Sweeter Than All the World (28 page)

And he sits here day after day remembering one single life, fingers it apart thread by thread. How can you comprehend centuries, and millions of people—or even the branches of a single family—when one day, one vanished life, overwhelms you?

There are infinite ways to be destroyed: sliced, spiked, slit, skewered, decapitated, smashed, shot, earthquaked, buried, drowned, burned, blown to bits, incinerated, run over by flowing molten rock. The irrefutable needle of longing. Also separation. Stupidity.

The sound of Trish’s voice, and the song she would not sing aloud:

and never sang word for word; not that he heard. But she hummed it in his mother’s high soprano, once even on the northwest tower of Harlech Castle where seven centuries of sand dunes now separated its massive inner wall from the white line of the sea. They were looking across a miniature railway and the golf course and the campground and the trailer park packed tight, window to wall, with holiday tenants. On the tower wall she murmured something about the Carter Family always “hurtin’ and hurtin’.”

After she was gone, all that rose like flotsam in his memory: the Carter Family was his sad mother humming to the static of battery radio in the low house in Waskahikan, those Carter guitars laying a clanging riff on turn by turn of rhythmic whine until Maybelle alone or Sara alone, or together, or both joined by A.P., droned their flat voices into tragedy, as if gentle knives were sliding flat through their gut and you would discover tomorrow you had been disembowelled, were already eviscerated though still sadly walking about the day after yesterday.

The Carter Family, strangely come again on that summer trip.

There are beautiful palm trees here, but where would you kneel if you wished to pray? Rice fields now rest like stamps brushed on the peaceful mountain … but there is never any warning of destruction, mountain or sea, and you never want to believe it anyway. You always hope—faith and love protect the heart but only hope can bastion the mind—and refuse until facts crush you, and where, when crushed, can you pray? She detested their family separation. Why, Mom? For god’s sake, Dad! Susannah had not anticipated such anger either. When they negotiated the spring and summer of their practical working and living
arrangement, and it hardened as they both knew it would into a continuing separateness, neither Trish nor Joel could quite understand. Though eventually they had all, he thought, managed to be so logical. They were living more and more independent lives, there was no need for the usual stupid trauma, money problems, whining. Everything could be reasonable, equitable, sufficient for four intelligent adults—highly emotional adults sometimes, yes, there was shouting, the odd explosion and occasional tear, but clearly and adultly reasonable. Not this.

There are no gulls here over the windy sea; there is nothing thrown away to gobble up, no garbage in a Balinese paradise. Above his father’s plough, folding back the grey-wooded soil of their homestead, the gulls circled in hundreds for an occasional offering of worms, his parents’ bush piety becoming for him such a swamp of sin-soaked boredom that it must be escaped, fled. And having fled, he discovered he could offer his children only folk tales, paintings, classical music, ballet, hockey, his daughter’s small sleeping body first in his arms swaying to Brahms and deep, inarticulate (beautifully so to him) Russian harmony. The Cossacks sang their discovery of faith and pain so deep in a land so far from home that he broke the record. But her baby face, her tiny fingers curled against it like his memory of her humming:

Maybelle Carter sang those words like a taut string; his mind is avoiding the rest of the song. He found that Carter record under the Coca-Cola sign at Piccadilly Circus, the song Trish hummed at Aberystwyth but not after.
For almost a year he has looked for her, he stares now into every crowd: such masses of people in cities, thousands, millions alive. If he stood at Yonge and Bloor in Toronto or the overpass on Waseda-dori at the Iidabashi Subway Station in Tokyo, or sat at a restaurant window above Leicester Square in London long enough, he must inevitably see her: there were so many people one must be she.

