As the old folks would say Page 17

  “Long hours . . . day after day . . . your body . . . worn . . .

  There was no safety then . . . you lived with death

  The dust . . . the damp . . . the way your lungs are torn . . .”

  He paused again and looked into the fire

  Searching there for all that he had lost

  “The pay was good . . . not bad . . . the work was sure”

  I thought I noticed bitterness creep in: “But b’y, the cost, the cost . . .”

  He stood to catch his breath, then looked at me

  Appealing, to make me understand

  “I had to work . . . a wife and children . . . don’t you see

  There was no other way . . . that time . . . in Newfoundland”

  ACROSS THE CHASM

  “Come back from the dead! The most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. How can anybody come back from the dead? In all my years of medicine I’ve never heard such nonsense. Such inane drivelling nonsense. . . . Come back from the dead. . . . As if there were some place to come back from . . .”

  Dr. Reilly’s booming voice, its tone one of undisguised contempt, thundered in the near-silent oppressiveness of the packed lounge. Wearied patrons glanced with disinterest in his direction, then resumed their listless wandering about the room. Others stood in silence by the plate-glass window, totally oblivious to the conversation, their mood despondent as they gazed at the harsh March landscape outside. The sight of rime-coated trees, their mute forms sagging under the weight of so much frozen rain, their limbs broken and strewn about the dirty spring snow—detritus of the lingering winter—did little to uplift their spirits.

  The worst sleet storm in living memory had grounded their plane at Gander, the bus chartered to take them on to St. John’s had been forced to stop at the motel due to treacherous road conditions, and they had more on their minds than to listen to the self-importance of a voice that became more grating as the afternoon wore on.

  Only the doctor’s immediate listeners displayed any interest, but it was a reluctant interest, subdued in tone, uncomfortable as they were in the presence of his arrogant, bullish personality.

  Pellets of ice rat-a-tatted an incessant drumbeat on the lounge window as Dr. Reilly continued, his contemptuous tone unchanged.

  “People coming back. . . . The afterlife. . . . Literature and imagination. Great literature from a highly developed imagination . . . but only literature and imagination . . .”

  Silence greeted his last remark. The priest moved to reply but seemed to think better of it. The public health nurse toyed with her glass, her eyes following its movements, while the company executive, his partially bald head pushed deep into his chair, slouched in the direction of the window, contenting himself with the incessant chewing of his nails. The government biologist, a rotund, genial little man with perpetual smiling face, fidgeted under the doctor’s glare, feeling embarrassed that he had unwittingly started the argument by telling ghost stories.

  Only Dr. O’Dea showed any real interest in rebuttal. She was a psychiatrist from Winnipeg who specialized in psychological disorders arising out of religious experience, and she welcomed any approach to the subject. She rested her arms on the table as she engaged Dr. Reilly, seemingly unperturbed by the overpowering force of his personality.

  “But surely that literature and imagination has to have some basis in experience. Every primitive society since the emergence of the human race has expressed its concern with the afterlife and has shown all kinds of ways of expressing that concern . . .”

  Dr. Reilly did not give her time to finish, making no attempt to disguise the sarcastic curtness of his reply.

  “You are absolutely right, Dr. O’Dea. You are absolutely right. . . . How could such an eminent psychiatrist such as yourself be wrong?”

  He then rose from his chair, his demeanour assuming a look of deep reverence—a look that did not hide the smirk that was forming at the corner of his mouth or the disdain and sarcasm that remained in his voice. He swung his empty brandy glass outward in a great, sweeping arc, parodying the act of delivering a toast.

  “To the afterlife, ladies and gentlemen. . . . And to all the great civilizations who found their own ways of expressing it. To the pharaohs who sailed their immortal boats across the sky; the Norse who slaughtered valiantly for Valhalla; those ancient Indo-Aryans who gave us the Vedas and reincarnation; and all those wonderful Scythians who buried their dead with horses and spears . . .”

  He sat down again, sweeping his eyes over the company as he set his glass on the table with a derisive clunk, the smirk now clearly visible.

  “Literature, Dr. O’Dea. . . . Literature. Literature and imagination. Beautiful literature and beautiful imagination, but still literature and imagination. As I said at the beginning, the whole idea . . . the whole concept . . . is preposterous. There is no life after death. . . . There is no afterlife. There is no place to come back from. And even if there were, there is no evidence that anyone has ever come back . . . ever.”

  He relaxed his grasp on the glass and leaned forward, certain that the argument was over. He pronounced the next words with deliberation, the rhythmic beat of his finger on the table in accompaniment to each measured phrase.

  “I repeat. No one has ever been known to come back. . . . No one has ever come back. . . . No one . . .”

  Nothing was said in reply. A deep silence had settled over the group, a silence broken only by the incessant drumming of frozen pellets on the windowpane, an unnerving sound rendered more acute by the ominous flickering of the ceiling lights. The silence ended with the quiet intrusion of another voice, the voice of a tall, athletic-looking young man at the bar.

  “But what if you are absolutely wrong . . . which is admittedly a possibility.”

