The Shoebox Bible

  Copyright © 2006 Amadeus Enterprises Limited

  Anchor Canada e-book edition published 2014

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Anchor Canada is a registered trademark.

  Library and Archives of Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request.

  ISBN: 978-0-385-68486-6

  Published in Canada by Anchor Canada,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  A Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  To all mothers everywhere – and especially mine.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE: Children of the East Wind

  CHAPTER TWO: Dwellers in the Dust

  CHAPTER THREE: The Treasures of the Snow

  CHAPTER FOUR: The Day of Small Things

  INTERLUDE

  A Light That Shineth in a Dark Place

  PART II

  CHAPTER FIVE: Coals of Juniper

  CHAPTER SIX: A Marvellous Work and a Wonder

  CHAPTER SEVEN: What Way the Light Is Parted

  Acknowledgements

  But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.

  2 Corinthians 3:18

  “GOODBYE, ADAM AND EVE,” my mother used to say. “Here comes the Big Bad Wolf.” I remember distinctly the first time I heard her use this expression. She had dolled me up in my best outfit – short pants of bright canary yellow and a white blouse with a doily collar – and hoisted me to the top of a weathered fence post that jutted up out of the earth in the wilderness of our garden. Here I sat, perched in a beam of sunlight.

  “Wolf,” I echoed, and she squeezed me to her so tightly that tears sprang to my eyes, and then to hers. When I was older, I would learn that occasions accompanied by pain are often fixed fast in the memory like snapshots, but at the time, I was barely two years old, and my father had just run away from home.

  I suppose my mother saw it coming, but if she did, she confided in no one. She had just turned forty, the season when self-counsel in despair is in full bloom. She would wait and see.

  We stayed there for a long time in the stillness of our garden: me on the post and she with her arms wrapped tightly round my body, gazing off into a distance that was far beyond my childish horizon.

  My father was a quiet man, known as a wizard at restoring to glowing life any kind of electrical gadget that had gone on the blink – particularly radios.

  He was something of a homegrown Thomas Edison and, like Edison, was sometimes referred to, even by his closest pals, as “The Faraway Man.” Still, in spite of his dreamy preoccupation – his “elsewhereness” – everyone said he was a kind and attentive husband, a proud and doting parent to his three children.

  But when Hitler’s polished jackboots goose-stepped across the face of Poland in 1939, my father began to grow restless, becoming increasingly agitated as the months of battle passed him by. The following year, as British troops were trapped at Dunkirk like so many brown rats, he reached the end of his tether, overcome at last by his heart’s gnawing need to be somewhere else.

  This was no symptom of the war, nor was it any new craving. It was an emptiness that had troubled him and grieved his parents throughout his haunted youth: an itch that they thought had been overcome and put to rest by marriage. But it had not. Like a fire in the coal bunker of an ocean liner, it had smouldered away far below the waterline, unsuspected by the happy passengers sunning themselves on the decks above.

  And so it happened that one day, my father opened the screen door, walked into the kitchen, pulled out a chair, sat down at the table, burst into tears, and confessed to my mother that he had joined up and was leaving in two days.

  The Royal Canadian Air Force, he said, was in desperate need of radio men. There was a war on, he said, and before anyone else could realize what he was about to do, before anyone could stop him, he was gone. His departure was its own reply to any possible objection. My sisters, both older than I – one by ten years and the other by eight – knew far better than I the reasons for his going. From time to time, I caught them looking at me as if in some way I had been the cause of his leaving them, as if I had somehow conspired with him to devastate their lives.

  For a while our house was filled with awkward silences, and one of my earliest memories is of sitting on the floor listening to the ticking of the kitchen clock.

  With his basic training complete, my father was posted three thousand miles away to a short-wave transmitting station on the West Coast: a station from which, with his high-powered, high-frequency communications equipment, he guided flying boats on their relentless round-the-clock hunt for enemy submarines in the Pacific Ocean. But his communications with the family he had left back east soon faded to little more than an occasional whisper, then to static, and then, finally, to utter silence.

  My mother continued to write him faithful letters, always tucking in private notes from my sisters, but he did not reply.

  It was then that my mother began to despair. Other than the small compulsory portion of my father’s pay that was mailed to her by the air force, she had no income. She had not worked for a salary since giving up her position with the telephone company to marry my father. But with the war on, there were no jobs left in our town – no jobs suitable for a woman, particularly a woman of forty with three children. In the years she had been bearing and raising her family, so much of the larger world had passed her by. Now, her options seemed pitifully few.

