The Stone Angel

  I look at him suspiciously. One candle is hardly sufficient to size a person up. He’s wearing a loose and floppy herringbone tweed coat, and at his feet he’s set the large paper bag he was carrying. He has a rodent face, uneasy eyes. Above his mouth grows a ginger-colored mustache, and he sticks out his lower teeth and nibbles at it persistently.

  “You’re sure? Marvin never sent you?”

  “Heavenly days, lady, I don’t even know who Marvin is.”

  “Marvin Shipley, my son. I’m Hagar Shipley.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” he says. “You can take it easy. I only came here for a little peace and quiet. Sometimes I like to think, by myself, that’s all. Mind if I sit down?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  He settles himself on a cushion of fishnets beside me. He might be lying of course. I don’t trust him, but for the moment I’ve had my fill of being alone.

  “Those dogs chased me,” he says piteously, as though it were a personal insult. “I don’t suppose they’re really vicious, but I sure wasn’t keen to find out.”

  “I heard them. I was frightened, too.”

  “I never said I was frightened, did I?”

  “Weren’t you?”

  “Yeh,” he says sullenly. “I suppose I was.”

  “Whose are they?”

  “How should I know?” he says. “You don’t think I come here often, do you?”

  “I only meant—”

  “They’re the watchman’s,” he says. “He lives up the hill, but he’s pretty old and hardly ever comes down here because of the steps.”

  “I couldn’t imagine why they changed their minds and left so suddenly.”

  “They found a wounded bird,” he says, “and fought over which was to have it. A gull, it looked, in the bushes outside.”

  “Oh. So that was it.” And for some reason I can’t fathom, I tell him.

  “Lucky for me you nabbed it,” he says.

  “I guess so. But I only wanted it to go away. I wish now I hadn’t harmed it.”

  “What?” he says, outraged. “And have me torn to pieces?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. But I wish they hadn’t got it.”

  He lights a cigarette and sucks in the smoke gluttonously. Then he holds out the packet.

  “Smoke?”

  To his surprise, I take one. He lights it for me and then he opens his paper bag and sets a jug of red wine on the floor. He’s come well supplied—he even has a plastic cup, and this he fills and hands to me.

  “Care for a drop? It’s not the best, but for two-fifty a half gallon, what can you expect?”

  “Thanks. I don’t mind if I do, just half a cup.”

  He drinks from the jug. I sip. A sweetish taste. slightly chemical, but to me it seems delicious after the rain water. I drink the rest right down.

  “You were sure thirsty,” he says. “Have you eaten today?”

  “How thoughtful of you to ask. But yes, I have. Have you?”

  “Of course,” he says. “Do you think I’m a tramp or something?”

  “Well no, but I’ve got some soda biscuits here somewhere. You can help yourself if you want any.”

  “Thanks,” he says, “but I’m not hungry right now. It’s nice of you, though.”

  Then he laughs, a low gurgling.

  “What’s the matter?” I ask.

  “We’re so polite,” he says.

  “I see no reason for people forgetting their manners,” I say, somewhat aloofly “wherever they happen to find themselves.”

  “No?” he says. “Well, I see every reason for it, to tell you the truth, but that’s neither here nor there. A little more?”

  “You’re very kind, Mr.—”

  “Lees. Murray F. Lees.” He holds the jug aloft and opens his throat. He’s skilled at this, I can see. Then he seems prepared to chat. “The F stands for Ferney. Murray Ferney Lees. My mother thought I’d be a poet, I guess, with a name like that. Ferney was Mother’s maiden name. She loved the name and hated to part with it when she married Dad. That’s why she gave it to me. Rose Ferney, that was her. A delicate name, she used to say.”

  He emits a bubble of laughter.

  “She was a little bit of a thing, a dainty little soul,” he says. “She couldn’t keep house worth a damn.”

  “She got fed up, more than likely,” I say. “Making meals day in and day out for a noisy bunch who never had a kind word for her.”

  “Believe you me,” he says, “it was not that way at all.”

  I sigh from the pit of my stomach and sip again. “How you see a thing—it depends which side of the fence you’re on.”

