Not Without the Angels

Chapter 21

2011-07-26T17:55:00.000-07:00

While there was no doubt that Toby understood that his blessings, all his life of them so far, had come from a providential Other, who had involved himself in Toby existence on an intensely daily basis, there was also no doubt that he had otherwise also been in error concerning at least two questions concerning that involvement. One, that the coming and going of the light was common to everyone, and that his increasingly constant dark moments, dark minutes, dark hours, were pretty much of his own invention, inasmuch as he had been determined, at least part of the time, to think that he was bound, as a philosopher, to absorb or even create, now and again, a sort of spiritual nihilism that would not only prove him extremely tough-minded about religion, and personally detached from any need of it - like his father sometimes insisted any real man should be - but was also a form of self-discipline he thought he should undergo before he turned to the commonly known consolations of a faith, church membership, etcetera.
Simply from the regularity of the painful times, he did suspect the Almighty to a degree, and he certainly had a general trust of the process he had been undergoing, quite consciously even before he started university, but he was by no means, as they say, academically sound as a theorist of the mystical life, and now could not seem otherwise than the time when God had chosen to bring him up to the mark, but as I said, not the easy way. No wandering Carmelite knocked on his basement suite door with a copy of the "Dark Night", even the earliest pages of which would have explained with comforting clarity why he so often, and for such healthy periods of time, felt so bloody lousy, without having a cure for it, except to wait for the passing of time in a stew of ignorance, which sometimes led him into trouble.
His first hint that there might be a flaw in conquest of the Peace did not show up until he arrived at his charioteer's apartment, late of a sunny afternoon - probably a Friday - with his duffle bag and typewriter, dropped off by a taxi. He had said his goodbyes to Jelena in the early afternoon, before she went off to work her afternoon shift at the railway office, and to his roommate the day before, as he was off to cross the country as a railway porter.
In Toby's experience of travelling, the departure had always been an adventure. There had been either the expectation of seeing new country, new faces, or the cherished familiarity of old places and persons. In this adventure there was new country, one familiar face, and a third traveller he had never met, but easily expected to enjoy as company on the journey. That would be the driver's mother, whose age could not be a disadvantage, but rather a very real reminder of his beloved grandmothers. And, more than that, she was the mother of one of the most distinguished of the men who made the city hum, which gave her an additional status, and therefore a special interest to the novelist.
But the trip began on a negative note. This was not from any external item, such as a misunderstanding over the hour of departure, or the address of the place from which the journey would begin, or a failure in packing and so forth. Nor was there anything personal: the driver did not seem to have regretted his invitation, or the prospect of extra company, and anyway, if he had, he was too much a gentlemen of the old school, with all the discipline of a good education and the experience of a wartime senior officer, to say so. He was thoughtful, welcoming, and eager to set off, with his mother to collect on their way out of town.
But none of this, so promising in every other natural circumstance, could remove from Toby's soul the dawning of the suspicion that there was something wrong in the process that had just begun. He was quite without his usual delight in setting off on a journey, and began to wonder if he had a made a mistake in agreeing to go. But how could this be? It had seemed like such an excellent plan when it was first heard about, and his expectations of this next step in his unfolding life as a catechumen had all felt as reasonable as they were fulfilling. The north would offer him all sorts of new opportunities for using his talents as well as gathering material for stories. It would be better if Jelena were going with him, of course, but that would follow in due time and meanwhile he would have all sorts of other interests to keep his life full, as it had always been full. So what was nagging at him? What was now taking the spark out of a plan that had at first and for the ensuing days seemed so reasonable?
Part of him, in fact, felt like turning back. And yet there was nothing to turn back to. He had no other job, no other place to live, and he would be out of money before very long. It made no sense, in the middle of the river, to suddenly look around for another horse. He simply had to ride it out, and take what came.
The mother lived in an apartment block a couple of miles south. They picked her up and came back toward the north so as to take the Broadway route east. This was Toby's old main road for travelling to and from the university in the years when he lived with his parents, so as with any return to an area previously experienced, it should have provided him with a headfull of pleasant, or at least useful memories, although not of the sort he would have to work to summon up, as they habitually just came to him. He had known the road as his bus route for two years, then as a stretch to drive on, usually with a passenger or two, and either way he'd invariably had an intellectual recognition of his own identity every time he crossed Granville Street: he may have grown up in the working man's side of town, but he was most content in the other, not because of property values but because of the more likely recognition of his capacity for thinking to be found on the university side.
But the problem with this trip was that there was no change. On the university side of Granville he'd felt what he would have called mentally sluggish, given his current vocabulary for his states of mind such as he could identify them, and he certainly felt no pleasant nostalgia for his boyhood on the eastern side. He simply felt quite dead. He did had enough possession of himself to engage in conversation, first with his driver and then with the older woman, who was definitely a lady, but his words seem to lack any of his customary enthusiasm for telling his own stories or asking for those of his interlocutors. He had never felt less useful to travelling companions, nor to himself.
It was not by any means the first time he had been thus affected in the company of others. He had been given his great warning, of no little length in fact, the night before he had flown out of the Homathko country, to return to the city and his family home and the university, and in each of those locations the warning had been fulfilled: the night of the spirit, the dragon that fed itself on the innermost faculties, often with the most excruciating results, had become the most regular of guests, and the great regulator and antidote to the years of the opposite kind of attention from the supernatural. But invariably in the privacy of his own room, or in the company of his closest friends, or if on neutral and public ground, when he was in control of the parameters and conversation. If he had needed to go more or less completely within to deal with the pain, he had rarely been interfered with by the inexperienced and uncomprehending. Not that his friends had any comprehension that he was a mystic, which was something in so many words he did not actually understand about himself, but, as he did, they could put down his sudden mood shifts to the fact that he was a writer and thus all was explained.
One night, not long before he met Jelena, he had really frightened his girl friend of those months, by telling her something of what was going on in his head before and after a movie they went to, but the pain of the experience had not become a habit in her company, although it may have had something to do with her definite return to her previous boyfriend, who was getting his education at a campus far removed from UBC.
But now, the darkness was behaving and feeling and registering with him as if it were his only habit.There seemed to be nothing in his memory, nothing in his imagination that he could draw to himself for comfort, nor did there seem to be anything to look forward to. Never in his life had he been on such a painful journey.

Chapter 20

2011-05-25T11:03:00.000-07:00

The year Toby became a Catholic was the same year a certain European priest, a Slav in a Communist country, was made a bishop. There was no reason for Toby to know anything about this event at the time and there would have been very few to no clergy in his part of the world who knew of it either. The only European priest Toby knew of by name then - except for the well-known cardinal enemies of the Communists - was Pius XII, the Pope of the day. That means, of course, that Pius knew all about the priest he was about to make bishop, and one of the things he knew was that this priest was such a devoted student of John of the Cross that he had written his doctoral thesis, when a student in Rome, on some of the saint's writings. The Pope had good reason to suspect that the young bishop - he was only thirty-eight - had known something by experience as well as study of John of the Cross' teachings, which would give him the best of all qualifications for going head to head politically with organized atheism.
At that point, or rather some months before the priest's elevation, Toby had yet to read John of the Cross himself. He had no idea that he should be doing so, nor did anyone else that knew him. Thus, because he was regularly subject to the kind of mental tossing up and down that is the infallible sign of the early spiritual life, he had a way of getting himself into predicaments, internal, external, or both, that he did not understand. There was no question that he was being gradually, inexorably, removed from the ordinary worldly way of doing things, and sometimes he went easily - as leaving law school illustrated handsomely - but there were other times that he had to learn the hard way, the really hard way, in fact the hardest way God knows of, and what follows is the account of one of the most remarkable of these times. Had it not turned out the way it did, it is probable that Toby would never have got to relate to the Slavic bishop. As the bishop has just now been beatified, this would have been a shame. And Toby would not have been a meaningful part of his history. Who can dodge predestination?
This is not to say that Toby should not have set off on his journey, for journey it most certainly was, and the longest he had taken since he had gone to army camp in Ontario. And there is nothing more normal to young men than to go travelling. They need to see the world, as it were, if only to acquire objectivity about their own backyard, to realize that further fields are rarely that much greener, and of course sometimes they need to travel for the sake of education, work, or romance. And, other matters being equal, travel is pleasant. Toby had from childhood been a good traveller, enraptured by landscape, whether new or familiar. In the natural order, it was impossible for him to grow tired of a field or forest, no matter how many times he had seen them. And was he not to head again up the legendary road to the Cariboo, and see even more of that fabled area than he had seen the previous year with the survey crew?
But to inquire of the whole truth, would he have gone if he was still in possession of a bank account? He had been quite content to be writing for the past several months, he had all the time he wanted for reading now that he was no longer attempting to study the law, and his courtship of Jelena had smoothed out considerably since he had decided to stop yapping at the Church and to have a look at her teachings. He was even saying the rosary, with a set of beads given him by Jelena's mother. But he had run out of money. A couple of weeks as a security guard had kept him for June, as well as given him a certain amount of new and puzzling self-knowledge, but that money was getting low and he had to find more work. So he found a line on some job or another - he never did recall what it was - and wrote to an older acquaintance whom he had always felt very comfortable using as a character reference, any time he needed one. The job, whatever it was, needed such a thing.
But he got much more than he had bargained for, and swiftly. Two days after he mailed the letter he was tapping away in his basement suite when the phone rang. The potential character reference was offering him a job. Not with his own company, a major construction enterprise, but with a son-in-law who had sudden need of a clerk in his accounting office in the North. Very well to the north, and cheek and jowl with Alberta. The job would start as soon as Toby could get there, and as it happened he could get there with the caller, who was in a day or two driving up, with his elderly mother, to visit a new grandchild, and great grandchild. Toby was invited to come along, all expenses paid.
Initially, and until the trip actually began, a couple of days later, it seemed the ideal solution. Toby had, utterly, no second thoughts, and Jelena did not seem able to raise any objections, not only because he was so full of enthusiasm for the project, but also because the whole conversion process had been so full of ups and downs that she knew she would not mind a solid spell of thinking on her own, and for herself. And probably both of them instinctively felt the hand of Providence somehow very much involved, manufacturing some sort of necessary next step. The entire year had been so full of surprises, and sudden turns of direction: why should yet another be out of line? And youth, naturally, - until it learns better - is always eager to test itself. And this was especially true of Toby, who thought that now he was becoming a Catholic he could pretty well undertake anything that took his fancy as a challenge or opportunity in any way connected with his personal abilities. He had never been un-energetic, but the Faith seemed to have augmented his ordinary enthusiasm.
And to see the Peace River country! Last year the Cariboo, this year, twice as far north! It was huge up there, with miles and miles of grain fields, and the oil patch to boot. He had felt the novelist's obligation to take the opportunity to familiarize himself with so much more of his home province. It all seemed so opportune that he never thought to ask what his salary would be, and simply assumed that board and room would be the same as the going rate for students in the city. Also, he got it into his head that Jelena would be happy to join him later on, even though he knew very well she had only recently refused to follow him to Toronto while he went to work as a journalist. Truly, there is no looser cannon than an apprentice contemplative who has yet to read the rule books. It was even a wonder that God should pay any special attention to him, should take him on in such manifold and manifest ways, and yet there it was, and there was not really anything anyone could do about it, except, hopefully, put him in the path of the appropriate reading.
And, to give the organization of the Church - not always the same thing as the organization of God, especially in the case of mystics - its due, the first priest he talked to had tried to do just that, give him a book somewhat proportional to Toby's state of soul. Toby had not actually said anything about being a mystic, because at that point he really did not think of himself as such, because mysticism was not a subject he had theoretically studied. But the priest easily realized that Toby had an intellect, and Toby had admitted that this intellect was not a little lacking in roots. So the priest had loaned him a copy of Thomas Merton's "Seven Storey Mountain", and Toby had quite enjoyed the last part of the book, about the monastery. The grounds themselves were well described, the monastic life made attractive, and from his time in the military Toby knew the value of the orderly life and felt no distaste for the obvious dominance of a strict social discipline. He had always, by reflection as well as reading, made a good silence in part of every day.But there was none of the technical language of mysticism in any part of the book - at least none that spoke to him - and he very profoundly felt that his own mental family and college education had been much more satisfactory than Merton's, a very full adventure for the mind and heart. He left the book at the rectory before he headed north. The priest was a very busy man, and there was no time to talk about it. And it was most certainly the technical language of mysticism that Toby needed to learn, especially that which dealt with dark and painful elements.

Chapter 19

2011-02-10T09:01:00.000-08:00

The course of true love never did run smooth.
It's a great line, and a true one, as applied to ordinary courtships, especially insofar as they have the good fortune to turn into at least a moderate form of the spiritual exercises. When Toby was just a lad, and living in his own paradise on a coastal island while his father was logging and his mother, most definitely a city girl, trying to keep her peace of mind in the midst of a social situation that contradicted anything she had ever known, most brutally, he read, and read again, a novel by the Western writer, Zane Grey, and therefore ran into a quite acceptable image of the Exercises in that book. "Code of the West" was a modern duster, dealing in part with Grey's own personal anguish, set in post War One Arizona, illustrating the clash of flapper philosophy with what Grey liked to think of as the superior instincts of the pioneers who built the West. As with all Westerns, put together on the assumption that men are better of using their muscles than their brains, the book limped with the sentimentality that must go with such priorities, but it had kept Toby excellent company as a boy, and his divine influences had used it well on his own mind. He was, after all, only ten years old when his first read it. There was an inescapable element of quiet in the weeks the heroine spent nursing her brutally beaten husband. At the time Toby had little training for seeing Cal Thurman as an image of the crucified Christ, but such omissions were not likely to stop a Holy Spirit who had already laid certain extraordinary claims to his protege, who had always been not only content with solitude and quiet, but often found it the most exciting option among the rest of the choices. Such is life for those who read as well as they can; such is death, by contrast, for those who will not read as well as they should.
I am not talking about the course of love with Jelena, or at least not from Toby's point of view. He course may have been rougher than his, as his mind over her had been made up with alarming alacrity, while hers possibly wavered back and forth, particularly while he was making so much racket against the Faith, with all the alarming energy of a mystic in fact not actually realizing at the moment where his peculiar brand of insight and energy theoretically - in a sense - came from, but I am talking about Toby and his wife's mother.
For he did truly love her. He loved her, he loved her husband, as he was Jelena's father, and he loved the younger brother and sister. He would have loved the dog and the cat, if they had owned such, simply because they came with the environment that had produced and encompassed the young woman of his destiny. So Toby was entirely open to the lady he was convinced would be his mother-in-law. But she was not entirely open to him.
They had first met, as I have said earlier, at the front stairs of the house, early of a Sunday morning when Mrs. Omagh was heading off to Mass with her two youngest, and Toby had been thus been given a golden, very early, insight into how easily his intended could take control of a difficult situation.
Their next meeting was not for a couple of weeks, when Jelena said that her mother had invited him for tea. "Two weeks is not a lifetime, but I think she feels there's a certain stability already in the fact of you and me, so she wants to meet you under more ordinary circumstances than the first time. After all, she never even got to hear you speak that morning, with me sending you off so quickly. She's never actually told me whether she admired your docility or thought you a pushover."
Toby had grinned. "It was neither. Just the automatic fruit of my years with the military. Doesn't she know anyone in the army? Maybe I should have given a salute, but I would be hard put to decide which one of you should get it."
"There weren't many soldiers around Hastings during the war. No reason for it, as there were no training campus near by. But we did put up a lot airmen from around the Commonwealth. They came from the training camps on the Prairies. They were nice, and they had funny expressions. One of them asked my mother to "Knock me up in the morning," meaning that she should wake him up with a rap on the door. I think he was from New Zealand."
"I hope she laughed."
"Of course. My mother has a great sense of humour."
"Good. As my mother-in-law, she'll need it."
"You seem awfully confident about your future. Our future."
"My confidence is a problem for some people, I admit. But I think I have to put it down to knowing when to obey orders. You can go a long away just doing what you're told. Like right now. I'm told to come to tea, so I'm going."
"That wasn't an order, that was an invitation!"
"Your mother's wish is my command."
"Are you being sarcastic?"
"No, not at all. Any woman who raised you deserves to be very profoundly respected until she creates very good reasons not to be. Reasons plural. One reason wouldn't be enough."
"Ah, so you're being politically astute. I get it."
"Well, I have read Machiavelli, in the same time frame as Freud and Havelock Ellis, but no, I don't think of you as, say, Mexico, and myself as the United States lobbying for annexation."
Jelena laughed. "But I am Catholic, and you're mostly not. It is sort of like Mexico and the States. That's very good."
"Thank you. I like to think that I can give you something to think about as well as all those books you read. By the way, how are doing with Caitlin Thomas? Is she still depressing you? Damn good thing I read some Dylan himself last summer, just so you can't be too far ahead of me. Do you know that you're the first girl I ever met, as far as I know, who's actually read Tolstoi?"
"Dylan's death was a great blow to her. It's not like reading "Pogo"." "I didn't say it was. I'm only saying that every time you mention it I get a headache and feel depressed myself and I wonder why that is. And, by the way, I can get depressed reading Pogo, every time Walt Kelly reminds me of Joe McCarthy."
"Do you know that we have someone in Hastings who used to work in Hollywood. A really important position, too, but he had to leave because he would not testify against old film-making friends he knew were inclined to the Left. The industry wouldn't allow him to work. So he came to Canada and bought a business in Hastings. We had our after Grad on his farm property out the lake. It was an old orchard, really. We sat up all night an watched the sun rise over the Purcells in the morning. Those are the mountains on the east side of the lake."
"I didn't go to my Grad. Our cadet corps was invited to a cruise on the honorary colonel's yacht, and I decided I had to go along, as I was head cheese."
"You really were part of the military-industrial complex, weren't you? So what do you think about the man who wouldn't testify?"
"I don't know him, but I hate witch-hunts, McCarthy was a pig, and I don't think that was Hollywood's finest hour. I certainly don't like Communism, but conscience is conscience or else the world goes mad. You'd think they would have learned from the Spanish Inquisition. Nationalism is a curse. You'd think they would have learned from the Nazis. By the way, the military-industrial complex did me a great deal of good, but when it was time to leave it, I left."
"My mother will find you interesting."
"And this time, not particularly silent."

