Elizabeth and After (13 page)

“I can give it to you. I’ll get something to write it down.” His father had never wanted regular visits before. Was he now expected to spend every Sunday at the R&R, eating lunch and making polite conversation? What were they supposed to talk about?

There was a pad of paper in the living room, he remembered. He went in to look for it. Moira trailed him. He suddenly realized that the living-room light had popped last night and he’d forgotten to buy new bulbs. He wondered if Moira had been assigned a social-worker spy mission by his father. When he and his father were living at the farm alone, a social worker had come to visit them a few times after one of McKelvey’s first trips to hospital. She would appear unannounced as though she were just dropping in to visit old friends and it was the biggest coincidence in the world that the government paid her to have tea with them.

He started to explain to Moira about the light but she had already sat down in the old armchair in the corner and was holding an unlit cigarette in her hand as if to announce that having managed to arrive, she now intended to stay
He wondered what she’d learned about him to make her so curious. Or maybe she was just lonely like him. He wanted a beer, but if he drank a beer every time he imagined his hand curling around a bottle … He reached into his pocket for matches and walked over to light her cigarette.

“I guess you and your father are pretty close,” Moira said. “He always talks about you.”

It occurred to Carl that all things considered she must be joking. He tried to think of some remark to come back with. Being smart was what McKelvey used to call that kind of comeback. His mother had known how to use her tongue. “Used it like a razor,” McKelvey had once complained to Carl after the accident and Carl got an unwanted picture of his father and mother kissing, of his father stepping away with blood running down his mouth and chin. These days Carl wasn’t much for being smart with words. He was in too deep, too deep inside himself. In even deeper than Ned Richardson had been. Even deeper than the cat Ned Richardson had killed. He was way down deep, six feet under, down so deep he couldn’t feel anything except for Lizzie.

Dark hair, a nice smile, almost pretty. Wearing some kind of polo shirt and skirt combination. Some kind of flowery scent. He lit her cigarette, accepted one for himself. He was standing across from her, his cigarette in one hand; the other was still trying to wrap itself around that phantom bottle of beer. His mouth felt dry. He took a step backwards towards the kitchen, stopped himself. He was aware of his jeans hanging awkwardly on his legs. If it hadn’t been for Ned Richardson he would have soaked all his clothes in the bathtub this weekend, then hung them out to dry in the sun. He liked the way they smelled after that.

Carl sat down on the sofa, waiting for what she would say, what he would think to reply. There was a patch of light from the kitchen, the pale glow of the moon. Gradually he realized Moira had let him off the hook, she too was just sitting and breathing.

Moira finished her cigarette and sat looking at the moon. She liked Carl’s face in the moonlight. His hair was combed straight back on the sides, almost to a ducktail, decades out of date. But there was something in him so fine and tightly drawn you could almost hear it—like the fine sharp twang of a banjo string. You could almost hear it—a song that keeps going in your mind after the music stops. She wished he would say or do something, or maybe his silence meant it was time for her to go. She got out of the chair and crossed the room. Carl stood up.

“Thanks,” she said.

He took her hands. They were small and delicate, like a child’s. When he released them, they began to slide up his arms and he drew her down to the sofa. The silky run of her arms. Legs touched with her flowery perfume, waves of muscle beneath skin that ran sweet and smooth beneath his tongue as it slid to the insides of her thighs. Her fingers digging into his hair, mapping his skull, pulling him up. Breasts wanting his mouth. Giggles as he carried her upstairs. Then her voice moaning deeply, humming, rising high, casting its spell on him.

In their new silence and the moonlight she made him lie still, first on his back and then on his belly, while she inspected him, hovered over him, cruised her snub-nosed face over his whole body, sniffing and kissing and touching and licking, massaging fingering stroking until he could no longer feel his muscles his bones the mattress the sheets the air, until he was released from everything that had weighed him down since he’d begun returning home and he was floating carefree and satisfied, safe and alive,
alive
in his own new bedroom in his own new house.

He knew he’d fallen asleep when her hands woke him. Again they glided together; this time what was torn from him came reluctantly, remnants of a bitterness hoarded too long.

