Elizabeth and After (16 page)

The next afternoon she was back in the cafeteria, her notes recovered, working away on her essay. She had decided to be in favour of Henry II. Queen Elizabeth had her royal tours, her gold- and red-velvet wardrobe, her old masters and her hounds, but she didn’t really have anything to do. Worse, her father had died of being king and her uncle had been glad to get out of it.

Henry II, on the other hand, had swashbuckled through the primeval forest, guzzling beer and decreeing decrees. A British Caesar, he had stamped the world with his mind and more than seven hundred years later, Elizabeth Glade, a second-generation Galician-Canadian Jew studying in a small city in the heartland of a continent Henry II hadn’t dreamt might exist, was admiring his accomplishments.

In the millennia to come, in the library of a space-station university orbiting an as yet undiscovered planet, no one was going to read about the accomplishments of George VI. At best he would be a royal footnote to his brother’s story, the story of a man who had traded an empire for his bride.

Elizabeths mind had swerved to the Plantagenets—the royal blood, the good old sword-waving banner-crackling days when a king was a king, the days when her own ancestors were getting ready to be racked and roasted in Spain—when she felt someone standing behind her.

Before she could turn, William McKelvey had circled the table and sat down opposite. His face looked pink, as though scraped with a too-sharp razor and his dirty-blond hair was firmly slicked into place.

“How are you?”

“Okay,” Elizabeth said.

He wasn’t wearing a coat, just a bulky cable-knit sweater with sleeves pushed up to his elbows. His forearms were thick and sunburned. He would have a made a good knight, she thought, the kind of man a Plantagenet could use, arms strong enough for shield and sword.

“Do you want to go for a drive?”

“A drive?”

“In my car. We could—” He fell silent.

It was early afternoon. Too late for a picnic lunch, too early for a drive-in.

“Where were you thinking of going?” Elizabeth asked, afraid he might find her difficult.

“I don’t know.”

“Okay,” she said. She began closing up her books, placing them with her notes in her father’s old briefcase which, aside from his ghost, seemed to be her main inheritance. When she stood up William reached across the table and took the case.

His car was an ancient pre-war snub-nosed Ford. Dusty and bulbous, it seemed to belong to a different species than the salami king’s sleek sedan. “Still runs most of the time.”
The inside of the car was as newly washed and scraped as William himself. There were wipe marks on the dashboard and beneath the smell of soap were the stale odours of tobacco and oil.

She had supposed he would drive along the lake. That was what Lionel Meyers did when he took her and her mother for “a spin.” They would appreciate the view of the water, drive slowly past the large gabled brick waterfront houses military money had built, maybe continue to the ferry landing and ride across to Wolfe Island where they would take tea at the General Wolfe before riding the ferry home again.

But William was heading north, away from Lake Ontario, away from historic Kingston with its historic money, its historic fort, its historic parliament that its historic city-wise legislators from Montreal and Toronto had found too historic and boring to occupy. Soon he was on a narrow paved road that wound between farms and increasingly craggy hills crowned by huge spreading maples and oaks. The landscape was a hilly explosion of mud and green swarming with life. There were cows, sheep, horses, even goats. Peeling clapboard houses with long burdened clotheslines, barns surrounded by clusters of pigs and chickens and geese and sometimes a swaggering nose-ringed bull that would turn its red eyes to them as they passed. Overhead the sky was a deep luminous blue encircled by woolly clouds that floated whitely above the horizon. The sun came in William’s side. He had his window open, his left arm hanging out. The way the light came through his hair made him seem to be wearing a golden halo, and as the road wound the halo shifted but never went away.

After a while they came to a gas station beside a lake. Its windows were shuttered, waiting for tourist season but the
door was open. William went inside and brought out a large man wearing overalls. While they gassed up the car, the man in overalls talked to William, his words tumbling out quickly, punctuated by toothless laughs. William seemed to understand, nodding vigorously as the man spoke and replying with a few of his own enigmatic grunts.