Chapter Eighteen

2011-01-29T14:58:00.000-08:00

This was the second visit to the Omagh's second Vancouver house. Nothing could ever equal the first visits to the first house, of course. The first house had been the house of his courting - if courting were an accurate description or a process in which no one in history had been more absolutely and immediately certain of his future spouse than Toby - and if it had been only a modest bungalow, by Point Grey standards, and the second house rather more palatial, it was still the castle, moat, drawbridge, and portcullis through which he had charged his steed and carried away the fair bride, through all the protests of the resident dragon, her mother. And carried her away, not only because she was fair, but because she also was so incredibly intelligent and such a reader, and so unshakable in her faith, that faith of the medieval knights, the faith of all the most penetrating and imitable writers, the faith of even himself, once he got around to realizing it. And once he had carried her off, there really was no need to keep the first house, so the Omagh's found the second one. Probably Jelena's industrious father had got himself a raise, so the bigger, definitely more elegant house was a possibility.
And this was good, because it was bigger and therefore had adequate guest room for a husband, a wife, and two children, at least for a week or two. This second house had an ample second story, so there was room to sprawl on their own without being too much of a nuisance, and no end of the privacy they would need to analyze and debate the day by day results of this return to the city.
As I said, this was a second visit, and it had come three years after the first, when from making a nice chunk of money from keeping a mid-coast light house for six weeks, so the incumbent operator could take his family off for a holiday, they had been able to fly down and show little Johanna to her very full set of grandparents. This was in general a useful visit, but not without meaningful incident, both at the natural and supernatural level. As Toby's mother had born only sons, and was looking forward naturally to making up for such excessive maleness in the blood line with granddaughter, she had begun a certain course of fantasy which came a cropper at her first sight of the little one.
"Oh! She's so chubby!" she had said at her first sight of Johanna. "I thought you said she was petite!" Toby's mother had always been full of declarations as to other people's physical attributes. But at least she had rallied and made the time at her house as comfortable as she could. Jelena's mother, although delighted to see the daughter Toby had spirited away from her and subsequently taken outside the city forever, had refused to move any of the household decorations on the lower floor at child level, assuming, apparently, that a one-year old should either be in complete control of her appetites, or have a mother that was continually interrupting the conversation to dash after Johanna as she laid hands on yet another quite expensive ash tray or delicate figurine. Johanna had learned to walk on the kitchen floor of the lighthouse and was busy celebrating her new found mobility, with a smile on little round face which indicated that she assumed everyone in sight relished her new found skill as much as her parents did.
But in spite of these minor irritations, that first return as a couple had been a triumph. Returning to his home town had always been a triumph in Toby's happy, busy, optimistic youth, and the tradition showed every sign of continuing in his compounded situtation. He and Jelena had a happy, healthy, child and he had a job that he loved and was useful at. And how many couples could say they lived in a rectory, with a priest of not a little heroic stature? True, the job did not pay as much money as would have pleased his father's worldly preferences, but it had relieved the anxieties of both grandmothers, especially the maternal. From long experience Toby's mother knew that her oldest was anything but lazy, but Jelena's, although she knew he walked all the time, or rode a bicycle, never actually saw him doing anything but talk, listen, and watch the Omagh television occasionally. Her one concrete sign of anything positive in his future, at least as being imagined by himself, had come at the end of the first summer of their acquaintance, when he had received an encouraging letter from one of Toronto's largest publishers, telling him that he definitely wrote well, but should not try do anything further with the submitted text, as the leading character in it didn't seem to do much. Toby did not write back to tell them this character was a deliberate attempt to show that he could write about an anti-hero as well as any of his peers. This particular novel had been conceived as a kind of exercise he was bound to before he settled down to deal with what he had actually experienced in himself, a kind of masterpiece in detachment from his own real person.
Even without the letter from the major publisher, the book had brought some good effects to himself. Although it was working on a play script that had set him up as high as a kite the night he had first realized that Jelena was part of his new circle of literary friends, at the party right after Christmas, that had come to an inconclusive end pretty quickly, so that by the time they were really starting to get together, he had returned somewhat to the pages he had been creating in the spring, before he went into the wilderness. They not only gave him reason to keep on enjoying the campus in spite of his continuing on as such a duffer at legal studies, but they had been the very thing he was bashing away at in the editor-in-chief's room in the Ubyssey office the Saturday morning Jelena had walked in to drop off an article she had just written. Nothing had seemed more natural, or in accordance with the unfolding of Providence's intentions than that she should pull up a chair into the doorway and start talking to him. They had talked about many things, not the least of which was how the opening night of her play had gone, and that he was coming tonight. He had probably said, rather bluntly, that while he was enjoying the writing of the moment, it was not the sort of thing he would eventually settle down to once he was older. He had gazed at her steadily, let the conversation be an even one, and looked deeply into his own interior so as to monitor his own reactions.
And,of course, only a few days before he had written her a poem, a small cautionary tale against another young man usually found in those offices, who although admirable in many ways, he already knew could never be Jelena's husband.
Ah, those wonderfully successful, even triumphant, days and years. There had come the greater ravages of the Spirit of the Dark Night in his soul, of course, and the concomitant ecstasies and floods of light, throughout his conversion and afterward, but no real failures, no setbacks that were anything but short-lived signs of redirection toward new and better challenges. It had been a surprise to turn their backs on Vancouver, but a greater adventure to be more intimately useful to the more struggling areas of the Church because of that emigration. It seemed doubtful that this meant anything to their university friends, nor much more to either of their families, but neither Toby nor Jelena would have had it any other way.
But now the grim reality of both of them being without work, for the first time ever, unless by their own choices, for the sake of schooling or creative activity.
In his heart of hearts, from the solid years of theology, especially spiritual theology, behind him, Toby knew that this too was a change of direction, to be lived through from day to day. But it nonetheless would hold its own elements of trial and uncertainty, not the least of which was being so dependent on the hospitality of relatives who had no idea at all of his own real place in the schemes of Providence. His own parents had no relation whatsoever with literature, his own first vocation, and Jelena's parents, even with her mother a Catholic, and an excellent reader up to a certain level, had no interest in the spiritual writers by which he had come to learn he had either to live by, or not live at all.
It was definitely a life few souls could be expected to understand, and he simply counted himself fortunate that he had found a wife who could do so. Who else could appreciate that merely passing from one text of the mystics to another could be such a major adventure? Or that mislaying one of them for a two or three days was such a source of anxiety?

Chapter 17

2011-01-12T13:17:00.000-08:00

There have been many notable groups of four, both in history and in literature. The Evangelists take the palm, of course, in terms of ultimate significance, but the 13th Century Paris quartet of Albert Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Louis IX rank a comfortable second; and then there are the Three Musketeers and D'Artagnan. And of course, in a text which must sooner or later deal with music, the Beatles. But four small heroes of my acquaintance do very well on their own behalf to bring up the train, and here is their story.
It was a Friday noon, a week after the annual Falkland Rodeo, and Joshua, Tom, Dick, and Toby, only a month away from graduating from their first year in primary, were walking across the school yard together talking about what to do with a free afternoon. For reasons no one would ever remember, they had been given a half-day off; the sun was shining, and their heads were still full of bucking broncos, calf-roping, and the wonderfully heroic young men who had dealt with all that four-footed energy the previous weekend.
It was actually Toby, for all that he was the newcomer to that favoured land, that held the edge on the knowledge of it all, for he it was that wandering out in the village on the previous Saturday morning, just after his breakfast and wondering what adventures this day out of school would bring him, had suddenly beheld the marvellous melee of the Shushwap cowboys bringing in the rodeo broncs. No scene on a film this affair, but the glory of a real event: thundering hooves, the wild neighing, the convulsive heave of two dozen bang tails being turned around a crucial corner on their way to the rodeo grounds. Heads flashing up and down and in every direction, flanks heaving, the dark skinned young men yelling and swinging ropes, the hooves drumming so hard he could feel it on his own stretch of gravel road a block away. He'd not even heard of the upcoming rodeo, but he was informed as soon as he returned to the house and started asking questions of their hosts, who had lived in the village for years, and the money was found for him to see it all.
His companion for the spectacle had been Tom, who he knew lived on a parcel of land of enough acres to support a small herd of beef cattle, right at the edge of the conifer forest the village was surrounded by. They had sat on the gray wooden seats in the grandstand amazed at the spectacles of the rodeo, and adopted their own special heroes. Toby's had been a native lad, who wound up breaking a bone a two when he was finally thrown of his bronco, which meant he could never be declared grand champion, but none of this disturbed Toby's sense of loyalty. He simply liked the look of the lad, and that was good enough. The other two boys had also seen the great adventure, with their own preferences, and a superior understanding of it all from having lived in the town longer.
"It was over too soon," Dick said, at the end of the school yard. "It should go on for a whole week."
"But we wouldn't be allowed out of school for a whole week," Toby said. "They have to have it on the long weekend, on the Old Queen's birthday, so people are off work and out of school to see it." Toby's mother had been born of a pair of Cockneys not long off the boat, and he had been told lots about about the British royalty.
"Hey," said Tom. "We can keep it going! We can have our own rodeo. I know where we can get a bucking bronco!"
The other boys looked at him, pausing at the edge of the school yard. There was a moment of joy, caused by memory, and then a moment of fear, caused by reality. Wherever their imaginations had taken them in the past few days, they were all astute enough to know a real bucking bronco was beyond their expertise, even if they could lay hands on one. They knew of no rodeo horses in their own fields, and the Indians had taken all theirs away.
"Well," Tom said, "not a real horse. And that's good, 'cause a real bucking bronc would kill us. But we've got a calf at our place. He's as big as a small pony, and there's a corral and everything. It'll be like bull riding. I can get a rope to tie around his belly, and there's even a chute, like they use at the rodeo. My Dad uses it for something he does with the calves. You back the calf in and hold him there with some bars. We can do the same, hold him in while the rider climbs on his back and gets ready, then pull the bars away and turn him loose."
"Wow! Holy Smoke! Let's go."
"I have to go home for lunch," Toby said. "My Mom . . . ."
"We all have to go home for lunch," Dick said. "I'm really hungry, anyway. But Tommy, what about your Dad? He ain't going to have anything to say about it?"
"He's at work all day. He won't be home till supper time, and we'll be done by then."
"What about your Mom?" asked Joshua. He was native, but his parents lived in the village, not on a reserve, because his father worked in the gypsum mine.
"She's not likely to leave the house, and it's a good piece from the corral and on the other side of the trees. She'll just think we're playing cowboys and Indians. And she'll be right, because Josh'll be with us." Joshua grinned and the other boys laughed, and everyone promised to get through lunch as quickly as possible. This was going to be an exceptionally fine afternoon. To be a spectator at a rodeo was one thing, but to have a rodeo of one's own was even better.
The calf was brown, and there really was a little chute to contain him while the rider got on board, made from a few poles, against one side of the modest area of the corral, perhaps fifteen yards by twenty, and it was definitely calf-size, with a couple of short poles across the exit, so that it worked like a chute for a bronco. As soon as the rider was in place - after the calf was caught and backed in between the sides - he was to give a yell, and another boy would yank the poles away.
The calf pretty much entered into the spirit of the thing, allowing itself to be lassoed with regularity and herded into place for each of its cavaliers. There was, of course, neither saddle nor bridle, just a bit of rope around the beast's waist to hold on to with one or both hands, depending on the degree of confidence or past experience.
As host, Tom went first, to test the process, and Joshua would finish off, as it was suspected by the other boys that he had done some of this before. Tom climbed up the poles on the side of the chute, dropped into place, took the rope in one hand, waved the free arm over his head and yelled "Let 'er rip!" Joshua yanked the poles of the gate and the calf sprang free. The excitement had begun.
But the calf got rid of Tom in less than twenty feet of head-long dash. Toby was surprised. He had expected that the calf would buck up and down like a horse, and that their bodily skills would parallel their imaginations much more closely, and take them the length and breadth of the corral, to the sounds of loud and repeated cheering. Well, maybe Tom was just unlucky this time.
They rounded up the calf and Dick went next. As Toby was the green-horn from the city, he was granted as long a period of observation as possible, allowing for Josh the expert finishing off. Dick said he would stay on a lot longer than Tom. But he actually bit the brown dust and pine needles of the corral a couple of feet earlier than the calf's first rider.
Toby set the record for the shortest ride. It was hard to believe how quickly the calf got rid of him, how little control he had been able to exercise over the determined bovine. Obviously growing up in the city had done him no good at all, and he hadn't learned as much about riding as his earlier Sunday afternoon had built him up to think! But although he hit the ground with a decided thump, he was not hurt, and there would not have to be any lengthy explanations to his mother. This was good.
There was a general expectation, now, that Joshua would be the one to control the monster and give them a real rodeo experience. He was for one thing, native, a Shuswap, from a people so long schooled with horses that it was they who brought the broncos into town for the rodeo, and were among the most skilled of the riders in the contest. Also, he was wiry little rascal, with a markedly gallant, devil-may-care, attitude about him, very much like Little Beaver in the Red Rider comics.
To a degree, Joshua's admirers were right on the money. He certainly did stick on that damned animal longer than the rest of them, well down toward the far end of the corral. He was yelling in triumph, the other boys cheered him on, and this time, thanks to the skill of his rider, the calf had to resort to real bucking, so that Joshua, in his gleaming white shirt, tossed up and down within the ambiance of the forested corral as brilliant as a schooner full-sailed in a stout wind. Now they had their rodeo! Grown up cowboys eat your heart out!
And then it happened. Although it took a little longer, the calf finished the day four out of four. Josh was tossed, to the left side, and into a cow pie. There were not a lot of these unpleasant items at the far end of the corral, but there were enough to get Joshua. The glorious white shirt was royally doused in cow shit, an ugly, depressing, yellow, and sticky. The king of the afternoon was suddenly the most unfortunate peasant.
The boys rushed to his side, and very clearly heard his first words: "My Mom's gonna kill me! This shirt was brand new clean this morning before I went to school. She'll whale the ass off me! What am I gonna do?"
The boys all stared at each other in horror. Not everyone had a father in the army, but it was war-time, and mothers generally were more ready with the belt than ordinarily. Poor Josh!
"The creek," Dick said. "It's early afternoon, and the sun's gonna be around all day. Go to the creek and wash your shirt and you'll have lots of time to dry it before you have to be in for supper."
So they trooped down to the creek with Joshua, to a part of the stream that was pretty private, and all stood by to make sure the best of the riders became a good laundress and washed out every vestige of his mishap. When the shirt was restored to its pristine and lovely whiteness, Joshua put it back on, flinching a trifle at the cold, but confident the shirt would be dry in an hour. And it was, so then each and all of the boys could troop off to their own homes at peace with their afternoon's adventure causing no one irreparable damage.
It had been, simply, a perfect adventure among small boys, although as I think I said earlier, they were never allowed to do near the calf again, for all that the four-legged one had consistently won all the battles hands - or hooves - down. And so for years, for Toby, it was only one more anecdote from a happy childhood, with his peers, and occasionally, a beast or two. But when he was much older, and more educated in the mores of different parts of his society, his nation, the philosophies of the times, he realized his childhood afternoon, under a Divine Providence that finds all things and event significant, had proven much. In his studies in the areas of social science and anthropology, he had learned of the attitudes of certain indigenous peoples, who refused, as a tribe or a culture, to obey the Biblical insistence on corporal punishment for children. He even encountered a classic Canadian text, albeit by a woman raised in England, in which on one hand the Ojibways were extolled for not physically chastising their children, yet on the other hand bewailed for having grown males, to a man, incapable of handling their liquor. Every evening in such and such a native encampment, all the wives had to take away all the knives before the drinking began.
He found it a relief to know that at least one native mother in his part of the world had known the normal arrangement for small boys.

