A Witness to Life (Ashland, 2) (9 page)

"They become familiar with forms long before they know any purpose for them. She calls it sense training."

I listen, fascinated, think about Margaret and Jack, and through the blue smoke see the dream called the future, see them in wonderful brick houses with fine clothes and shoes, their families about them, healthy, educated, all reading books.

On Friday, December 20, instead of going directly home with the small brown envelope the size of a playing card that holds my weekly pay, I trudge back and forth in the snow between Simpson's and Eaton's, riding the escalators to the toy departments. I buy a circular alphabet board made of metal and fiber, twelve inches in diameter. It has eighty letters and characters and a drawing slate in the middle and costs me $1.39.1 buy wooden alphabet blocks, a set of jacks, an Erector set. A toy milk wagon, twelve-by-four inches, with red-spoked wheels, twisted wire loop handles, rubber tires, and metal wheels, costs me fifty-nine cents. The front wheels turn. And then, picturing Margaret with it in her hands, I buy a toy piano, eleven-by-sixteen inches, with fifteen keys and a lithographed front consisting of birds in a tree and the word "Symphony." The $2.98 price is more than a day's pay, and dizzy with the excitement, I have to stop the wild spending.

But before I leave, on the main floor of Eaton's, thinking of Maggie, I buy a perfume atomizer for thirty-seven cents and a manicure and toilet set for $1.69.

Nine dollars, I think. I have spent more than nine dollars. It is Christmas, I tell myself. Jack and Margaret will be excited. And swaggering through the snow to the streetcar, picturing their reactions, their faces, I am euphoric.

"We don't have nine dollars to spare," Maggie says.

"It's Christmas."

"What will we do for the groceries, for the rent?"

"I'll borrow some."

"From who?"

I do not know. "From mother. From Mike."

She shakes her head, touches her brow.

"I have money," says Margaret, who has been listening. She reaches into her pocket, pulls out a nickel. "Uncle Mike gave it to me." Her English is perfect, her eyes dark and round.

I think of the atomizer, its rubber squeeze ball, its scrolled surface, of the manicure and toilet set, combs, mirror, brushes, scissors. Jack is clinging to my leg. I reach down, pick him up. He plays with my tie, my collar, my ear. Margaret holds out the nickel.

* * *

FROM: JOCK ROSS

190 MICHIGAN AVE

DETROIT MICH

23 DECEMBER 1912

TO: MARTIN RADEY

DON VALLEY PRESSED BRICKS AND TERRA COTTA

60 ADELAIDE STREET EAST TORONTO ONT

$10 ENCLOSED STOP PAY ME BACK
5
AND SAY MERRY XMAS TO THE KIDS AND BUY A TREE AND SOMETHING FROM US STOP GETTING MARRIED IN THE SPRING WILL WRITE WITH DETAILS STOP GET READY TO COME TO DETROIT STOP

SANTA

3

I pour tea from the silver thermos into my cup and sip it slowly. "Margaret is the only one that I make happy," I say. When the words are out, they astonish me because I realize that they are true, yet I have never thought them before.

Propped up against her pillow, Gramma listens, stares.

A long pause: the trickle effect of what I have uttered runs through my veins, opens doors. "I disappoint everybody else."

Gramma opens her mouth. I lean forward with her tea, help her drink.

"Even though he's still a baby, Jack has no interest in me."

Gramma looks at me.

"Maybe when he gets older."

We sit quietly for a while.

"I think Maggie expected more."

The cup warms my hands.

"I don't know what they want."

Her mouth makes the
o,
her eyes soften, and I think, maybe, she understands.

I dream that Jack and I are on a wooden dock by a lake when Jack slips into the water and beneath the surface. I dive into the water, hold my breath, search, but cannot find him. I dive again and again, deeper, lungs bursting, but he has sunk out of sight. I know that he cannot last much longer without air. I am frantic. The water is black. He is gone.

A moan breaks from my chest. I wake up sweating, heart pounding, Maggie holding me by a shoulder.

"You were dreaming," she says.
"A bad dream."

"I lost Jack." I am panting. "I couldn't find him. I couldn't save him."

In the darkness, she strokes my head, my brow. "You're all wet," she says.

I am cold. Jack, I think.

Jack.

TEN

We must always walk in darkness. We must travel in silence. We must fly by night.

—Thomas Merton

The Ascent to Truth

The hawk took another.

A burst of feathers, soundless. We erupted from the field, an explosion of black dots, knowing that death was among us, our movements random, swaying, spurred by the primal
 
flight from extinction.

To the south, then east, headlong, for hours.

Into another node, another loop. Fog.

Suddenly, below us, the St. Lawrence. May 29, 1914, and the
Empress of Ireland,
rammed by the Norwegian collier
Storstad,
sank out of sight completely in fourteen short minutes. We settled into trees near the shore, listened, watched. One thousand fourteen people silenced. The hush, the mist, shrouded us. As before, we had fled the hawk only to encounter the cleansing of fire, the finality of water, always.

The
Titanic,
women and children first. Jack, in a dream, disappearing beneath dark waters, my lungs squeezing, dying.

Through the fog and the curved horizon that was the future, I now could make out the blurred shape of troops that would sail to England down this same river, across the Atlantic, and knew that if I soared high enough I would almost be able to glimpse them plunging down muddy embankments at Ypres, the yellow gas falling, heavy as it tumbled into the trenches, into their lungs, into their hearts and the hearts of their families forever, replacing the fog.

