The Reading Rock

By Craig Conley

A successful professional woman reconnects with a man from her youth through a twist of fate. This unexpected connection to her happy childhood prompts her to consider how her life has come to be what it is today and she wonders what became of those idyllic and innocent times. Her childhood friend has his own story, one that has left him sadly unfulfilled, and though worlds apart now, the fortunes of chance draw the two inexorably toward each other. Returning separately to the town they grew up in, they meet and talk over old times in an intimate surrounding. Helping each other to answer the difficult questions they harbor regarding their identities, and putting to rest nagging doubts concerning certain ignominious childhood events, a healing begins for them both. They become restored and refreshed and foresee their lives changing in the future as it stretches out welcoming before them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Craig Conley
• Release date: Oct 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9780983280194

Craig Conley

Craig Conley is an established teacher and author with a long history of writing for schools and public libraries. He is currently a consulting editor for McGraw-Hill and Globe Fearon publishers. For nine years he was an instructor of composition, literature, and study skills at universities and community colleges in Tennessee, Virginia, and Florida. His articles have appeared in magazines such as Verbatim, Mothering, Mnemosyne Journal, American Cage-Bird, and Home Education. Conley holds a B.S. in mass communications and an M.A. in English from Middle Tennessee State University.

Book preview

THE READING ROCK

Marilyn Nickson

Copyright© Craig Conley 2012

Published by CeeCee Publishing at Smashwords

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

Second Edition

ISBN: 9780983280194

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011920858

About the Author:

Doctor Marilyn Nickson was Canadian-born and educated, but lived a major portion of her life in England. Prominent in the academic world surrounding Cambridge University, her books on Mathematics Education Research have influenced many British educators, and her work as Chair for the Board of Governors for King’s School, Ely resulted in higher degrees of excellence for that august body. She wanted to try her hand at a fiction novel, and luckily finished this one mere weeks before her sad and untimely death. Although it is indeed to be classified as fiction, there is something of the autobiographical about it. Many of the events and characters are real, drawn from her own experiences. She was an incredible woman and everyone whom she touched became the better for the experience. The Reading Rock is a real rock, and I scattered her ashes beside it. I was her husband. This story, combined with that symbolic gesture, make a thing of beauty that will stand forever.

Craig Conley

C O N T E N T S:

Chapter I

Bourval 1

Chapter II

Cambridge 1

Chapter III

Toronto 1

Chapter IV

London

Chapter V

Toronto

Chapter VI

Cambridge

Chapter VII

Bourval 2

Chapter VIII

Montreal

Chapter IX

Toronto 3

Chapter X

Bourval 3

Chapter XI

Toronto 4

Chapter XII

Lake Two Trees

Chapter XIII

Bourval 4

Chapter XIV

Bourval 5

CHAPTER I

Bourval 1

A clearing in the bush is not everyone’s idea of a romantic setting, but for some, taming a wilderness to make it habitable is nothing short of adventure, and adventures are romantic. A love for the rawness of nature competes with the need to impose a degree of civilisation bit by bit and there is a see-saw of emotion between loving it as it is and a desire to control it. When the focus of all this activity is gold lying dormant beneath the wilderness, a kind of urgent madness permeates life and gives it a unique character all its own.

Gold was discovered in northern Quebec in the1930’s and gave birth to a town called Bourval. It began quite simply as a clearing in the bush, and this was the environment into which Eve was born. With her child’s mind, she imagined the mine as a hole that was drilled and dug until it disappeared from the light of day together with the drilling and digging men, deeper and deeper below the surface, but beyond that, it did not make much sense to her.