Chapter 16

2010-11-01T17:38:00.000-07:00

In a perfectly ordered world,and especially in the world of higher education, Toby and Jelena's return to the city would have been a notable event. After all, as Toby had been a mystic from his infancy, it stands to reason that an orderly universe would have provided for him to be able to pick up some degree of useful information on his peculiar state of soul at a campus which made all the claims to excellence in higher education that the University of British Columbia was wont to do. He might have taken a course or two, written a few decent essays for interested professors, and perhaps in other ways exhibited an external sense of accomplishment, as did students in the faculties of engineering, law, medicine, the humanities and so forth. Real mysticism is actually more concrete than any other subject that requires an emphatic use of the intellect and imagination, and all other factors being equal, its achievements merit enormous satisfaction in the hearts of men and women. So, although he had spent a full six years on and about the Vancouver campus, and thus owed it an immense debt for her undoubted help in shaping the more ordinary parts of his soul, UBC had no way of officially recognizing what he had been given during his time within her ordinary jurisdiction.
There were, as one would expect, courses that actually touched on religious matters as subjects of history or literature, and he might have made a mark there, had he gone on in arts to the years of the upper class men. But he shunted over to the law school for his third year, in part to avoid more speculative studies, and thus saved himself, perhaps, from being discovered as just the sort of student who could profit the most from a subject his university, and indeed the majority of universities, possessed no professors qualified to teach.
There is, of course, nothing more difficult to come by than a complete expertise in mysticism. It is easier to get dogs to fetch non-existent bones than it is to lead the human spirit to make actual discernible contact with the Divine. The very best an academic institution can do without access to a real mystic is to identify the classic texts, set up a teacher with some theological training who has the humility not to interfere with as much of the plain speech of the books that the students can absorb and re-articulate, and hope for the best. And in fact, to give his alma mater its due, this situation had been to a small extent created in Toby's first year English class, with a reference in his literature text to the English mystics of the middle ages, and a brief but timely allusion to such matters by his professor, who may have had an inkling as to Toby's primary vocation. But there were no classes on contemplation itself in Toby's day, and little of note later, as least insofar as he was able to ascertain. Thus he was pretty much left to fend for himself, or, more accurately, to pay attention when the Lord of the mystics was fending for him, which, even though he was without a properly acquired vocabulary to explain it, was pretty well his daily bread. Unless the soul manages to go terribly wrong, God is the most reliable of investors in its futures, and generously determined to bestow graces miles out of proportion to a capacity for deserving them.
From his earliest days on the campus, Toby was aware that he was as happy, generally speaking, as any student he knew, if not happier, even much happier. He had a certain sense that God was behind most of this, but he was also inclined to credit the natural beauty of the campus' location, or the immense variety of the student body, or the inescapable demands of higher education all based on adequate reading. Then too, the university newspaper had given him a chance to write for an audience somewhat larger than a single classroom teacher, and his mind on its own had also taken up story telling. But the whole truth has an additional element, really the substance and foundation of all these things, for what is said of him so far could have been said of many students who used their time well, yet were not mystics.
The precisely indicative observations come from John of the Cross' Spiritual Canticle, where this incomparable master of the spiritual life is commenting on the significance of his own image in stanzas 14 and 15: "The silent music".
"In that aforesaid tranquillity and silence of the night, and in that knowledge of the Divine light, the soul is able to see a marvellous fitness and disposition of the wisdom of God in the diversities of all His creatures and works, all and each of which are endowed with a certain response to God, whereby each after its manner testifies to that which God is in it, so that it seems to hear a harmony of sublimest music surpassing all concerts and melodies of the world. The Bride calls this music silent because, as we have said, it is tranquil and quiet intelligence, without sound of voices; and in it are thus enjoyed both the sweetness of the music and the quiet of the silence. And so she says that her Beloved is this silent music, because this harmony of spiritual music is known and expressed in Him. Not only so but likewise He is 'The sounding solitude'.
"This is almost the same as silent music; for, although that music is silent to the senses and the natural faculties, it is a most sounding solitude to the spiritual faculties: for when these are alone and empty of all natural forms and apprehensions they can readily and most sonorously receive in the spirit the spiritual sound of the excellence of God, in Himself and in His creatures."
All of this had swept over him and through him as a little boy, when he had not yet learned to read books but could very easily be utterly absorbed by the beauty of the created world, so that simply for him go out of doors anywhere in pleasant neighbourhoods was an adventure of the highest order, and the pleasure of this was so intense that he quickly sensed that there was something wrong in other children who did not get so much out of this constant opportunity to be an appreciative spirit within a local universe of endless satisfactions. And once he went to school and learned to read, that habitual appreciation could thus take in the universe in its entirety. Thus, on at least two accounts, he was virtually never lonely. He made friends quickly - a necessary skill, amongst the regular moving of his boyhood - and when there were no other children about, he had the companionship of nature or a story book.
At the beginning, of course, it never occurred to him that his fondness for books was not equally shared by everybody, especially not his family. School was all about books, of one form or another, and the challenge of learning to read, which he realized he had accomplished sufficiently at some point after Christmas in his first year at school to be able to henceforth navigate the comics on his own immediately, and before long whatever else took his fancy. There was about his house at that point a little soft-covered book,with line drawings, about two bears who set up a house together. Much of the brief tale was about laying in provisions for the winter. There was one item he had never heard of before, a bag of malt. His Nana grunted something puzzling when he asked her what malt was. He gathered that it was in her mind an unwonted substance, even though it had been featured in the little book as just as important as the bag of flour and the bag of sugar. His father could have told him, but his father was off in England. Besides, if anyone had told him that malt was for making beer, he would still have been none the wiser, for there was no beer around his Nana's house, and at school all the children were served milk, either chocolate or plain, in waxed cardboard cartons at recess. With both a mother and grandmother full of professionally educated smarts about food quality, Toby was never allowed the chocolate variety, which was little more than a sugared composition which covered up the flaws of milk unsuitable for being presented on its own true behalf.
But his school had other compensations, including a seemingly huge school ground to boot the grade one soccer ball about, or, in the wake of a patriotic film, to soar about, arms outstretched like a Spitfire with a like-minded youthful pilot. And immediately across the road, to the east, lay a fish and chip shop, to which he had access a fair number of times. For some reason, even though no one in the house had any affection for Catholicism, this seemed to happen on Fridays. And then there was the tank that clanked up Kingsway one morning. No one ever explained what it was doing there, although it may have come about at the same time as a drive to collect aluminum pots and pans, in order to stimulate patriotism. Every child who brought a pot was given the opportunity to hurl it at a large poster of either Hitler, Tojo, or Mussolini. Carleton School held eight very full classrooms, if not more in the name of doubled grades, and there was a satisfyingly large pile of the neighbourhood aluminum, and the principal made a speech.
After teaching Toby to read, the other great cultural input from that part of the city was the movies. The "Kingsway", a member of the Famous Players theatre chain, stood just across the road of the same name from the school, and there Toby found his first experiences in being part of a great mob of young laughers, at stamping his feet among the hundreds of feet thumping at the romantic clinches, and at being scared out of his mind without ever learning that stuffing his fingers in his ears made even Frankenstein look funny. (With the sensibilities of a born musician, he was intensely vulnerable to the mood of a sound track.)He quite loved the big screen, especially when the cowboys and their horses rambled into it, but he didn't think much of Roy Rogers' attempt to be a cowboy in the present time, with all its planes, trains, and automobiles. It would be more than a few years before he could feel confident that the opening of the Old West was not actually the noblest and most romantic era in the history of the universe, and even the morphing out of this strange syndrome was only accomplished with the very marked aid of a quite the similar experience of his own. Nor was he absolutely free of temptations to regress.
But it also must be said that his fondness for the combination of horses, grazing animals, and landscape also came from more than movies or books, because with the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbour, Toby's concerned father, too far away to be able to defend his family from an invasion of Vancouver, arranged to have his wife and two small sons moved to the Interior, to the North Okanagan, first to a regular sized farm, and then to a town with a few small farms of its own, so that Toby got to live among horses and cows, and even to ride a full grown version of the former and a little offspring of the latter. Neither of these two adventures were too significant, being very much unlike anything Hopalong Cassidy got to do, but in his mere boyhood simplicity and grateful acceptance of the qualities of rural life, he was stunningly surprised by the beauty and meaning of the necessary alternative to the big city of his infancy. To be dwarfed by mountains and the stream that wound through the valley between them was at least as meaningful as to be dwarfed by endless lanes of substantial and dignified houses. Nobody had to tell him - and nobody did - that for a boy of six he was incredibly lucky to have such back-to-back experiences before he was even out of grade one. In his short life, he had not met anyone else who got to go to three different schools in his first grade. And that was only the beginning, thanks to the war.
Educators worry, legitimately in many cases, about regularly changing schools interfering with a child's education. But this was not the case with little Toby, especially as he was not moved before he had learned to read. After that all he really needed was a reasonably orderly classroom and a well designed text book, like any born reader, and in most subjects, his schools were well supplied with both. Only once was he knocked off his stride across the heights of primary education, but that is another story. This was not to say that his early education was perfect, by any means. As typical of the Canadian schools of his day, there was little common sense instruction in art, and the music suffered from a long list of negligences. But his mother sang well, and there was always the radio to give him the necessary something to try to imitate.The first songs he studied on his own were "You Are My Sunshine" and "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town." He got pretty good on both. And there was, of course, "O Canada", and "God Save the King", for those were the days when school mornings got off to good starts on set occasions. There was no religious instruction as such, but the morning also began with The Lord's Prayer and the readings from the Bible, which did much to augment Christ's showing up and speaking to him even before he trundled off to school. One has to wonder at the judgements on modern educational authorities.
And then there was the use his Creator, Saviour, and guardian angels made of nature. It too was a book, filled with unlimited adventure and stimulus, especially in the least of things. The spiritual forces seemed always to be whispering to him of the wonderment, the power, the being, that rested most significantly in everything he beheld. He had never heard of Saint Francis in the Baptist Church or the devotional conversations of his grandparents, but he did know the brotherhood and sisterhood of water and fire and forests, the rising of the sun and its setting, the moon and the stars and the rain and fog and sometimes the snow of his coastal origins. These creatures of nature were so impinged on his soul that he was automatically drawn to any writer or illustrator who knew how to celebrate their glories.
And always, at so many regular intervals, there was that light that seemed to augment what he encountered and beheld, even without his actually knowing it for what it was, like an invisible Gabriel shadowing the Tobias of the Bible. When the little Thomas Aquinas arrived at Monte Cassino, so it is told, he astounded one of the monks assigned to take care of him by asking him not, "Who is God?", but the astoundingly more metaphysical "What is God?" So Toby might have been moved to ask "What is that light?", so co-natural, although not always constant, was it to his daily journey. But he never did ask, then, because the light was never a feature of its own, but was always with the other objects in front of his eyes, so he simply assumed it went with the rest of life and everyone knew it as he did. He would be in his teens before he ever saw it as a separate entity,and it would be many more years before he was taught to see it as the light that disappeared from the eyes of those in mortal sin, and an element of identification in the spirit of a room, without or without people in it. Such weighty and demanding skills God has a patient schedule for bestowing. He has to. Too much of such ability too quickly might simply blow a soul to pieces.
But that was a long way away. For the moment in the Interior he was simply an appreciative child of nature, with a certain amount of grace thrown in here and there so as to perfect and consolidate and refer to their final and best recollection in eternity, the open-hearted experiences of the here and now in the life of a child.
It was on this first journey away from the city, for example, that he found out what marvellous things passenger trains are: travelling versions of one's own living room, with the added advantages of making instant friends of complete strangers and watching the country side slide by. And so much new land, and so many trees. He had not been without trees where he had lived up to now, having spent most of his conscious living a bow shot from the lofty first growth conifers of Central Park, but these new reaches of trees were virtually endless. And how interesting a device, the railway station, with all the fellows in their black caps and uniforms, blowing whistles and trundling baggage. And the steam engine. Oh my. He had been on a steamer once, with his Nana going to Bowen Island for the annual picnic of the department store where she was head cook, and that was a great exposure to the sea, but he was fundamentally a landlubber, because it was on the land where you could find horses and the other animals, so the mighty engines that took you over the land where very noble beasts indeed. And he even got to spend some time in a station, because at Sicamous, with its great stuffed rainbow trout on the wall you got off, and waited to catch the branch line that went south to Falkland.
And before Sicamous he was led to approach the subject of malt again, in a fashion once removed, by seeing the loftiest of all fields plants, acres of them, hop vines on their tall racks. His mother answered his question without evasion. Hop vines, and miles of open fields, so unlike the coastal rain forest, with such opportunities for horses. And Lombardy poplars! Such a tree, and not a one to be found that he had ever seen in Vancouver. They seemed immensely special, and deepest reason for that would remain a secret until he was much older. He thought very highly of the people that had invented this country.
And then there was the stream that wandered through the village, a creek in the narrowest valley he had ever seen. In the town, beside the motel - did they stay in the motel before or after their weeks at the farm at Glenemma? - there was a bridge over the creek, and he learned about hanging over a bridge rail and gazing at the lively flow of the water.
And the motel had peacocks, the first he'd seen. Obviously the people who lived amongst cows and horses were not simply content with the unexotic. Probably his newly discovered skill of reading slowed down in these new surroundings, except for school. There was so much new stuff to take in.
It was at the farm, their first home, that he got to ride a horse for the first time. The second youngest daughter, his walking companion over the two-and-a-half miles each way to the Glenemma school, his first one-roomer, took him out on a sunny Sunday afternoon. There was no saddle, as they rode bareback, him behind, along the wooded hill that rose across the road above the farm. With no cattle to round up, bandits to chase, nor Indians to flee, it was all much tamer than what he had seen in the movies, and he also got himself such a sore pair of thighs from straddling a work horse, that he could not walk to school the next day. It was his first conscious lesson in the possibility of difference between imagination and reality, expectation and realization. It had also been a let down not to have the bridle in his own hands. But she was a very pleasant girl, possibly the best mannered of all the other girls in the crowded school, so the time spent was a pleasant memory, although not as pleasant as the hours they spent walking along the North Okanagan road to and from school. It was a memory he always went back to hereafter when the cottonwoods began to put their leaves out in the spring and the unmistakable smell hit his nostrils on a warm day.
And then his mother found a place in Falkland itself, with a family who would later keep his little brother while Toby and his mother were in eastern Canada.
It was in Falkland, still a major player in the rodeo circuit, that he not only got to see the broncs and their riders, but tried the skill himself, albeit on a poor defenseless calf belonging to a new friend's father, who owned a small farm at the edge of the town. The episode left him with many things to think about, which is what the spontaneous adventures of childhood are largely about.

Chapter 15

2010-08-14T17:21:00.000-07:00

Because a maturing mystic is under contract to the spiritual - and even to some extent the material - welfare of the entire universe, travel, even to his home town that raised him, is not the most significant of adventures. When Toby was younger, of course his visits out and back were wonderful, and coming home from the wilderness to his fifth year at the university has already been discussed in some of its glory, because that was also a preface to the deepening of his spiritual life and his conversion, but once these events were accomplished, and he had also started a family, mere geography, no matter how culturally significant and full of the most useful memories, never held any sway over the inner landscape of his spirit.
Claims like this easily disturb the ordinary human way of thinking, even in pretty lofty places. As Toby himself was later rather shocked to read, the author John Buchan waxed remarkably undiscerning - and he the son of a clergyman - over an occasion when Saint Bernard of Clairvaux walked the shores of an alpine lake lost in religious rapture and quite unmoved by the natural splendors of his surroundings. Being fond of the Buchan stories he had read in his youth, Toby was doubly scandalized. Moreover, having had a home for some months in some first rate mountain scenery himself, but also knowing at the same time no little presence of the spirit of philosophy, to say nothing of a few definitely spiritual events, he knew what it was to have nature simply get shoved to the back burner. This was logical enough: once you were given a handle on the Creator, creation was the ladder to the stars, not the stars themselves.
So this re-entry to the city of his formation was somewhat flat. Perhaps if he had arrived convinced that he was coming back to stay there might have been more mental fireworks, as when he returned from the Homathko wilderness, but he had no such expectations. It was really Hastings and the little university there that seemed to be his provocations, as much as he had felt much against leaving Sitka Flats. He would try to find a reason for staying in Vancouver, of course. Jelena was quite adamant about Hastings and its provincialism and small-mindedness becoming the grave of his intellect, and therefore hers as well. In fact she seemed to have a particular abhorrence against returning that seemed quite insurmountable, and not a little puzzling, given all the merry stories of the place she had told him over the years. Her reaction was a surprise, but, as a mystic with his head most of the time in the hands of a God who preferred him to concentrate on situations immediately in front of his nose, and had the actual technical apparatus for making sure this happened, Toby did not speculate very far ahead of the day-to-day. The simple plan of the moment was to hole up at the Omagh's, nicely located for his foraging out into the city in search of a teaching post. They'd a different place now, more spacious, and a few blocks closer to Tenth Avenue.
As even the most casual reader is aware by now, Toby was not going to find himself with a school, neither in Vancouver nor anywhere else in the southwest corner of the province. He was scheduled for another destination, and, in the long run, for a task much more demanding and important than that of a simple commander of the blackboard, as noble and essential calling as that may be. Some of his assignment would be incomparably positive - further development in the spiritual life and spiritual direction - while at the precise same time he would faced - albeit in confusion and puzzlement - with as dark and negative a set of situations as a devout soul could encounter. This was not then clear to Toby, but it was perfectly clear to Providence, which knew all about, with equal clarity in each case, not only the highest possible levels of spiritual activity, but also the lowest depths of depraved behaviour in clergy and religious. His short summer in his old home town was simply an interesting interlude, with an opportunity to survey other areas of the Church, to have a chance to realize that they were not especially exciting, after he and Jelena's time in the north, so that he would be content in all the dramas and trials of his new home. When God has for a man a job in mind, He prepares him for it in detail.
In Toby's case, the preparation had been exhaustive, thorough, utterly complete, in someone under thirty, for a soul that would have to endure, as a devout Catholic, the failures in leadership that had begun to plague the Hastings diocese in precisely the same year that Toby, literally raging with the fervour that only a converted mystic can have, joined the Church and found it all he could ever hope to ask for as a place to give his entire being. It was not simply that he had spent his life so far analyzing mankind with the eye and ear of a novelist, but he had also had the mystic's intellect's repeated visits to the forge of perfection, to meet the hammer that God so thoughtfully provided for steadily eliminating all the spiritual faults known to mankind. It was not that he had nothing left to learn: far from it, and his last diocese would give him just that school of finality; but as those who habitually knelt before the sacrament of life and liberty went on their way from day to day, he was not a little unique. Perhaps he had come to the city of his birth and education for a few weeks just so God could make him further realize his own peculiar situation, little of which had anything specific to do with geography, and everything to do with what went on in his own soul.
And, of course, the soul of his spouse, who was not merely his wife and the mother of his children, but to her own great surprise from the very beginning, the keeper of his conscience and the monitor of his spirit. That's what you got when you fell in love with a woman who had read the autobiography of Teresa of Avila before she was out of her teens, and also bricked up such a nice act of spiritual intelligence by studying literature and history, and sang and acted well stuff that was worth acting and singing. If she felt strong reasons for not going back to Hastings, there was no way he could argue them away. He would have to rely on the Toby/Jelena traditional method, which was to wait on God's providence. This was a routine which had worked impeccably so far, giving them a life of constant adventure in all the things which really mattered, so it could only be expected that it would work again. Gods always knew what He was up to: the trick was not to get in his way.
But why was she so stuck on a life back in Vancouver? Surely she knew that on both sides of the family the parents were too middle class to accept their - well, mendicant, life style - and there would be constant rows over the raising of the grandchildren. His own parents were hopelessly inimical to organized religion, while Jelena's father never darkened the door of a church except for weddings and funerals of his friends and relatives, and her mother, for all her faithfulness, and admirable affections for culture, had never been entirely happy with her son-in-law's radical relationship with theology. Priests, of course, were expected to know the supreme texts of the Church. It was their job, and the laity took comfort in priests who earned their humble salaries. But that a layman should quote Thomas Aquinas, and scowl like Elijah? Especially when he had taken an unseemly lot of time to get a decent job?
If only to keep familial peace, and save Toby from one hell of a lot of yelling at his relatives, Providence had moved them north six weeks after they were married, got them out of town, up on the cutting edge of the necessities of the faith, and given him one more year as a monk in his texts and his mystical brooding before he stepped up the blackboard and discovered how much he loved the company of the souls of children.
And Jelena had gone for all that like Joan of Arc straightening out the Dauphin and the army of the Franks.
How had they got to this determination to try to re-roost in the chief market town of the Fraser Valley and its Catholics dedicated to taking it easy? What did she know about Hastings that he didn't know?

