Wild Fell (17 page)

My father calmed at once. It was as though Nurse Jackson had drawn the terror from him like yarrow. As they walked away together down the corridor towards his new home, the place where he would spend the final stages of his life, my father turned back just once. “Jamie,” he said. “You go on home, son. I’m going to walk for a bit.”

Though my heart was utterly breaking, I still noted with joy that my father had called me
Jamie
, not any other name. He
knew
me again. How long he would know me, I wasn’t sure.

But he knew me then, and I
knew
he was aware that he was saying goodbye.

That was three years ago. In the time between that day and today, my father slipped entirely into the hazy, oblique world of his illness.

I visited him at the MacNeil Institute every day, usually after classes, but occasionally also in the morning, before school started.

Then, late one black November night, my world changed once again.

I was driving home from school after staying behind to work with my student actors on the school’s production of Arthur Miller’s
The Crucible.
I had been teaching the play at the same time the students were acting in it. That afternoon in class, there had been a rousing discussion about small-town sexual hypocrisy and the roiling passions locked away beneath Salem’s rigorous façade of pious New England propriety. As a teacher, I had been quietly proud to see that the passion I had been able to get out of my students that afternoon in class had carried through to that night’s rehearsal.

It had been raining all day, an early-winter drizzle that began to freeze as evening fell. After sundown, the temperature had steadily dropped until the cold and wet turned the roads and highways slick and black and slippery as wet glass.

In my mind, I had been replaying the scene near the end of the play when Jeff Renwick, who was playing John Proctor, had delivered Proctor’s wrenching soliloquy about losing the dignity of his name by confessing to witchcraft when so many of his friends had gone to the gallows rather than besmirch their own with a false confession.

“
Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”

When he had finished, I had tears in my eyes. And I was not the only one in the auditorium who did. The applause had begun slowly, but it reached a crescendo that echoed through the rehearsal auditorium and out into the corridor.

I was smiling at the memory and tapping my fingers on the steering wheel when my car was abruptly sideswiped by a drunken lawyer making an illegal left-hand turn. The impact sent me crashing into a guardrail, or so I was told later.

When I woke from the coma in traction three days later, the attending physician asked me if I knew who I was, or where I was.

My first words to him were, “Leave me my name.”

I spent almost six months in hospital recovering from a variety of injuries, including a mild brain trauma that nonetheless left me unable to focus for long periods of time. This particular injury, of all the damage I sustained, effectively ended my teaching career.

On the upside, between the insurance and the money the lawyer’s family paid me to avoid me suing them for everything they had, I found myself with more money than I’d ever seen in my life. Certainly it was enough to ensure my father’s continued care at the MacNeil Institute. It was also enough money for me to fulfill a dream I’d cherished ever since my divorce: the dream of leaving the city and all its painful memories. I didn’t want to be more than a half-day’s drive from the MacNeil Institute as long as my father was alive, but as it now stood, I was marking time. I couldn’t teach and I was too young for anything resembling a retirement.

So when I came across the advertisement in the
Globe & Mail
for the sale of a turn-of-the-century estate on a private island in Georgian Bay in excellent repair—suitable for a family or as an income property/guesthouse—for a price that was a virtual steal, I did something I’d never done in my entire dogmatically practical, safe, honourable life: I bought the house, sight unseen.

The very act of cutting the cheque felt almost pornographic in its decadence, but it was that very sense of abandon that allowed me to envision a life beyond the grim borders of the one in which I found myself. The point was, I had never done anything like that in my life, and I now could.

On the telephone, when I’d called to tell Hank that I’d bought the house, she’d asked me if perhaps its impulsive purchase was another symptom of the brain injury.

I’d laughed and replied, “No, it’s a symptom of having enough money to afford to be able to make mistakes, even big ones. And buying this house—which has a name, by the way, “Wild Fell”—on a crazy impulse is the first fun I’ve had in years.”

I told her about my plans to turn it into a guesthouse, which sounded more than ever like a lark when I related it over the telephone. Hank must have sensed something uncertain in my voice, because she waited till I was finished talking, then asked me the sort of to-the-point question in which she specialized.

