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Overview
Gulliver’s Travels meets The Underground Railroad: a road trip through the countryside – and the psyche – by the author of Fifteen Dogs.
Botanist Alfred Homer, ever hopeful and constantly surprised, is invited on a road trip by his parents’ friend, Professor Morgan Bruno, who wants company as he tries to unearth the story of the mysterious poet John Skennen. But this is no ordinary road trip. Alfred and the Professor encounter towns where Black residents speak only in sign language and towns that hold Indigenous Parades; it is a land of house burnings, werewolves, and witches.
Complete with Alfred’s drawings of plants both real and implausible, Days by Moonlight is a Dantesque journey taken during the “hour of the wolf,” that time of day when the sun is setting and the traveller can’t tell the difference between dog and wolf. And it asks that perpetual question: how do we know the things we know are real, and what is real anyway?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770565791 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Coach House Books |
| Publication date: | 02/19/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Sales rank: | 768,024 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. His 2019 novel, Days by Moonlight, won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Fifteen Dogs won the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize, CBC Canada Reads, and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His other books include Asylum, Pastoral, The Hidden Keys, and The Night Piece: Collected Stories. He is the recipient of a Windham Campbell Prize.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
TO EAST GWILLIMBURY
In August 2017, I was eating an egg and cress sandwich when Professor Bruno called to ask if I'd help him in his travels through Southern Ontario. I love watercress (Nasturtium officinale). It's delicious and it reminds me of my mother's garden. So, I was already in a fair mood.
Professor Bruno had been a friend of my father's. He was a kind man, one I'd known since I was a child. It would have been difficult to turn him down. The fact that his invitation came on the anniversary of my parents' death – a terrible accident on the 401 – made it doubly hard to refuse. I would take my yearly vacation from the lab and spend part of it with the professor, one of the many mourners who'd wished me well at my parents' funeral.
– I'm sure you find your parents' friends beyond boring, he'd said, but I hope you'll look in on me from time to time. It'd be lovely to keep in touch.
– Yes, I'd said.
And a year later, I was happy to show him that I'd meant it, that I was glad to keep in touch. Professor Bruno proposed that we spend two or three days driving through the land on which the poet John Skennen had lived, the land about which Skennen had written, the land that had created the artist. The professor had spent years writing a "literary account" of Skennen. He had all the basic facts, he said. He knew enough about the man's life to get a solid grip on the poetry. What he wanted from our trip were "touches": a few colourful details, any anecdotes he might glean from people who'd known Skennen at different stages of his life.
– You never know, he said, where you'll find a detail, the detail, that'll illuminate a work.
– So, we're looking for light, I said, teasing him.
– Not just any light, my boy, he answered. We're looking for the correct light.
My duties: I'd carry the professor's bags, help him transcribe any interviews he did, and serve as his driver. In exchange, he insisted on paying my expenses – hotels, incidentals – and promised that I'd have time to do some botanical research. I wasn't happy about his paying my expenses. I make more than I can spend at Alpha Labs. Besides, he was doing me a favour, giving me an excuse to leave Toronto for a few days, a few days away from a city that was, at times, oppressive because I knew it too well.
But I could tell he was disappointed when I said I'd pay for myself. So, I relented.
– Thank you, I said. I'm grateful for the time away.
I was grateful for another reason, too: I'd recently heard about a plant called five fingers (Oniaten grandiflora) that was said to have fantastic medicinal properties – the ability to cure jaundice, for instance. Professor Bruno planned to visit Feversham, a town on the outskirts of which there was a field of Oniaten. So a friend of mine had heard tell anyway. I didn't believe that a plant with such qualities would be as little-known as Oniaten and I didn't quite believe my friend, a fellow lab tech with a strange sense of humour. But the professor's visit to Feversham would give me a chance to wander around outdoors – something that always makes me happy – while looking for a specimen of the plant.
Besides, I was sure Professor Bruno would be amusing company. I'd be on vacation. I'd have an excuse to play at being the botanist I trained to be. I'd be distracted from my grief – my twin griefs – and we'd be visiting Southern Ontario, the countryside: the woods, fields, and farms I find calming and wonderful. If I worried about anything, it was that I didn't know the poet Professor Bruno was writing about, John Skennen. The professor didn't mind my ignorance, though.
– Alfie, he said, by the end of our trip you'll know as much about Skennen as anyone. He's a bit of a mystery.
– How so? I asked.
– Actually, Professor Bruno answered, it might be better to say he was a mystery. He stopped publishing twenty years ago. No one's seen him or heard from him since. Can you imagine? The talent of an angel. Gone! Like that!
As I'm sure he knew it would, his enthusiasm encouraged me from my torpor.