Chapter 14

2010-06-14T17:38:00.000-07:00

Decades down the road, with a Pope well aware of the early sixteenth century lechery of the Bavarian priesthood that helped give Luther his troubled platform, and a totally different bishop than the one heading the diocese of Hastings in the time of Toby's second visit - and indeed for years afterward - that little experience at the student/faculty lunch tables would have sent Toby to the chancery. He would have had time before he caught his bus home. He had not spent a winter steeped in the moral theology of Thomas Aquinas for nothing. Shame was appropriate to the young, said the Dominican, but not for the mature. Thomas, of course, was a most clear minded theologian, and not at all as confused on such issues as so much of the Church Militant in the twentieth century. And Toby himself, a veteran of inexperience amongst the clergy, could honestly wonder if the priest was blushing merely because he had caught Toby's look, blushing for the younger man's hasty judgement? Yet the girl's mood had been a possessive one, and awfully confident. In that, she was even annoying. In fact, damned irritating. Yet again, accusation in a serious matter required more than one witness. Aquinas would say that too, but the Lord had already put the rule as strongly as possible. If there was something going on, why would she flaunt it so publicly?
But he was not inspired to go to the chancery, and without inspiration, because that was what he had now been living with for some time, he could not act. And, had he done so, it would only have been a waste of time, given the bishop of the day. He did not go down that metaphorical road, but walked instead up a real one, the gravel track leading to the creek and the reservoir that served as one of the town's two sources of water, for the little campus was truly on the edge of the forest and the mountain that loomed over the town. He had to admit that he was surprised at the rejection, and disappointed, and needed some time with his old friend the natural universe. He even wept a few tears, and yet he could not see any alternative but that he return at some point. God had insisted on putting the place in his head so much, and so regularly. But what water had to flow under the bridge before he came back?
He did not sleep all that well on the bus, and when he arrived back at the Omagh family house at nine, Jelena fed him breakfast and ordered him to bed, where she climbed in and held him until he fell asleep. He recounted the interview, but without mentioning the girl, and teased his wife about their first months about this house, when the only thing she could cook for him was a fried egg sandwich. Her mother had not been one to share the kitchen very much when Jelena was growing up. Indeed, he never thought about the priest and the girl again until he returned to Hastings.
But he did speak about the priest's odd question about Thomas Dewey. "I went there, I suppose, to talk about Thomas Aquinas, and this sort-of-Franciscan asks me about an education philosopher that even the intelligent pagans at UBC had no time for. What the hell was that all about? Oh, well. I saw where you grew up. Beautiful place. This must have been all for a reason, although I'm fried if I know what it was. Anyway, we're having a holiday. You and your Mom been getting along?"
"As well as can be expected. She can't understand how you thought you could get a job teaching English in a college without a degree."
"In a place where the president asks a theologian about John Dewey they want a degree? Give me a break. I don't think he knew either the Bible or Saint Thomas from a doughnut shop. What I do know is that God writes straight with crooked lines, especially in my life. So we go back to Broughton Harbour and maybe the novelist will get a job on a seine boat. If I made lots of money maybe we could go to Toronto. Did you search out the return route?" The plan, because he had to be back to work in the village post office on Monday, was not a return on the weekly steamer, but the ferry to Namaimo, the bus to Kelsey Bay, and the little old Lady Rose, earlier a Union Steamship vessel on the milk runs out of Vancouver. He had probably sailed on her on his childhood excursions to Bowen Island.
"We can go to the early mass, and then catch the ferry. Dad said he'd drive us. That leaves Saturday to check out some old haunts. Do you want to go out to the campus?"
Toby thought for a long minute. He had by no means disliked Broughton Harbour. With their substantial library, the Church, and his musical instruments, there had been no shortage of intellectual life. The teachers had been good, interesting, and even adventurous company, and he'd got his chances to teach, even making a definite name for himself and realizing that at some point the classroom and the blackboard was his natural - and supernatural - turf. And most important, there had been no interruption whatever with his essential browsing and experiencing Thomas, the Scriptures, and John of the Cross. Moreover, he'd even got back into organized sports, with the island's softball team. Yet, from time to time, he'd missed the university and all that went with it. Truly, it had been a most nourishing Alma Mater, even had it not been where he met his beloved. Sometimes, two hundred miles north of the city, he had wished so strongly that he could simply get up from his desk and saunter into the Brock or the Caf for a coffee and a chat with whomever showed up with the same intentions. He had known no hankerings to return to class there, simply because there was no instruction in what he held dearest, his theologians, in that outpost of reformation and rationalist culture, but he could not help but miss his old friends and very useful interlocutors. Yet he had no desire now to walk out to the tip of Point Grey, as they had so often done in earlier days. Somehow, there was not a shred of sentimentality in him, and it was not just because the academic season out there was virtually done. He simply had no interest, at this point, in seeing the place.
"No," he said. "I'd rather go down town. I want to get some books at Duthie's, and buy a pair of baseball spikes. We've already had our reunion." That was true. Coming up from the dock when they had arrived in the city they had into a pair of old acquaintances, one a fellow law student, and then a girl he had known very well. They had gone to coffee with her, and caught up, and that was enough for such a flying visit. Moreover, he felt a certain degree of failure and bewilderment over not getting the teaching post, and had no yearning to talk about it.
But Duthie's was great and just what the doctor ordered. He found almost a dozen paper backs that he knew he was ready for: Teresa's Interior Castle, and the remainder of John of the Cross' series, a Belloc, a couple of Gerald Vann, and other related titles. There was no bookstore in Broughton Harbour. And it was in Duthie's, back in August before they set off from the city, that he had ordered his three-volume Summa., and quietly enjoyed the clerk's discreet show of amazement at such a request from someone so young and not in a collar. It was in plundering the book store that they truly revisited his old alma mater, for throughout his last and finest year there he had made good use of the specifically Catholic titles from the shelves of the main library and Saint Mark's. And in the winter they had also made good use of Duthie's, for Jelena had ordered him Etienne Gilson's Christian Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas for his Christmas present.
On the Sunday morning they caught the early mass at the church of his baptism, first communion, first confessions, confirmation, and their marriage, then were driven to the CPR ferry to Nanaimo. There was a bus to Campbell River, which he had ridden south when he and his mates from the survey crew had flown out of the Homathko country, and then another, smaller, bus over the dirt road to Kelsey Bay. They sailed home on the Lady Rose in the rain, and Toby found himself, among the usual passenger list, somewhat aching for the students and the mood of the little campus he had failed to get a job with.
But back at the Harbour, they took a taxi home and Toby felt good about telling the driver he'd picked up a pair of baseball spikes.

Chapter 13

2010-05-31T12:50:00.000-07:00

Four years later, at the same time of year, Toby was back in the Kootenays. This time he did not fly, nor did he travel on someone else's budget. He came by boat and by bus, not for the sake of a story, but in hopes of getting a job teaching English at the little university. He was not successful with the job prospect, but he did see Hastings for a few hours, and thus took in a nice eyeful of the town that had raised his wife. Then he had a pleasant afternoon ride back to Vancouver through the sunny, open, fields of northern Washington State as far as the Okanagan, feeling quite sad and disappointed that he had not been hired, and wondering why he had failed, after Providence seemed to have so clearly set him up to make the journey.
How regularly, he pondered, did God throw bloody great logs at the propeller of the West Coast's principal passenger ship, laying her up in the Prince Rupert dock, taking nine hours to replace the propeller shaft? Or did they simply straighten it? The technicalities didn't matter, what mattered was that the ship got knocked off her schedule substantially enough to enable Toby to telephone the university president with his intention and arrange for a replacement to take over his job in the Broughton Harbour post office for a couple of days. Then he and a very pregnant Jelena caught the boat after supper and headed for Vancouver, sliding along over calm seas, through the evening rain. They were both very merry. Jelena wasn't teaching any more, so they could call it a holiday. Her mother had been delighted to hear that they were coming, and with Toby in the interior for a full day she could have her oldest to herself. Losing Jelena to a marriage, and then having that marriage move away, had not been easy for her. On the other hand, living regularly within handy reach of a mystic would not be easy for her either.
The boat was by no means full. In fact the only other passengers he was ever to remember were rather highly placed. The Anglican clergyman from their own Broughton Harbour, the provincial minister of education and his wife, and, as it would turn out, his future employer, the parish priest of one of the nearest major towns to the north. In spite of having already taught two weeks of elementary school, and substituting at the high school level occasionally, Toby was still thinking he would be happiest at the college level. He did miss from time to time the campus that had been his home for six years. But there was no real game plan for life in all this: he simply went from day to day, with his studies centred around Thomas Aquinas and John of the Cross, learning more folk songs and writing from to time, and also learning to endure increasing assaults on his peace of mind in the eye of an uncertain future. He had little understanding of the degree to which God liked to use him simply to go about challenging the complacent, and I don't mean to use that word in the sense that Francis de Sales does.
But on that boat trip he also got a lesson on how other souls had a similar capacity, as he watched the priest zero in on the education minister. Toby was not eavesdropping, so he only learned later what the subject matter was: the priest was bluntly lobbying the minister on the subject of public money for Catholic schools and the injustice of double taxation. The conversation was all very well mannered, of course, but Toby had no doubt about the intensity and determination of the priest's address. He also had no idea whatsoever that the man was only months away from being his employer, for all that his own pastor had been intimating at regular intervals that he and Jelena would find no better place to do the will of God than the pulp town two hundred miles to the north. Living one day at a time, primarily as a contemplative, left him with all sorts of certainty about the past - except the certainty of being able to write accurately about it - but with nothing of the sort for the future.
He was, however, struck by the priest's forthrightness with the cabinet minister. The cleric obviously knew how to seize the moment in a good cause. The priest was a big man, with a very square-shouldered look about him. Toby had met him before, of course, in the autumn, when as Dean of the North Coast he had come down to Broughton Harbour with a mission preacher, an Augustinian father from the priory in the Delta. But it was then the prior, a European, that Toby had been fascinated by and got on with so well, for they had talked vigourously of theology and the saints, and the prior had told him his own story of a priest professor with certain gifts of spiritual discernment. They had laughed a good deal, and teased each other over their professional attachments, Toby lobbying for his Aquinas, the prior for his Augustine, with an Augustinian legend thrown in that pointed the finger at the Dominicans. Something about a poltergeist in a monastery that had changed hands in the Counter-Reformation.
The priest had also told Toby a discernment story, as if in his Old World trained ways in ascetic and mystical theology he had realized that Toby was no ordinary Catholic. Ordinary Catholics did not spend their hard-earned money on a complete Summa, nor study John of the Cross as naturally as small boys read comic books. Or perhaps he had talked with Toby's own Broughton Harbour pastor, also a European, a German, who, unlike the Canadian clergy, simply accepted that Toby was a mystic.
"When I was in the seminary in Louvain," he said, "We had a professor of Trinitarian Theology who was known for his skill in reading the spiritual value of something, and he had an interesting way of demonstrating this to the students."
Toby grinned from ear to ear. He no more doubted the priest than he had doubted the story of Padre Pio appearing at eight thousand feet to redirect an American bombing squadron. The Augustinian knew he had an appreciative audience.
"He asked for a volunteer to take three simple little unblessed medals that he offered. One of them, he said, was to remain unblessed. The second was to be taken to a young American priest they all knew, famous - or infamous - for saying his Mass in fifteen minutes, and the third to an elderly, very pious, priest the students were also familiar with, and of course have these medals blessed. The volunteer was to come early to class the next day and put the three medals on the professor's desk, in plain sight of the class, and the class was to be instructed by the volunteer as to which medal was which in terms of its particular status. When we next assembled, the professor came in a little late, so as to make sure all had gone according to his directions. Then he came to his desk. With all eyes fastened on him, he picked up first the unblessed medal, gave it the most cursory of glances and threw it into the body of students. 'This one is worth nothing,' he said. The second, which the assembly knew had come from the hands of the American priest, he held for a bit, and acknowledged contained an adequate grace, then replaced on the desk. 'So so,' he said.Then he picked up the third medal, held it tenderly, reverently, like Joseph with the Christ child. 'Now this one,' he said. 'This one has a real blessing.'
Toby had made some appreciative comment, and Jelena served the scones for which she was becoming famous within their visitors' circle. They contained flour and all that, but it was the currants and the brown sugar rolled within that made them so desirable. But she too had loved the story, not only for the spark of something above ordinary faith, but also for the memories of the university classroom. Broughton Harbour, with all its charms, was about as radically different an atmosphere as one could find.
It had all been a bit odd, in retrospect, how God had said one thing and then done something else. Standing at the corner of Tenth and Trimble that morning in the early summer of his conversion, Toby had distinctly heard, as he pondered his choice of clergy - the Basilians especially trained to deal with the peculiar angsts of students, or the Redemptorists wired to family, work, and related temptations - "I want you to see what kind of priests ordinary Catholics have to put up with." At the time, he had taken this simply as an application to his career as a writer, but was also a bit surprised at the Almighty's seeming slight of the class you would be most expected to think his favourite.
And, as he set off to study the priesthood as a novelist all the while he was studying the faith they spoke of, he really had seen little to complain about that wore a collar. The simple fact of their celibacy was refreshing, the obvious dedication, the humility before a young adult soul anxious for the whole truth after an upbringing in the shade of trees of error and inadequacy: all this genuine wool and a wide yard of it was more than enough to overcome the few incidents of misunderstanding that turned up, if only to prove that ordination did not automatically make an intellectual and spiritual superman. It was Christ who was the Superman, with the Mass and the Sacraments to prove it. And yes, the clergy were a sort of supermen too, for in their learning, their devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and, again, their celibacy, they casually, unconsciously, possessed and effused, without conscious exhibition, a masculinity that always had an edge on most other men. Was there in fact any liability greater than the habit of sex, even legitimate sex?
And, before his fateful bus ride into the Kootenays, for his first two years in the Church, the pattern continued, almost without blemish. He knew of only one priest the tiniest bit indiscreet, and that in itself, Toby reflected years later, may have been only because the priest was deliberately indiscreet, choosing to perform his alleged misdemeanour in a social situation in the company of a leading parish lady sure to notify the archbishop, and thus get him a most desirable move out of the parish that was driving him crazy. There were few Catholics in the Broughton Harbour parish, which in itself was remarkably isolated, and possessed of none of the cultural amenities of his native region of Germany. Toby had been happy with him as a parish priest, for the good father accepted the fact that he was a mystic. Toby was blunt in the confessional, and plainly backed up his situation with his studies. When you read Aquinas and John of the Cross as a matter of course, you were either the real thing or a very skillful liar. And being German, the priest had possessed a sensibility for all the fondest trappings of Christmas. With Jelena on the seasonal break from teaching, they had tramped the woods for cedar boughs, and decorated the altar and the church for midnight mass. It was Toby's first as part of the music, and it had a special quality of its own in terms of memory, for Christmas was the one element of religion his parents had honoured. With the new year, the German disappeared, Toby acquired something of an altered view of the clergy, and the replacement showed up. He was Canadian, the son of a dock worker in Vancouver, and someone who had known difficulties with the intellectual demands of seminary studies. But he could easily see that Toby was born to teach, and regularly, although gently enough, pressured him to go up to the little school at Camden Falls. This good Father, who had known nothing but trouble with this theological studies, was astounded at how co-naturally, to use Saint Thomas' own language, Toby browsed the Summa, and how vehemently Toby berated his own high school education for its lack of formal philosophy.
"I was twenty years old before I knew how to take my own mind seriously. Or rather twenty when I started to take it seriously. What a waste!"
The priest said he thought Toby had quickly made up for lost time.
"But I've yet to get a degree in philosophy. That's why I'm thinking about going to Toronto. To Saint Michael's."
When Toby was in that vein the priest did not talk about Camden Falls. Some things were better left to Providence, which had its own ways of guiding the externals of the spiritual life. But he had rarely met a young couple who at the same time were so much at home with both faith and a fully comprehended cultural life. The education they possessed between them was already, he was quite sure, something he in his working class background had never seen before. He could not see that Toronto could add anything worth the journey. They should be kept within the province, if he had his way. They both seemed to have so little to learn, and so much to teach. And had there been a monk at the abbey where he had received his priestly education who could sing the chant any better than Toby? Their Easter services, for all that Broughton Harbour was as small a parish as any in the diocese, had simply been wonderful. It was quality that mattered, not quantity. When Toby called the rectory to explain why they would be absent on Sunday, the priest wished him good luck, but in his heart was quite sure that the Interior could not use him as well as the Coast could, nor had it any right to him. Diocesan priests can be as parochial as anyone, especially where talent is concerned.
So there were hugs and kisses all around when they got to Jelena's old home in Vancouver, with all its memories of their first months of knowing each other - and last of their university careers - and then in the afternoon Toby got on the bus.
That was in the days before the new highway over the mountains east of the Boundary country, when the bus that left later in the day was not allowed to cross the American border through the Okanagan, arriving there too late in the evening, so it switch backed on the Canadian side until its tail nearly fell off, but on a moonlight night in the spring, with the moon shining down on the still snow covered mountains, it was a ride worth paying for, even if no job did turn up, and Toby felt quite delighted with the whole adventure. Besides, he had never before been east of Keremeos. They climbed forever, and then, inevitably, they did the opposite. The bus seemed to rocket down the narrow road, and the old lady in the seat behind spent the entire time holding nervously on to the back of Toby's seat. He could not have cared less.
They stopped at Trail, in full daylight again, and Toby bought a newspaper. If they were going to move here, he thought, he should get a look at local concerns. And on the rest of the run, into Hastings, he was quite overwhelmed with how much space there would be for rambling about, after the confinement of an island of so few square miles. Then there were the fields high up on the hills coming into Hastings, the old, small farms, with the risen sun upon them. Like Switzerland, he thought, and utterly wonderful. Jelena's stories of growing up here had made it all seem like a book of endless characters, and now he was seeing the backdrop. A Catholic university in such a setting was surely a Paradise Regained. Could Providence really be that generous?
In those days, big for bus travel with the railway having closed its passenger service just a few years earlier, the Hastings station also held a restaurant. Toby had a stout breakfast of bacon and eggs at the upstairs counter, then headed virtually kiddy corner to the home of one of Jelena's best school friends, to bring his news and kill some time before his appointment with the university president. He was not due until eleven.
When the time came, Toby wound his way up the hill, heading south-east as he climbed, loving the view of the lake and the loft of the mountains on all four sides of him. What a place to learn! What a place to teach! Who could be unhappy in such a setting?
The president wore the clothes of what to Toby seemed to be a monk, but he was in fact a friar, belonging to one of the hundreds of branches of Franciscans, this one founded by a convert from the Anglican persuasion.
He was a little taller than Toby, and striking in an intellectual sort of way, not quite fifty, and his order carried a lot of credit with Toby, because a good friend of his in Vancouver had always spoken so highly of a priest from it that was a friend of his. And Toby's habitual gratitude for the Catholic priesthood at first made him completely open to any virtues this priest/friar might have had. But as they talked - and Toby made it plain to this man of the cloth, this potential spiritual director - that he was a mystic, a Thomist, a Carmelite in spirit - he began to feel that his adventurous effort was getting him nowhere, especially when the priest/president asked him what he knew of John Dewey.
Toby, fortunately, knew nothing of John Dewey, and was puzzled by the question. But they had talked about Jelena, somehow, and the president said that her degree could make her useful to the university. Toby balked at that, the president said he could not see his way clear to hiring Toby, but he would like to invite him to lunch in the student/faculty cafeteria. After all, he had traveled a considerable distance.
Thus, they went to lunch. It was simple fare, the species of which is well known to university students the world over. Hot dogs, and something besides that suffers for carbohydrates.
Conversation somehow continued, in spite of Toby's disappointment. And then, out of the blue, came a student . A female student. She came from elsewhere in the cafeteria, but she came to murmur something in the ear of the president of the university. She was undoubtedly an attractive young wench. A presentable body, a comely face. And as this whisper took its toll, the friar/president blushed.
Toby by that time had been through a lot of priests. But this was the first time he had ever seen a priest blush.

