Christian. Dull. Quiescent. But growing. Yes, it must be admitted, the Dominion is growing.
Seven hundred settlers, representing nearly every European nationality, reached Montreal last week, arriving aboard four rather motley steamers: the Letitia, the Athiaunia, the Pennland, the Bergenfjord. But what difference, you say, can a mere seven hundred citizens make in all that vastness? A grain of sand added to a desert. A teaspoon of water dribbled into the ocean. Moreover, reverse immigration must be taken into consideration, those settlers who fail to adapt and who, in a year or two, or sometimes twenty or thirty, return to their countries of origin.
Such a one is Magnus Flett of Tyndall, Manitoba, retired quarry worker, who is on his way “home” to the Orkney Islands. What a misery that man’s existence has been — these exact words have been said of him by at least a dozen acquaintances, for he has no one who might be called a friend: the poor man, the unfortunate soul, his tragic, lonely life. A life that carries in its blood a romantic chill, or so some might think.
Born in 1862, the man is now sixty-five — sore of spirit, toothless, arthritic, deaf in his left ear, troubled by duodenal ulcers, his great frame bent, his hair grizzled, his skin broken, his muscles atrophied, his testicles shrunken, his feet yellowed. He has lived in the Dominion since he was a mere lad. Here is where he brought his strong, young body, which was all he possessed, and his skill with stone. Here is where he sought his fortune. Where he met and married one Clarentine Barker of Lac de Bonnet Township, a farmer’s daughter. Where he sired three sons, Barker (now a fancy-talking civil servant in Ottawa), Simon (a machinist in Edmonton, a drinker), and Andrew (a Baptist preacher presently living in Climax, Saskatchewan, himself the father of a daughter).
You would think old Magnus Flett would be rooted in this new country, that the ties of family and vocation would bind him tight, and that he would wish, when the time came, to be buried in Manitoba’s thin saline soil under a chunk of mottled Tyndall stone. Instead he has forked out a hefty portion of his savings for passage back to his homeland in the Orkneys, a place where he has no remaining blood connections that he knows of, and very few memories.
He doesn’t know what he’ll do with himself when he arrives.
He’s cranked up the courage to leave Canada, but he’s waiting for the bare Orkney landscape to rise up and inform him, to advise him, of what he must do next. Something will emerge from his past, he’s sure of it, some wisdom to rescue his last days. This faith comes out of a vacuum, an absence of recollection, though he does dimly remember the stripped hills and vales of home, their sudden, minor angles of incline, and the freshness of the wind diving about, and a remnant of other sensations too, none stronger than the smoky, blocked airlessness of his parents’ kitchen, the blackened ceiling and the way the breath caught in the throat, offering a promise of safety, yet a threat too. There was a good deal of loud quarreling under that low roof, he’s certain of that, it went on for years, but over what? His parents and an older brother are buried in the churchyard at Sandwick, and he imagines that he will join them there sooner or later. Dust to dust. A gathering of spirits.
Something anyway.
He traveled first to Montreal by train, four days, and then boarded ship for the eight-day crossing to Liverpool. He has his savings, which are respectable. He has a trunk packed with warm clothing, enough to last him the rest of his days, and with a few mementos of his forty-six years in Canada: some stone specimens, Tyndall dolomites, beauties, carefully wrapped round in woolen underwear. His tools. His pipe. Five pounds of his favorite tobacco. Four books — these protected in triple layers of newspaper — from which he is never parted. Some family papers too, immigration certificates, birth documents (the three sons, his progeny, his only trace in the wide world), and his wife’s goodbye note, left for him under her handkerchief press in the year 1905.
Goodbye, it said; that was all, after twenty-five years of marriage; goodbye. A penciled scrawl.
And there are a few photographs too. His wedding photo: a formal pose, 1880, his young bride seated on a carved studio chair, her hands stiff in her lap, her hair whisked back flat, her expression blank. And he, a fine figure of a man — impossible to deny it — six feet three inches, standing behind her, his left hand raised to his ear lobe, tweaking it somehow, or scratching it. Was it the photographer who instructed him to fool with his ear in this manner?
And, if so, why had he obeyed?
Another photo: the three boys. Barker, at six years, staring sullenly into the lens: Simon, four (in short velvet pants, unimaginable those pants, where had they come from?), sitting cross-legged on a cushioned bench; and Andrew, two, squirming — unmistakably squirming — at Simon’s feet. His sons. His dear sons.
Lost.
And one more photo.
It is a group portrait, undated, but he believes it was taken in 1901 or 1902. Before his wife went “strange.” Before everything altered. On the back of the photo someone — the handwriting is unknown to him — has written the words: “The Ladies Rhythm and Movement Club.” There are six women in the photo. He recognizes the doctor’s wife, Mrs. Spears. He recognizes Maude Little and Mamie Heftner standing at the back. He recognizes each of those staring ladies. Oh, aren’t they just chuffed with themselves. It makes you laugh to look at the lot of them. They’re all got up in identical skirts and waists, some kind of colored border around the collar, and a wide sash wrapped around the waist. They are daft in their expression, but oddly stern too, saying with their teeth and lips and with the lift of their shoulders: aren’t we swell though, aren’t we just something else. Clarentine Barker Flett, his wife, is in the front row, a wee bit shorter than the others, slim, pretty, mischievous, cheeky; it’s hard to believe she is in her early forties and has borne three sons, she looks so like a fresh girl. She’s biting down on her lower lip as if life was one wonderful lark. Happy, yes, she seems irreverently happy.
Magnus Flett has looked at this photograph of the Ladies Rhythm and Movement Club a thousand times, searching from face to face, moving from left to right, from top to bottom, and always he comes down to this: the proven fact of his wife’s happiness.
A painting will lie, but the camera insists on the truth, he’s heard this said. His beleaguered mate, her little bones and covering of soft flesh, occupied a place in the world in those days; no sane person, examining this photograph, would deny that fact. She had, the evidence says, floated upward toward moments of exaltation or else foolishness, it came to the same thing. His wife. Her sassy smile, her knees bent, her sash catching the light. She does not look anything at all like the wife of a brutal husband. She cannot have been oppressed and ill-used twenty-four hours a day for twenty-five long years, the idea is unthinkable.
He consoles himself with this thought.
He remembers, too, that she had had a kind of pride, a respect for her own labor, refusing, for instance, to pit the prunes that went into her prune pudding, letting those who ate her steamed offerings wrestle with the stones in their own mouths. He admired her for that, that curious disinclination to exhaust herself.
And he denies and denies — but who is there to listen? — that he forbade her to visit Dr. Spears about an abscessed tooth in the early autumn of 1905. It was not true. No. He would have paid out the two dollars and fifty cents gladly. He had only reminded her, when her toothache came on so sudden, as to how his own ear infection the previous spring had cleared up on its own without the need for costly medical consultation. (This is true, though it is also true that he eventually lost half his hearing in that ear.)