And then there was the last detail he needed to take care of, the arrival that would complete his homecoming. He asked her if she would go somewhere with him. Soon they were in the truck driving through the last of the night. She was sitting beside him, her body pressed close, and as he drove she took his right hand and tucked it under her jeans and her panties, so that his hand was filled with the tangled half moon of her warmth.

By the time they got to the cemetery there was a faint blue line between the horizon and the receding dark dome of the night. They climbed over the metal fence and walked to the wide twin gravestone of his grandparents and to the matching twin gravestone with his mother’s name and dates on one side, the other with his father’s name already engraved but without the final date. In the light of the rising dawn the polished grey marble took on the colours of the sky.

Moira bent close to read the writing. As she ran her hands along the letters, Carl could almost feel the cut stone beneath his fingers. He went to sit on the grass. From somewhere down
the road the cattle began lowing in a barn until the milkers were switched on and a low hum of machinery spread into the growing light. So strange—all these people gradually being stripped down to bone, accompanied by the twice-daily music of milk being pulsed from swollen cow teats into shining steel tanks.

Moira came and sat beside him. Carl told her how ten years ago, following the last of those New Year’s Eve parties Luke Richardson threw at the mansion now known as the West Gull R&R, an all-night booze-up farewell to a century of all-night booze-up farewells, William McKelvey had got so drunk that Elizabeth had insisted Carl drive them home. About two miles from the farm, Carl had fallen asleep at the wheel and piled his car into an oak tree. “When I woke up my father was screaming from a broken knee. She was dead. I was just fine. I walked home and called the police.”

They sit, silent, for a long time. “That’s how close my father and I are,” Carl finally says. “Just wanted to show you. Killed my own mother.”

Driving home as light fills the air: trees, houses, barns, rising into the sun. Carl parks the truck, they go into the kitchen. While Carl opens the coffee tin, Moira sits at the table.

“Okay,” she starts.

He’s at the stove, feeling vulnerable and exposed, he knows he’s shown too much. But he had needed to go there, needed someone to witness his truth. His eyes fall onto the cold world of white-enamelled metal and grease stains. “Okay,” he agrees and he thinks,
Okay, so what?
He’ll just make coffee and then he’ll drive her back to the R&R. It’s not as if he doesn’t know the way. Then he remembers she came on her own. He takes the kettle to the sink. As the tap runs the sun climbs high
enough to shoot its light into the streaming water. He tears his eyes away, turns off the tap.

Even at the cemetery where she watched him standing like some crazy tragicomic icon beside his mother’s tombstone as the dawn came over the horizon like the yellow light of a slow-moving train, half of her was thinking: Brother,
brother
, am I supposed to believe all this or is this guy just one big good-looking slice of pure country ham. Then the train had come closer and the light began to spread along the rims of the hills and from the cemetery she could hear the noises of the farms starting and in the east see the low silhouette of the town roofs and she stopped thinking because her heart was beating so hard.

The sound of the kettle now fills the kitchen and as the water climbs towards boiling Moira decides that once Carl has poured the water into the filter he has prepared, she will stand up and go to him again.

“There are things I have to explain,” Carl says.

Moira wonders what else that quiet voice of his could have to confess.

“I can’t be with anyone right now,” Carl says. “I mean tonight was great but that’s all I’m good for.”

He turns his back to her as he pours the water. She’s watching her hands and she remembers what she did with his hand as they were driving to the cemetery.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Carl says. “For all I know you hated it but I thought you should know it’s all I’m good for. I’m just too fucked up about my wife and drinking and the old shit in the R&R and the whole thing out at the cemetery and I’m going to try to be a father to my daughter and that’s going to take everything I’ve got.”

Now she’s glad his back is to her. “You’re more than that,” she says. God.

“I’m nothing,” Carl says. “I’m just an old used-up piece of shit and I know it. But I’m going to do my best for Lizzie.” He turns around. “That’s the way things are.”