chapter 12

2010-04-12T17:05:00.000-07:00

But the writing course was not the only great adventure of the summer. Before the class, because Toby hurt his neck diving into the university swimming pool, he ran into an inspiring moment with formal philosophy; and before that, while he was still working the day shift at the paper, he got himself a flight into the Kootenays, for his first look at the region, and even a spiritual sighting as a useful reference, as it would turn out, for a later time. He was able to see part of the diocese of Hastings, to fly into it, to walk around on a small part of it, while it was still under the guidance of a good and virtuous bishop. These events can often seem so ordinary at the time, like not being in jail, or not going hungry, and then comes the onslaught of disorder and deprivation that put the ordinary blessings into the perspective they deserve.
It was the third time in his young life he had used the Sea Island airport facility. His very first flight hand landed there, a mighty C-119 transport, built for carrying tanks as well as soldiers and other goods, bringing him home from his first summer at officer cadet school. It had been a great journey across the country from military Dorval, at Montreal, with a hold full of other cadets, a number of them French Canadian and awfully friendly as well as humiliatingly bi-lingual. The skies had been totally clear from central Canada to Alberta, where they had stayed over night in the air force barracks, and then, in the morning, full of cloud almost all the way home to Vancouver. Calgary was invisible, totally, and the Fraser Valley clouded and wet until they were a few hundred feet above the tarmack. The entire flight, they had been told, was for the purpose of training a navigator, and obviously had not been wasted by perfect weather.
His second plane ride had come two years later, when he and fellow members of Older Boys' Parliament from the Vancouver area had flown to Victoria. Just a DC-3 this time, with his return flight delayed because a mighty fog had come down on the Victoria airport, at Patricia Bay, and he had chosen to fall back on friends instead of switching to the night boat boat. He thus got to a very pleasant New Year's Eve party among the Victoria socialists - and pinker - during his surprise lay-over, which mention of prompted one hell of a right wing outburst from his father after being picked up at the Vancouver airport. Toby was quite shocked, actually, and not inspired to think much of a view of democracy that denied free association of people and ideas.
He had quite enjoyed hearing about social construction of hospitals in Bulgaria, and for a long time afterward fondly kept a little wooden cigarette holder with the nation's name engraved on it, a sign of friendship given him by the raconteur. Toby's father had loudly insisted that this kind of conduct would have the RCMP investigating him, ruining his career as a lawyer.
Toby thought that anytime the RCMP started behaving like the KGB the country was not worth having a legal career in. He had already had rather profound spiritual thoughts about the demise of Soviet Communism, as a personal project of his own, which he had not been able to share with his professionally irreligious sire. This little mission, which he did not totally understand, having had no ordinary instruction in the ways of the spiritual life, had been one of his graduation presents, although not from human sources.
For this third flight, the military was again involved.
The run-off from the snow pack in the province's mountains was the biggest since 1948, when Toby's father had gone to the dykes on the Fraser, to fill and carry sandbags, no doubt with memories of when he had filled and carried sandbags to stack around the anti-aircraft guns as protection against the shrapnel from German bombs. This year the Fraser flood was not that extreme, and his father had stayed in his office. But the army had been called out to the Kootenays, to shore up the dykes that protected the agriculture on the Creston flats, and by the time the soldiers had been at work for a few days the officer in charge of Western Command decided to fly in from the Coast and have a look. His public relations man called the Star to ask if they wanted to send a reporter.
Toby was still on day shift, and not remotely near any stories that would require him to be in the city the following day. The city editor cupped his hand over the receiver and asked him if he wanted a plane ride.
"Where to?"
"Creston. The flood on the Kootenay that's threatening the dykes there."
"But we already have a man there. I've been reading the Star."
"You might find a different angle. Don't you like flying? Especially in a military aircraft?"
"Sure. Crossed the country in a C119 two years ago, and came to no harm. I guess I can entrust my life to the air force once again. Where and when do I connect with this expedition?"
"Be at the air force station on Sea Island tomorrow morning at eight."
In the morning he talked with the co-pilot, who had stayed on in the service after the war. The pilot was prophetical. It was a cloudy morning, almost raining, and he told Toby that British Columbia was the worst part of the country to fly in. All the mountain ranges running north and south against the prevailing winds from the Pacific meant that every valley had its own weather system. From one mountain range to the other you never knew what you were going to run into. Toby said that he remembered this from his ride west in the giant transport plane.
"We went on instrument somewhere between Edmonton and Calgary, and never saw any of southern Alberta at all, but we did see some of the Rockies, then cloud again, then a break in the cover that gave them sun and a view of an airport somewhere in the interior, probably the Okanagan, and then solid cloud until the plane dropped through the late August drizzle to five hundred feet above the tarmac at Sea Island."
The co-pilots said he was all too familiar with the provincial variations.
This time the weather was better, and Toby got a good look at the province. They were in a Canso, which meant he could look out the old machine gun or camera blisters on either side of the aft fuselage. The brigadier who was flying in to inspect his soldiers and their situation was swiftly airsick and stretched out on one of the hard bunks between the blister section and the cockpit. Toby, possessing only a single shoulder pip from his time in officer cadet school, naturally felt a deference as well as sympathy for the poor brigadier, but he was very much at ease with the reporter from the morning paper, chattering away either in the belly of the plane or the stern. The brigadier was too under the weather for them to exchange anecdotes from their respective military careers.
When they reached Kootenay Lake, the clouds were high, letting them turn above some place for which Toby had no name, and proceed south above the main lake, meanwhile beginning to experience some turbulence. It all seemed most adventurous, as brand new country always does, and Toby and the other journalist were both feeling pretty pleased with themselves, by this time getting a bird's eye view of the fiord below them and the mountains on either side, adventure tourists at the expense of the country and their employers.
And then they hit an air pocket.
In all his varied reading, Toby had seen mention of air pockets. He probably could not have told you exactly where - maybe in the Biggles episodes of his early, wartime, childhood; perhaps from a volume of Haliburton's travel stories - but he would not have been sure, and whatever he had read had not really prepared him for the reality. And certainly he had not heretofore experienced an air pocket, neither in the long trip in the C-119 from Montreal, nor the DC-3 flight from his home town to Victoria, for the sake of an Older Boys' Parliament gathering in the legislative assembly. So, with only a literary reference, and no experience, he had not the foggiest idea of what the hell was going on with the airplane.
Suddenly, simply, it dropped, and by no means for a mere instant. There they were, with the clouds above, the mountains on either side, the lake below wonderfully visible through the plexiglass of Canso's machine gun blister, all's well in the comfort of a conversation between two working journalists, and now they might be about to be killed. Their vehicle was falling out of the sky.
Afterward, the radio engineer said it was the deepest air pocket he'd ever experience, and he would carry the scar of a deep gash on his forehead as witness for the rest of his life. The brigadier, lying horizontal on the short, hard, bunk admidships, was thrown against the ceiling of the aircraft, and had a bloody nose. Toby and the other reporter became space men, floating in the aft cabin like balloons, until the plane finally regained normal air density and they hit the floor with a painful thump.
In the lengthy interval, Toby saw clearly into his favourite sins and knew, although the thought he was going to die, that he wasn't ready to do so.
But nobody died. The Canso righted itself and droaned on down Kootenay Lake until it landed outside of Creston and an army truck took its passengers to their destination, the end of a long field surmounted, at its southern end, by the rise of a dyke. It was a respectable trudge to the top. Toby, from his minimal experience as a surveyor's chainman, tried to calculate. Thirty vertical feet? Fifty? At any rate it was one hell of a lot of dirt - albeit nicely covered by grass - under his own journalistic feet.
Now in spite of growing up in Vancouver, Toby had not actually had any great experience of dykes. As a schoolboy, he knew of their importance to Holland, busy stealing land from the North Sea, and he had his father's tales of the great 48 flood on the Fraser, and of farmers stealing sandbags. But a real dyke at flood time, even though one of his regular beats was the Richmond Municipal Council, he had not experienced. Thus, in his ignorance, he expected that when he got to the top of his mighty grass covered hill, he would find himself looking down, something like ten or fifteen feet to the surface of the mighty Kootenay River.
It was not so. There was a foot or so of sandbags on the top of the dyke, laid down over a long circle by diligent soldiers, and the water was lapping at the very top of the sand bags, with only an inch or two to spare. And the water volume the dyke and the sandbags hoped to contain was not a mere river, but a bloody ocean, water to the left and right as far as the eye could see, spreading southward into the United States without a visible horizon. The sheer massiveness of it was a shock to the summer journalist. It seemed so much bigger than anything that could happen on his own native river, the Fraser. He turned to look back at the hill they had so ignorantly climbed. Well, he was ignorant. Perhaps the other reporter was more knowledgeable about dykes, being an older man by a decade or so.
"My God," Toby said. "Would you look at that! I had no idea it was so big!" He turned around and looked back at the hill they had climbed. As always, from the top the height looks much greater than from the bottom. "Can you imagine what it would be like if this thing let go? The tidal wave would go for miles!"
"Now I know how Noah felt," said the other reporter.
They walked back down the slope of the dyke and were driven into town on the army truck. Toby told the other reporter he had learned to drive on a truck just like it.When they got into Creston Toby went to one of the banks, where he knew one of his friends from the old neighbourhood was working. The lad was not at the bank at the moment they told him, but at home for lunch. They gave Toby the address and he zipped off to the lad's rooming house, to have a visit and to learn that his friend was not really one for small towns and could hardly wait to get a transfer back to the city. Busily being overwhelmed by nature, Toby thought of the old fable about the two mice visiting, one from the city and one from the outback. Art said they should get together when he was back in Vancouver for Christmas.
The flight home stayed utterly level, although at 13,000 feet the crew put on oxygen masks, leaving the passengers - no problem - to survive on their own. Toby could not really think of anything much to write about, the danger of flooding now being over, and he was not at all aware of the symbols the journey had left him with for the future, but it was always an adventure to see more the province, especially from the clouds. Vancouver might not be bigger than New York, but the province was, and he was a country boy at heart.

Chapter Eleven

2010-01-13T15:58:00.000-08:00

Is it not fascinating how easily we become our own worst enemies? Just think of Satan, Judas, and certain ecclesiastical bodies of recent decades.
For Toby to attack Saint Ignatius Loyola was most certainly one of the major acts of ingratitude and hypocrisy of his times. He may even have set, quite unconsciously, mind you, some sort of Olympic record for this kind of achievement. For the simple fact was, when you sat down and thought about it, that he had actually been living out of the feisty Basque's most famous note book for most of his conscious life. Ignatius was and is, of course, the master of spiritual retreats and personal social changes that can initiate spiritual growth. Attacking the founder of the Jesuits and one of the sixteenth century saviours of Christianity was like denying that he had a father, although, again, we do have to admit that his gaffe was somewhat unconscious, given the precise lack of Catholic instruction normal to bright young men fortunate enough to grow up in the bosom of Holy Mother Church. And yet how many times in his life had he been given the grace to withdraw from all the hubbub around him in order to think things out or get a grip on a new and difficult situation, and how many times had he been able to depart from present company to find new company and a therefore a different view of himself? And the fact that he had done these things without benefit of clergy, Jesuit or otherwise, was totally irrelevant, as he had always had the company of his guardian angel and, to no small degree, that angel's superiors. I've known many a soul who came home from one of those outwardly organized retreats, with a spiritual director and all, in no better shape than he or she went, and on occasion, worse.
But of course, Ignatius was not just talking about getting away from it all. His purpose was not really all about new techniques for dealing with old stresses, but learning how to grow up by finally getting down to what Christ, Mary, and the Church were all about, in more or less adult fashion. And Toby was still battling with all that authoritative stuff.
Just take the episode of two summers previous, for example, when in effect he had gone on retreat not for a week, not even merely for a month, but four entire months. This was in fact much closer to the original standard for a thoroughgoing run through the spiritual exercises as they were known of before Ignatius came up with the image of thirty days. Nine to twelve months was the original schedule, so that Ignatius' scheme, fascinating is it sounds, and effective as it is for those genuinely prepared by a lengthy previous attention to one's Christian and even spiritual duties, is an apparent shortcut only really justified either by an assumption of a lengthy, dedicated, follow up, or else a director who is nothing short of a soul in the full blown possession of the seventh mansion, someone who is in the inner circle of those who know the Transformation.
Of course Toby had no such high falutin' concepts as these by which to talk himself into that very full summer. He had merely decided that it was time to move out of the family home, as young men are wont to do, not only because he had realized he could no longer trust his father's concept of his professional future, but also because the family was moving anyway, heading significantly east and even further from the campus. And above that, to be consistent with this hypothesis of a retreat, because he knew he had to be on his own. He had some thinking to do, and some different living.
But he not planned on as much solitude as he got, he had not planned on a retreat.
In his first weeks with the newspaper, they put him on the day shift. He went to work with the rest of the world, at eight-thirty. They had to supervise him, of course, to see how he would do at the newspaper game. A college paper was one thing, a downtown daily in a major city was another. But he did all right, albeit with plenty of company of peers and supervisors, and so in a few weeks they put him on the afternoon shift, so he could cover a couple of regular municipal meetings and the election campaigns of candidates not so close to the top as to be cabinet ministers. He liked that. The office was much quieter in the evening than in the day, and he got to drive all over the city and local area when he had to leave the office. The paper paid mileage for his car. He was very happy, with the most mild-mannered editor in the building for his boss, and a growing certainty that he did not want to be a journalist for the rest of his life. No one else in the place seemed to know or care very much about literature, and that, he was pretty sure, was a valuable lesson for someone like him.
But for now, the situation was perfect, and just landing the job itself, without actually having to go looking for it, or beating down any doors, he took as a sign that as long as he stayed true to his inner promptings, the outside of him would be looked after. It was one of the older staffers at the university paper that had set him up, back at the end of March. What was he going to work at for the summer? The older lad had taken an interest in Toby's writing a novel, in the first months they had known each other, when Toby was in first year but Toby had not been into having anyone read what he knew was not really the themes he was born to deal with. Toby said he hadn't really thought about his summer job, he simply knew he wasn't going back to officer cadet school and he was going to try to pass his first year law exams. The other lad said that the downtown Star needed one more summer reporter.
Toby had boogied and got the job. The money was the least he'd ever made in the summer, and keeping himself was going to cost, but the opportunity had been too good to miss. The universe had unfolded according to plan. And then it got even better with the afternoon shift because this meant he would have the morning free to take the creative writing course that was being offered in July and August, headed up by none other than Lister Sinclair, whom Toby remembered from Sunday afternoon CBC radio theatre in his house. In his second year, his last in arts, Toby's writing angels took him into short stories, and did not seem to object to his aiming at outlets like the Saturday Evening Post or the Star Weekly. He failed, of course, but had a good time anyway. But in his third year, when he was less than brilliant at his legal studies, and was also busy working in a mill a long way from the campus, he found himself ready to deal with the mentality of the "little magazines" and wrote a small handful of tales which were not romantic, nor did they feature guns. He had shipped these off to the campus teacher of short story writing, who answered kindly, invited him for a chat, told him he could write, and that he would really help himself by attending the summer course in creative writing the English department was setting up for the summer. There would be one general class, for all the students at once, for the first hour of the morning; a short break, and then three separate classes: poetry, drama, and the short story. Regardless of whatever section he chose, the teacher said, Sinclair was too good an opportunity to pass up.
All progress in the spiritual life begins with self knowledge. It is to accept the role that the infinite almighty has fore-ordained for oneself that brings self-recognition, honestly, thus contentment, thus creative progress toward an accomplishment that will be genuinely useful to the completely informed sprawl of mankind, especially as it is sprawled over the endless plains of eternity at the event of judgement day. Now, item by item, Toby had suffered no shortage of events in his young life that confronted him with an accurate knowledge of himself, both negative and positive. Sometimes this came about from circumstances in which personalities played only an incidental part, on other occasions the personality was everything, whether adult or a peer. He had been very fortunate in some of his teachers, a particular scout leader, and two or three of his university professors, in the adult category, and extremely blessed, he was to think for the rest of his life, in a number of his peers, especially at the university. He had been, and was to continue, coming through a golden age of west coast journalists and critics.
But Lister Sinclair was something else again, an utterly pleasant, utterly stunning, utterly liberating shock, and perhaps the single most spiritually freeing encounter Toby was to know in his life as a young adult, in the sense that he was a real, live, working artist, a writer, performing in the classroom Toby sat in happily five days a week, and not merely a slice of wisdom gleaned from a book published far away.
For Toby, he was the source, precisely, of a most inspiring flight of imagination. This was something utterly possible. He, Toby Skinner, might one day be a teacher of creative writing! It was possible, it was exciting, it was himself, reacting to the inspiration of a genuinely learned, world traveled, professionally successful, mentor. It was the sort of thing he had expected would catch fire in him from his law school professors, yet somehow never had. Nor had it happened in officer cadet school, from his instructors there. And none of the newspaper reporters, interesting characters as they might be, were making him feel so much at home.
Nor, in fact, was the actual instructor in short story writing. He was a professor in the subject, from an American university, with a story recently published in a leading American journal of creative thought, but he was not a spark for Toby,nor did Toby catch fire from any other member of the class, with an exception that one of them would later proved profoundly, inescapably, useful. To be blunt, Toby was personally convinced that he himself was the only member of the class who would ever amount to much as an author. One young man showed enough talent, when he read his piece, that Toby was later to speculate for a time if he might have been Jack Hodgins, but Hodgins was too young. Everyone seemed to write too close to "what they knew", which was their own personal sensitivity. Too small a palate, too few colours. But this made the experience, in its own way, a model for the spiritual exercises. Sinclair was the consolation, the other business the desolation. While the newspaper office might not have been Parnassus, it was much more real than the second classroom. Toby remembered all the names of his fellow reporters, very few of the fellow students.
Should he have signed up for the play writing course, which was the part Sinclair taught? Afterward, he would wonder. The two of them might really have hit it off, as from the first time he'd stepped up to the story-teller's keyboard Toby had known he could write dialogue as easily as catching a bus. But would Sinclair have tried to convince him to move to Toronto? In which case he would never have met Jelena, never had his wonderful months in the time that followed the course. No, it had been right to tough out the Slumber Lodge for those two hours, after Sinclair and before lunch. At least he had been resting after the very short night's sleep he got getting home at two-thirty.

