coming, too. At the end of seven months of arduous performance on the mandolin on my part, my younger brother, Joel, came along, picked up the mandolin, stared at it for a few seconds, and then proceeded to play it with aplomb. Tony, meanwhile, had become something of a hotshot on the banjo. Suddenly there was a guitar in the house as well, and Tony began his adventures on the fretboard, adventures that continue to this day. All of which is to say, my brothers very quickly demonstrated themselves to be much more musically gifted than I.
I could, however, sing. When I sang, pleasant things happened. My father would pause in the doorway to his den and pull on his pipe reflectively. My mother would lay aside her book (for she read constantly), and a vague, somewhat wistful smile would visit. When we three brothers joined forces, my brothers would let me sing lead, while Joel undertook the higher harmony and Tony essayed the bass.
The music we favoured was bluegrass, popularized in those days by groups like the New Lost City Ramblers. During those sessions with my brothers, I imprinted upon myself particular notions of music-making. For one thing, in bluegrass (the result of a backwoods tryst between English traditional folk music and the blues), instrumental virtuosity is encouraged, the musicians bellying forward in turn to improvise over the changes. Also, bluegrass features harmonies, dense and often a little dissonant, the characteristic “high lonesome” wail of Bill Monroe. And I adopted, back then, an iconography of trains and birds and churches that would show up later in my songs. Finally, bluegrass music, for all its up-tempo spirit, often embraces dark subject matter: murder, alcoholism, the untimely death of loved ones.
ALL RIGHT: on that note, here comes the new thematic material. As Martin and I drove home from the meeting with Dr. Frazier, we weren’t sure how to proceed. There seemed to be very little to do. Very little to say. At one point Martin ventured, “Well, I guess if you ever wondered what you’d do if someone gave you that news, now you know.”
“Uh-huh.”
Martin is not technically my oldest friend, but he is my dearest. He had come with me to the doctor because several people had suggested it was good to have two sets of ears. But the truth of the matter was, Marty had been every bit as gob-smacked as I, and neither of us had heard much more than dick-all of what was said. Somewhere in there Dr. Frazier had seemed to suggest that I was going to die in a few months.
I called Dorothy at work. Dorothy and I had divorced several years prior to all this, but when I first got ill she took me back into the house on First Avenue. (The house on First Avenue is next door to the house owned by Martin and his wife, Jill, which is no coincidence. We bought the houses together, two adjacent row houses, and then we tore down the fence separating the gardens, giving us a larger shared space. This wasn’t done for any Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice type reasons, rather so that both couples would have handy babysitting. Indeed, my daughters, Carson and Flannery, think of Marty and Jill as a second set of parents, especially since their first set of parents split up.)
Anyway, Dorothy worked part time for E & C Marine, the “C” of which was Charles Gallimore, who had sold me my houseboat, and she arrived home a little while later, seeming very calm and collected. (I found out later, from Charles, that she’d done her crying there in the shop, a nor’easter of misery, so that she could appear at home unruffled and strong.) “So, it’s lung cancer?” she asked.
“Uh-huh.”
Again. Very little to do. Very little to say. We exchanged words of some sort, and then I announced, “Well, I think I’ll go for a little drive.”
I headed, without thinking, toward the east, way out into Scarborough. As I drove, I said, under my breath, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck” over and over again.
My cell phone rang. It was Shaughnessy, who often phones up to see how I am. I dare say he didn’t expect such a blunt answer: “I’ve got lung cancer.”
“What?”
“Non-operable.”
“Shit shit shit shit.”
“No, it’s fuck fuck fuck fuck.” I tried to be stoic, saying as how I had led a good life, and had lovely friends and loved ones. But then the sight of a very pretty girl reduced me to convulsive sobs. “I’m going to miss this so much,” I managed to get out, although my throat was so knotted with remorse that speech seemed hardly possible. I told Shaughn that I’d call him back later, and I drove on down to the Bluffs.
Some brief earth-science history: over many millennia, the eastern end of the land that modern Toronto sits upon eroded, and the effluvia ribboned across the water to the west. Over time, it formed a long, bent peninsula; a storm in the nineteenth century severed and separated this landmass, which now forms the Toronto Islands. The Bluffs are fascinating, to me, on several counts. For one thing, they are beautiful, in a bleak and desolate way. They rise hundreds of feet into the air, with the kind of naked nature, lifeless and alien, that one encounters in hoodoos and mesas.
The Bluffs are also associated in my mind with death. I don’t believe this was at the forefront of my mind as I drove there on D-Day, Diagnosis Day. But throughout my childhood I heard stories of people meeting their end on the Bluffs, either by suicide or when a part of the cliffside suddenly collapsed. A very popular art teacher at my high school lived on the Bluffs; his young daughter was standing close to the edge one day when the earth disappeared from beneath her feet, and she was gone. So maybe this was leading me down to the Bluffs, on some level: it seemed a place to go to begin battle with the Darkness. (“To begin negotiations” might be more accurate.)
Various species of birds inhabit the Scarborough Bluffs, evolution having brought them to this particular place of endless bickering and squawking. Any scrap of food is the epicentre of a convergence of ungodly screech and ululation. Wings are beaten menacingly, necks ruffled. The only relatively quiet species is the swan. Those elegant creatures maintain their silence, for the same reason the crazed and homicidal do: to keep their victims unsuspecting and unprepared. I mention this because, having driven down the huge hill and left the car in the lot, I stumbled out to the shore and bawled like a baby. Not non-stop. But every minute or so I would emit a long wail of, oh, who knows what the emotion was at that point? The truest thing to say would be that it wasn’t a single emotion, it was quite a few of them stumbling into each other to get out, like drunkards in a doorway.
In the midst of all this, a swan snuck up behind me and bit me on the ass.
I was of course very indignant, but the creature had a point. Get on with it. I started back toward my car. My first resolution: no more cheap wine. I drove back to First Avenue, stopping at the LCBO on the way to buy some Borolos and Amarones.
We held an impromptu wake.
1 Here’s another bit of family lore I just learned from my brother Tony. Apparently, for a while, my grandfather played in a band that supplied entertainment on some sort of pleasure vessel, a huge paddleboat or something, that cruised down the Don River. That’s a lovely bit of family lore, but I’m not going to fact-check it too aggressively, if you see what I mean. If you could see and smell the Don River these days, you would share some of my misgivings. But the story goes that Joe Quarrington played in the band, and also featured on board—her act consisting of “Recitation and Elocution”— was Nora Fleischer, who was to become my grandmother. Tony says he has seen the playbill, even thinks that he possesses a copy of it, but Tony is a pathological collector, and the chances of finding any one thing in his collections is remote.
2 There is also, I’ve since learned, an Irish version of this song (“from the hills of Kerry
