Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [40]
He told the child about his boyhood in Stonewall, laying out for her the streets of that town, the site of his parents’ house by the lime kilns, the smell of burning lime on a winter morning, how sometimes he was wretched and sometimes joyous. He confessed to her his simple amusements, his liking for tasks, his ready adaptation to the trade of quarrying, his curious bond with rock and earth.
On and on. Dinner came and went. The little girl felt faintly sick, the train lurching this way and that, and the heaviness of chicken and gravy in her stomach. In the dining car she had spilled a trail of this yellow gravy on the white table cloth, and her father had pulled the linen napkin from his shirt front where it was tucked, and covered the spot over, never breaking for a moment his flow of words. He was talking now about his dead wife, the child’s mother; her name was Mercy—Mercy Goodwill, a young woman uniquely skilled with pies and preserves and household management.
Some of this the young Daisy took in and some she didn’t. The hour was late. She drifted in and out of sleep, but even awake her mind kept coasting back to the surfaces of the Simcoe Street house in Winnipeg where she had lived most of her life, its snug-fitting windows and doors and its flights of wooden steps, down into the cellar or out to the side garden where Aunt Clarentine’s flowers grew in their rows. The face of Aunt Clarentine floated by, smiling.
(This face must now be returned to dust, a comforting thought, dust being familiar, ubiquitous, and friendly and not at all threatening.) Uncle Barker would be packing up his instruments and specimens and preparing for the journey to Ottawa, another train journey, but eastward instead of southward. He had pointed out on a map where Ottawa was placed, a small black dot sitting in a nest of intersecting waterways.
Dreaming her way backward in time, resurrecting images, the young girl realized, with wonder, that the absent are always present, that you don’t make them go away simply because you get on a train and head off in a particular direction. This observation kept her hopeful about the future with a parent she had never known, a parent who had surrendered her to the care of others when she was barely two months old.
Her eyes nodded shut, but still her father talked. It seemed to her that his voice continued all night long, but that was impossible, for she woke once or twice to find herself alone on a smooth cool cotton sheet and a mattress of wonderful thickness, with darkness all around.
In the morning it began again, the two of them breakfasting in the dining car (soft poached eggs, triangles of buttered toast), and her father talking, talking. His restlessness was stirred up now, stirred up so it couldn’t be put down. The child had to shut her ears; she needed calming, not this assault of unsorted recollections. Sealed in, she reconstructed in her head the patches of grass and gravel that lay behind Aberdeen School back in Winnipeg, and the bushes that rubbed up against the rough fence of the schoolyard. Her father was going on about the intricacy of stone carving, how the right chisel had to be selected, and how carefully it must be held, how too much pressure in the wrong place can split and ruin good material, how every piece of stone in the world has its own center with something imprisoned in it.
Green corn filled the passing fields, every row made perfect as it swung around out of sight, each stalk a long-leafed gentleman or lady bending toward its neighbor, chattering there in the breeze, so tall and polite. Her father was explaining the difference between sandstone and limestone, between granite and marble. She felt his voice filter into her veins and arteries, and spread out in her memory.
Deeper and deeper into the well of his life he went: a rainbow, a gravestone, a slant of morning light.
He talked to fill the frightening silence and to hold back the uncertainty of the future, but chiefly he talked in order to claim back his child. He felt, rightly, that he owed her