The hawk we have fled was clean, simple, pure. It was right.

The world, both large and small, was in madness.

We lifted off, moving, again.

ELEVEN

1916

1917

1

It is 8 p.m., January 18, 1916. Maggie is telling me about Manitoba's Nellie McClung, who has succeeded in attaining the right to vote and hold office in her province. It is seven months since the sinking of the
Lusitania
by a German U-boat and the drowning of 1,198 people, whose grave, strangely, is Cork Harbour, the port from which mother and father sailed in 1846. Farther north, in Dublin, in three months the Easter Rising will occur, taking with it thousands more lives, ending in the court martial and execution of fifteen men, leaving more than one hundred thousand in the city on public relief. In Brooklyn, New York, Margaret Sanger is being arrested and jailed for opening a birth control clinic and dispensing information. The Parliament buildings in Ottawa will be destroyed by fire within a month. In two months, the legal drinking of alcoholic beverages will cease for eighteen years in Ontario, and stores will sell off their stock before the deadline. D & W Special Whiskey will go for seventy-five cents a quart. A walk down Dufferin in the evening and a glance along Liberty Street reveals shell casings like giant empty gray pods lining both sides of the street as far as one can see, higher than a man's head, overflowing from the munitions factory that is staffed mostly by women. Six months from now 624,000 Allied troops will perish during the offensive at the Somme, and fourteen months later, American president Woodrow Wilson will take the United States into the war in Europe, the war in which everyone has a friend a brother a cousin an uncle.

There is a knock at the front door and we hear Verna from downstairs talking with someone. Then there are footsteps on the stairs and Maggie and I turn expectantly at the sound. Margaret, six and a half, and Jack, not yet five, both wrapped in a blanket, close to the stove, stop talking. The circus characters carefully arrayed on the sofa beside them, figures of wood, enameled in colors now faded and chipped, are ignored. I lay my cigar in an ashtray, the blue smoke slow to rise in the cold winter air of the room, fold my newspaper. It is wartime. We have no telephone. A knock on the door in the evening is seldom a good thing.

When I open the door, it is Mike, my brother. He has been to our flat only twice before. Our lives, like so many others, have separated, somehow, inevitably, without our being aware of it.

His face is ashen, sunken, his eyes blank.

Dear God, I think. Oh, God.

Both Bill and John, his two oldest, are overseas, Irish sons fighting England's war.

But then he speaks, standing there in the doorway, says: "It's Kervin, Martin. He's dead."

I don't know what I'm hearing. Kervin. He is not at war. He is here, at home. He is just a boy. Mike's youngest.

Mike comes forward, puts his arms around me, puts his face on my shoulder, holds me tightly. I feel the coarseness of his hair against my cheek, feel him trembling, am filled with his pain. My brother. He cries, and I hold him, pull him closer, afraid to let him go.

Jack and Margaret are silent, still.

Mike is seated, a cup of hot tea in his hands.

"What happened?" I ask.

He shakes his head, shrugs. Mike is fifty, his hair thinning, his face gray. "It was his heart, they say. He wasn't strong enough." He looks at me. "Heart failure. He was only fifteen."

I remember Kervin, coughing, sick. "Have you told Ma?"

He shakes his head. "No," he says. His head continues to shake. Then, again, "No."

Maggie and I glance at each other, then at Jack and Margaret, and cannot speak. Without words, we have said it: we cannot imagine this. It is impossible to imagine.

At
5 p.m., Friday, March 17, 1916, Peter Sterling, the owner and president of Don Valley Pressed Bricks and Terra Cotta, calls me into his office to tell me face-to-face what he has been telling others all day. He is seated behind his desk. "Sit down, Martin."

I sit.

"You know what I'm going to say."

"Yes."

We are quiet for a moment. He is writing on a piece of paper. Peter Sterling, an Orangeman, a Lancashire man, took a chance on me, hired me when no one would hire an Irishman, even one born in Canada. I have always thought of him as a model of decency, of fairness, of Presbyterian sobriety. He wears a blue suit, a red tie, his hair white, his glasses thick. I have never seen his wife, his family, although they say he has two grown sons who work in Chicago. I do not know him well at all. We live in different worlds.

"It's true. I've sold the company and will be retiring. The company will cease to exist as of the end of the month. The new owners will bring in their own people. I'm not a young man anymore." He pauses. "How old are you, Martin?"

"Thirty-five. I'll be thirty-six in June."

"And you've worked here a long time."

"Almost eighteen years." Half my life, I think.

He writes something on the piece of paper. "And you have a wife and two children."

"Yes."

He nods. "What will you do?"

I look into a corner of the room, away from his face, puzzled. "I don't know," I say. I am one of twenty-four employees. I do not know what any one of us will do.

He folds the paper on which he has been writing and slides it into an envelope. It lies on the desk between us.

I look back at his face, realize he is not really seeing me, that he is somewhere else, distracted. He is thinking of his life, not mine.

He picks up the envelope, hands it to me.

I take it, rise, shake his hand, leave.

Don Valley Pressed Bricks and Terra Cotta

60 Adelaide Street East

Toronto

March 17, 1916

To Whom It May Concern:

The bearer of this letter,
Martin Radey
,
has been in my employ for the past
eighteen
years. During this period I have always found him to be honest, and reliable, and I have no hesitation in recommending him.