And sometimes he did see her, even among the black heads of Jakarta and Singapore, the incredible complexions of Lima, Kuala Lumpur, São Paulo: a profile, a momentary back, a jacket fold or blond flip of hair and shoulder shift, and his heart would lurch for the certain disappointment. But the first betraying detail always crushed him—the walk wasn’t right, the length of leg or nose, the hands too large. Millions had been born on her day, and in grief he feels he would search out every one in every country on earth if only one were she. He had, since she disappeared, never actually seen anyone, he realized at some point, except those who in some detail suggested her; the day he was finally forced to recognize that she had vanished herself, deliberately, he was walking through an Edmonton park where young women were running, playing, field hockey perhaps, and he had to crouch against a tree unable to walk past their bodies—they were running, laughing aloud, he would not have missed a single one if she had not been there, and yet there they all were. And one had come and touched him, with that girlish lightness he knew and he could barely shake his head at her.

But he found the words when he clamped the earphones to his head in the store above Piccadilly Circus. They chiselled themselves into the acoustic tile of his mind, indelible wherever he happened to be:

So he has come to the sea. Again. The Java Sea where he has been with no one, neither family nor lovers. Not Peru, where Susannah and baby Joel once sat safely beside volcanic boulders watching the ocean break like mountains after a run across the whole Pacific, and slice up the beach faster than Trish’s baby legs or his adult ones could run; not Copacabana, where the warm hiss of undertow was hedged in by extravagant cliffs of rock and celebrity buildings; not the night surf’s crash and hiss below their hotel window in San Juan—he still went to medical conventions then—and Trish so exhausted after the long flight, “I want to sleep, Daddy, sleep.” Unlike those beautiful seas, this one at least held no memories of her.

She crawled over him like a rock at every age, he changed her diapers streaked with babyshit and cradled her around the room against his chest to Handel and Vivaldi and Cree drumming and Schubert, and only two summers ago she led him through every clean and messy hall and cranny in Harlech and Caernarvon and Beaumaris and Conwy and Rhuddlan and Flint—and Beaumaris again because it was so symmetrical, so well preserved and historically useless—and ruined Aberystwyth, returning there as if by necessity in daylight after they had walked there in night mist. They would never have heard the musicians that day except for its three centuries of grass and the sudden sunlight on the exploded stones—see, our ancestor Adam could have shown the Welsh how only earth can swallow cannon-balls. She must already have been wearing her deepening necessity then, everywhere they went, where were his goddamn eyes?

But among the castles she was brilliant and quick, laughing, dearest Jesus how he had longed for that, for four years, even the faintest trace of it and there it was at last, she was humming a song!

And then the medieval musicians at Aberystwyth began that same melody, singing, “There is a deep valley…” and she stopped. “Those are different words,” was all she said. The blacker words she had hummed, and never uttered, now spun themselves round and round on the record of his memory.

The open parkland and prairie where he had lived most of his life was always being compared to the sea; land and sky and sea and song: somewhere the sea must hold her.

On their last journey together, to the Frisian coast of the Netherlands where the Menniste Wiebes began, they saw how for centuries the Lowland people had lured the sea into slowly making land.

“The winter storms are very good, they bring up ground,” the young Frisian guiding them said carefully. “The heavy wind piles the muddy water against the coast and—”

“The wind does what?” Trish interrupted.

“The steady winter wind of course, day by day,” the guide said into its November bite, his accented words almost lost with all their hair streaming across their eyes. “It is the friction of wind on water, friction piles the water up against the dikes and
slopes of the watte, here, we call the whole area outside the dike ‘watte,’ and the wind dies, then the water has to run back of course and that is why we build low rows of twisted willows, these reeds across the watte, because when it runs back the mud in the water sinks down, catches in the rows and builds up, you see, grain by grain it stays here, land.”

Like snow carried by wind, caught in drifts by prairie brush and fences; but here the water was wind and the brush was deliberately laid out to catch it, a thin, slimy ridge and ditch growing imperceptibly out of the frothing sea that continuously played over them.

“So after some twenties or thirties of years the rotting willows are covered like over there, and then there is land enough for sea grass and the grass catches mud out of high tides and storm flooding even better and then soon the sheep, there you see, graze and only the high winter storms, very high, come up here and you see it keeps building. Fresh land of course, the salt leached out.”

She was squinting past the young man’s pale hair into the sea light. “The rows are all so … straight,” she said. “Right angles.”