“How’re you doing, Jamie? Really, though. I don’t want to hear bullshit from you. How’re you feeling about all of this? Not in general, I mean, but right now, at this moment?”

“Right now, at this moment, I feel guilty, frankly,” I told her. “But at the same time, I feel excited, which probably makes me feel even guiltier. I really feel like I needed some distance from everything—the divorce, Dad’s diagnosis, the accident. Buying this house and thinking of turning it into a summer bed and breakfast, or guesthouse, might just be a very expensive pipe dream. But I wanted to forget about it all, at least for a while. Does that make sense to you? Do you think I’m crazy?”

Hank snorted. “I’ve spent a lifetime trying to forget that I was born a girl named Lucinda. What do
you
think? And yes, of course I understand what you’re saying. And I agree with you. I’ve never seen anyone love his father as much as you love yours, Jamie. And it’s not like you’re leaving the country. You’ll be three, maybe four hours away from him. That’s nothing. If he needs you, or if you feel like you need to see him, we’ll just get in the car and drive.”

“Is it really that simple? That’s sort of what Nurse Jackson has said, too.”

“Yes, Jamie, it’s really that simple.”

“Then why do I feel sick inside about this?”

She laughed at that. “Because you
are
crazy, Jamie. Just not for the reasons you think you are.” That voice with its rawboned, rational practicality could soothe and calm me like no other.

I asked Hank again, “
Do
you think I’m crazy? For buying Wild Fell?”

She paused. I pictured her rubbing her chin as she did when she pondered. “First off, no, I don’t think you’re remotely crazy. Buying it, especially sight-unseen, might not necessarily have been my first choice when you came into all that money. Me, I might have done some travelling—”

I interrupted her, a bit more brusquely than I might have wanted to. “You know why I can’t leave the country.”

“
As
I was saying,” Hank said patiently. “Whatever I might have done, I’m not you. You took care of your responsibilities with it. You can’t teach right now because of your injury, and you don’t want to sit around. All of which is a very long and involved way of saying, no, I don’t think you’re crazy for buying . . .
what’s it called . . . ?”

“Wild Fell.”

“What the hell kind of a name for a cottage is that? What does that even
mean
?”

“‘Fell’ has at least two meanings,” I said. The faintly pompous, lecturing inflection that had become second nature to me after all those years of teaching embarrassed me. It sometimes manifested itself without warning, especially when I felt challenged, as I now did by Hank. “As an adjective, it means ‘of terrible evil or ferocity.’ But as a noun—which is how I believe it’s used in this case—it refers to a hill, or a stretch of high moorland. Alexander Blackmore, the politician who bought the island and built the house in the early-1800s, came to Canada from Cornwall. Unlike most of the islands in the Georgian Bay region, which are flat, this one actually has a rise, like a cliff. It slopes, too. Mrs. Fowler the real estate agent in Alvina, the nearest town, told me was that Mr. Blackmore had been struck by the romantic notion that it reminded him of the moors of his childhood, except it was right in the middle of a Canadian lake. Hence, the ‘wild’ part. He named the island after himself, and named the house ‘Wild Fell’ in a sort of romanticized homage to his roots.”

“All this fuss over a cottage,” Hank mused.

“This is more than a cottage,” I said. “You’ll understand what I mean when you see it.”

“
You
haven’t seen it,” Hank said dryly. “Did he live there alone?”

“Not from what I understand,” I said. “He raised a family there. He had a wife and two children—a son and a daughter.”

Hank seemed more curious now. “What happened to them? Who sold the house? Grandchildren? Great-grandchildren?”

“I don’t know what happened to the Blackmore children,” I said. “Mrs. Fowler didn’t say. The house passed from the Blackmore family in Canada to cousins in England who apparently didn’t want the bother of its upkeep, or the expense. According to Mrs. Fowler, no one has lived in it for over fifty years.”

“Jesus, Jamie, are you kidding? Fifty years? The place is going to be a wreck! What were you thinking?”