Her first memories were of mud and tar paper. The family log cabin was one of a short row of little cabins on a mud track that had an occasional thin layer of gravel on top which quickly became absorbed in the underlying sludge. The smell of tar came from tar-paper roofs and the chinking between the logs of the cabins. It was awhile before she came to realise there were at least two rows of cabins in the world and a bit later, when the family moved into a larger one, there was the discovery of something magical called stairs. These allowed her to sit up high at her bedroom window and watch the rest of the world below: an exciting new perspective on life. She could see people come and go, sometimes in the evening when the northern summer light was still bright and sometimes in the strange half-dark of the long winter days. As far as she could tell it was mostly men who made up the world and who did the coming and going, day and night, with a strange rhythm of hours and all carrying black metallic boxes under an arm. These, she soon discovered, were lunch pails; the men did shift-work and had to eat while they worked underground - eight hours on, eight hours off - and the black lunch pail was a vital part of their lives.

All of this was strange to Eve’s young mind because as far as she was aware her father did not have a lunch pail. He often carried a small black bag as he came and went quite regularly but he was almost always home for lunch. He did occasionally go off in the dead of night, however. She would hear his footsteps going down the stairs as he went out the back door to the garage, then hear the car door open and slam and the sound of the engine growing fainter as he drove down the back lane. For what seemed like a long time, she took all of this for granted and assumed that other children’s fathers came and went with their work, carrying either black boxes or black leather bags. It was not until her world began to expand and she was allowed to follow her older brother and sister to an exciting place called kindergarten that she discovered a wider picture of her father’s activities and of who he was and as a result, something about who she was.

Kindergarten was a room in a cabin just like theirs directly across the back lane. There were always several other children there and they were given fun things to do by a kindly lady called Mrs Jaynes. Up until that point, Eve had thought of Mrs Jaynes as someone just like her mother who did ordinary things like hang out her washing every Monday but clearly, she was different. She could draw and tell stories and teach them songs and how to make letters. Eve soon learned from Mrs Jaynes, as well as the other children, that as the company doctor, her father was regarded as someone special; gradually she realised that this somehow made her special too. As time went on, this special-ness would change from being something to enjoy to becoming something of a bore. There were expectations associated with it that were cumbersome and restrictive but in her younger years, she quite enjoyed the extra attention it brought.

One of the most important events in Eve’s early years was the discovery of flowers which came about as the result of new people entering her life. By the time she was five, the family had grown to include a sister and two brothers which meant her mother needed help around the house so a large, warm woman called Anna came into their lives. Her arrival occurred shortly before that of Eve’s little brother and the two events became firmly linked in Eve’s memory. On the evening little brother Ross ‘arrived’ she and her sister and big brother had been taken for a drive by family friends – something unheard of – and when they returned, they found Anna sitting on a chair in the kitchen, crying and wiping away tears with her apron. This was upsetting and when asked what the matter was, Anna replied ‘You got a new little baby brother upstairs!’ and she was crying because she was happy. This seemed like utter nonsense to the three of them but it turned out to be true

Anna was different and seemed quite exotic to Eve. She had at least two gold teeth and spoke English in a strange way. She had a different sort of smell about her which turned out to be from eating garlic which, for some strange reason, seemed not to be entirely acceptable to her parents. Anna did some of the cooking and it was clear that garlic was not to be introduced into the family diet because it was something unpleasant that ‘foreigners’ ate. (Eve often thinks to this day of how ironic it was that she should grow to love garlic and almost never cook without it.) Thus it was that at this very early stage in her life, the whole notion of foreignness began to colour Eve’s perceptions of the world and her place in it. But the most important result of Anna’s presence was that she sometimes brought her son, Stefan, to work with her.

Stefan was older than Eve - she wasn’t sure by how much - but he seemed to know a lot more about their world than she did. He was allowed to go pretty well anywhere in town and talked about people and stores and strange locations like the ‘taxi stand’ and a ‘tavern’ that she had never heard of. Even at that tender age, it struck her as being odd that she and her siblings weren’t allowed to wander freely and explore as Stefan was able to do. As with Anna, Eve had always thought of her son as strangely exotic because he came from beyond her immediate world. Usually he played with her brother and had no time for what he probably thought of as a sissy little girl, but one day when he came to the house, Peter and her sister weren’t there and he rather grudgingly ended up playing with Eve. They were outside playing in a backyard with no softness about it and no colour, just the bareness of hard-packed sandy soil, a wooden garage and a huge woodpile. Perched against the side of the garage on an up-ended log was a small flat wooden box filled with the same dry sandy soil that was the yard, but in the box were magic little bits of green making their way through the top of the dryness.