  The voice emerged from the shadow of the bar as the form of the speaker materialized in front of the table.

  “What if somebody would return, somebody you recognized? . . . Appear to you right in front of your face, so to speak. . . . Would you accept it then?”

  Dr. Reilly turned, a contemptuous retort forming on his lips, but he visibly softened when he beheld the younger man who was the source of the questions. He recognized the speaker as another travelling companion from Toronto.

  “Wrong, James?” He laughed. “Why, has somebody returned to you?” he added in a sly tone, winking in the direction of the government biologist.

  The brandy was beginning to have its effect, and he again raised his empty glass in a toasting gesture, swinging his torso to face each member of the group in turn. The priest leaned back to avoid the moving arm.

  “Let’s drink again, gentlemen—and ladies—to my friend James and his guest from across the chasm. Standing before you is the absolute and living proof that I am entirely and unquestionably wrong . . .”

  He then paused to set the glass on the table, restraining a chuckle as he ended on a humourously sardonic note.

  “. . . in the event that he should disappear into a cloud of smoke or brimstone or sulphur or whatever and our last piece of evidence will be lost forever.”

  The younger man moved quietly toward the table, unperturbed by the doctor’s offensive tone.

  “No, there were no clouds of smoke or brimstone or anything like that. There was none of that stuff . . . but I was there when it happened. And it wasn’t me. I was just a witness, if you will. It had all to do with my friend Martin . . . and the return of his father.”

  His statements were uttered with such candour, such sincerity, that even Dr. Reilly, who up to now was shaking his head bemusedly, and quietly laughing in a condescending manner, stopped to listen.

  The priest had motioned for the speaker to join the group, and they stood shuffling in various forms of movement to accommodate the chair which he was inserting into the ring of chairs around
the small table.

  He continued talking while he adjusted himself, setting his beer bottle on the table as he assumed the position of attention in their midst. The frozen pellets of rain continued their incessant fusillade on the window, trying to penetrate to the inside.

  “I grant you, I never believed in that sort of thing myself, either . . . prior to what happened, that is. I mean, I’d heard lots of ghost stories growing up . . . stories about fairies taking children and leading people astray in the woods and that sort of thing. There was even an old abandoned house up the road that was supposed to be haunted. The old people frightened us to death when we were small with stuff like that. But when you grow up you realize that they were just that, stories, like Dr. Reilly was saying . . .”

  Dr. Reilly smiled at the unexpected recognition, but then quickly resumed his skeptical look. A different mood now pervaded the listeners as they focused their full attention on the new voice. People at the surrounding tables ceased their conversations and turned to listen, and a lone drinker at the bar also turned to look in the speaker’s direction.

  “I was never much of a believer, if you know what I mean. Like a lot of people today, that stuff got thrown out the window as soon as I got big enough to stop going to church. Standing by a pond flicking in trout on a Sunday morning was a whole lot better than listening to somebody beating his gums in a pulpit. I wasn’t the overly religious type.”

  “I expected you to talk about Martin.”

  The public health nurse was speaking in a tired tone, which didn’t seem to perturb the speaker in any way, continuing in the easy tone with which he had begun.

  “And I will. Because it was through my friendship with Martin that I came to experience what I did . . .”

  The speaker paused to sip his beer, seemingly lost in himself.

  “. . . We were the best of friends . . . the best of friends . . . even though he was totally different . . .”

  “Different?”

  The priest turned his gaze from the window to focus on the speaker.

  “Totally. I mean, Martin, to quote the old people, lived in the church. He had to be one of the more religious persons I have ever met. Said his morning prayers, said his evening prayers, said something called the Angelus at noon. . . . And this in the middle of a camp full of construction workers who weren’t all that shy about poking a bit of fun. . . . Yes, he took his religion very, very seriously, that boy. Religion with a capital ‘R’, my uncle Jim would say . . .”

  The speaker shook his head, smiling at the memory.

  “. . . Praying, reading those books. . . . I mean, I used to make the height of fun of those books. Could you imagine when you were seventeen or eighteen reading something called The Pillars of Grace . . . when there was all that other good stuff on the shelves . . . ?”

  The speaker blushed as he detected a frown of condemnation from the priest, and hastened to continue.

  “I mean, Martin didn’t seem to mind. He would smile and say, ‘James, I’m going to convert you yet,’ and he’d go away shaking his head and laughing himself. Which he did a lot before his breakdown . . .”

  “Breakdown?”

  Dr. O’Dea was instantly alert, her physical motion attracting the attention of the speaker.

  “That’s what I calls it, anyway. I mean, he didn’t wind up in hospital or anything like that . . . but just like that, when he struck nineteen he changed completely, like black and white. Before he was quiet, funny now and again. . . . After, the only word you could use to describe him was pitiful . . .”

  Here the speaker stopped to motion to the passing waitress, pointing to his empty bottle. Within moments she had deposited another beer on the table as he continued speaking.

  “I mean, Martin had always been the nicest kind of a person. But that summer when we went together as labourers on that big hydro construction job at Larch Falls—working our way through, you know—man, he changed . . . and I mean ‘changed.’”