“Engineers say straight catches best.”

The sea light was relentless, like her voice. “But if the sea is so muddy here, it must be tearing down land somewhere else.”

“Well, of course, the sea is always tearing down somewhere, but also deep from the bot—”

“And there is far more sea than land, eventually there can be nothing but sea, everywhere.”

“Well,” he laughed, startled, “there are such very big lands, also mountains.”

“Some of the highest mountains are closest to the deepest
seas, the Himalayas to the Sanda and Philippine Trench and the Andes to the Chile Trench, the whole earth will be…”

Adam and the pale young man were staring at her; he remembers thinking then, We named her wrong, she’s a real
Menniste Suzje
, always so quietly lovely and proper but setting sly traps when you least expect it—oh, Susannah, I can find ancestors anywhere, could we find each other again?—looking at Menniste Suzje Trish bent into the hard sea breeze, there was more than wind starting tears in his eyes. Bad decisions.

Trish said, “It has to be, when the sea has torn down all the land in the world, the entire globe will be two hundred feet under water.”

The young man replied, very gently, “But it will take very long. And here”—he was reaching down and he might have taken her arm if she had been the kind of woman a man could touch easily—“here, the land mostly comes deep up, from the sea bottom.”

His fingers dug in the muddy slime. They were standing on a buried line of woven willows, the ridged, muddy silt stretching far away to the frothing but mostly indistinguishable edge of the grey sea.

“Many shells, many, many bones. Ground into bits,” he said, spreading that mud across his hand like a page.

He has nothing to hold in his hand. The memory of her last voice—“I’m in Patrai, I may take a ship up the Adriatic coast”—and then nothing. Not a penny withdrawn from her account after November 16, 1990. She never wrote to him anyway, not even a postcard, only that occasional beautiful “Hey, Dad” suddenly assuring him she was somewhere on earth; or Susannah’s
voice telling him what Trish had told her, Susannah still anchored in Calgary, receiving and relaying messages between herself and Adam and Trish and Joel wherever in the world they were. Once, when Adam called from a street phone in Rome, Susannah muttered out of her sleep, “Dear god, I’m becoming a satellite connector, it’s four in the morning and Joel phoned an hour ago from Mexico, I’m getting a machine to exchange all your messages for each other!”

But she didn’t then, and certainly would not now, after a year of Trish gone.

“ ‘Hello, Central, give me he-e-aven,’ ” she sang the Carter twang perfectly in Wales:

“It’s not ‘gramma’ in the song,” Adam said, “it’s ‘mother.’ ”

“I know,” she said, “but my mother isn’t with the angels yet, is she. Watching us every second from ‘up there.’ ”

“Please,” he begged her.

“Please you too,” she said, going. “Pretty please with artificial sugar on top.”

He had noticed it, finally, the depth of her accumulating sadness. He had not sensed that during their early travels together, and never before their family splintered—but maybe he was just stupid then, and she younger. Tomorrow, October 25th, she should be twenty-six years and three months.

“Eighteen is old enough, girls should be married,” his father had always pronounced. The family wisdom of
Mennonite-village Russia, as usual worse than useless in Canada.

Three weeks ago, just before he fled empty Edmonton again, he had recognized, across a crowded concert hall lobby, the back of a business acquaintance whose wife he knew was dying of cancer. He had known for months but easily avoided him, unable to consider the words he must try to say, but suddenly he was beside him, touching him, and Fred turned instantly and they embraced, quickly, between clusters of concert chatter. “I’ve been thinking about you,” Adam murmured against his ear, and Fred murmured back, “I know, I know … I’ve been thinking about you.” They could hear violins tuning in the concert hall, some elementary Mozart delicacy, and Fred was describing a sigmoidoscope, which he explained at length was something like an eye at the end of a hose with which doctors had seen the enormous cancer, and drew a map with his finger on the white shirt of his abdomen, tucked right in there, and they had cut that all out, every bit of that. But the liver was beyond any scalpel. I know, Adam said.