  “How true,” he says. “Take me, for example. You’ll find people who’ll tell you you’re a parasite if you’re in insurance. Well, that’s just not so. What would people do if they couldn’t provide for the future? Answer me that. A man knows his dependents will be cared for if anything should happen to him—it gives him peace of mind. I’ve been selling peace of mind since 1934. I joined Dependable during the depression and I’ve never looked back. Before I went to work for them, my prospects weren’t worth a nickel.”

  He talks and talks. He’s a bore, this man, but I find the sound of his voice comforting. The wine warms me. I can’t notice the chest pain so much now.

  Outside, the sea nuzzles at the floorboards that edge the water. If I were alone, I wouldn’t find the sound soothing in the slightest. I’d be drawn out and out, with each receding layer of water to its beginning, a depth as alien and chill as some far frozen planet, a night sea hoarding sly-eyed serpents, killer whales, swarming phosphorescent creatures dead to the daytime, a black sea sucking everything into itself, the spent gull, the trivial garbage from boats, and men protected from eternity only by their soft and fearful flesh and their seeing eyes. But I have a companion and so I’m safe, and the sea is only the sound of water slapping against the planking.

  “I got the job by prayer,” he’s saying. “You wouldn’t think so to look at me, would you? But that’s what happened. I was convinced of it. I was a Redeemer’s Advocate in those days. I came by it honestly. My granddad on my father’s side was a circuit rider.”

  “A circus rider?”

  “Yeh, Nero’s circus. He was an early Christian. Circuit, I said, actually. He used to go around preaching the Word. He’d set up that big gray flapping canvas tent of his in the fairgrounds at the edge of town, and he’d put his sign outside. Hear Tollemache Lees. Well-known Evangelist. Renowned throughout the Cariboo and the entire Peace River Country. Tonight’s Sermon—What Awaits the Damned? Don’t miss this timely topic. Some such thing. The brand of salvation he sold was firewater, nothing meek about it, believe you me. It might be hard to swallow but you sure felt good once it was down. He’d started out as a shingle-binder but changed to being a spell-binder—that’s what Dad used to say about him, not meaning it as any compliment, either. My dad kept a shoe store in Blackfly, sawmill town up north. He was United Church and couldn’t stand the sight of the old guy. I grew up in Blackfly.”

  “What an odd name for a town.”

  “You wouldn’t think so,” he says, “if you’d ever been there in summer. The little bastards never gave you a moment’s peace. Mother was even more death on the old guy than Dad was. After the Tabernacle was built, up in Blackfly, he used to come regularly. He liked it a whole lot better than his tent, which was wearing kind of thin by that time. The Tabernacle had a fumed oak pulpit with a white satin cover fringed all around with gilt tassels, and at the front, in nifty maroon script letters, it said All Now Living Can Be Saved. Mother forbade me to go but I went anyway. She even used to walk right past him if she met him in the street. He’d come around to the shoe store and Dad would give him the odd buck to get rid of him. Mother said she couldn’t hold her head up in Blackfly while he was there. I liked the meetings. He had a voice that carried like the spouting of a whale. He’d lead the gathering in song. I can hear him yet—

  ??
?Dip your hands, dip your hands,

  Dip them in the blood,

  The pure and living Blood of the Lamb—’ ”

  He sings gustily, in a voice breathless with laughter. I’m not much diverted. This seems in poor taste to me.

  “What an unpleasant hymn.”

  “Not at all,” he says. “It was better than Buck Rogers and Tom Mix rolled into one. Also, I believed it with all my might and main. When I was grown, and joined the Advocates, Mother said I was a throwback. Poor Mother. Poor little soul. She was a worrier. She was an Anglican and she worried about the possibility of any other Anglican seeing me sauntering into the Tabernacle. She worried about everything. In summer she worried in case she smelled, and she used to patter into the bedroom every half hour or so and sprinkle herself with lavender talcum, but when deodorants came on the market, she wouldn’t use them in case they made a mark on her dress and people saw.”

  “Well, the poor thing,” I say, clicking my tongue and holding out my plastic goblet again. “Fancy spending your life worrying what people were thinking. She must have had a rather weak character.”

  “Ever noticed a morning glory?” he asks. “They look-so frail you’d think they’d wither if you spat at them. But try to weed them out and see how far you get. Weak, hell. She fussed so much about me being an Advocate that finally I left Blackfly for good. She was more determined even than Lou.”