The professor was almost as tall as I am – six feet – but he stooped slightly. He had a full head of hair but his hair was like a contradiction: thick and youthful but white as cornstarch. He'd kept himself in good shape. He would walk for blocks – briskly, without stopping, despite his arthritis. And he looked debonair, always smiling. Not one of those big, broad smiles. A small smile, ironical. His smile made me feel as if we shared a secret. I'd felt this way about him since I was a child. His only flaw – and it wasn't so much a ?aw as an occasionally misguided effort to be helpful – was that he would sometimes speak of things so learned my mind would fog up while listening to him. I'd never stop listening, but the professor's enthusiasm alone wasn't enough to help me with things like hermeneutics or the Freudian unconscious.
I had five days – from Wednesday to Sunday – to get ready. This was relatively short notice for work, but more than enough time to pack a few days' clothes. Not that anyone at the lab minded my going. In the year since my parents died and, yet more grief, the months since Anne decided we should not grow old together, I'd accumulated seven weeks' worth of overtime. Management at Alpha was probably relieved to grant me a few workdays along with my regular vacation. It was more difficult deciding what to do with the time before we left than it was getting days off.
In so far as I know myself, I'd say I'm cheerful and even-tempered. I like other people and I've always been sociable. The death of my parents certainly changed me. Though I knew their going would come – my father had often warned me that they would not be with me always – I felt as if I'd had no time to prepare for it. Anne's leaving had been almost as difficult, and it was more recent. I still turned to her side of the bed in the morning, anticipating her warmth, still found strands of her hair on my clothes.
The bewildering thing about grief, for me, is how difficult it makes the world to navigate. Home itself becomes foreign territory, though everything around you is familiar. For some time, none of the things I loved – trees, music, the novels of P. G. Wodehouse – had had any meaning, as if all of them had flaws through which darkness came. So, it really was a relief when Professor Bruno asked me to accompany him through Southern Ontario and a relief that I wanted to be around others again, wanted to see past my shrunken world.
We'd leave Toronto on the twentieth and in the days that followed the professor hoped to visit Whitchurch-Stouffville, Concord, Nobleton, Coulson's Hill, Feversham: places where he'd arranged to meet people who'd known John Skennen, places where John Skennen had been seen, places that were important to Skennen's poetry. I packed pants, shirts, underwear, and a mustard-coloured jacket. I thought of my mother, as I took the things she always reminded me to take: toothpaste, a toothbrush, and deodorant. I also brought my pencils, a sharpener, a kneaded eraser, and a sketchbook in which I planned to draw some of the plants I saw on our way.
Professor Bruno was surprised by my drawings.
– I had no idea you were a Leonardo, Alfie! I welcome the noble intrusions of Art!
– But I'm not an artist, I said.
It's something else that compels me to draw. I've been doing it since I was ten. Twenty-three years. I could not imagine a life without pencils, pens, inks, erasers, and sketches.
My mother used to say
– The world doesn't exist until you draw it, Alfie!
She was only teasing, but she was right, in a way. I feel as if the books I've filled with drawings are my journals. They hold my life and memories. The past rushes back whenever I open one of my sketchbooks. I remember where I was, the sensations I felt, the mood I was in – all at a glance. My first drawing was of a four-leaf clover I saw in the schoolyard at Davisville. The clover, which I'd heard brought good luck, was a kind of "mixed signal." I found it just before John Smith punched me in the face and I punched him back. Then again, John and I have been close friends since Grade 6, a year after I drew the clover. I'm not a mystical person, but I think of it this way: I'm drawn to flowers, herbs, and weeds, some of which I draw over and over. I feel a connection to them and, in drawing them, I allow them the place in my life they were meant to have. On the other hand, my love for plants is fairly straightforward, too. I'm attracted to their lines and curves, their structure and colour, their complex simplicity. These were the things that inspired my studies in botany, for which I've never had even a moment's regret.
Before we left, I bought the McClelland & Stewart edition of John Skennen's collected poems. I thought it might be helpful to Professor Bruno if I knew at least a little about Skennen's work. I was surprised by what I found. There were any number of love poems, some of them difficult for me to read without thinking about Anne. And there were more philosophical poems, some of which you could call light. But, overall, the poetry was gloomier than I'd expected. I couldn't see Professor Bruno in it. Of course, this could be because the first poem I read, the one that made the deepest impression, "Rabbit and the Rabbits," was from what the professor called Skennen's "melancholy period," just before he stopped publishing. In fact, it was the last poem in his final collection:
Strange to see struggle but not what's struggled with –
wire round your throat, head caught like a wintry birth. White as your mother's haunches, bloody specks when the rifle butt breaks your neck – a careless wind busy sweeping. Trees in rumpled linens.
We who've killed you talk rosemary and onions while somewhere underground your family scarpers,
running from the lumpish beings above.
Scarpering still, they're carrying their jitters through my nights – along narrows, around dungeon corners – whiskering my dreams, their endless warrens,
coming on like regret, vicious and remorseless –
quick, quicker than memory in some respects.
Caught but uncatchable, they rise unpredictably –
digging up strange lands, hard soil, dark pitch.