These are onions, said Eve. My Daddy told me if I poured water over these that one day there would be onions we could eat.

Not much of a garden, Stefan scoffed. I know where there is a real garden with lots of colour and not just potatoes and onions and stuff but real flowers.

Eve had mostly seen flowers in her picture books and occasionally some real ones that came out of boxes delivered to the front door for her mother, apparently arriving from some far-away place. The pictures had stirred the beginnings of a feeling of awe that anything could be so beautiful, and the scent and fragility of the real ones from the boxes added to their magical quality. In the bush where they lived (and she now realised it was bush as she began to recognise the rugged roughness of the surrounding world) the idea of seeing the miracle of flowers as they actually grew was the most exciting prospect she could think of.

Don’t believe you, said Eve. Nothing like flowers grows here. This is the bush and all we have are trees and rocks and gold.

C’mon and I’ll show you, Stefan said. It’s not very far away.

It didn’t have to be very far away to be out of bounds for Eve and she knew that her mother would be more than a little cross if she just walked away. But she also knew that if she asked her mother whether or not she could go, the answer would definitely be ‘no’.

Where is it? she asked.

At the Lodge up behind First Street. You know – it’s where my Mom says all the important men from the mine come to stay. It’s not far.

Eve didn’t know, but was intrigued by the idea of something called a ‘lodge’ and though Stefan might not think so, First Street sounded a long way from Fifth Street where she now lived. What wonders could there be, so near and yet so far? Rebellion stirred in her soul for the first time (at least this is the way she would see it in later years) and she said, C’mon - show me!

It didn’t occur to Stefan that they might be doing anything out of the ordinary, and especially that it was something that might be considered ‘bad’. He took for granted the freedom he enjoyed and never questioned the fact that others might not share it. So off they went. They walked behind the garage to the back lane, turned left for a little bit, then right along a road that led up a gentle hill. Eve couldn’t remember ever having been this way before and found herself looking at the ends of rows of log cabins just like the one she lived in.

D’you know who lives in all these houses? she asked Stefan.

Some, he replied, but mostly they’re not for men like my Dad ‘cause he works underground.

How come that makes him different? she asked.

Don’t really know. `Cause he isn’t important enough, maybe. said Stefan. But we’re better off than anyone living in any old log cabin. We got our own house and it isn’t logs and doesn’t really look like anyone else’s. That’s special. He sounded proud and defensive at the same time.

This caused a slight stirring of resentment in Eve who felt that if there were anyone special in the town, it was her Dad and their home ought to reflect his importance. But she let the thought go as Stefan led them to the left, off the road and into a slightly narrower one which turned out to be a driveway. It had lots of trees on both sides where large rocks rose smoothly out of the ground, looking somehow as though they had been deliberately placed there although they weren’t. It was strangely quiet except for a few noisy birds and the quietness made her think that perhaps they were too far from home and this was somewhere she ought not to be. At the same time, it was enchanting and she felt a sense of adventure.

Are you sure this is okay? Is somebody going to be cross with us for walking here? she asked.

Naw, said Stefan. The only person here is Mr Wojik – he’s the gardener – and he’s a friend of my family. He’ll be glad to see us.

The driveway curved and as they turned the corner, Eve saw a building unlike any other she had ever seen. It was much taller than the family’s cabin and there wasn’t a log in sight. Instead, the whole thing was painted white and was criss-crossed with pieces of black wood, all of which reminded her of pictures of buildings in her book of nursery rhymes. In front of the house there was a grassy glade – she had never seen so much grass all at once before – and there were two big splotches of colour on either side of the large black front door. To the right and slightly behind the front of the house there was even more colour that seemed to come every-which-way from a whole lot of rocks.