Chapter Ten

2010-01-01T07:22:00.000-08:00

Broughton Harbour had turned out to be interesting, fulfilling, and a great rung up the ladder to the point where Toby became settled and happy in finding himself as a classroom teacher, but no reason for its purpose in his life was more important than its proving his prophetical instincts. To repeat, the world is full of amateur psychologists, the naysayers of divine wisdom and foresight in the name of the goals and standards of this or that form of materialism, and in order to deal with them at each and every corner on which they like to show their faces - even faces disfigured with good and supposedly kindly intentions - the prophet needs hard external facts as well as faith in his inner promptings. In his own life, these hard facts become a track record, an historical manifestation of the first principle of metaphysics: a thing is what it is. There is no rule on the face of the earth that an amateur psychologist likes to break more than this one, nor is there any rule on the face of the earth which can faster break up an amateur psychologist.
It was hard fact that precisely a year before the move to Gull Island, Toby finished a novel. It was his second completed long work, and an experiment in trying to make a full text out of a lot of things he did not really believe in, nor much care about, a kind of deliberate mistake in the name of proving he could hang in there with a lot of faithless moderns just as well as they could hang in with themselves, before he turned to the things he actually did care about. He definitely accomplished his goal, for the head editor of the major Canadian firm he sent the manuscript to wrote back to tell him that while he plainly could write well, his leading character didn't seem to do much. She recommended that he not try to rewrite the story. Toby was very happy with the result. To have it officially on paper from one of Toronto's most respected editors that he wrote well was one in the eye for his prospective mother-in-law, who by then had started a steady campaign against her daughter marrying him; and to be virtually ordered off the existentialist beat was a solid help to his sometimes confused way of going about his apprenticeship. He felt that he had done his duty by the losers, and could now get on with life as he had been raised to take hold of it.
But the most important aspect of the effort was how he had concluded the story, with the young man who didn't do anything taking the girl he had just met off to a Gulf Island, significantly enough just like the one he had lived on for a while as a boy.
When he had started this novel, earlier in the spring, he had just left law school and was at last once again pouring himself into writing, with once again a tyro writer for a roommate, and battling with the death-throes of his own arguments against particularizing his talents within the bosom of the Church Universal. He had, as he saw it, lofty reasons to leave himself open to any and all of mankind's beliefs, so great was his intellect and imagination that putting it to the service of one institution was to rob all the others.
But he also by then had a battle going with Jelena, who had grown up in a mixed faith family, without being especially grateful for the opportunity, and thus was not looking forward to the same problems repeated under her own roof, especially with a husband with a willful intellect like young Mister Skinner, the instinctive debater. His entire family had assumed he would do well at law, and throughout his adult life people periodically thought he should be in politics.
"You're all over the goddamn place and you're wearing me out! I'm not God! Go find Him for yourself or we're through!" Unlike him, she rarely swore, so this was quite the outburst and among all the other issues he was dealing with, Toby took it to heart. And then, on a strictly personal issue, he had a further rebuke from the Virgin Mary herself. She was consoling, but also critical - not unlike Jelena - and he came out of that event admitting to himself that it was time to take on the Church. He was, after all, for all his mental powers, simply one more poor, stupid, sinner who would need all the offices and sacraments of Catholicism to get his butt out of the hot seat.
And everything after that had been most adventurous. Good Lord. He was a reader, a writer; he knew great copy when he saw it, and great copy he was getting after his turn around. The priests were one after another the most engaging characters, about as stereotyped or predictable as a flock of all species of birds in a hurricane. And he even landed a lovely case of scruples as soon as he changed directions. The Devil, naked as a stripper, coming at him one smoking June afternoon on Tenth Avenue as he walked home from his temporary job as a security guard, laying on him that he was only becoming a Catholic because it would give him an unusual edge as a writer! Converts were automatically interesting, especially if they were writers. It seemed almost unfair, the advantages you had in the market place if you were a convert. What a position to be in, when you'd always preferred to play with the odds against you.
But none of this had turned him swiftly into a Thomas Merton - author of the first book to be given him by priest - nor a Chesterton, whom he had been sent to some months later by a priest who taught history at the university. With his fiction, whenever he seemed to have the grace to write it, he leaned heavily on his old love of nature and quite ordinary human activity, staying away from theological issues until he clearly had the spark to handle them. Thus the book he had begun when he left law school for the second time, not long after Jelena had crossed his bows, even though the last half of it was completed weeks after he had plunged into Rome, reflected none of his new interest.
Nor did it reflect, except in an off-handed symbolic sort of way, the most interesting element of his life, which in fact had always been there to one degree or another, that he was a mystic and already a veteran of aridity and other forms of the dark night. It could not show these things, of course, as long as he was totally ignorant of the language of mystical discourse and understanding; and even more important it could not show them until the Holy Ghost gave him both inspiration and permission, and that which no novelist has ever progressed without, a list of characters and a plot to put them in.
As has been said, he had been born to run against the long odds, and permission of the Holy Spirit being withheld is the longest odds the world can ever know.
Jelena had nailed his predicament early, although not according to the norms of mysticism. "You're like Churchill. You'll have to do a lot before you can write about it."
"But he wrote a novel when he was young."
"And who reads it now? Fin de siecle. You don't want that." She laughed. "I'm not yoking myself to the editorship of anything so forgettable as Winston Churchill's first novel."
"You've read it?"
"No. And that's why I know it's forgettable. I don't mean to be mean. I only mean to be comparative. To be Aristotelean and sensitive to categories. I just won't have you writing any ordinary old novel, that's all."
"Thanks. I think. Don't you ever read ordinary novels? Or is it always a combination of D.H. Lawrence and Saint Teresa?"
"I read what interests me. What keeps me above and away from the mundane."
"You don't worry about the common man? Or what he reads?"
"I don't believe in the common man. That image is even more ridiculous than the image of Plato's Republic. And it's far less noble as an image. The common man is the illiterate imbecile that Pilate gave into, if you really want to know. I suppose that was necessary once, for the sake of the salvation of mankind, but there's no reason for it to happen again. Where did you get this common man idea anyway? In law school?"
"No. In law school you have the doctrine of the reasonable man, which presumes the ability to think. I suspect you don't believe the common man can think."
"It's not that he can't, because God gave all men reason. It's that he won't. He prefers to remain illiterate. If you won't read, and read well, you won't think well. And you don't really believe in the common man either."
"How do you know?"
"Because of the way you talk about your friends. Not one of them is a 'common man' to you. They're all real individuals. You love them, you really enjoy them. Nobody enjoys or even thinks of loving a common man. He's just a principle, a false principle, for justifying one more ridiculous doctrine. In Russia it's the proletariat, over here its the common man crowd. You're not all wrong. You like people. You're a folk singer. You enjoyed working for the biggest daily in town and writing for twelve-year-old minds. It was a good place to be for a while, but you have to move on. You're too smart not to."
"You're not just being ambitious for your future husband?"
'I'm being ambitious for my own peace of mind. Having to listen to twaddle at breakfast would give me indigestion. Maybe an ulcer. And you're being far too presumptuous about the husband bit." But she would smile, and maybe give his arm a squeeze and he would feel that the debate had been worth it.
So he had given up the common man routine, somewhat, and moved on to abuse Saint Ignatius, the Spiritual Exercises, and the good old principle of having to believe that if the Church says black is white you'd better believe it, and then, because the pains in his head kept threatening to kill him, he thought that the least the scientist in him could do was to give Rome a chance.
By the time they arrived in Broughton Harbour, a year later, he was thus in great shape to take the place by the throat.
Bloody converts.

Chapter Nine

2009-12-27T16:29:00.000-08:00

Actually, leaving the city had come as a surprise. In the final weeks of their engagement, in the first weeks of their marriage, the old town still held all its charms. Through friends they had learned of an apartment in Kitsilano that could be sublet for the summer. A professor and his wife were going to Europe. As students they were of course none too well-heeled, and actually had little money to get married with when Jelena finally set the date, but she did quickly find a secretarial job, and then through the same friends who knew about the apartment, they were both, as singers, signed on for a short CBC Vancouver filming of a beach party centred on folk songs. Toby was not one of the head-liners, and found himself happiest sitting on a log feeding hot dogs to a German Shepherd, but the money was good, covering six weeks of the summer rent from an afternoon at the seaside.
And as well, somewhere in that time frame, he had found himself one sunny afternoon pondering the fact that the world had yet to hear of a native saint from the city of his birth. He was by that time completely lost to the norms of the world, utterly wrapped up in the writings of and about the saints, and it had come to him, walking along West Hastings, after lunch with Jelena taking a break from her office, that there should be a Saint Somebody-or-Other of Vancouver. He was pretty sure he had not yet many any clergy who would quite qualify - God had warned him about keeping his spiritual life to himself - but perhaps he could work on the project. Possibly the old town deserved it, for all that it had given him, and it would be a very nice one in the eye for all the Protestant and pagan overburden on the nation's most western province. At the very least, the idea had been a very nice spiritual experience, and of course taking place right on one of the city's most historical streets.
And then had come the inspiration of not long after they were man and wife, when he had been reflecting on his last year on the campus, as an independent student primarily of theology, fully enjoying - with a few unpleasant distractions from his own quick temper - the status of an unofficial don, a man of genuine learning going about bringing peace, conviction, and cheer to his younger peers still engaged in the classroom structure. He and Jelena should rent a big house, he thought, and take in a group of student boarders, for whom they might serve as laid-back but quite knowledgeable and encouraging study masters.
And then Providence's axe fell like the guillotine. Of a sudden Toby realized that he was actually bored with Vancouver. The place had no challenges. He started to write a story about a character much like himself who became good friends with a young priest. (All the priests he had known were middle-aged and upward.) On the television that came with the apartment they had watched a show about a private school in upper New York state, and Toby had felt, not for the first time, an inescapable pull for the classroom.
And then Jelena, not really interested in a life at the stenographer's typewriter, began to study the ads for teachers wanted outside the city. The provincial department of education had a rule: until the end of July, all school districts had to try to fill their teaching rosters with teachers certified from the Normal schools or the university teaching programme. But once August came, they could hire anybody they felt capable of holding a classroom together. The big centres, with the culture teachers were generally so fond of, were well filled by the fully qualified according to these norms, and it was in fact very difficult of even the certified to break in in Vancouver, Burnaby, Victoria and so on. But the outback was a different story.
It was interesting that Toby, although bitten deeply by the television drama, and earlier utterly provoked by a photo and a story about a Catholic elementary school in the diocesan weekly, felt no urge in himself to apply. But Jelena spotted an ad for a post for which she had most of the qualifications in spades, and caught the boat to Nanaimo to confer with the superintendent of the relevant district.
She got the job, but it was not quite where she had thought it was. Growing up in the eastern part of the province, she was no expert in the geography of the western end of it, for all that she had got to know Vancouver.
"Where's Broughton Harbour? Which Gulf Island is it on? How close to Victoria?"
Toby chuckled. "That's where you're teaching? Broughton Harbour? That's where we're going?"
"Yes. Is there something wrong?"
"Not as far as I know, unless you're anxious to be close to the cultural advantages of Little London. Or feel called to take your history students to meetings of the Legislature on a regular basis. Broughton Harbour is on an island all right. In fact a rather small island. Gull, I think. But Gull isn't in the Gulf Islands. It's a couple of hundred miles north of here. Near the top end of Vancouver Island."
"Oh, dear. Then where's Fulford Harbour?"
"I think that's on Saltspring Island. Which is a Gulf Island, of course, and where we thought we might like to wind up. Did you think Broughton Harbour was on Saltspring?"
"Yes."
"And the superintendent who hired you didn't take out a map and give you a geography lesson. Or, in the this case, is it oceanography? He either needs to go back to school or he was up to something. He's probably been around long enough to know that most recent graduates of the biggest university west of Toronto would think of Broughton Harbour as the end of the earth. I don't because I know a native lad from there who has one of the greatest senses of humour I've ever known. Now I can find out how he got it. If you had stars in your eyes at the thought of being able to hop a short ferry ride to Victoria why should he make you any wiser."
"You don't mind?"
"It is a bit of a surprise, but it's also a job and it feels all right. I'm starting to feel like anywhere out of this city would feel all right, and Broughton Harbour is definitely not one of the suburbs or Fraser Valley feeding lots. I just hope they've got a church. I don't think Billy Whaler was Catholic, for all that us Dogans have the best jokes."
"I think God has just had a good joke on me. The superintendent - which he was; you're right - was very nice. He asked me about you, too. Were you also a teacher? I told him you were currently a writer, although not as yet published. He said he was sorry he didn't have two jobs. I told him you would probably prefer one more year of studying and writing before I had a baby."
"Good for you. Why would anyone want two salaries? And you're obviously much better as a director of personnel than he is at geography. I take it you signed a contract?"
"Yes. I don't see how I can back out."
"Do you really want to?"
"Not if you don't."
"Then we're going. Broughton Harbour it is."

Chapter Eight

2009-12-21T18:01:00.000-08:00

"Damn," Toby said. He was staring through the airplane window, on the port side.
"What's the matter?"
"I guess we're not going to be able to see Waddington. I wanted to be able to show Joanna." Their oldest was sitting on his lap, her little brother on his mother's. "To show her where Daddy once worked and all that. She'd be so impressed I'd never have to do anything remarkable again. But those mountains are all covered with cloud. It's clear enough here, and on the ocean side, but not over the mountains. No wonder. That must have been one of the wettest Junes on record. Remember when we flew down from Camden Falls, after the lighthouse? That was at the end of August and you couldn't see Waddington because of the smoke from the forest fires. Obviously my timing isn't very good."
"I wouldn't fuss if I were you. You're a writer, not a photographer. You'll get to describe it all in words one day."
"Maybe," Toby said. "I haven't been very good at it so far."
"Was it a really high mountain, Daddy?"
"Really high. 14,000 feet. Twice as high as anything close to the Flats. Second highest mountain in the province."
"Did you climb that mountain?"
"No. That wasn't part of my job. I just climbed the hills beside the river. And once went up a high ridge on my day off. But that wasn't near 14,000 feet. But I got to ride around in helicopters and a plane quite a lot. That was part of my job. The plane was a lot smaller than this one, and it took off from and landed on the lakes. This plane can only land on a cement runway. But you're only four and you've been in planes a lot earlier than I was."
"So already you're more impressive than your father," Jelena said.
"What's 'impressive' mean?"
"It means that people notice you a lot, like the time we were at the piano recitals at the school and you piped up good and loud at half-time and asked when we were going to hear Beethoven," Jelena laughed.
"Now you're going to have to explain what 'precocious' means as well, and admit where she got it from."
"But you're pretty precocious," Jelena said.
"Not when I was four, and only after I turned twenty-two and met you."
"You met me when you were twenty-one."
"I saw you when I was twenty-one. I didn't talk to you until I was twenty-two. When I was twenty-two I became precocious and wrote you a poem and then later I vaulted a counter in the Howden ball room and asked you to dance."
"I think you told me I had to dance."
"Like I said, I saw you and then became precocious. No wonder Joanna is precocious, because she gets to see both of us." He hugged the girl to him for a moment and kissed the top of her head. "Well, we don't get to see the mountain, but in a little while you will get to see your grandmother. She's kind of a mountain in her own way and she'll think you're terrific."
"And precocious," Jelena said.
"Is 'precocious' good, Daddy?"
"It's very good. Your Mummy was the most precocious girl I'd ever met and that's why she had to marry me. She got so precocious because she read a lot of books. I have no idea what she was like before she started reading."
"I was illiterate," Jelena said.
"And so you should have been. You were only four. Most people are illiterate after thirty. That's why they're not precocious."
"I thought the literate people were retiring. Into corners to read their books."
"I think we have different meanings for 'precocious' going here."
"That's what you get when you use three-syllable words on a child."
"But her name is a three-syllable word. Jo-an-na."
"Which you usually shorten to 'Jo-jo'. That's two syllables."
"Your Mummy is very quick today. Maybe she's light-headed because we're so high in the air."
"It's because I've got time to think because this one's asleep."
But she might have well spoken the past tense, for the other three-syllabled child - Dominic - was waking up, in surroundings not at all like where he had been accustomed to coming to. He needed attention, and he got it, from his sister as well as his mother, and Toby was left to his thoughts, which had remained with the mountains in the clouds to the east.
It had come back to him that while the summer in the Homathko Valley had been utterly magnificent from the simply natural point of view, the sort of working adventure to comment on and tell anecdotes from for the rest of his days, none of these ordinary wonders held a candle to the extraordinary events, none of which could be made plain to a daughter of four, and the most significant of which were intelligible to few souls over forty. Certainly at twenty even Jelena, for all her Catholicism and even a certain amount of reading in the great Teresa of Avila, had not always had a perfectly easy time with it all.
Who could? Would anyone who thought of him or herself as a sane and normal person want to hear about a half-hour when a fellow human's brain had simply been quietly but steadily, and with no comfort whatsoever, been taken apart by a kind of interior hacksaw, while all the time, in that particular middle of the night, the moon shone brightly down from a completely clear September sky, and the river rumbled along thirty feet from the cabin door? Literally, a cabin door. The survey crew had lived in tents all summer, but at the end, on a nice little flat below Homathko Canyon, they had put up a couple of rough log shelters to serve the drillers that were to come later on. The moon had shone through the cabin door while Toby felt his brains attacked. And then, suddenly, they weren't, and he went to sleep. The next day they were helicoptered in turn up to the main camp on the lake, and the day after that flown out to Campbell River in a Beaver, to ride the bus south to Nanaimo and then the ferry to town. The working summer was over, and his brains, for what they were worth, had been sent back to the city and his family and any of his old friends who were left on the campus. As he was coming back for a fifth year, that would mean changes in the circle, and he had been enormously excited by the prospect of the months ahead, and he had been proved right to be so.
But those were his student days, and the months leading up to his conversion, and God, as usual with newcomers, was giving him the time of his life. He was an old salt, now, sort of, and so there were difficulties.
Difficulties like the fact that Jelena was really looking forward to getting back to Vancouver and he was not especially excited about it. In the months and years following their exodus, he had missed the place from time to time, of course. Until he was twenty-three and married, Vancouver had basically been the only city on earth for him. He'd tried others: Toronto, New York, Seattle. Even brief skirmishes with Montreal, Winnipeg, Edmonton. But Vancouver had been home and any and all challenges worth addressing. And then it wasn't. All of a sudden it had lost its spark, and the place he started to see in his visionary moments was the mere little town where Jelena had grown up. That was the problem with having your brains fried in the middle of the night. Somebody else had taken over your sense of direction, and They really had you, because they operated from inner depths you really didn't know much about, and they knew how to keep on operating, cutting, grinding, deeper and deeper, and more and more painfully, until you got the point, and went where you were supposed to go, for whatever apparent reason, or retreated from where you had thought you should be and then found reason not to.
There was, of course, a certain long term existential safety in the process. The mistakes were short-lived, overcome and corrected before there was any lasting damage. He might find himself very unpleasantly trapped, but that made him realize some change was needed, and then he found the new situation, and regained his usual freedom and sense of buoyancy, and sooner or later could look back quite objectively and find the hidden values of the experience.
It always worked. But it wasn't always explainable, especially around the painful parts. The world was full of amateur psychologists. One of these was his own father, and others had worn Roman collars. He was about to meet his father again, after a gap of three years, and who knew what priests lay ahead.