The poem was well done, I guess, but I felt like I understood why he'd abandoned poetry: Skennen's talent hadn't brought him much happiness at all.
– Ah! said Professor Bruno. Now, there you're wrong, Alfie! To begin with, the object of poetry isn't the happiness or sadness of the poet. Artists do what they do because they're compelled. It's therapy that makes the patient feel much worse before it makes them feel better. If they ever manage to feel better at all! But the other thing to remember, Alfie, is that the psyche wants what it wants. You and I, untalented mortals as we are, live for sunshine. We live for the light! But the true Artist is different. For all we know, darkness may have been what Skennen needed. It may have been the very thing to bring him relief. Then again, it's damned hard to tell with poets. I've met my fair share, Alfie, and I wonder if any of them can distinguish between happy and unhappy.
The first town we visited was Whitchurch-Stouffville. We left early Monday morning, sun up and bright, the sky a light blue, the land its late-summer self: hot but forgiving. I've always loved driving in Southern Ontario, and as, that first day, we'd planned to visit two towns that are close to each other – Whitchurch-Stouffville and Concord – we were not pressed for time. I avoided the highways (the 400s) and drove instead along country roads (38, 29, etc.) that go up and down and take you past farm fields, villages, and towns.
So many things made our setting out pleasant: the smell of the land, the way cows or horses will sometimes stare at you as you pass, the farmhouses that look like broken old faces. Then, too, Professor Bruno seemed to know everything about every inch of countryside. As we drove, it was like the past and the present intertwined. He'd point out this place where, for instance, a farmer's cow had drowned in a pool of oil (1865) or that one where a bishop had taken a tumble down a hill (1903) which thereafter was known as Collar Bone Mound.
I loved the professor's stories, but then, I find it comforting to know that others have been somewhere before me. I'm not a Speke or a Bartram, not an intrepid explorer. But I do have a sense of adventure. I like to imagine I'm seeing things that those before me missed. I cherish little details. I've always been this way. My father, Doctor of Divinity as he was, liked to say that paying attention is a way of being devout. God had taken the trouble to put a spur on the ant's tibia. It was right to notice and admire His delicate work.
– Why, my mother used to say, are you giving your son excuses to be idle?
But we never considered attention idleness, my father and I, and it seemed to me, as I travelled with Professor Bruno, that the stories he told, coming as they did from paying attention – listening, not looking – were proof of devoutness, and I took great pleasure in them.
– I love hearing the old stories, I said.
– Yes, Professor Bruno said, it's good to remember that a place is more than earth and ground. It's all that earth and ground make possible! All the stories and imaginings. Goethe says: 'Wer den Dichter will verstehen muss in Dichters Lande gehen!' If you want to understand the poet, you've got to go to the poet's country. He's not wrong, not wrong at all! But I say if you want to understand a country, then you've got to go to the poets and artists, to the ones who refashion the world and make it live for their fellows. And where do these poets draw their inspiration? From earth, ground, stories, dreams, language, and history. That's what a place is, Alfie. It feeds o? us while we feed off it. It's a bit of a paradox, you know, like context giving context to a context, but there you have it.
I'm sure the professor was right. But I remember his stories more than I do some of the towns and grounds we passed through, their buildings and streets. Whitchurch-Stouffville, for instance. By the time we got there, we were both happy to be out in the sun and away from the city. So, it's possible I was distracted. But the town itself, the Stouffville part, was like any number of towns in the area. It had a Chinese restaurant and a business of some sort housed behind a red-brick facade. That's about it. In trying to recall its streets, I find I'm not sure I haven't got it confused with Concord or Nobleton. In fact, there are buildings in my memory of Stouffville that, I'm almost certain, belong elsewhere.
We were there so Professor Bruno could talk to John Skennen's aunt, Moira Stephens, the last of Skennen's relatives who'd known him when he was young. Her house was at the bottom of a street that ended in a cul-de-sac. The house wasn't unusual – single storey, its front porch coming away, slightly, a few of the black tiles from its roof scattered on the front lawn – but it was painted light green. The colour shimmered and the smell of paint was strong. We were met at the door by a young woman whose hair was, in streaks, blue. She was tall and willowy. She didn't smile, exactly, but she politely said
– What do youse want?
– Ah, said Professor Bruno. We're here to speak to Mrs. Stephens about her nephew. I'm Professor Morgan Bruno and this is my travel companion, Alfred Homer.
– You're from the university? said the woman. Good to see youse! I don't think youse are going to get much out of Gram. She hasn't been herself lately, eh? But it's your own time youse are killing. Didn't you say something about a few bucks for the inconvenience?
– You must be Roberta, Professor Bruno said. I'm happy to make a contribution to your well-being.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Days By Moonlight"
by .
Copyright © 2019 André Alexis.
Excerpted by permission of COACH HOUSE BOOKS.
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