Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [59]
It was always said of Magnus Flett that he led an unlucky life. Bad luck followed him in his marriage and in his dealings with his sons, and bad luck tracked him all the way to the Louisa, the ship that carried him from Montreal to Liverpool in the summer of 1927.
Everyone knows that early summer is a peaceful time on the Atlantic—it can be depended on—but the eight-day period of Magnus Flett’s crossing was plagued with freak storms. The old man was unable to eat or sleep, and he spent every possible moment on the open deck, vomiting into an enamel basin. The days and nights fused together in a width of misery. If anyone had asked him what his wish was at that time, he would have declared that he wished for death. The image came to him one morning, as he stood retching over the railing, of the quarry in Tyndall, the sunlight striking and warming the mottled rock surface, and a good day’s work waiting; he knew then what a perfect fool he was to have left. He vomited out the memory, erased it. He vomited out the sum of his pain and disappointment, his three sons, his disloyal wife; he vomited out the whole of his humiliation, so that when the Louisa arrived finally at Liverpool, he stepped out on to firm land light as a boy. Hurrying past the stink of the fish docks, he had himself a good feed of boiled beef and mash, a long night’s sleep in clean bedding, and woke feeling more vigorous than he had in years and more eager for life.
He sent his baggage on to Thurso by train, keeping only a change of clothing, a few odds and ends, and his copy of Jane Eyre.
At a Liverpool outfitters he bought himself a pair of stout boots and a spirit stove, having determined to walk his way up across the north of England and through the wilds of Scotland. This act seemed to him at first a defiance, then a compulsion. And then something as simple and natural as air. Nevertheless every muscle in his body lightened at the thought of what he was about to do.
The weather was with him, long soft days and evenings, and the ground dry and giving underfoot. He took his position from the sun, that only. Home; the word hummed in his ears as he walked along country roads northward, sweeter than any scattering shout of bird-song, filling him up like a meal of bread and good butter.
In a ditch he came upon a rod of smoothed wood that fit his hand perfectly, and with this he beat rhythmically against the dusty surface of the road. His whiskers grew out fine and white and soft.
The hills of England, so rounded and mannerly, grew steeper once he left Carlisle behind, but whenever he felt his legs giving way, he stretched out under a tree for an hour, opened his book and read himself out of his aches and blisters. Can this really be but an island, he said to himself, looking skyward, looking out beyond hedged pastures of sheep and cattle. This wide, green, stony land, this richness of darkness and light. He thought, with happiness, of all the undated winters that had passed over these fields, the snows, and then the slow warming up of spring. Later, reaching the treeless moors past Inverness, it seemed to him he was tramping on God’s broad seamy forehead. After that there was a leveling off, an airy sensation of descent, his mind gloriously emptied and calm.
The country hotels along the way offered a bluff, democratic welcome, and, though not a drinking man, he came to savor his pint of ale at the end of a long day’s walking. He bent his head low over his glass, sniffing, then drinking. Easeful conversation flourished in the public houses—"So what’s it like out there in Canada?" from farmers with red, rude faces—and once, in the town of Jedburgh, the landlady of a lodging house joined him for a few hours between the sheets. Her skin was roughened and full of folds, but smelt freshly of soap. Sometimes children followed him for a bit out of the towns, curious and noisy. A young woman with a ragged cough accompanied