Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [21]
The adamantine clock chimes six, and on the final stroke these witnesses turn and look at each other, and at me, the uninvited guest. The mysteries, secrets, and lies of their separate selves dance like atoms across a magnetic field so that the room, this simple low-ceilinged country kitchen, is charged with the same kind of vibrancy that precedes a cyclone. I am almost certain that the room offers no suggestion to its inhabitants of what should happen next, what words might be spoken, what comforts are available, tea, whisky, or the jointed, stuttering rhetoric of piety.
These good souls, for that’s what they are, are borne up by an ancient shelf of limestone, gleaming whitely just inches beneath the floorboards, yet each of them at this moment feels unanchored, rattling loose in the world between the clout of death and the squirming foolishness of birth.
Embarrassed, or perhaps ashamed, they cast their gaze one last time on the great white covered form of Mercy Stone Goodwill who lies before them, silent and still as a boat, a stranger in the world for all of her life, who has given her child the last of her breath.
It’s this wing-beat of breath I reach out for. Even now I claim it absolutely. I insist upon its literal volume and vapors, for however hard I try I can be sure of nothing else in the world but this—the fact of her final breath, the merest trace of it lingering in the room like snow or sunlight, burning, freezing against my sealed eyelids and saying: open, open.
CHAPTER TWO =
Childhood, 1916
Barker Flett at thirty-three is stooped of shoulder and sad of expression, but women who set their eyes on him think: now here is a man who might easily be made happy.
They yearn to take a pressing cloth to that cheap worsted jacket he wears while lecturing to his students on the life cycle of the cyclamen or the prairie crocus. His shirts could be fresher too, and his collars properly attached, and those scuffed oxfords of his are crying out for a coat of polish, and so forth and so on. All Professor Flett needs is a little womanly attention. Affectionate attention, that is. Don’t laugh at him; pity him, love him.
Distracted, he arrives at the College, five or sometimes ten minutes late for his classes, a look of dazed surprise in his eyes as he peers out at the waiting faces and rummages in his satchel for his lecture notes.
There, he’s found them. He arranges them on the lectern, fussing, frowning. His spectacles, he’s forgotten his spectacles. No, there they are, folded in his breast pocket. He removes them, hooking the wire temples around his nicely shaped ears, first the left, then the right—then, with his middle finger placed firm on the nose bridge, brings them straight. He blinks twice. Clears his throat. And begins.
His voice is beautiful. Its texture is fine-woven wool. If it had a color it would be a warm chestnut. In tone, in fluidity, in resonance, it is all that a man’s voice should be, with just that hint of Scottish burr, thinner than the skin of varnish on his oak lectern, giving necessary hardness. He rides straight up the walls of his sentences. His little pauses are sensuous gateways, without which his listeners would fall into a trance.
As it is, they keep their eyes fixed on him, focusing especially on his handsome, sorrowing, scholarly mouth, bending their heads only when it becomes necessary to write down the lists of words he unspools for them: the parts of a particular flower: pistil, stigma, style, ovary, stamen, anther, filament, petal, sepal, receptacle. Often he uses the blackboard, but today, having forgotten to bring his chalks along, he sketches these shapes in the air. His long fingers open and close around the airy forms. What a pity his shirt cuffs are in such a state, and it looks as though—yes, definitely—there is a button missing from his left sleeve; but he is oblivious to its absence—which is precisely what his female students find so