See, I told you, said Stefan. Look at all the flowers! Beats growing onions in a wooden box. Pride sounded in his voice as he waved his hands in the direction of the colour – pride in producing what he had promised.

As they came closer to the rocks, Eve could see that the flowers were not quite the confusion of shape and colour she had thought at first, but were in fact growing out of little pockets of earth that were carefully spaced amongst large stones which themselves appeared to have been chosen for shape and colour. There were plants with little pink and red and mauve flowers that flowed over the edge of the rocks; some that stood up straight bearing feathery pink and blue blooms; some with thick glossy leaves and a single flower at the end of a stem; others with dark blue clusters on a fat stem. Most delightful of all to Eve were the tiny little velvety things that had dark purple faces with just a touch of yellow and looked as though they expected a greeting from the onlooker.

Wow! said Eve. How did they get here? Who do they belong to? Can we pick some? Stefan could see how excited Eve had become at the glorious sight he had produced for her.

Don’t think that would be such a good idea – they belong to the lodge – but we could ask Mr Wojik if we could have a few. Why d’you want them anyway? They look good where they are. Stefan shuffled his feet a bit, annoyed to find that just having shown the flowers to Eve apparently was not enough and that yet more was required to please her.

I’d love to take some to my mother. She only ever gets flowers that come in boxes. But she’s never seen anything like these before in her whole life, I’ll bet.

Okay – I’ll ask. Mr Wojik’s probably in the greenhouse out at the back. C’mon, said Stefan.

Eve was becoming more and more impressed by Stefan’s knowledge of the wider world.

What’s a greenhouse? she asked.

Well it’s not green, for a start, said Stefan, but everything inside it is. You’ll see.

They walked along a path through tall shrubs that had flowers on them – trees with flowers, thought Eve- and she felt like a character from one of her storybooks. The greenhouse, as Stefan had said, was not green but made of panels of glass. It was a peculiar looking structure that looked like something from another planet with funny angles that came together at the top. They could see someone moving inside.

Hey Mr Wojik! Stefan cried. It’s me, Stefan.

A man emerged, bending slightly to get through the greenhouse door. He had a very shiny head with hardly a hair on it. At first sight, this made him look severe, but the roundness of his nose and cheeks were reassuringly gentle. He wore dungarees with straps over a rough blue shirt. There were brown patches on his knees.

Well – whaddya want, boy? he said, and who’s dis little lady?

No one had ever referred to Eve as a ‘little lady’ before and she wasn’t quite sure she liked it.

Stefan said, This here’s Eve. She’s Doc Cameron’s girl – one of ‘em anyway. I brought her to show her the flowers. Is that okay?

Sure, sure boy. You know flowers is for everybody said the man. Hello, little Eve. So you like flowers, eh?

Yes, Mr Wojik. She sounded a bit prim even to her own ears.

She likes `em so much she wants to pick some, Mr Wojik, said Stefan. I told her they look good where they are but she wants `em for her Mom.

Not a lot – just a couple. My mother only gets flowers out of a box sometimes. These’d be really different. Eve found it difficult to explain the wonder she had felt at seeing the flowers where they grew and how she wanted to share the excitement of their discovery with her mother. It surely was more exciting to be handed flowers that were just picked than to have to cut the ribbon around a long cardboard box and lift long stems out of a bed of green tissue paper. And they were only ever red flowers.

Well, Doc is a good man and I’m glad to make his little girl happy. said Mr Wojik. Come - show me which ones you like and we see what we c’n do.

He led them back along the path through the shrubs and in passing he broke a heavy, drooping lavender bloom from one of the branches and handed it to Eve. "This here’s lilac, little girl.