“Yeah, I thought that, too,” I said. “But they included a home inspection. The results were sort of a surprise.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, the house doesn’t seem to have aged.”

She grunted. “Oh, bullshit. You’ve been totally had, Jamie. Thank God you can afford it.”

“No, really,” I insisted. “Some fire damage to the exterior of one of the wings, and the usual wear and tear. But other than that, it’s in remarkable shape. I read the report, Hank. And for the price I paid for the houswould have been a fool not to buy it.”

“‘Remarkable shape,’” Hank mimicked. “Jesus. I hope Alvina has a decent hotel for you to stay in once you see this dilapidated wreck.”

“You’re a landscaper, Hank,” I said. “If it’s broken, you can fix it, right? You can do anything.”

Now it was Hank’s turn to sound professorial. “I landscape
outside
, Jamie,” she said. “I make award-winning landscapes out of nothing. If you need a
garden
outside this albatross of a house of yours, I can probably do it. But fixing up an uninhabited wreck . . .” Hank trailed off. “Jesus Christ.”

“Remember what you said,” I teased her. “If it doesn’t work out, I can just turn around and go home.”

All that was left was for me to close up my dad’s house, pack, and leave. I’d briefly thought of selling it, but it was paid up and I favoured the idea of having it to come home to when I visited.

First, though, I had to see him and ask his blessing on my departure, or his forgiveness, even if I knew he couldn’t rightly give it. And yet, still, here I was in his room, my suitcases stacked in the hall, trying to say goodbye.

I knelt down next to my father’s wheelchair and took his hand in mine. It felt as delicate and dry as a bird’s claw. The skin seemed almost translucent, pale veins rising like frozen blue streams in the midst of snow.

“Dad, can you hear me? You know I’m here. I
know
you know.” I leaned my cheek against his shoulder, feeling the soft red cashmere against my skin. Even in this awful place, with all its olfactory assaults, I still smelled the sweet scent of my father on the sweater. “Daddy? It’s me, Jamie. It’s your son. I’m going away for a little while. I’ll be back soon to see you, I promise. I swear it. I’m going to go fix up a house. I’m going to turn it into a guesthouse. Maybe you can come and stay with me once it’s done.” I winced. I hated the sound of my own lie, and I hated how quickly it had come to me. It served to underscore how far away my father was, that I could say almost anything to him and not elicit a reaction.

At that exact moment, I missed the entirety of Peter Browning so much that I felt my heart would shatter from the sheer pressure of the loss.

My father remained silent, his eyes fixed on the window out of which the moths had once flown. In the soft light, he looked younger than his seventy-five years. The disease hadn’t robbed him of the aspect of benevolence that was as germane to his face as the planes of skin and bone. While many of the patients at the MacNeil Institute habitually wore looks of confusion, or vacancy, or terror, my father had acquired the beatific patina of an ancient saint in a nineteenth-century Spanish fresco.

“Ah, Jesus,” I said. “I feel guilty about leaving. Really,
really
guilty.”

“I know you do,” Nurse Jackson said. “I understand that. But you shouldn’t. He’d want you to live. And you’ll be back for regular visits. We’ll stay in touch. I’ll take good care of your Dad, I promise.”

“Do you think he knows I’m going away?”

Nurse Jackson frowned at me. She had a remarkable frown, one that made me feel like I was a bad five-year-old who wasn’t paying attention.

“Stop saying you’re ‘going away,’ Jamie,” she said crisply. “If you keep saying it, it’ll become real to you, and you’ll be as lost as your father, in your own way. You’re not ‘going away’ from him. You bought a cottage on an island up north. Think of it
that
way. You’re going to make it
into
something. You’re not leaving home. You’ll be back. Your home is right here, in your father’s heart. You’re moving to a different spot on that long thread connecting you.”

“The house is pretty big to be a called a cottage.” I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, more grateful to her for her blessing in lieu of my father’s than I trusted myself able to express. “A white elephant, more likely. I probably should have used the insurance money from my accident on something else. Probably too good to be true.”