Winnipeg in the year 1916 is an agreeable place. One can live a decent life in this city — despite its geographic isolation, despite the war across the ocean. Even the long hard winters are cheerfully borne by the complacent, generally law-abiding population, and indeed winter brings a benign, clean countenance to the raw look of wooden buildings and laissez-faire planning.
Increasingly, though, the city is growing mannerly. A series of wide, new boulevards has been proposed, and an immense new legislative building in the neo-classical style is underway. Ground was broken back in the year 1913. The vast amounts of stone required for this ambitious undertaking have kept the Tyndall Quarry working full-tilt and the stonecutters steadily employed and well out of the Kaiser’s reach. Churches now stand on many of the downtown corners, sometimes two or three different sects represented at one crossing. (“Let us hope God has a sense of humor,” quipped a well-respected Baptist pastor at a recent civic meeting.) These churches are made of stone, as are the many fine banks and insurance companies, also the well-known Wesley College and the new Law Courts. Scanning the municipal horizon, you can’t help thinking: isn’t this astonishing! A stone city rising up out of our soft prairie loam! (An eminent Chicago architect, on seeing the blocks of polished Tyndall stone, declared that American builders would be clamoring for the material, were they but to lay eyes on its beauty.)
During the winter season Winnipeg offers a variety of theatrical productions, skating parties, balls, and dinners. In the summer the well-to-do flee the heat for the Lake of the Woods, and the less privileged make do with day trips to Victoria Beach or to various other interesting attractions of the region. Among the young people, those, say, between eighteen and twenty-five years of age, a railway excursion to the village of Tyndall has become exceedingly popular of late. The cost of a train ticket is moderate, and the young people, picnicking on sandwiches and bottles of cold tea, grow very merry. The ladies greatly outnumber the gentlemen during these war years, but the gender imbalance, far from dampening spirits, produces an oddly exhilarating effect. Many bring along bathing costumes, since the old abandoned part of the quarry provides a sunken cube of clear, cold water which is ideal for swimming. But it is really Goodwill Tower they come to see.
To be sure, getting to the tower requires an energetic halfhour’s tramp along a country road, and then a further stretch to the east, down a dirt trail. But this exertion is part of the day’s pleasure for these lively young people. They are full of ginger and fizz, invigorated by fresh air and the relief of having escaped for a few hours their more sober responsibilities in the city, not to mention the horror of a war being fought across the sea.
Across the low-lying fields the tower can be easily spotted.
“There it is,” someone will shout. (For some of them this is the second or third visit.)
When the sun is high overhead the tower appears white; later in the afternoon it takes on a blue-gray softness.
Always, one or two of these young people will break into a run.
First man there is a starving bear. They reach the low stone cemetery wall, scramble over it — never mind the gate with its rusted hook — dodging the gravestones and stands of thistle. There! At last! They pat the tower’s bumpy sides, which are surprisingly warm from the sun’s rays, and clamber up and down its stepping stones — the young women often have to be coaxed, or assisted, before they’ll go all the way to the top, being fearful of heights, or of exposing their undergarments. They persevere, however, since the view of the surrounding countryside is said to be superb, and they are curious, every last one of them, to peer down into the tower’s hollow core at the circle of weeds, beneath which lies a small gravestone — or so it is said.
There is a good deal of shrieking and laughing on these excursions. Someone locates the mermaid stone. Someone else finds the carved cat, and the little stone down near the bottom which is inscribed with the single word “woe.” The most knowledgeable person in the party will recount the history of the tower: a beautiful young wife dead of childbirth. A handsome young husband, stunned by grief — a man who can still be glimpsed occasionally, working away on the tower in the early morning hours, although he is no longer young, no longer handsome by the day’s standards, and no longer building with his original fervor; he is happy enough, in fact, to stop work and pass the time of day with visitors.
And the baby, what happened to the baby? No one seems to know.
It touches the heart. It does.
And now, just look at the time; the day-trippers must head back to the village and catch their train. The sun is dipping low. They walk more slowly; some of the couples hold hands or go arm in arm. One or two of them may turn, on an impulse, and look back at the tower. They are heard to comment aloud on the almost medieval look of the structure, and how strange it is to see a sight like this poking up in the middle of the prairie horizon. A remark will be made about the beauty of the limestone, how nearly it resembles Italian marble. One of the young men has pocketed a small carved nugget, which he fingers as he walks along. Someone else, one of the more bookish of the young women, murmurs something about the Taj Mahal in faraway India, how it too is a monument to lost love.
How does a poet know when a poem is ended? Because it lies flat, taut; nothing can be added or subtracted.
How does a woman know when a marriage is over? Because of the way her life suddenly shears off in just two directions: past and future. Ask Clarentine Flett.
We say a war is ended by a surrender, an armistice, a treaty. But, really, it just wears itself out, is no longer its own recompense, seems suddenly ignoble, part of the vast discourtesy of the world.
Things begin, things end. Just when we seem to arrive at a quiet place we are swept up, suddenly, between the body’s smooth, functioning predictability and the need for disruption. We do irrational things, outrageous things. Or else something will come along and intervene, an unimaginable foe. Abe Skutari, after years and years of peddling door-to-door in rural Manitoba, is drummed out of business by Eaton’s Mail Order. Who would have expected such a thing? So what does he do but borrow money from the Royal Bank — the first such loan ever made to a son of Israel — and open his own retail establishment on Selkirk Avenue in Winnipeg, specializing in men’s workclothes and footwear, garden supplies and bicycles. A door closes, a door opens; Mr. Skutari’s own words.
Professor Barker Flett in 1916 is at the end of his Winnipeg chapter. His mother is dead. His faith is exhausted. His thirty-three-year-old body frightens him with its perversities. The world frightens him, too, even as it beckons to him brightly, offering him whatever he desires, or almost. He must turn a page now, and move forward, eastward, Ottawa to be precise, the capital of the Dominion.
And my father, Cuyler Goodwill of Tyndall, Manitoba, has finished his tower. How does he know it is finished? The proportions tell him so, the wholly pleasing correspondence of height, width, circumference; one more course around the top and the thing would grow unbalanced; he looks at it and his thoughts become easy, almost lazy. And there have been so many visitors lately, and so many newspaper reporters. (He suspects that visitors are carrying away pieces of his worked stone, and all he can do when he hears such gossip is shrug.) These visitors have distracted him to the extent that lately he has forgotten the impulse that launched the tower. He talks willingly, even eagerly, with those who come, but shies away from the root of his obsession. Why exactly have you persevered with your tower, Mr. Goodwill? Well, now, a person starts a piece of work and the work takes over. God has receded, a mere shadow, and as for Mercy — her grave so sunken and grown over — he cannot recollect the look of her face or the outline of her body. His brief marriage, his conversion — these seem no more than curious intersections in a life that is stretching itself forward.