Whylah Falls

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By George Elliott Clarke

Polestar

Copyright © 2000 George Elliott Clarke.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-896095-50-X

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Chapter One

THE ARGUMENT

Crows trumpet indigo dawn. The rose sun blossoms. A paddlewheel steamer, spilling blues, country, and flamenco guitar, churns the still Sixhiboux River. Simultaneously, a dark blue engine steams into Whylah station — a white marble phantasm. Garbed in baroque motley, a theatre troupe disembarks. One actor, blurred completely in white, brandishes an oily shotgun. Another player, a poet, bears a satchel full of letters and seven books of the elegant verse that perished in the slaughter of The Great War. His black suit, tie, shirt, shoes, melt into the dark dawn. A comet streak of rose flames on one lapel. Thin as any dreamer, this Mandinga-Mi'kmaq wears circle lenses on his earthen face. A slow clock, Xavier Zachary turns, his hands crying rose petals, and wheels upward into the high, blue hills above Whylah.

    Wooooooo! The train howls into steam and vanishes.

    Shelley Adah Clemence, eighteen Aprils old, awakens, stretches in her brass bed. The train moans. She wonders, "Is this trouble?" Small, slender, she rises, tossing back the covers like a spurned wave. She resembles Rousseau's Yadwigha. Same almond-shaped eyes, same sloe-coloured hair. She peers into her diary, a garden of immortelles and printed sunflowers. Then, Shelley opens her warm Bible and copies verses from The Song of Solomon into her own book. A radio awakens, croons a Ma Rainey song rich with regretful guitars, and Shelley crafts a song with Hebrew lyrics and a Coptic melody:

Snow softly, silently, settles
White petals upon white petals.

She buttons her long, ivory nightdress down to her thin, brown ankles and angles carefully down steep steps to the kitchen, a bath of yellow light. Her ma, Cora, is pulling fire from the woodstove. Othello, her brother, rests his guitar-troubled fingers on a mug of coffee. They suspect that X will arrive shortly, after five years of exile, to court Shelley with words that she will know have been pilfered from literature. Smooth lines come from Castiglione. Shelley vows she'll not be tricked. She be wisdom.

    Outside, Whylah shimmers. Sunshine illumines the mirage of literature, how everyone uses words to create a truth he or she can trust and live within.

    THE RIVER PILGRIM: A LETTER

At eighteen, I thought the Sixhiboux wept.
Five years younger, you were lush, beautiful
Mystery; your limbs — scrolls of deep water.
Before your home, lost in roses, I swooned,
Drunken in the village of Whylah Falls,
And brought you apple blossoms you refused,
Wanting Hank Snow woodsmoke blues and dried smelts,
Wanting some milljerk's dumb, unlettered love.

That May, freights chimed xylophone tracks that rang
To Montréal. I scribbled postcard odes,
Painted le fleuve Saint-Laurent comme la Seine —
Sad watercolours for Negro exiles
In France, and dreamt Paris white with lepers,
Soft cripples who finger pawns under elms,
Drink blurry into young debauchery,
Their glasses clear with Cointreau, rain, and tears.

You hung the moon backwards, crooned crooked poems
That no voice could straighten, not even O
Who stroked guitars because he was going
To die with a bullet through his stomach.
Innocent, you curled among notes — petals
That scaled glissando from windows agape,
And remained in southwest Nova Scotia,
While I drifted, sad and tired, in the east.

I have been gone four springs. This April, pale
Apple blossoms blizzard. The garden flutes
E-flats of lilacs, G-sharps of lilies.
Too many years, too many years, are past ...

Past the marble and pale flowers of Paris,
Past the broken, Cubist guitars of Arles,
Shelley, I am coming down through the narrows
Of the Sixhiboux River. I will write
Beforehand. Please, please come out to meet me
As far as Beulah Beach.

TO X

April _, 19_

Dear X:

You asked how I'm doing. I take the D.A.R. train up the line to Jarvis once a month; and I study the woman wisdom hidden in letters, diaries, and songs. One thing I've found is the chastity of numbers. Take the number nine. It mirrors any number to which it's wed. Here's the sum of my argument:

9+7=16=1+6=7

The same miracle happens with multiples of nine:

18+16=1+8+1+6=9+7=16=1+6=7
or 18+16=34=3+4=7

Numbers reveal truth. Words always have something to hide.

    Remember Rafael Rivers who works at the up-and-down mill in New France, back by the Seven Pence Ha' Penny River? He doesn't know books but he knows good jokes. We go out some.

    I'm leaving in June to work all summer on the Yarmouth-Boston steamers. I'm hoping to scrounge enough for teachers's college next year.

    Me and ma and all are glad you're coming down. It's spring!

Bessie Bird flits from limb to limb.
Apple blossoms petal the snow.

    Watch out for living gales. God speed. Shelley

    MAY 19_

Othello staggered in the yard, he lurched,
Squared his fist in my face, and spat, "If you
So much as dream that you and my sis' might ..."
That night was moist with chance, the liquid shock
Of lightning. The river crashed like timber.
Tarpaper homes collapsed under the weight
Of scarlet Liberal election lies.

You fed me coffee, weiners, beans, and bread;
I wept love poems with tragic majesty,
Remembering every epic failure,
The cigarette smoke of café Marxists,
The pearl of moon above the pawnshop's pearls,
When I staggered across the spine of Montréal,
From Pie IX to Berri-de-Montigny,
In dark loneliness and indigo lust.
Five years later, Shelley, I can't forget.
We are our pasts. Nothing is forgotten.

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Excerpted from Whylah Falls by George Elliott Clarke. Copyright © 2000 by George Elliott Clarke. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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