Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [38]
Cuyler Goodwill himself believes (though he does not bruit this about, or even confess it to himself) that speech came to him during his brief two-year marriage to Mercy Goodwill. There in the sheeted width of their feather bed, his roughened male skin discovering the abundant soft flesh of his wife’s body, enclosing it, entering it—that was the moment when the stone in his throat became dislodged. An explosion of self-forgetfulness set his tongue free, or rather a series of explosions ignited along the seasonal curve: autumn Sundays in the tiny village of Tyndall, Manitoba, a crispness in the air. Or a string of cold January nights. And spring evenings, the breezes moist, the sun still present in the western sky, slanting in through the window across the pale embroidered pillow covers and on to the curves of wifely flesh—his dear, dear, willing Mercy. Words gathered in his mouth then, words he hadn’t known were part of his being. They leapt from his lips: his gratitude, his ardor, his most private longings—he whispered them into his sweetheart’s ear, and she, so impassive and unmoved, had offered up a kind of mute encouragement. At least she had not been offended, not even surprised, nor did she appear to find him foolish or unnatural in his mode of expression.
My own belief is that my father found his voice, found it truly and forever, in the rhetorical music of the King James scriptures.
During the years following his conversion by my mother’s grave—that sudden rainbow, that October anointing—he applied himself to his Bible morning and night. Its narratives frankly puzzled him—the parade of bearded kings and prophets, their curious ravings. Biblical warnings and imprecations flew straight over his commonsensical head. But scriptural rhythms entered his body directly, their syntax and coloring and suggestive tonality. How else to explain his archaic formal locutions, his balance and play of phrase, his exotic inversions, his metaphoric extravagance. Language spoke through him, and not—as is the usual case—the other way around.
Another theory holds that the man grew articulate as the result of the great crowds who traveled northward to see the tower he built to his wife’s memory, a tower constructed with his own hands. A fair proportion of these visitors, after all, were journalists, journalists who stood by Cuyler Goodwill’s side with a notebook and pencil in hand. Just a few questions, Mr. Goodwill, if you don’t mind. Young, clear-eyed, ready to be astonished, they came from all across the continent, and from as far away as London, England, bringing their journalists’ sheaf of queries, their hows, whens, their whys. Cuyler Goodwill had become a public person.
Eccentric perhaps, an artisan naif, but not unapproachable, not in the least. He was a man, on the contrary, who could easily be sounded out, given space. This was his moment, and he must have recognized it. His tongue learned to dance then, learned to deal with the intricacies of evasion and drama, fiction and distraction.
His voice, you might say, became the place where he lived, the way other people live in their furniture or gestures. At the same time he developed the orator’s knack for endurance, talking and talking without exhaustion, not always (it can be confessed) with substance.
More and more of late, his stamina on the platform has been exclaimed over, his lungs, his bellows, those organs of projection, that chest full of eager air. His hands dance a vigorous accompaniment. At the Lawrence County Businessmen’s Luncheon last winter he spoke for sixty minutes without notes, his remarkable tenor instrument never seeming to tire. And, standing before the Chamber of Commerce’s annual smoker in Bedford,