  “Lou—that’s your wife?”

  He tilts the jug again and wipes his mouth with a hand.

  “Yeh. I met her at a Bible Camp. She was a big strapping girl, a redhead. Like a feather mattress, that woman was, and that’s a fact. That Bible Camp was quite something, I can tell you.”

  He’s rather a coarse man, I can see that. I sniff and he glances at me.

  “I was fond of her,” he says defensively. “Did I say fond? I was crazy about her. In those days she could have prayed the angels themselves right down from heaven, if she’d been so inclined, and when she lay down on the moss and spread those great white thighs of hers, there wasn’t a sweeter place in this entire world.”

  His plain words take me aback, and I’m embarrassed and can’t look at him.

  “Well, that’s a mighty odd combination, I must say, prayer and that.”

  There’s thousands would agree with you,” he says morosely. “God is Love, but please don’t mention the two in the same breath. I loved that woman, I tell you.”

  “You call that love?”

  “Lady,” he says, “if that wasn’t, what is?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know, I’m sure.”

  I heave the breath in and out of my lungs. “Oh—I’m tired. I’m quite worn out these days. I never used to feel this tired. That fool of a doctor. A good tonic would be a lot more benefit to me than all his X rays.”

  ‘You okay?” my companion asks. “You want me to quit gabbing?”

  I smile at that. He couldn’t stop talking to save his life.

  “No—go on. I like to hear you.”

  “Well, okay, if you’re sure. Where’s your glass got to?”

  “No, really, I mustn’t take any more. You’ll want it.”

  “Don’t give it a thought,” he says. “I’m glad of the company. As I was saying, Lou and I got married sooner than we’d meant to, but that didn’t bother me any. It bothered her, though. All of a sudden she’s a worrier, too. She planned to tell everybody the baby was premature. She hardly ate a thing except tomatoes, very low calorie, you know, But when Donnie was born he was nine pounds twelve—what a disaster.”

  He hands me the glass and I drink again. His vintage is stronger than it tastes. But I’m light-limbed, comfortable, and the pain has quite vanished. He lifts his shoulders in a shrug.

  “I hugged her hard and told her it didn’t matter a damn,” he says. “But it was no use. God was punishing her, that’s what she thought. Some punishment, I said, a whopping kid like this, healthy, all there. He doesn’t have two heads, does he, or an eye missing? She never saw it that way at all. You won’t believe it, but she was never the same.”

  “You don’t say? How?”

  “She held herself back. Her heart wasn’t in it. She was twice as keen at the Tabernacle though. She still is. But not me.”

  He leans over and looks me straight in the eye.

  “I lost my faith,” he says confidingly. “I kind of mislaid it and when I went to look for it, it wasn’t there.”

  “Maybe you never had it, then,” I offer, thinking how impertinent of him to be telling me this. As if I were interested.

  “I thought I did,” he says doubtfully. “But maybe I never, at that. I took it more easy than some, it’s true, but when I got up to testify I talked like Corinthians says with the tongues of men and of angels. I was fed up when Lou said that about Donnie. But it was really the end of the world that finished me on it once and for all.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “We had a lay preacher in our Tabernacle at that time,” he explains. “He’d started out as a boulder painter. You know, one of those guys who go around with a bucket of whitewash, painting slogans on boulders along the road, to cheer up passing drivers. Doom is Night—stuff like that. Well, he ran out of whitewash, I guess, so he came to the Larkspur Street Tabernacle and started informing us the hour was at hand. I bet you thought that sort of thing went out of style years ago. But uh-uh. It never did.”

  “I never had anything to do with those sects,” I say. “I wouldn’t know one way or another.”

  “You never mixed in the right company,” Murray Ferney Lees says. “This guy, Pulsifer was his name, he was pretty convincing, I have to hand it to him. You know the sort of guy. Big, not actually handsome, but with that reassuring look. You listen to him and you think—boy, he sure sounds certain; how could he be wrong? Lou lapped it up. He wasn’t taking any chances, though. He never said the world—as we know it—they always put in that bit as a precaution—is going to terminate on September fourth at two-thirty in the afternoon. No, sir. He just said it would be soon, and he could prove it with chapter and verse, and we should post watches and hold these vigils and pray to have the exact time revealed to us, so we could be prepared, see? Listen, I said to Lou, so what if the exact time is revealed? You’re going to stop it, maybe, ask God to kindly wait until you’re an old lady? That’s just simply not the point, Murray, she said, the point is could you not keep watch one hour? Personally, she said, she certainly could and if I couldn’t that was my tough luck.”

