Cuyler Goodwill himself believes (though he does not bruit this about, or even confess it to himself) that speech came to him during his brief two-year marriage to Mercy Goodwill. There in the sheeted width of their feather bed, his roughened male skin discovering the abundant soft flesh of his wife’s body, enclosing it, entering it — that was the moment when the stone in his throat became dislodged. An explosion of self-forgetfulness set his tongue free, or rather a series of explosions ignited along the seasonal curve: autumn Sundays in the tiny village of Tyndall, Manitoba, a crispness in the air. Or a string of cold January nights. And spring evenings, the breezes moist, the sun still present in the western sky, slanting in through the window across the pale embroidered pillow covers and on to the curves of wifely flesh — his dear, dear, willing Mercy. Words gathered in his mouth then, words he hadn’t known were part of his being. They leapt from his lips: his gratitude, his ardor, his most private longings — he whispered them into his sweetheart’s ear, and she, so impassive and unmoved, had offered up a kind of mute encouragement. At least she had not been offended, not even surprised, nor did she appear to find him foolish or unnatural in his mode of expression.
My own belief is that my father found his voice, found it truly and forever, in the rhetorical music of the King James scriptures.
During the years following his conversion by my mother’s grave — that sudden rainbow, that October anointing — he applied himself to his Bible morning and night. Its narratives frankly puzzled him — the parade of bearded kings and prophets, their curious ravings. Biblical warnings and imprecations flew straight over his commonsensical head. But scriptural rhythms entered his body directly, their syntax and coloring and suggestive tonality. How else to explain his archaic formal locutions, his balance and play of phrase, his exotic inversions, his metaphoric extravagance. Language spoke through him, and not — as is the usual case — the other way around.
Another theory holds that the man grew articulate as the result of the great crowds who traveled northward to see the tower he built to his wife’s memory, a tower constructed with his own hands. A fair proportion of these visitors, after all, were journalists, journalists who stood by Cuyler Goodwill’s side with a notebook and pencil in hand. Just a few questions, Mr. Goodwill, if you don’t mind. Young, clear-eyed, ready to be astonished, they came from all across the continent, and from as far away as London, England, bringing their journalists’ sheaf of queries, their hows, whens, their whys. Cuyler Goodwill had become a public person.
Eccentric perhaps, an artisan naif, but not unapproachable, not in the least. He was a man, on the contrary, who could easily be sounded out, given space. This was his moment, and he must have recognized it. His tongue learned to dance then, learned to deal with the intricacies of evasion and drama, fiction and distraction.
His voice, you might say, became the place where he lived, the way other people live in their furniture or gestures. At the same time he developed the orator’s knack for endurance, talking and talking without exhaustion, not always (it can be confessed) with substance.
More and more of late, his stamina on the platform has been exclaimed over, his lungs, his bellows, those organs of projection, that chest full of eager air. His hands dance a vigorous accompaniment. At the Lawrence County Businessmen’s Luncheon last winter he spoke for sixty minutes without notes, his remarkable tenor instrument never seeming to tire. And, standing before the Chamber of Commerce’s annual smoker in Bedford, he carried on — delightfully so, according to the Star-Phoenix — for a full hour and a quarter. And just one year ago, a fine June morning, he presented an inspiring address to the graduating students of Long College for Women on the banks of the Ohio River, his daughter, Daisy, being one of those receiving the degree artium bacheloreus. His talk, entitled “A Heritage in Stone,” a mythopoetic yoking of commerce and geology, stretched to an unprecedented two hours, and it was said afterward that scarcely half a dozen of the young ladies dozed off in all that time. “What a set of pipes the man’s got,” the college president remarked at the strawberry shortcake reception that followed. “What exuberance, what gusto.”
But Cuyler Goodwill’s longest oration, his longest by far, took place in the year 1916 aboard a train traveling between Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Bloomington, Indiana, a distance of some thirteen hundred miles. His audience consisted of one person only, his young daughter, Daisy, who was then a mere eleven years of age.
They traveled, by day, in a first class lounge car, courtesy of the Indiana Limestone Company, Cuyler Goodwill’s new employer. The green plush seats were roomy, luxurious, and could be tipped back and forth for comfort. An ingenious mahogany panel pulled down to form a table, and one could order tea brought to this table, tea with a wedge of lemon perched on the saucer’s edge. Side by side the father and daughter sat, with only a little wood arm rest between them. They were virtual strangers, these two, and hence each avoided placing an arm on the barrier of polished wood. The journey lasted three full days — with confused, hectic changes at Fargo and Chicago, and again at Indianapolis — and for all that time the father talked and talked and talked.
A switch had been shifted in his brain, activated, perhaps, by sheer nervousness, at least at first. He had not “traveled” before.
The world’s landscape, as glimpsed from the train window, was larger than he had imagined and more densely compacted. The sight filled him with alarm, and also with excitement. The forests and fields of North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin seemed to him to be swollen with growth, standing verdant and full-formed against a bright haze. The land dipped and rose disconcertingly, and he was amazed to see that haying was taking place so early in the season. Towns sprang up, one after the other, the spaces between them startlingly short, and the names unfamiliar. He was discomfited to see how easily men (and women as well) stepped from the train to station platform, from platform to train — with ease, with levity, laughing and talking and greeting each other as though oblivious to the abrupt geographical shifts they were making, and disrespectful of the distance and differences they entered. Many were hatless, their clothes brightly colored. The cases they carried appeared, from the way they handled them, to be feather-light, and made of materials — straw, canvas — that mocked his own dark brown Gladstone, purchased only days before and as yet unscuffed.
South, and further south the train went, an arrow of silver cutting through the uncaring landscape. The sun shone brilliantly. As the miles clicked away, it seemed to Goodwill that the seriousness of the world was in retreat. Singing could be heard from the club car: “Ain’t She Sweet,” round after round, as they crossed the Illinois border into Indiana. Rivers, rounded hills, paved roads, fenced fields. Advertisements for chewing tobacco appeared on the sides of barns. The towns grew larger and dirtier. Electric wires slashed the bright air like razors.
The first day was the worst. He talked wildly, knowing that shortly he and his daughter would be called to the dining car for the second sitting, and he deeply feared this new excitement. Soon after that the sun would sink from view, and he would be confronted with the aberration of a Pullman bed, of the need to arrange his body in a curtained cubicle, yielding it up to the particles of displaced time and space.