M
YSTERIES BEGIN WITH THE DISCOVERY
of the body. Through a careful examination of the relevant details, the circumstances, facts as supplied by witnesses and other third parties, the human body no longer alive becomes the simple and inevitable conclusion to a story of tangled plots and complex motives. In the rush towards this classic finale it is easy to forget that bodies have not only endings but beginnings, beginnings surrounded by complications and entanglements, the kinds of entanglements themselves susceptible to vivid and compelling description, forensic details, even witnesses.

To the beginning in question, the catalytic event that would lead to the existence of the living body of Elizabeth McKelvey, the self-proclaimed prime witness was Flora Goldsmith. It happened late in the afternoon of December 18, 1932, in front of West Gull’s historic Long Gull Lake Inn.

At noon, the day had been mild enough to set the town’s icicles dripping and to melt what snow remained on its sidewalks so that a friendly almost springlike atmosphere reigned
beneath the Christmas decorations that had been strung across Main Street in the hope of loosening a few tight fists. But as the sun followed its shallow arc towards the horizon all that had melted became ice once more. Flora Goldsmith, accustomed to such variations, was keeping her eyes to the pavement as she walked past the inn on her way home from a last-minute trip to the butcher. In one hand she held her shopping bag; the other she used to drag along her son, Adam, at that time a tallish three-year-old with adorable blond ringlets, a babyish way of stumbling when he walked or ran—a quiet well-behaved child who would sit placidly on his mother’s knee while emitting an almost inaudible and as yet unintelligible stammer during the bible meetings she held in her kitchen.

Meanwhile, moving in the opposite direction was a Kingston couple. Louis and Lillian Glade had come north to spend a few days at Long Gull Lake Inn because Louis, a clerk at the Queen’s University Medical Library, had been advised that he needed a vacation to provide relief from a puzzling series of dizzy spells. Immigrants from Galicia, the Glades made a striking couple: Louis was a tall slender man with distinguished greying temples and narrow handsome features marred only by heavy-lidded eyes; his wife, Lillian, was much shorter, almost stout, with a luxuriant mass of red hair she wore coiled and pinned to the back of her head. In her youth this hair had dazzled at piano recitals where she specialized in moody Rachmaninoff concertos. “Like a big copper snake just waiting to strike,” Flora Goldsmith later complained to her son, who would have his own part to play.

Arm in arm, the Glades were also keeping their eyes to the icy sidewalk. Just before the collision, Adam Goldsmith looked up at the Glades and let out a warning shriek. The Glades,
startled, lost their footing and pitched forward into Adam and Flora. All four went down, in the process jolting free the egg that must be considered the beginning’s beginning. In the barrage of soothings and apologies that followed, Louis Glade insisted that the inconsolable Adam, along with Flora and her husband, Hank—the assistant manager at the local bank—join them that evening for dinner.

After the dinner the Glades retired to their room where the inadequate radiators combined with several layers of down comforters and a sagging mattress to produce an intensely romantic interlude. Nine months later the previously unim-pregnable Lillian Glade, copper snake and all, gave birth to a daughter. Overwhelmed with happiness they decided their princess must be named after a real princess—Elizabeth.

Meanwhile Adam, apparently himself catalyzed by this incendiary collision, soon progressed from uncontrollable stammering to speaking in tongues. In an ecstasy of thrashing and drooling he would fall to the floor and moan wild strings of babble—possessed by the Holy Spirit, demons, or the need to show off, depending on whom you asked.

From the mouths of babes, and Adam was young.

Flora Goldsmith claimed it first happened the week after the fateful encounter with the vacationing Glades. As always Adam was sitting on her lap, relaxed and docile; she had one arm slung around his waist and stomach while her free hand held the Bible, reading to her fellow members of the Inner Circle from Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians. At that point, she said, it took him over.
It
—a thing she couldn’t define but could feel inside him, a restless overexcited demon that had taken control of her son’s body, twitching his muscles convulsively, expelling all manner of grunts and moans as though it were trying to burst out of Adam’s skin to be born itself. It
threw Adam to the floor in what she first thought was an epileptic seizure, then recognized as possession.