2
Reverend Huxley interpreted the request as an order and immediately packed, put on his clerical collar, and left for Port Carling. James McCrum and the other church elders were waiting at the wharf when he arrived on a steamer late in the afternoon on the first Sunday of July carrying his battered suitcase. James insisted that he come home to meet his wife and eat a good home-cooked meal. It just so happened that Isabel McFadden, a cousin of James and a teacher at the elementary school, had been invited to the same dinner; Isabel, florid-faced, long-necked, flat-chested, skinny-legged, unmarried, opinionated, and ten years older than the guest of honour, was a granddaughter of a pioneer and loved Port Carling to distraction. She had spent a year in Toronto at teacher’s college after she graduated from high school and had been so homesick that she vowed that once back in Port Carling she would never leave again.
In honour of the distinguished guest, Leila brought out the family silver and porcelain dishes. Dinner was served in the dining room on a damask linen tablecloth spread over the solid top-of-the-line oak table James had inherited from his parents. They had ordered it, together with matching chairs and sideboard, from the Timothy Eaton mail order company in Toronto at the turn of the century. A large coloured print of “Good King Billy,” iconic figure of the Orange Lodge, defeating the Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, looked down on the dinner party from one wall. On another was a black-and-white tintype photograph of James’s parents staring at the camera at a country fair in Gravenhurst in the early 1880s. Since it was a hot summer day, the door to the balcony looking down over the river was left open to catch the evening breeze.
Everyone bowed their heads and closed their eyes as James sought God’s blessing for the food they were about to eat. Leila then got up to bring the platters in from the kitchen: roast beef, nicely overdone as everyone liked it, gravy, baked potatoes with sour cream, Yorkshire pudding, and carrots, peas, and salad from the garden. Afterward, as a special treat, there would be home-made vanilla ice cream with wild raspberries.
Isabel, who was seated beside Lloyd, tried to get up to help, but Leila told her there was no need.
“She’s been helping me with the cooking all afternoon,” she said, addressing herself to Lloyd. “She’ll make someone an excellent wife someday.”
During the meal itself, after Lloyd told her he had been raised in China, Isabel, with becoming earnestness, said that ever since she had been a little girl she had been fascinated by China and all things Chinese. “When my thoughts turn to China,” she said,” I think of Confucius and gunpowder.”
“You have surprisingly good knowledge of China,” Lloyd answered politely.
“Why, thank you, Reverend Huxley,” Isabel said. “I’ve always been interested in other peoples and their cultures. When I was at teacher’s college in Toronto, I even got to know a Chinese gentleman. He ran a small laundry close to my boarding house and I used to take my things to him for cleaning. Although he didn’t speak English, he always smiled and bowed when I went in. I ate at a Chinese restaurant once, even though my friends told me I would probably be eating cat and dog disguised as chicken. I didn’t like the foreign sauces but the rest of the food was quite good, especially the rice.”
By the end of the summer, without being too sure how it had happened, Lloyd was the new resident minister of the Port Carling Presbyterian Church. And although he didn’t remember asking her, he found himself engaged to be married to Isabel, who had prepared her wedding trousseau many years before, hoping a man like him would come along. After she thoroughly inspected the manse, she concluded that all it needed to make it fit for her habitation were frilly white lace curtains on the windows.
When it took place the following summer, the wedding was a big affair. Reverend Huxley’s parents came from China and stayed with their son at the manse. The entire congregation was invited and all the members of the extended McFadden and McCrum families came. Clem arrived at the church drunk and slept through the ceremony, but nobody minded. The wedding reception was held at the Orange Lodge and was catered for a modest fee by the Women’s Orange Benevolent Association. Everyone had agreeable things to say afterward about the tea and coffee, the tasty egg salad and chicken sandwiches, the orange Jell-O with pieces of fresh fruit encased within, and the flaky crust of the apple and peach pies.
Life would have been good had Reverend Huxley not had ongoing nightmares about the war. In them, he saw himself climbing over the top of a trench in the middle of the night and carefully making his way to a secluded place in no man’s land — a tower in a derelict church, a ruined house, a partially destroyed barn — anything with a view over the enemy’s front line. At first light the next morning, he would begin looking for potential targets, almost always catching someone unawares, someone who thought he would not die that day. He would take one shot — never more than one to avoid giving away his position and drawing down hostile artillery fire — and another German soldier would be dead. For the rest of the day, he would lie concealed under a pile of mouldy hay, under a heap of rubble, under anything that would keep him from the enemy soldiers searching the area for the man who had killed their comrade. That same night, he would creep back to his own lines, call out the password, report to the sergeant, have something to eat, rest throughout the day, and go out after dark to kill again. And when that nightmare ended, it would repeat itself endlessly in his head until dawn.
As the years went by, and as he slept in his bed beside his innocent Isabel in peaceful Port Carling, his eyes in his dreams began to focus on the faces of the men he had killed. During the war he had shot the same man over and over again. The man might well have been smiling, crying, laughing, or scowling; he might have had a fat face or a thin face; he might have been clean-shaven, bearded, or moustached. But he always shot the same man. And he always shot him in the same place, in the forehead. It had always been so easy, so simple to do. He would gently squeeze the trigger, the face in the scope would explode, like a pumpkin or maybe a squash when hit with a round from a Ross rifle. But as he relived those moments in the years after the war in Port Carling, his dreams unearthed details from his memory about each man that he never remembered recording, turning the universal target into individuals with hopes and fears and a wife just like Isabel.
Isabel would shake him awake when he moaned and tossed in his sleep and he would say, “It’s just the war. The war makes me do that.”
On the surface, Reverend Huxley was well-balanced and cheerful, a model husband who loved his wife, who was loved by her in return, a pastor who cared for his parishioners, and who was liked and respected by them in return. But on the inside, he was living an empty existence, pursuing a profession he had never wanted to follow, racked by guilt for crimes he had committed in the war, his soul taken by the devil, preaching a gospel he did not believe in to a people in a community where he did not want to live, and married to a woman he liked but did not love. All because he hadn’t been able to say no to his father, to his professor, to James McCrum, or to Isabel.
But then, one day, during a trip to Toronto, he went into the Metropolitan Presbyterian Church in the downtown to wait out a rainstorm. He sat down in a pew and listened to the rehearsal of a massed choir, accompanied by an organ, singing Handel’s Messiah, and when a soprano began to sing “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth,” he felt a divine presence in the music. He turned to the poetry he had studied at the mission school in China and found spiritual meaning he had not understood before. Soon he was reading Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, Newman, and Mansfield. T.S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” best reflected his new outlook.
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?