William and Elizabeth started off again, supplied with bottles of orange pop that William had fished out of the cooler. William was still driving north.

“Are we going anywhere special?” Elizabeth asked.

“I don’t know,” William said. “We have to get a bit closer, see how it feels.” He looked across the seat at her, then turned back to the road.

“How I felt was nervous, afraid. I knew some kind of test was coming and I wasn’t sure I wanted to pass. Suddenly I felt like my own skeptical parents, needing to know more about him. I asked his plans for after he graduated. ‘We vets get offered jobs,’ he told me. ‘Insurance companies, government. Or I could go into some kind of engineering—I was a sapper during the war.’ Then he asked me about myself and I explained that I was studying history and English, that I was planning to go into teaching.

“History and English? What was that supposed to mean to someone who specialized in blowing things up? What was I doing choosing Robin Hood over the British legal system? But I needed to be with William. Nothing fancy, just sitting in his car or standing in the middle of the street or going for a walk to nowhere, anything at all so long as I was with him, just like those women in the silly stories my mother read in the magazines she bought to amuse herself between visits with the smoked-meat king.

“On top of a hill, William pulled the car over. We were beside a cemetery. Beyond us the road curved slowly until it disappeared behind a row of trees; then it picked up again, a long black ribbon leading finally to a town flattened against the side of a lake. I asked him what the town was. West Gull, he said, on Long Gull Lake, and so there it was—so bizarre—this man had led me to the mythological place where I’d supposedly been conceived after my parents had an accident on the ice.”

While Elizabeth admired the towering stone archway of the West Gull Cemetery, William undid the latched gate. Early dandelions spotted the grass as, of course, did graves. At the front there was a section marked by flat rectangular stones, hardly larger than shoebox tops, pushed so far into the earth their engraved surfaces were level with the grass. The dates there were all a hundred years old or more—this, Elizabeth saw, must have been the original settlers’ cemetery, a northern boot hill placed high for the view or because of some superstition. Beside and behind the horizontal markers rose the tombstones. Shiny, dull, large, small, expensive, modest, adorned, plain, fronted by flowers real or plastic or entirely absent—the hundreds of tombstones were a random testimony to lives and fortunes unpredictably gained and lost. Along a small crest stood a few trees, ancient wind-tortured maples, gnarled trunks and boughs offering their still-dense burdens of leaves to the sun. Just beyond the trees, William pointed at a double gravestone. One side read:

Carved into the other side was:

“There’s my mother,” William said. “My father still hasn’t made it but we know where he’s going.”

“You must have been—”

“Twelve years old,” William said. “They were some kind of cousins. When the second baby came along it was made wrong and my mother died trying to have it.” While William told this his face jerked, as though he were back there watching. “Sorry,” he said. “Since we were in the neighbourhood—” Elizabeth was calculating that William must be thirty-three, which was older than she had thought, and now that she could put a number to his age the confident way he had of just
doing
things without preliminaries made more sense. And then William turned, took her hands in his, looked straight into her face.

The May grass. The fragrant breeze coming across the fields. The soft sounds of leaves. His hands were squeezing hers, hard. Just as the pressure began to turn into pain, he loosened his grip. Elizabeth stepped away. The lake, the town, the farmland. The dizzy richness of the grass. The dizzy thumping of her heart in the centre of this strange universe. She had a weird presentiment that she was being introduced to the place where she would be buried. Somehow this idea seemed normal.

“Walk?” McKelvey now asked. Before Elizabeth could answer he was off again, past the gravestones and out a gate at the back of the cemetery that gave onto a path twisting down into a cedar-filled valley.

The fragrance was thick, a sweet full odour Elizabeth inhaled until she felt her lungs would burst. Further down a small creek zigzagged through a rocky descent that wound between the cedars. They sat on a large flat boulder at the water’s edge. Elizabeth took in the moss, the trilliums, the ferns, the strange gradations and shadings of colour of the layered cedar bark. She picked a wild violet and as she brushed its velvety petals against her cheek a burst of blue butterflies swept by like a convoy from another world; and then mixed in with the bright rush of water she could almost hear the echoes of the voices of children come to fish or make little boats or watch birds like the small yellow-bellied canary-like creatures fluttering nearby. The children could never have guessed that one day there would be a cemetery and highway just a few steps away from their tiny paradise.

