Believing Cedric (35 page)

She worked at one of the cafés in town, then a deli, but began asking around for other possibilities. At a regional art exhibit, she met a woman who helped run one of the retirement homes in the area and had asked her a few questions about it. Melissa was soon enrolled at the local college, in the course that she needed to work at a home, and by the time she'd gotten her certificate was already employed at a retirement residence that was a short walk from where she and Troy lived.

It wasn't a glorious job. Most of it boiled down to a domestic tedium, assisting the residents to bathe, dress, eat, lie down, urinate, defecate, clipping and filing their fingernails, styling and hair spraying their sickly and thinning curls, and moving them from activity to program to scheduled event: crafts and board games, bingo and trivia, book readings and bread making. But there were some aspects of the work, like the intimacy that such human frailty lent itself to, that she enjoyed, valued. The sentimental stories and grossly inaccurate recollections that some of them shared with her, details that they conferred with so much buildup and bearing it was as if they were long-kept secrets.

Of course there were nights that—like everyone, she rationalized—she questioned her choices: moving there, her new line of work, her quiet life with Troy. Walking home in the winter dark, past living room windows that flickered with the blue flame of television, glazed faces that might have been watching fire if it weren't for the icy refractions, their expressions at once captivated and vacant, the intoxicating trance of nullity. Her legs involuntarily slowing to a stroll while the doubt-pokings of pine needles injected the skyline on either side of her, catching herself feeling lonely in her skin, isolated, insular. It was as if she were lacking something basic, some critical sustenance, an essential nutrient of some kind. And when she met Eamon Barham, what she found in him wasn't enough to quell this feeling entirely, but it was enough to appease it more than she'd ever thought she would.

He arrived at the home uneventfully, a nursing aide helping to set up his room, arranging things in a minimalist and uncluttered way, explaining some of the particulars in caring for him, as he was partially blind. He was seventy-four, a widower with no surviving siblings, no children, had had prostate cancer, kidney problems, and was somewhat underweight, moving around as if with the knowledge that, were he to fall, bones would break. During his third day at the home, Melissa had knocked on his door just to check on him, seeing as it was late morning and the staff had already grown accustomed to his sitting in front of a small portable stereo in his room at that time, listening attentively to the
CBC
. Whereas now, though they could hear that he was awake and moving around, his small stereo was quiet.

“Yes? Come in.” Eamon's voice from the other side of the door was polite, if shy.

Melissa opened the door to find him sitting near the radio, tinkering with it. “Hello, Mr. Barham, how are you today?”

“All right. I guess,” he said with an inflection that made the tone Melissa had used with him sound condescending, like she'd addressed someone who was half-deaf but who, in reality, could hear much better than her.

“You
guess
?” She adjusted her pitch. “What seems to be the problem?”

“Well, it's either this
CD
player's on the blink or my being blind as a bat has fouled things up again. My bet, unfortunately, is on the latter.”

Melissa walked over and pressed play on the machine, saw the
CD
begin to spin, and an error message blink onto the display. When she opened it, she realized that he'd just put the
CD
in upside down, and turned it over for him. As she did so, he noticed how taken aback she was, that she'd frozen, held her breath.

“Don't worry. It's not nearly as frightening as you think.”

“No, it's . . . Uhm . . . It's . . . an audiobook. Of contemporary poetry, from New Zealand.”

“Yes. It is. And perhaps you'd be so kind as to put it in correctly for me.”

Melissa fumbled with the
CD
, inserting it into the player but didn't press play. “You know . . .” her hand still on the machine, “there's a great site I know of, which is a yearly, kind of ‘best of' anthology of New Zealand poems. It's really . . . really quite good. I mean, if you'd like, I could always print a few of them up, or even the whole thing, and . . .”

Eamon smiled. “You know, the doctors told me they could have operated in time to—
maybe
, they said—save enough of my vision to read.” He spoke clearly but at an unhurried and deliberate pace. “Only they made the mistake of explaining the procedure to me beforehand. A simple local anaesthetic, they said, then they would probe, scrape, and cut away at my eyes and their inner workings. Can you
imagine
that? People huddled around your face, clamping your lids open and slitting along the glossy flesh of your eyeballs with a scalpel, throbbing spotlight, blood on their plastic gloves? Just hearing about it was enough, frankly, to have me settling on audiobooks and broadcasts for the few years I've got left.”