  We lived, in those days, in a rented four-square clapboard house (two up, two down) on a quiet, tree-lined residential street in a small southern Ontario town. Our garden, backed by a jungle of chokecherry bushes, was curtained off from the front lawn by a row of towering Lombardy poplars, whose restless leaves not only foretold the weather but indicated the season as perfectly as any brass weather gauge. In autumn, their summer foliage of salamander green turned overnight to blazing gold, as if, in the hours of darkness, a master gilder had lovingly burnished each leaf by hand. Beneath these whispering poplars, in a galvanized washtub, dwelt Jeremiah, my pet turtle, whom I had found sculling heavily through the long dew-soaked grass of our lawn one summer morning. Named for the prophet (because of the “seething pot” his tub became on hot August afternoons), he had in the middle of his square tin home a large stone for an island and a floating board upon which he could clamber to bask in the sun. Occasionally, he would contrive to wedge the board tightly between the rock and the sheer side of the tub, then, with a steady platform, claw himself up and teeter on the lip. Sometimes he splashed backwards into the water, and other times he would fall out onto the grass, where he would immediately set off like a windup toy tank – but always toward the north – to wherever he had been going the day I found him.

  Often I would overtake him in the chokecherry bushes at the back of the garden, plodding doggedly on toward whatever it was that was calling him, and he would let out through his sharp beak a peevish, world-weary hiss as I lifted him warily by his scalloped carapace and restored him to his washtub kingdom.

  After my father had gone, my mother gave up to my siste
rs the big, sunny south bedroom and moved her few personal possessions into a small shadowed chamber on the north side of the house, where the single windowpane gazed out from under the sagging eyebrow of a rickety flight of exterior wooden stairs. This window overlooked the garden, so that the hinged three-paned mirror of her dressing table formed a perfect triptych of reflected chokecherries. Here, on the floor of her bedroom, I would play on rainy days, grating my toy cars and trucks endlessly back and forth across the patterned linoleum: beneath her dresser, the fire hall; under her bed, the police station and the hoosegow; and in her closet, the service station and garage. Free air.

  And it was here I had discovered not long before, at the back of this closet, beneath the imaginary burnt-orange gas pumps and the red India-rubber air hose, a loose plank: a plank that I could slide back and lift out, allowing me to peer down into a dim, dusty otherworld beneath the floorboards. I knew without a doubt that there were other beings down below – other living things – for I had glimpsed them sometimes, from the corner of my eye, scurrying down a hole or vanishing into a crack when they thought I wasn’t looking: fat furry creatures with pink paws whose busy black eyes looked up at me boldly through the green glass goggles of their Buck Rogers helmets. And it was there, in that under-floor world of wood shavings and ancient sawdust, tucked as far back between the joists as it could possibly go, that I found the Shoebox Bible.

  I was lying flat on my stomach with my chin pressed hard against the exposed joists, my right arm stretched to the shuddering point, when my fingertips brushed against something that wasn’t part of the house. My arm jerked back in shock. Could it be pirate treasure? A money box, hidden, lost and forgotten by a long-dead miser? My curious fingers went questing once again.

  Hooking the edges of the object with my fingernails, I finally managed to fish it up from the depths, up into the grey, watery light of my mother’s bedroom.

  It was an ordinary, large, square shoebox – one that might originally have contained galoshes. On one end was a label printed in blue script: Clarke’s Shoe Shop – For Finer Footwear, King Street, Phone 536W.

  Fearing that some live creature – one of those goggled things, perhaps – might fly out at my face, I lifted the lid slowly – gingerly – my heart clattering like the hooves of the Highwayman’s horse on the cobbles. But I was sadly disappointed. There was nothing in the box but a nest of jumbled paper: scraps of coloured Christmas wrap, lids and bottoms of pulpy white cardboard pie boxes from the bakery, used envelopes turned inside out, handbills, paper napkins, labels from Campbell’s soup cans – anything with one blank side or space enough upon which to write, and every one of them covered with what I immediately recognized as my mother’s spidery, old-fashioned handwriting.

  Some of these sheets were torn from a cheap household notepad: soft blank luxuries of pink, yellow, green, and blue pastel to be densely covered on both sides with her looping hand; the ink from her old Parker pen bleeding out here and there into the absorbent paper like black, broken blood vessels.

  On the back of a postcard-sized 1942 calendar from the nearby Supertest service station – its front a colourful painting of a woodland stream in whose cool depths a pipe-smoking sportsman in hip waders, under the watchful eye of an amiable Irish setter, nets an iridescent beauty of a trout – my mother had written this:

  Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is green.

  The beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir.

  I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.

  As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.

  Song of Solomon 1:6–17, 2:1–2

  and this:

  By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth:

  I sought him, but I found him not.