It occurred to Elizabeth that just as the children had been unable to see the future so wholly concrete to her, so was she blind to her own future. The future she and William would or wouldn’t share. Perhaps one day this moment would be a remembered aberration, a fragrant unexpected digression in which she glimpsed her own beginning as a prelude to her launch into the kind of life her parents had in mind—teacher, wife of a secure professional or businessman, carrier of the Glade blood into a lakeside brick home complete with family silver and other accoutrements. That would be no place for someone like William. William was someone else, Elizabeth thought, but she was as blind to his invisible chains as he was to hers. Meanwhile William, who had taken out a penknife, was entirely concentrated on whittling a twig of cedar. He looked like a twelve-year-old in permanent hiding from being the kind of man the parental Glades wanted for
their daughter. His skin was flushed with the open air and his usually angular and ironic face had gone smooth and round.

Now he raised his head, smiled at her, folded up his knife. He stood up. “Better get going.” He started walking, out of the grove and towards the cemetery.

Back in the car Elizabeth felt she’d been enchanted. How was it he always knew what to do and she just ran after him? To break the spell she said, “What about your father?”

“Don’t worry,” William answered. “We’re getting to him.”

They drove into West Gull and out the other side. There was a gas station, a few stores, a church, sidestreets lined with neat frame houses each fronted by an emerald patch of May grass. Elizabeth searched in vain for a spark of recognition but it was just a small town with empty streets.

The fields on the other side of town were orderly and prosperous. The alfalfa and clover were dense and uniform, the fences solid and unbroken, the clusters of barns augmented by shining silver silos poking up like so many incongruous and boastful rockets. Between the fields and along the roads stretched long rows of elm and maple. “When men get old, they plant trees,” Elizabeth remembered her father saying. If so, whoever had planted these neat lines of trees must be under the flat stones at the cemetery.

After a while the paved road turned to gravel and the car began to jostle and shake in a bone-rattling dance that set Elizabeth bouncing on the seat. She looked over to William. He was watching her, grinning. Suddenly he jerked the steering wheel so violently the car skidded around a corner and onto a narrow dirt road.

It was late in the afternoon and the light was beginning to slant through the trees. They were so far from anything
Elizabeth knew, they might as well have been on a polar expedition. Except that instead of being winter it was spring, and instead of a sky filled with a screaming blizzard they were driving beneath a bower of newly leaved maples. William turned onto a dirt path and continued until they came to a rusted mailbox.

“This is it,” William announced. They were parked at the top of the drive. On one side was the letterbox on its tilted post. On the other, a rotting platform Elizabeth would learn had been used for milk in the days when William’s father had set out cans for the truck going to the cheese factory.

William was still wearing his little boy’s face, the face he must have worn when he walked up this drive on the way to school, a school in which he would have been taught by a woman perhaps similar to the woman Elizabeth intended to become.

“Don’t worry,” William said. He turned the car towards the house, a ramshackle frame structure, the remains of its white paint hanging from the siding in shreds. Behind it were two large barns. Wagons, farm implements, old tires, two cars that might have been parked for a thousand years or more, a tractor, a truck with one side of the windshield bashed in were scattered between the barns. A few pigs and cattle grazed among them, pushing at the weeds and mud.

Elizabeth stepped out of the car. The smell was strong and ripe. From the other side of the house, in the direction of one of the barns, there came a loud shout. “Jay-sus! I’m coming after you!”

Around the corner appeared a headless chicken, running at full speed and spouting an impossibly thick geyser of blood. William’s father followed. He was wearing rubber boots and
overalls and carrying an axe. The chicken suddenly veered towards William and Elizabeth which was when William’s father looked up.