“And people reading out loud.”

“Yes. And people reading out loud. Perhaps, like these printed poems that you, Miss . . . ?”

“Melissa.”

“That you, Miss Melissa, might bring in and read to me at some point.”

Melissa, giving a silent snicker, pressed play on the small stereo. “Well, I'll leave you to it.”

“Thank you.” Eamon spoke toward the door before she'd reached it. “And I look forward to listening.”

But it was two days later, in reading the poetry that she'd promised him, that they both made the real discovery. He found her to be an excellent reader, never too dramatic, more inclined to understatement than to affected stress and pause, yet still managing to read with emotion. He was also pleasantly surprised by the selection she'd made from this “best of” collection. She had an eye. While Melissa found him to have a sharp critical ear, nodding contentedly at the cleanest images, seeming to catch the subtlest undercurrents. She learned that he'd been a literature professor at Trent University, and that it was only in his retirement, after he'd moved to live year-round at his cottage in the area, that he'd acquired his taste for the most recent poetry. The classics had their place, of course, he'd said, but it was what was happening in the twenty-first century that reassured him this was anything but a fading art. And he was determined to keep pace with it too, follow in the direction it was heading, until, he declared, he was too senile to care. In the meantime, it was one of those things that helped keep him sharp, he'd said, with an aimless wink.

So Melissa began spending her evenings and free time rereading the collections of yearly “best of” anthologies that she'd amassed over the years, earmarking the pages and poems she was convinced he would appreciate.

Before Eamon came along, she'd never had a conversation with anyone about poetry, and wasn't prepared for how similar two independently formed opinions could be. They loved the same poets, Ashbery, Hughes, Hirshfield, Collins; the same Canadians, early Atwood, late Purdy, Nowlan, Michaels, Birney; they staunchly agreed that poems should never be discussed in writing, and that when talked about, only the most regular language should be used—it was good, poor, brilliant, unclear—and that was all; though most of the time it amounted to even less, being boiled down to a single physical reaction after Melissa had finished reading, both of them pausing to consider the piece in silence, after which Eamon would finally give a nod, or a simper, a scowl, grin, which almost always mirrored Melissa's judgment exactly. Identical waves cancelling out sound, any need for discussion.

“So tell me,” he asked her one day, a late morning in early spring while she was pushing him in a wheelchair outside, the snow thawing into mud, parting a path of dry concrete down the centre of the road. “Did your parents read poetry?”

“My mom, no; and my dad probably hasn't read a book in his sorry life.”

“Mmm. I once read that being a father was waiting patiently, silently, for forgiveness.”

Melissa, finding she had nothing to say to this, waited for him to speak again.

“And do you write any yourself, Miss Melissa?”

“Uh . . .” Melissa looked down at the top of his head, which was almost bald, a mole-blotted map of islands under the wispy clouds of his remnant hair. “Some.”

He gave a single nod, turned his face up into the sunlight. “That's good.”

But the truth was that she wrote more than some. She'd been writing poetry since she was fifteen, and had filled entire spiral-bound notebooks with it, the pages heavily edited in the same pen, words crossed out, sometimes whole lines, stanzas, arrows guiding others to their rightful places. And out of all of this poetry she'd produced, she was tempted to tell Eamon the thing she was most proud of concerning it, which had nothing to do with the poems she wrote, but with the ones that she destroyed.

It was the summer before she moved to Haliburton, still living in Toronto, pining for something in her life to overturn, when she picked up yet another book by an author she adored, Umberto Eco. In it, she came across a passage that struck her, something to the effect of: “Everyone writes poetry in their adolescence, but only true poets destroy it.” The next time she was at her mother's house, she went into her old room, where she still kept a drawer that was full of her past notebooks. She spread them out on the desk and went through them, dividing the ones that were written when she was “too young”—when the verse was over-wrought and melancholic; only a teen would romanticize tragedy—and the ones that were written later, with the help of a little more perspective. And while flipping through the stapled pages and notebooks, she noticed that one of the compilations in a series of biographical poems that she'd written (this one in particular on the life of Primo Levi) was missing. And for some reason it annoyed her, searching more intently now, through every notebook and folder, leafing through the pages almost desperately, until she realized how absurd it was. What did it really matter if one of them had already been lost or thrown away? She only wanted to have it in her hands so she could place it in a neat pile with the others and burn it.

