Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [107]
Cuyler Goodwill died back in the spring of 1955, the same year Victoria Flett was born. He was out working in the backyard of his house on Lake Lemon, a man of seventy-eight years, when he felt himself go suddenly light-headed. Probably he shouldn’t have been out there at all in the bright sun without a hat on his head; that’s what his wife Maria was always saying.
This strange dry dizziness—it was friendly enough at first, accompanied by a persistent buzzing noise and a corner-of-the-eye glimpse of bees’ wings, like blurred spheres of sound, invisible.
He stretched himself out on the soft grass, flat on his back, his laced shoes pointing skyward. A cool breeze came along, rippling across his forehead, stirring a strand of his thin hair, and almost immediately he felt stronger. Still he did not get up.
There’s no hurry, he said to himself, I can lie here all morning if I like.
Maria had taken her big straw shopping bag and walked around the Point to the Bridgeport Grocery Store; she was out of butter.
She’d announced this at breakfast—she was always running out of something or other, never having accustomed herself to the bulk-buying habits of North Americans. Her husband knew she would be gone for at least an hour; she liked to dilly dally on the Lake Road, especially now that the redbud was coming into bloom, and their young neighbors, the MacGregors, Lydia and Bill, would be out working on their new cedar deck. She’d be sure to stop by their place and pass the time of day—and never notice for a minute that she was interrupting or that the two young people were passing looks back and forth, rolling their eyes and making minute shrugs of exasperation. On and on she’d jabber, gesturing at the trees, the waves on the lake, the cloudless sky, making suggestions about the support brackets for their deck, about the loose shingles on the back of their house, about their rhubarb plants, whether or not they received enough sun, and neither Bill nor Lydia would understand one word she said.
Talk, talk, talk. Meanwhile, here he lay, an old man sprawled on his back.
The novelty of his position amused him at first, and very gradually he became aware of the warmth that rose out of the earth, penetrating first the crushed grass beneath him and then passing through the smooth broadcloth of his checked shirt. This was surprising to him, that he should be able to feel the immense stored heat of the planet spreading across the width of his seventy-eight year-old back. When had he last lain like this on bare ground, fitting the irregularities of his physiognomy, muscles, bone, cartilage, against a bed of recently clipped grass, giving himself over to it? Only young people surrendered themselves to the earth in this unguarded way, allowing it to support them, the whole weight of their bodies trustingly held.
Minutes passed. He had nothing much to think of, so he thought about the angle of the sun, which was almost directly overhead, and about his body, his seventy-eight-year-old body, hatched up north in Canada in another century by parents now firmly erased, growing to strength there in his early years, and now, removed as if on a magic carpet to this other place, lying flat on a patch of Indiana grass like a window screen about to be rinsed off by the garden hose.
He lay in the backyard of a lakeside cottage, but one that he and Maria now made their permanent home. They’d been here for some years, since his retirement from business. The wide pie-shaped lot was landscaped with lilacs, forsythia, and mock orange, with the result that his body was obscured from the view of passing motorists, not that there were many of those in the middle of the day. Only locals used the Lake Road, and of course it was too early for the summer people.
He loved this time of year, April. Life shone through