EXCERPT

AFTER MY FATHER had gone, my mother gave up to my sisters the big, sunny south bedroom, and moved her few personal possessions into a small shadowed chamber on the north side of the house whose single windowpane peered out from under the sagging eyebrow of a rickety flight of outside wooden stairs. This window overlooked the garden, so that the hinged three-paned mirror of her dressing table formed a perfect triptych of reflected choke-cherries. 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 clothes-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 which I could slide back and lift out, allowing me to peer down into a dim, dusty other-world 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 peered up at me boldly through the green glass goggles of their Buck Rogers helmets. And it was there, in that underfloor world of wood-shavings and ancient sawdust, tucked as far back between the joists as it could possibly go, that I found the shoe-box 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 perhaps? 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 shoe-box—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 note-pad: 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 the thirteenth. It was a Friday.