  I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.

  Song of Solomon 3:1–2

  Circled in blue ink on the front of the calendar is the day my father went away. February 13. It was a Friday.

  For a time my mother must have tried to put the best face on the rash thing my father had done. She wrote this on the back of a bill for $7.50 from the grocery store (upon which is written in hard red pencil, Mrs. B. – Past Due – Please Remit – Thank You):

  Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.

  The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil.

  She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.

  She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.

  She is like the merchants’ ships; she bringeth her food from afar.

  She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens.

  She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her candle goeth not out by night.

  Nor did it. When no further support was forthcoming from my father, she began taking in sewing and alterations. A neatly lettered card pinned up discreetly in the A&P grocery store resulted in her first inquiry: a doctor’s daughter was being sent away to school and would require a uniform consisting of a pleated jumper of navy serge, a matching blazer (complete down to its school crest on the pocket), and two white middy blouses. The wine-red crest, with its ivory unicorns, cast a powerful spell upon me, and my mother had more than once to retrieve it from my pyjama jacket, where I had pinned it.

  When her first few customers told their friends about the quality of my mother’s work, and about her extremely reasonable prices, word of mouth soon kicked in, and the old Singer treadle sewing machine – the one she had bought so proudly with the first money she ever earned before her marriage – was now kept chattering day and night.

  She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff.

  She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy.

  Not only was she manufacturing coats and dresses for my two sisters – and how they hated them! …

  She is not afraid of the snow for her household: for all her household are clothed with scarlet.

  … but she was turning out, from patterns of flimsy translucent paper, copies of the latest fashionable dresses for the wives of our town’s doctors and lawyers.

  She maketh herself coverings of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple.

  These coverings could only have been the rose-flowered slipcovers she cut and sewed to hide our threadbare couch from the eyes of her customers; her own clothing consisted of homemade replicas of the cotton-print housedresses she had seen in the Eaton’s and Simpsons mail-order catalogues.

  She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant.

  Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come.

  She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.

  Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.

  … a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised.

  Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates.

  Proverbs 31:10–31

  Written in ink on both sides of a single sheet of blue notepaper, these entries in the Shoebox Bible are in a firm and unwavering hand – a hand of faith and of surety – and I realize with a pang that it is this I love most about my mother.

  Some children are born seeking God outside themselves, and it is a lifelong quest, but one that can never be fulfilled, so that they are often left, in the end, sitting among the remnants of the things they have accumulated, and love is not one of them.

  Yet other children – born in awe of the roaring torrents of their own arteries, the wide deserts of their skins, the uncharted forests of their silken hair, and the craggy mountains of their own knees, knuckles, and toes – sense insti
nctively from birth that the Creator is within, that in the hidden depths of movement lies the secret of existence. No such child, watching in wonder a ladybug trudging across a sun-warmed forearm, would ever question the presence of a higher and unseen authority: one who knows all the answers.

  Born blessed, these happy souls never, ever – not for the fractional part of a second – tire of the spectacle of thoughts and inspirations that dance and play across their minds like lightning in a summer sky, or of the ideas they glimpse, like the sudden flashing of silvery fins, just beneath the surface of their own depths. They are certain that God is not only “out there” but also “in here.” I was such a child, and I knew that deep inside me was whatever remained of Eden.

  The worm in the apple was this: a colourful-sounding circus parade of childhood accidents and illnesses had laid me low. Not long after my first birthday, I had somehow managed to overturn and bring crashing down upon myself a fully loaded and off-balance wringer washing machine, flooding our kitchen with hot soapy water and pinning me beneath the wreckage. Diphtheria as a baby was followed – a few years after the washing machine mishap – by red measles, then mumps and yellow jaundice, but they were as nothing compared with the tonsillitis that struck me down next. The family doctor decided these inflamed glands were the cause of my shaky health, and that out they must come.

  And so on a day in springtime, looking for all the world like Dr. Doolittle, with his black suit and matching bag, he arrived at our house with a mute anaesthetist in tow, and I was boosted up onto the dining-room table.

  “Upsy-daisy,” the doctor said. His breath smelled of creamed corn.

  A portable electric pump with a drive belt and flywheel was set snuffling away on the floor nearby, and save for the unnerving clink-clinking of their stainless-steel instruments, all was quiet – until an acrid mask of black phenolic was clapped over my nose and I tasted that first burning, nauseating breath of chloroform. I tried to fight my way loose, but my wrists were tied down with rubber tubes, and I was left struggling and gasping in terror until mercifully, at last, I was sucked head first down that reticulated black rubber hose into a reverberating darkness.