She went down into the Don Valley Brick Works with the stack of pages and a lighter, setting them down on a rock amid a tangle of small trees and long grass. She lit the wad of papers and straightened up, already satisfied, watching the line of char creep and boil, the corners curling like obscene gangrenous tongues, velvety and cresting to lick the roof of a mouth that wasn't there, and so continued to furl and lift, until they were floating, the ashes rising, whirling into the air, only to settle farther off, into the bushes and grass, the fireflies of their sparks still glowing. She stepped back, suddenly panicked, realizing the potential disaster. She ran over to one of the larger embers and stamped it into the reeds, looking over her shoulder as another feathery-grey parachute landed onto a shrub. She darted over there next, shoes crunching through thorny branches, then began moving out in a wide circle, patting and stomping, already humiliated, thinking in headlines, mortified that the cinders would spread, that the singeings of her scribbled lines might catch fire, the embers of her words growing into a swath of something wide and consuming and precarious, until she was laughing, madly laughing at the idea of it, knowing that this, her ridiculous scene, was sure to become a poem she would write out someday. Words smouldering to take on a life of their own.

She considered sharing this story with Eamon, was even sure that he'd appreciate it, but ultimately, she thought the better of it.

This last summer had been a dry one, and the leaves, desiccated and brittle on the branches, seemed eager to change colour and fall, the fingers of the willows tarnishing with amber, the bleeding canines of sumac drooping, the generous spilling of the aspens' golden coins onto the ground for children to pile and toss into the air like lottery winners.

They were outside again, in an afternoon that was cool and blowing, when Melissa asked him, sounding as if the question had been on her mind for hours but had been far too delicate to introduce. “Honestly, Eamon, sometimes—
most
of the time—I don't even know what it is. Do academics? Do you guys know?”

Eamon's mouth was open. He dug his nail into the corner of it, looking off to a slope of rose granite that descended out of the forest and plunged into the retirement home's lawn. “Poetry? No. We don't. Nor do I know anyone who would take a stab at its definition really.”

“And doesn't that bother you sometimes? I mean, here's this thing that I can't picture ever living without, one of the oldest art forms in existence, and I don't even know, really, what it is. I mean, doesn't that . . . doesn't that bother you, somehow?”

Eamon blinked at the rock again. “No.” He folded his hands in his lap, adjusted his weight on the bench that they were sitting on. “Though it is something I've thought about. And a fair bit at that. To start with, I think we all, poets or not, have the
feeling
of what poetry is. We know when something poignant, something song-worthy, passes through our lives, makes one of our days more of a story worth telling than just another empty orbit of the clock. We know what poetry is when we hear it, when we see it, touch it. That much is almost simple. But what poetry is to me, personally, is the larger complex that it produces, that we are embedded inside.

“If you think of your own life,” he continued, “you might be able to string its narration together using the exotic beads of those few, most singular moments that you've experienced, the big turning points, the poems, until you could look at those glass colours all butted up together, side by side. But what you don't see looking at it—or even stop to consider—is that every human being that your path collides with
at
those poignant moments also has a string of beads, which is now intersecting with yours, and so is woven into it. And I think that this network of blindness to the poetry of other lives, this reluctance to penetrate such an expansive yet simple code—to admit the verse that is beneath everything, behind everyone, impelling its way through every existence, silently, cloaked and teeming—that we could exist without acknowledging this interplay around us, is, to me, exactly that: poetry. Poetry is being deaf to the extravagant choir that is behind you, below you, above you. But singing anyway. It is the collective and soundless cacophony of our solitary melodies, which is humming, even now, ringing in our ears with its almost perfect silence.”