Chapter Seven

2009-12-11T14:21:00.000-08:00

In the hallowed halls of Heaven, Toby's prayer must have set some kind of record as a joke, or, in a moment redolent with serious criticism of educational methods, at least an interesting commentary on the educational methods of his time, still bobbing along in the wake of the theological betrayal of a nation once outstandingly dedicated to the Catholic Church and the Virgin Mary. We speak, of course, of England, Mother England, home of innumerable saints and excellent mystical writers - up the sixteenth century - as well as the teaching platform for John Duns Scotus, whom, like Albert the Great, they took an awfully long time to canonize, and also who, unlike the otherwise impeccable genius of Thomas Aquinas, was able to figure out that yes, God could do two things at the same time in regards to the Virgin Mary, i.e., both have her conceived, and conceived free of original sin.
And then came Henry. Henry the Damned, when you think about it, simply begging, through his assault on all that was best about England - the Church, the monasteries, the schools, to say nothing of ordinary common sense monogamy - for all those lovely punishments God promises in the Bible over and over again for loutish leaders who misuse their clout. And oh, so many barons and bishops to go along with him. Thus more punishment. What a joke. What a tragedy. What a recreation of the Augean Stables, without a Hercules to shovel the proverbial. And following so closely on the new technique of the printing press, so that the plethora of heretical vomit that would follow Henry's lechery and treachery could find itself a ready vehicle of distribution. Any idiot who could scribble a pamphlet, let alone a book, could find a reader, and any reader, thus capable of finding himself in ecstasy over being able to put one word together with another could thus find himself not only a philosopher, but even, what ho, a theologian!
And in certain locations of the literate globe - principally Europe, at that time - he could find armies of half-wits to defend his imbecility.
Being born where and when and to whom he was, coming out of the Great Depression, and just before the second of the wars that was to punish the world for its chronic neglect of religion and the guidance of he Gospels and the Popes, little Toby Skinner, if he were to make sense of all this self-indulgent nonsense -as he was born with the skills of the writer - would need no little Divine help and intervention if here were to get to any point from which he could survey the universe he was born to report upon with any reasonable degree of accuracy and genuine, practical, realistic hope. Thus, his angels would not only have to be there, but to be rampantly there, infinitely more swashbuckling and spiritual sword-waving than any coterie of pirates, and God Himself, the Lord of the most inner boy and man, would be hard put to keep away the malformations of the world and the psychological abuses of heresy.
Well, perhaps not hard put, as omnipotence is not really hard put for anything, but quick off the mark, and then constant, in a variety of ways. Some of these, of course, were perfectly natural, or ordinarily graceful, and others were downright out of the usual.
The very first of them had been the Light. He had been all but three, only three, when he had seen a strange light around his grandfather's head. His grandfather was saying the grace for Christmas dinner. Toby's grandfather was a very prayerful man, and Toby's father did not pray anymore in his young manhood, but he had been raised with grace for every meal and knew his parents would be most upset without it, so he had asked Toby's grandfather to say the grace.
Admittedly, for all his kindly piety, Walter Skinner was also a victim of the follies of Henry the Damned and his numerous sycophantic, greedy, unprincipled followers, and had wound up in less of a religion than that which once had set the tone for "Mary's England". In fact, as a Baptist at that point, he had not had much time for Mary at all, as far as Toby was thereafter able to ascertain, but he was nonetheless a strong man for the Bible, which habitually lay at his bedside, and did little in life without prior and continuing consultation with the Lord as he knew Him. In such an example, Toby could have done a great deal worse, and it was significant of Providence to provide him, in his inquiring days, with a Redemptorist brother as the first Catholic man of vows he ever spoke to, and a spitting image of his grandfather. Profoundly gentle, as humble and useful as a fence post, with a personal presence that was nothing but comfort.
But that was in Toby's young manhood. Back to his infancy, when, to square away some of the future in an overall accurate balance, the God of Light also shed a few rays on the little squirt when he was in a private kindergarten, rather younger than the five of the public schools that had such things in those days, if they did at all. He was in a basement room, riding on a tricycle, under the care of a young teacher who from time to time gave out chocolate covered buffaloes. An apt location, given that Toby would one day fall in love with teaching, to hold it in such esteem that he found all other callings boring. In our Father's house, there are many mansions, but Toby found it hard to believe that any of them was complete without a desk and a blackboard.
And all this interference with the ordinary was to continue, and thus the real burden of our story, so lately allowed to be told.

Chapter Six

2009-11-27T08:55:00.000-08:00

It would not be until just after Christmas that Toby would see the girl with the big brown eyes again. He was in fact pursuing another romantic interest, insofar as his puzzled soul was capable of such an enterprise, realizing that he and Rosalind were probably just good friends. Besides, he had come back to the campus for a fifth year primarily because he felt he needed more experience of university life, that he owed this to himself as a writer, so he was soaking up all the life he could get. The thoughts of journalism in Toronto had moved on, and he could not imagine any place in the world of more lively interest than his old alma mater. He was surprised that he had not returned to the novel he had been writing in the spring, but he had his column and whatever other stories came his way, friends he had made the year before, some new arrivals on the campus since, and always the inescapable drive to learn yet another folk song. In the summer before the bush job, when he worked as a journalist and took a course in creative writing, he had happened upon a couple of Harry Belafonte records in the fraternity house where he was staying. He had studied these and used them well over the following year, including his time in the woods. But by the time he came back to the city the Kingston Trio was doing well and widely, and then Pete Seeger himself had come to the campus and not only electrified the crowd in the big old room where Toby had studied first year physics, but had demonstrated to Toby that there was much more to fretted instruments than chording. How in the hell does he do that? Toby had wondered, and got no answers about picking from the Muse. His inspirations then were mostly about the words of songs. Friends of his, a married couple with a basement flat close to the gates that opened on to the university endowment lands, had a further new record, the best of them all, the Weavers at Carnegie Hall. Pete Seeger again, along with a very solid other three. Toby listened carefully, every time he dropped in to visit. He got the words, he got the chords. He had to assume that he just wasn't a picker, that his fortune was in his voice. At least he could sing for his supper, and strum out something underneath that carried the process. And once in a while he could even write a song.
He had no inspiration about the Law. And the second year room didn't even have a decent view. That is to say it utterly lacked the incredible views of the first and third year rooms and the library. Howe Sound, the entrance to Burrard Inlet, the mountains. Was there a university in the world, a law school in the world, that could boast such an outlook over land and sea? Being able in those months, past and present, to brood over such a scene had done nothing for the law, only made him more of a poet, had helped him be more of a poet. He'd had no need to 'wander lonely as a cloud', because all that a cloud could hope to see had lain before his eyes. Still, he appreciated knowing something of the law. It ran much of the world, had a reason to exist. His fellow students were basically a noble lot. Mostly male. Predominantly male. Only a handful of women, and all but one of them older than he. Any girls other than Rosalind that had caught his eye came from other faculties, and most of those haunted the same scribblers' basement that he did. They were excellent company on a day-to-day basis, because they not only read, they had accepted the challenge to the mind created by writing.
But in a mid-autumn interlude of the mind, when he had been quite lifted above and beyond any of these feminine objects of interest, he had found himself praying for a wife.
For someone, however, whose soul had already known so much attention, for so long, from the Almighty, it was an odd prayer. At least in part. The first section was reasonable enough, because he really did feel that he'd had enough adventures for a single young man and it was time he moved toward settling down and raising a family. This was not the first time he'd thought along these lines, but the intensity of the interest had definitely shot up. But the second section, while it added to this new intensity, was very strange. From the experiential point of view it was utterly illogical, because he'd always had faith and a steady series of events to prove it, and yet because he had yet to undertake the simple introductions to philosophy that any seminarian or freshman in a confessional college is used to, it did make a little sense to a patient and understanding guardian angel. Toby still thought too much like a mere humanist. He believed in God - although he lacked the dialectical skills to prove His existence - but as a writer, how could he demonstrate that existence to others, i.e. his often apparently unbelieving fellow students? He found it possible to accept, wholeheartedly, the principle that if God gave him a good wife, He must exist. He would accept this as proof that everyone else would have to accept as well, and if they didn't, or couldn't, he know longer had any responsibility toward them. He could love his own generation, and acknowledge his debt to its contribution to his sense of life, but he had no interest in being its slave. But on the other hand, having as yet to take on a study of moral theology, he did not actually understand that human respect was a vice, not a virtue.
So his inspiration toward the prayer had to come through the back door, as it were. acting not so much as an instrument of orthodox logic, but as forecast that the future mother of his children was just around the corner, and proof that it was most definitely a family he had in mind, not a romantic affair.

Chapter Five

2009-11-21T06:34:00.000-08:00

It was not until he was fifteen, at the cadet camp in Vernon, that Toby first really heard of Hastings, from the some of the noblest of its ambassadors. In those big huts, left over from the military establishment erected in World War, for training infantry, it was a healthy throw of a football from one end to the other, and Toby had found no shortage of friends at his own end, plenty of constant and good humoured daily company in class or parade ground or recreation. Thus for over a month. But somehow in the last week or ten days left to the summer in khaki, he had run into a tightly knit trio who occupied the beds at the far end. They regularly hung out together and they all came from the same unit in the same town. At his end, his regulars were from different towns, different regiments. A piper from the Calgary Highlanders, a giant of a lad from the electrical and mechanical regiment in New Westminster, a third from northern Alberta.
The three lads had asked him if he knew how to play Canasta, a card game that was all the rage in those days. When Toby said no, they said he would teach him, because they needed a fourth.
They were not all cliquish, but being very secure with each other, and happy with where they came from, they made him comfortable at once. He was not especially curious about Hastings, but he of course asked them something about it, still recalling how put out at himself he was when the Vancouver newspaper his parents subscribed to had run a contest on the provincial place names and he had been utterly ignorant of those in the south-east corner of the province. At school, he was very good at geography, and had traveled from one end of the country to the other, so he'd had to conclude that somehow his education had been neglected by those responsible to keep him informed. Also, the household had been short of maps. The Skinners had been in the rebuilding phase. After the war, after his father going under in the logging business.
What was eminently notable about all three of the boys, without exception, was their manner. They were quite the young gentlemen: self-composed, urbane, relaxed, not coarse, but without being priggish. They chatted about anything as they played the game, and whoever lost was never upset over the downfall. They made a very pleasant end to the last days of the camp. And they taught him a card game. The piper, for all Toby's curiosity, had been unable to teach him any music, although he knew he was anxious to learn. He did not learn a lot about Hastings, but he gathered that it seemed to be a good place to grow up, a town with a life of its own, although they never mentioned the university, nor did they discuss any of the girls they knew.

Chapter Four

2009-11-17T08:00:00.000-08:00

For all its culture, especially musical culture, America in the middle of the twentieth century had yet to rival Europe in the creation of grand opera on the Italian or German scale. As the Met or San Francisco had amply proved was that the nation could certainly mount an opera, and then prove to bring on plenty of world class performers, but the compositions lagged behind. Gershwin's 'Porgy and Bess' inclined toward the older models of musical drama, but not enough that it shook free the more ambitious venue. What did thunder around New York, of course, was the second daughter of that genre of inspiration, the musical, in the native tongue and full of singable songs with the sort of memorable phrases that people could use, as with the Bible and Shakespeare, as guide lines in their daily lives.
We have all heard, if not sung, we have all quoted, 'Some enchanted evening . . .' etcetera.
But, actually, while Jelena and Toby did indeed first see other across a crowded room, the evening had not been in any way enchanted for her. She was simply out with an acquaintance from her home town, who belonged to a fraternity, and thus wound up at a fraternity dance in a very modest rented hall on the New Year's Eve of her first year in Vancouver and on the campus. She was not really having a good time, and thus was ready to be most aware of a pair of couple who were. Well, to be perfectly honest, she was not entirely sure that the girls were having an unflawed evening, but the two young men were constantly laughing and chatting, dressed as Highlanders, dancing vigourously with their dates. The slightly taller one, she noted especially, had very good legs below the tartan and moved like a dancer even when he was only walking. Her date, noting her interest at one point, told that the lad was not actually a member of the fraternity, but lived in the frat house. He was a musician, he had heard, and he and his roommate, the other kilt, were supposed to
be writing a play together. He knew nothing about the play, but he had heard them sing a very funny song they had written together.
Jelena never saw the young man again, because by that time he was no longer about the campus, but was working in the city, until one wet night in November, ten months later, when she came lolloping down the stairs from the Green Room in the old UBC auditorium, the hang out room for the Players'Club. She was with two other girls, all of them members of the cast of the English Department's annual production of a classic, Ibsen's 'Peer Gynt' in this case. She gave a little 'whoop' when she and her companions hit the bottom of the stairs, not because of Toby and any memories she might have of the New Year's Eve event, but because he was with her most recent significant male interest. Toby was there to pick up one of her companions for a ride home. That young lady had been a very sweet and good friend of his for several months, the girl of New Year's Eve having moved on.
Noting the energy, and the big brown eyes, Toby said to his companion, "Who's that?"
"Jelena Omagh," he said.
"Oh," said Toby. He did not recognize her from the New Year's Eve party, where she had come dressed as a nurse, and he drove the other girl home without any more thought about the incident,as they had plenty to talk about, and then he did the long drive to his parent's house at the eastern end of Burrard Inlet, on the hill above Port Moody.
This other girl was a very sweet creature. They had got together in the spring, a couple of months after the girl from the party had moved on. But it was more a case of keeping each other pleasant company than a real romance. She had spoken of a boy friend at a different university, almost a fiancee. Toby had gathered, from the profession the lad was studying for, that he was not much inclined toward the arts, and she was. She acted, she wrote, she sang to his small guitar. But one night recently, when he had found himself, not for the first time in recent months, in a very strange, puzzling, and painful mental state, and asked her to keep him company at a movie, she had been frightened when he told her about his current state of soul. It had not helped either of them that the plot of the film, a murder mystery called "Footsteps in the Fog", was concerned with a victim who wondered if she were going crazy, over the question of being stalked. This had become a common thought for Toby. By religion, she was Anglican, which in his mind put her close to the Catholic girls he had known in his cadet corps and the university. She had entered his life like a vessel of innocence, not long before he went into the woods, and she had got hold of some philosophy texts for him while he was there, then become his companion when he got back and re-entered life on the campus. Yet between them they did not have the words for what had become the most pressing daily questions regarding the constant hammering that assaulted his soul. Time after time he seemed to startle her, and he did not know why. And he also knew he found other girls around the newspaper office just as interesting.
And Jelena had started showing up in those same offices, coming down to write or deliver articles to do with the Players' Club and some other campus organizations she belonged to. Toby had his own column to write, and all sorts of friends from earlier years, but he noticed her, and once, when she seemed to be in an odd relationship with one of those friends, he wrote her a poem. It was by no means a rival of the least deliberations of Keats, but it was proof of personal notice. The poem said that she was barking up the wrong tree, and yet he would have had to admit that he was by no means certain that he was the right one.
Years later, their campus got down to trying to teach courses on the subject of mysticism. It is unlikely that any of these sessions were presided over by actual mystics, as universities, and even seminaries crediting themselves with competence in ascetical and mystical theology are profoundly effective, steeped in academic vices, of contradicting real mystics as solidly as the Sanhedrin contradicted Christ, but they were at least in place, and had they existed then Toby Skinner might have had a reason to think of a university degree as representative of his own experience. As it was, his presence back on the campus and in law school, from the present academic and professional formation aspect was an enormous joke. In a sense, he was wiser and more experienced than any professor on the campus, as none of them were capable of adjudicating his intellectual bent, yet as he had no idea what he really was, he had to function, he had to be present, through the artificial means of enrollment, once again, in the law school. This had not stopped the Holy Spirit in any way from flooding him, day after day, with the intimations that would guide the rest of his adult life, much beyond anything the university could teach him, but it left Toby puzzled about his relationship with an organized world.
It had also puzzled Rosalind, the sweetest of companions, She had begun to think that a dentist you knew was much safer that an artist who did not even know himself.

