks from this awkward meeting. And from the confusion of travel — he has never been to the city, has never seen any reason for going — and is reluctant, anyway, to sacrifice the whole of a Sunday. On Sundays he reads his Testament, prays for forgiveness and works on his tower.
It’s Sunday morning now, a fine June morning, and the iron bell in the steeple of the Tyndall Methodist Church is calling the faithful to worship, but my father is not drawn by this clanging and banging.
Religion has not made a church-goer of Cuyler Goodwill. In the early days of his conversion he attempted, three or four times, the morning service in Tyndall, and once, once only, he walked seven miles west to the settlement at Oakmidden where he sat, bewildered, through the arcane rites of a Greek Orthodox mass. The noisiness of public worship — singing, praying, chanting, preaching — make him uneasy. The vestments of holy men, even the simple white Methodist collar, abrade his sensibilities, crowd him to the edge of his belief, and the dusted, raftered, churchy spaces assault him with their perfume and polish, belittling him, taunting him. Moreover, his natural instincts feel constrained by the order of holy service, the breathy invocations and amens and numbered hymns, and afterwards the obligation to shake hands with others of the congregation, to greet them soberly, to engage his tongue in social exchange — all this rubs the man the wrong way.
Instead, almost by accident, he has fallen upon a mode of sustained personal meditation which is not so far removed from that practiced for centuries on the Asian subcontinent, a trance of concentration which was to become fashionable in our own culture later in the century, the foolish sixties, the seventies.
In his case it is an ecstatic communion. On Sundays he approaches his Maker by a series of ritualized steps, rising at dawn, taking a breakfast of tea and bread, then walking out, and in all weathers, to the burial grounds off the Quarry Road. As he walks he recites to himself a scrap of scripture, a single verse usually, which he repeats over and over.