  I’m growing sleepy, listening to him, but something in his voice keeps me awake. He drinks again, then pushes the jug across to me. I try to tip it and pour, but the wine slops on the floor. Appalled, he seizes it from me. He’s drunk as a lord, but he pours my glass without wasting a drop. He’s an experienced hand. But I’m not mocking him, even inwardly. There’s a plausibility about this man. I like him now, despite his rabbity face, his nervous gnawing at his mustache. His strangeness interests me and I wonder how I could have thought him a bore. I’ve heard vaguely of the Redeemer’s Advocates, but never at firsthand before. I’d never have dreamed of having anything to do with such people.

  “Did you go, then, Mr. Lees, to the vigils at the Tabernacle?”

  “Yeh,” he says. “I thought—what the hell, it’s not worth making a scene about. I hate scenes. They give me migraine. Lou can shout the place down when she gets going. Being in insurance, though, it put me in an awkward spot, as you can appreciate. What am I supposed to do, I said to Lou, go on selling annuities just the same? Which, if I believe my clients will none of them see sixty, is hypocritical, you got to admit it. Or tell them they’re wasting their money? In which case, I said to her, the New Kingdom better come pretty damn quick or we won’t be able to keep up the payments on the house. All the more reason, she said, for praying to know the date.”

  “You didn’t believe it would happen, though, did you?”

  He spreads his hands as though inviting m
e to examine them. The nails are bitten down to the quick.

  “I believed when I was right there in the Tabernacle, along with all the rest. You think—my God, they all believe it—I can’t be the only one not to. But what you don’t know is maybe they’re thinking the exact same thing. Or maybe not. How can you tell? That’s what made me nervous sometimes.”

  “But you—yourself—when you weren’t with them?”

  “I’d heard the same malarkey since I was a kid. It was old stuff. I was used to it. I couldn’t get worked up about it the way Lou could. Or—yeh, maybe I could, at that, but not so easily. I needed a boost, see? Anyway, I went that night to the vigil.”

  He breaks off and gazes around the room, up at the high rafters hidden by darkness, over to the derelict boat, its prow only dimly discernible, the grubby glass windows of its wheelhouse catching our one taper’s worth of light and glinting as though a mirror were set into the night. I lean forward, attentive, ease a cramped limb with a hand, and look at this man, whose name I have suddenly forgotten but whose face, now turned to mine, says in plain and urgent silence—Listen. You must listen. He’s sitting cross-legged, and he wavers a little and sways as he speaks in a deep loud voice.

  “Reveal, oh Lord, to these few faithful ones. Thy mysterious purpose, that they may prepare to partake of the heavenly feast in Thy Tabernacle on high and drink the grapes anew in Thine Own Kingdom—”

  He stops. He peers at me to see what I make of it. I look at him and at the shadows streaking now around him. His face recedes, then rushes closer, but only his face, as though the rest of him had ceased to exist. Now I’m afraid, and wish he’d stop. I don’t want to hear any more.

  “What they really meant,” he says, “was—if we’re for it, God, for pity’s sake tell us when. It’s this suspense we can’t stand.”

  “Not an unusual plight,” I say dryly.

  “Yeh? Well, that’s as may be, but I knelt there—the floor was like iron, I may say, and the crease in my pants was ruined—and all at once I lifted my head and looked around and saw old Pulsifer throbbing like a heart, his eyes closed, and it struck me then that if the tribulation didn’t come he wouldn’t be relieved—he’d be disappointed. I thought two things then. One was that if God had any sense of humor, He’d be laughing His head off that very minute. The other was that when the hour did strike, it would likely come as more of a surprise to Him than to us. No future here, Murray, I said to myself. You can do as you please, I said to Lou, but I’m getting the hell out of here and going home. We shouldn’t have left Donnie so long anyhow. She didn’t hear me. I took the housekey out of her purse. She never noticed. She was too busy begging for the keys of heaven.”