  “How? How did he change?”

  It was Dr. O’Dea again, leaning ahead with an expression of keen interest.

  The speaker rested his arm on the table as he grasped his beer bottle, staring at it as if into a crystal ball of the past.

  “I don’t know. . . . Moody. . . . Far away. . . . Really sad. . . . Like he was in another world. You’d see him by himself just staring ahead at nothing at all. I mean, he kept his work up and all that, but he’d go for days and not speak. . . . Totally within himself. . . . And if it’s possible to become more religious, he did it. Leave after work and go for hours in the bush. . . . I followed him once and found him sitting on a rock by the Larch River . . . praying, would you believe . . .”

  “That isn’t such unnatural behaviour,” interrupted the priest. “The great mystics would spend days, weeks, in such solitary contemplation.”

  “But what brought all of this on?” Dr. O’Dea’s eagerness was undisguised. “There must have been some traumatic upheaval in his life to affect his emotions like that.”

  The speaker lifted his gaze from the beer bottle to look directly into her eyes.

  “I asked him that very thing. And after a while he told me. We were strolling along the bank of the Larch River one Sunday afternoon. Martin seemed to have come out of himself a bit, and when I kind of got after him to tell me what was wrong, he looked at me with the saddest expression you could ever see on a man’s face. Then he looked at the river for a long time, like he was lost in the churning of the water. When he looked back he said: . . .

  “‘You want to know what is wrong with me, James? Would you understand if I told you? It’s my father, James,’ he said. ‘My father.’”

  “He was being abused by his father!” The public health nurse was not as shocked as she seemed quietly angry.

  “Oh, no, nothing like that,” the speaker replied. “That was impossible. Martin’s father had died before he was even born. . . . Drowned off the Virgin Rocks. . . . You remember, that time the Lucy Gray went down with all hands. . . . While Martin was in the womb, so to speak.”

  “What’s all this got to do with ‘coming back’?”

  It was the first time the company executive had spoken, and his sulkiness was apparent.

  The speaker continued, ignoring the rudeness of the tone.

  “Everything. Because my story is about Martin and his father. And because I don’t think things like this happen to people like me and you. I think they only happen to people like Martin, people who really believe.”

  The man at the bar took advantage of the pause to sneer in the speaker’s direction.

  “I knew a buddy like that. He was always talking to God. Off his head . . .”

  This attempt at censure was greeted by disapproving facial expressions around the table. Not expecting such a show of support for the storyteller from his audience, the man at the bar withdrew from the conversation, struggling with embarrassment.

  “What I meant was . . . he was religion-crazy. The hospitals are full of people like that . . . delusions, hallucinations, seeing stuff like angels. . . . Isn’t that so, Doctor?

  He had appealed to Dr. Reilly for support, but the doctor merely nodded assent and continued his focus on the speaker, who turned toward the man at the bar, eyeing him across the distance.

  “I suppose. . . . I really don’t know enough about that side of it. Although Martin didn’t seem to be any of those things. Like I said, his work was never a problem, and when it was all said and done—in spite of all the tormenting—he got along pretty good with the men.”

  “So, in your opinion, he wasn’t mentally unstable in any way.”

  Dr. O’Dea was pursuing the line of questioning she had begun.

  “Not as far as I could see. He was pretty hung up about his father’s death. . . . Like he really missed him
after all those years, although he had never, ever seen him. Over and over he’d say: ‘If I could only see him just once, James. If I could only hear him speak to me just once. If I could only stand beside him on this riverbank. . . . Oh, James, how I have prayed to see him . . . just once. . . .’ It was like he was in a continual search back in time for the father he never had.”

  “That would certainly explain the moody behaviour, the introspection,” mused Dr. O’Dea. “Our latest studies show that the child in the womb can have maintained a form of liaison with the external parent.”

  She was speaking in a clinical manner, reviewing reports in her mind, as the speaker continued.

  “He wasn’t helped much in all of this by his mother, poor soul. Instead of helping the boy accept and overcome his father’s death, she continually fostered his sense of belonging and loss.”

  “I suppose she was so devastated by the father’s death.”

  The public health nurse had dropped her tired tone and was shaking her head in sympathy.

  “Totally,” replied the speaker. “She never recovered. Especially when the body was never found. She still continued on with her life in a more or less normal way, but she lived in the past, reliving over and over the two short years of marriage to her husband.

  “She never accepted his death, and she constantly talked about him, night and day. . . . Story after story about her husband, Martin’s father. And it wasn’t just her. It seemed everybody had a good word to say about that man. Seems he was quite a person. As a result, Martin became totally caught up with wanting to see his father . . . in the living flesh, so to speak . . .”

  “But he was dead. This is so irrational . . . so . . . sick.”

  The public health nurse was contorting her face disapprovingly.

  “Perhaps. But you have to understand the longing that Martin—and his mother—were experiencing, and their conviction that the person who was such an important part of their lives was now living in another life . . . another world . . . right now . . . that he could be seen if one, say, believed enough, prayed enough . . .”