Chapter Three

2009-11-05T16:28:00.000-08:00

When they had left Vancouver five years earlier it had been with great expectations and only one problem: what to do with all their books. Throughout his earlier student years, Toby's library had not been extensive. What he had collected for himself was respectable, no junk, and only the some of classics ancient and modern that a serious writer requires to read over a lifetime. People loaned him books they thought a writer should read and he used the university library. But Jelena had gathered her volumes from the time she became literate and had shelved a lot more along the way. Her basement room in her parents' Vancouver home had been a modest library in itself - from which Toby had been given A.A. Milne, to test his qualifications for fatherhood, which obviously was to include reading to his children - and all of these had come to their joint stock after the wedding, to be moved into their first home together, a sub-rented apartment close to the beach in Kitsilano, which they held down until the middle of August and their departure for Jelena's teaching job two hundred miles up the Coast.
For the week previous to the move the apartment living room had to be a sorting station. In the middle of room stood three piles of books: those which could definitely stay behind - a friend had offered a basement - those which had to go with them, and the maybes. The first made the smallest pile, while the second and third began fairly equal, only to have the traveling section grow much faster than the remainder pile. In the end, four boxes stayed and nine headed north. The rest of their freight was wedding presents and Toby's trunk, which held, among other things, his typewriter. The only furniture was Jelena's modest record player. Toby also owned a guitar and a tenor banjo, and each of them had a three-speed bike. Toby had bought his months earlier, having given up his car, and Jelena had asked for hers as a wedding present from her parents. She had ridden it to work, getting to her downtown office, over the Burrard Bridge, in much less time than those going in their cars.
The modest guitar had been replaced by a better, and the tenor banjo succeeded by a five-string Toby had found in the little music store in the Flats. There were also more books, of course, some of them even coming from correspondence study with an Eastern university, but the only additional furniture had to do with the children. For five years they had lived in teachers' quarters provided by their employers. They'd had no need to buy furniture. Wisely, they had bought a collapsible crib, which had flown before, and flew again when they headed forever out of the north. Except for their personal luggage, all else went by train, to lie in a freight shed until they could decide what to do with it. Jelena took a handful of novels from the family store to tide her over the mystery interval. Toby latched on to his Carmelites.
They were by no means worried about the future. They would unquestionably land on their feet somewhere. Providence might be puzzling, but it also possessed an impeccable mind for getting the round pegs in the round holes. Yet, at the same time, they were not agreed about where they should go.
Toby, in his heart of hearts, was pretty much for Hastings. In the long run, it had to be Hastings, if visions meant anything, but of course it could be later than now, especially considering how fond he was of Sitka Flats and the life there, so much of the arts as well as teaching for the Church. And visions had always to be scrutinized, now matter how wonderfully they might possess one, how delightfully, how irresistably, they broke the heart and let in some further insight into the mind of Christ and the Virgin Mary, to say nothing of that spiritual companion who was forever hovering about and sprinkling salt and light on everything, one's guardian angel and whomever he brought in his wake. Of course they would wind up in Hastings one day, because he was a mystic and a Thomist and in Hastings there was a new, young, Catholic university named after the Mother of Christ. But Jelena knew the town. She had grown up there. It had been, for all its charms, a catch basin for small minds, stupid factions, and a provincial mentality that just might drive her cosmopolitan husband bonkers.
In the beginning, of course, it had been nothing of the sort. In the beginning, in the 1880's, Hastings was the principal city - by frontier standards - of one of the richest mining regions in the world. Only the diamond mines of the Transvaal had a greater lure for investors, writers, romantics, traveling actors, musicians and prostitutes. The ore in the mountains - silver, lead, zinc consistently, and gold and copper in certain locations - stared at the prospector from the rock in his hand, peeled in shards under the stroke of his knife or chisel, and wove fantastic dreams in the minds of those with any amount of money for shares in the bonanza. Along with the same kind of ore bodies immediately south of the line, the products of these mines, run through the American smelters, provided ten percent of the gross national product of the United States. This was too generous to the Americans, naturally, for Canadian financial interests, and thus came a huge smelter north of the Forty-Ninth, and some more railway. So, in those days, Hastings was notable on the world stage.
But like so many mines, hers dwindled. So then lumbering became the larger employer, and orchards were also a substantial form of wealth until irrigation made the warmer Okanagan the queen of the fruit growing trade, and then Hastings settled, like British Army officers retired on half-pay, into restrained gentility. When people are no longer rich, unless they possess some other genius in their midst, they resign themselves to thinking provincially, not expecting too much of each other, and become more and more suspicious of excellence. This does not stop them, generally, from being respectable, but it does make them resist having their personal boundaries widened from forces within their own community.
Then, toward the end of the Depression, Rome created a new diocese out of the south-east corner of the political province and made Hastings the see. There were no other towns in the region appreciably larger, and Hastings lay in the centre of the territory the new bishop would have to supervise, travel within for confirming children, bucking up his clergy and religious, and so forth. Besides, the Anglicans had already done something of the same. No new cathedral building was required, because the founder of the original parish, backed by the faith and generosity of his flock built as the initial church a modest basilica, against the day of the inevitable designation. Rome also took another great chunk of land and churches away from the Archdiocese Vancouver at the same time, but that estimable creation has a history of its own which does not concern us here.
What is of concern is what, or who, went along with the creation of the diocese of Hastings, that is, a bishop to rule over it, in this case the Reverend William Walter Michaelson, at the time of his appointment rector of the cathedral in Toronto and a genuine priest in every way; prayerful, kindly, and reasonably firm. He was also a builder, and as he had no need to erect a cathedral, he eventually created an old folks home and hospital, setting it under the care of the nuns of those days, a children's camp, and as his last creation before his obvious talents took him to a larger responsibility, a small college. He had never been flooded with vocations to the priesthood, and Rome had suggested that if the sons of immigrant miners and woodsmen could be persuaded to study at the university level,some of them might study themselves into the priesthood. This was working in Africa, so why not in British Columbia?
The college had begun in utter modesty in Hastings, in very small buildings, at the time Toby was then in high school in Vancouver, and it is a fact, interesting to ponder as the future unrolled, that when Toby read about this beginning in a small story in the newspaper, he actually wondered what it would be like to go to university in a confessional situation. And then when he was going on to the classrooms of the ten thousand, sprawled all over the western end of the Point Grey peninsula, he was comforted by the knowledge that if he were in danger of losing the faith he did have among the high-powered cynics of the secular institution he could always take his battered soul to the Kootenays, or south to one of the American church affiliated schools. He had excellent memories of his two months, in grade four, in a church run private school in Ontario.
Now in all truth, although Toby was no Aloysius Gonzaga in his youth, and totally unschooled, thanks to the wonders of modern secular education in the matters of philosophy, theology, and mysticism by book larnin' of the formal sort in those areas, he was about as much likely to lose the actual faith he had in the general Christian scheme of thing as Caesar or Alexander or Bernard Montgomery were to lose their grasp of military science. There are degrees to the metaphysical intensity that make up the operating efficiency of different angels, and in Toby's case his invisible guardian not only came about as powerful as such creatures can be, but he was not entirely invisible. Since Toby's earliest childhood memories, his hidden sidekick had a way of turning up the lights, literally, on any situation, and around the university, given all that steamy intellectual ferment over constantly contradictory concepts, he seemed never to turn them off. Or at least not until Toby left. Occasionally returning in subsequent years, Toby was always put to musing as to why the campus seemed so drab, in comparison with how he had known it.
And as for having his faith threatened, it was really the other way around. He challenged his company.Within his first weeks as a regular on the campus paper, he had found himself one evening at home inspired to crank up his noisy old typewriter and bang out a piece comparing the poisoning of Socrates to the crucifixion of Christ, left it the following morning on the editor's desk, and opened the next day's paper to find it printed therein. He was never moved to write anything like it again, but it was a clear indication to everyone of what basically ran up and down his backbone. Following this little publication, his English lecture referred to the subject of mysticism one rainy afternoon while the class was encountering the metaphysical poets, and there was a significant show of light in the classroom, but Toby prayed that none of it would identify him, and kept his mouth shut. Nobody but nobody was to intercept his own journey to whatever it was he was to write about when he finally, really, simply had enough life and study experience to know what he was up to.
This was a specially intense display of the light. Most of the time, at home, on the campus,elsewhere in his travels, it was of a lower key, but definitely pleasant enough, and reassuring him that he was in the place and amongst the people he was supposed to be with.
Then, after four years of this light and and accompanying spirit and all the adventures that went with them, had come Jelena, who doubled everything. And she had grown up in Hastings, in the Kootenays, which had intruded an image and a spirit into his sometime musings on his future,and that also had a doubling effect. Yet these effects had been something he never seemed to get permission from the Muse to write about. At twenty-two he had insisted to Jelena, vehemently as was his wont, that as Hemingway and Fitzgerald had been published at twenty-five, he was sure to do the same, if not sooner. Yet here he was three years older than twenty-five, , stuffed full of experiences with man and God neither of those two had ever dreamed of, let alone been able to write and publish, and yet neither could he write of such things, no matter how much his typewriter might clatter over other subjects, and no editor or publisher had ever nodded contractual approval over the lesser items he had sent them.
So, was he now a teacher out of a job for the sake of his writing? Once could, after all, go back to the city and hang out with the very dear old literary friends and maybe get some inspiration, some direction, some clarification. Yet why was his first concrete act of looking for a new placement the writing of a letter to the bishop of Hastings, with the result of an encouraging reply saying they should meet as soon as he was settled in the place? Jelena had not been overjoyed, but then she knew that he could speculate, and even make profoundly involved approaches to people and projects and then do an immediate about face. They would work this out, just as they had worked everything out.
Sister Principal and the pastor and some of their friends came to see them off at the air port. Father Clancy put a wad of bills in Toby's hand, as had his father the day Toby and Jelena got married, and their plane climbed into a clear sky. They were to start the search for the new life staying with Jelena's parents. And perhaps on the flight south they would get a look at the Waddington Range, the mountains Toby had lived amongst the summer before he met her.

Chapter Two

2009-10-27T12:30:00.000-07:00

Even getting back to Hastings had been something of a battle, in the summer when Toby's teaching career in the North had come to an end. He had been so gloriously successful in the classroom and in the community that it had been hard to believe he would not be kept on in the Catholic school, where he and Jelena had been content to work for very modest wages, but even those wages were too much for a system that flourished on the apostolic spirit of unmarried, unfamilied, volunteers, and the halcyon days had come to a close. The priests were sorry, the sisters regretful, but that's how it was. The Skinners were two adults - only one of whom was a teacher - now with two children, and too expensive for the slim resources of the parish and the diocese, in those days before the government decided to support separate schools. The axe had come down well before the school year was over, when Jelena had taken the train to Vancouver, with the children, to visit her parents for a fortnight.
Toby had taken the news fairly calmly. He had become accustomed to surprises, well versed both in life and study with a God who liked breaking molds in the name of improvement. So far, throughout his twenty-eight years, he had survived all the sudden contradictions, and would do so again. And he knew he was simply far too good in the classroom not to be in demand. He was too natively studious and well-read, too artistically talented, too amusing - for the sake of learning and the wisdom that would eventually make him a spiritual director - either directly or indirectly - of the highest ranks in the Church - and also too awfully good at discipline, not to be necessary to children, to the Catholic education system, to the Church itself, and to ever be out of work.
Or so he had thought, up to that point.
He had told Jelena as soon as she came back from Vancouver, of course. He had not called with the news. He did not want to worry her parents, particularly her mother. Hopefully the future would be straightened out before they had to know.
But where to go?
In the last months of teaching in Sitka Flats he stayed awake a lot wondering if he should head for an Indian reserve school. He'd begun his teaching career substituting in native schools, and made some good points, even thought they were not Catholic students, but on a Catholic reserve, with his successes in art and music, with a hope of taking the native's skills with quiet into Thomistic metaphysics, he might be able to work some great stuff. But no inspirations reared their head, and he had been, after all, hooked up with a bishop who had plenty of natives under his jurisdiction.
(Years later, Toby realized those sleepless hours had been all about the suffering of the native children under predatory clergy, and not just in his own diocese.)
So it was fall-back time, a return to the fiery flood of inspirations that had come upon him when he first met Jelena, provoking his love affair with the town where she had grown up, far away in the Kootenays, the burgh of Hastings.
But Jelena had absolutely no appetite for returning to the land of her childhood. It was not that she had no happy memories. Quite the contrary, as evidenced in her scrapbook and the stories she had told Toby from the beginning. She had loved where she had grown up, loved the town that had raised her - although she was not born in Hastings - and seen her through her first university year, in the little Catholic college established, at the suggestion of Rome, only a few years before she attended.
But once she had settled on the Coast, thanks her father's transfer, she grew even fonder of the big city - because of its culture, not because of its increased shopping opportunities - and of the university, because she not only loved study and the classroom, but assumed she would, as a professor of literature, make university life her own for the rest of her days. She had always been a blue stocking's blue stocking, but with an equal passion for the arts, which kept her from the least threat of the academic's accidie.
But she had at least two personal qualities which had gravely endangered her supposed vocational choices. The first, which affected most manners of young men she had hitherto encountered, was the happy possession of the face of a film actress, with large brown eyes that could dance like a pair of nymphs but also take in everything within their view at the same time.
The other virtue, which was specific to Toby's interests - although usually terrifying to the lads and other things in pants that started with the face and the dancing eyes - was that she was an omniverous reader. Thus Toby had known at once that she was not simply intelligent much above the average, but that she knew books. Thus she knew his life work, and he knew he could tolerate no rivals. This was not just love at work; this was destiny.
And then there was her singing voice, and it was really music that had exposed them to each other as what they each really cared about, over and above the verbal skirmishing that goes on between students thrown together on a huge secular campus which somehow has not been allowed to destroy or even dampen the real depths of personal faith.
Even though he had grown up in the West Coast city, big and getting bigger, and had loved the place to the extent of falling into excruciatingly patronizing attitudes toward the poor souls who had not grown up there, it was not until Jelena showed up that he had completely taken all it had to offer under his tyro writer's wing, and even then it had taken some pretty heavy handed intrusions from his guardian angel, and his guardian angels commanders-in-chief, to get him completely receptive.
So, when the crunch came down, the conversations naturally turned to Vancouver and the possibility of returning there.

"You almost had a job at that new high school in the East End," Jelena said at one point. "In fact you did have it, if you'd decided to take it. Notre Dame, wasn't it? Maybe the same principal is still there. I've always been really happy in Vancouver. I know I would be again."
"It was only four years ago. But I'm so glad we went north. Camden Falls was incredible. I don't think Vancouver could have offered that much of a challenge. And we would never have had the chance to live with a priest, to be so much at the heart of a parish and mix with all those clergy passing through. I don't know of any writer who got such a break. Not that I've been able to do much with it. There always seems to be so much to learn about education. That's what hurts about having to leave here. I've really proved something with the art and the music and the philosophy and the meditation. I know I have. But neither the bishop nor Clancy seem to appreciate it the same way I do."
"'Man proposes,' etcetera."
"Of course. And there have always been the visions from Hastings. Your fault, of course, from growing up there."
"But that president of the college you went to see before we went to Camden Falls: he wouldn't hire you."
"No. I've always wondered why I took the trip. Mind you, you had a visit with your Mom, and I got a look at the town I'd dreamed so much about. And it was most definitely Providence at work. God sent a log to take out the propeller shaft of the Canadian Prince just so I could get ride on a boat and the bus to Hastings to get a look at the college. And, remember, Father McPatrick was on the Prince on the night of trip. Now there was a coincidence. Remember? He went barreling after the Minister of Education, coincidentally on the trip as well, and bashed him about over financial aid to Catholic schools." Toby would laugh at himself. "Very precise of God, don't you think? To be provided with a working view of my future boss at the very time I was flitting off to the Kootenays to talk to someone I hoped would be my boss? As it was, I wonder if I was speaking with an idiot. I wanted to talk about Saint Thomas and his relations with education, and he asked me about John Dewey. Months later, under McPatrick and his gallant little school, I was learning about how John Dewey had destroyed generations of American reading students and any Canadians stupid enough to follow suit. You can say that for the Vancouver school authorities. I don't think they bought the bullshit. At least not my grade one teacher. I was a phonetic whizz by the New Year."
"You've learned a lot in four years. Me too. Maybe we could be some real use to a parish in Vancouver. Maybe even the diocese. Remember that I'm virtually an old friend of the co-adjutor archbishop."
"So you'll write him a letter?"
Jelena was quiet for a bit. "No. That I know I can't do. For heaven's sake, Toby.You've never been incapable of speaking for yourself." She would laugh. "And in that, Michaelson would suspect that you'd come to take over his diocese. How many times do I have to tell you that the clergy don't like laity who study? Who know Saint Thomas, and worse, the mystics? Good Lord, even McPatrick, who was and is the salt of the earth, had trouble with you. And the pastor here, just as much. You've said so yourself. But Vancouver is bigger than an archbishop. We'd survive. There's always the culture. And the ocean. And your memories of growing up on the Coast. You haven't even begun to write about them, and, God knows, you have some wonderful stories to tell."
"Yes, I have. But only when I'm ready to do them right."

Chapter One

2009-10-13T06:49:00.000-07:00

Had it somehow come about in the Creator's original design that there were no angels, only men, good or bad, it is highly unlikely that Toby and Jelena Skinner would ever have been inspired, or even permitted, within the ordering of Providence, to take up permanent roots in the diocese of Hastings. That particular region of the Church, by the time the couple arrived, had become so remarkably corrupt, especially in its bishop, as well as in other significant areas of leadership, that it had acquired the mood of an insane asylum wherein the inmates run the building rather than register for treatment.
This is not to say that the bishop and a significant proportion of his priests were crazy in the clinical sense. They were in fact quite in control of their faculties, and knew very well what they were doing, especially when it was inordinately sinful and perverse. Nor was this diocese, tucked quite out of the way in the south-east mountain ranges of British Columbia, totally unique within the Church of that time, of just before, and painfully long after, the Second Vatican Council. The Church Universal was suffering throughout itself, on every continent, from the incontinent, especially the incontinent clergy preying on the young, of both sexes, and each other. But the diocese of Hastings could boast, in its own perverse way, of being. proportional to its modest population, one of the front runners, and could also claim the special uniqueness of both a bishop and a president of its little university as clerics in high places who had blandly bid goodbye to their clerical vows of chastity. And, in order to hold on to their sinecures in the land of sinful behaviour, these men collaborated, whenever necessary, to prevent the honest clergy, the reverend sisters, and any informed or suspicious laity from getting at the roots of this extremely ugly problem.
Nor, for some time, were the other agencies of protection of much use over these questions. The police, the relevant government ministries, were slow off the mark, not entirely from want of information, but from want of knowing how to deal with the information, or having the will. It was a social predicament, in certain ways similar to the chaos in the Church preceding the reforms of the Council of Trent, which could be changed only by extraordinary virtue and an indescribable intensity of the spiritual life, the infallible activity - and passivity - of the determination to get to perfection, on a personal basis, and thus drag the institution of the Church, at least, into the aura of decency. For, if the Church does not lead, every other organization must fail.
And it also could be said, that had the Church Militant been the only segment of the organization that God was concerned about, that there were not in fact the Church Triumphant, or the Church Suffering, that Toby and company would as well have been prohibited from bringing their manifest abilities to this, in so many ways, unfortunate segment of the visible portion of the entirety of Catholicism. After all, no matter how naturally talented, intelligent, and strong-willed a man might be according to his native fashioning, he is still a life-long victim of original sin, vulnerable to his own inherent frailties and limitations and further vulnerable to the iniquities and indifference to real value of his fellow human beings. In Toby's case, the difficulties of the diocesan personnel - I speak here of the professionals - would have been so disappointing and discouraging that without the assurance in faith that all his frustrations, accepted in Christ's patience, would do a good deal for the souls in purgatory and, at least elsewhere in the universe, the conversion of sinners, he would have no doubt given up and gone elsewhere, for he was a man with a mission in his mind and a fire in his belly, and the sort of being who could not abide thinking that he was not always of some good use or another.
But the angels quite naturally make it possible for a soul that contemplates to be useful everywhere, and in their own turn know of so few that take the way of contemplation and the perfect spiritual work seriously, that they are forever bringing their own jurisdictions to the habitually prayerful ones quite hand over fist, putting him or her at work now somewhere in deepest Africa, next in China, and a little later in Moscow, or Rome, or New York, or even the Pasadena Playhouse. Thus, in a certain sense, and except for the sorrow in the lack of salvation in the derelict clergy and religious he had to live amongst, Toby was even grateful for the horrors of the Hasting diocese. They gave him something to endure, to be tempted to despair over - without ever surrendering to; he had the glorious vocation of the contemplative, against which all other callings suffer a certain lack of lustre, a conspicuous dullness vis-a-vis the constant and omnipresent light of the angels - although, in this life, not always the pleasant light of the good ones.
But that was, in its perfect degree, in retrospect. In the reality of the unfolding present, the diocese was unquestionably a nightmare, especially to someone seemingly inspired to such high expectations, of both the educational and spiritual lives.