Free (1993) The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields Page B

about the question of Daisy, whom my Mother has loved as dearly all these years as if she were her own child—doted on her, in fact. You will agree, I am sure, that it is not in any way desirable for a young girl of eleven years to share a household with a man of my circumstances who has neither a wife nor the means to engage a person who would look after her needs. In any case, it seems I must leave Winnipeg very soon in order to pursue my work with the Dominion Cerealist and his committee in Ottawa. Will you be kind enough to write me the full expression of your thoughts on the subject of Daisy and what we can arrange between us to ensure her future accommodation and happiness.
    Yours faithfully, Barker Flett Having known rapture, my father, Cuyler Goodwill, could not live without it.
    Once awakened, he was susceptible. It might have been poetry he embraced after the untimely death of his wife—or whisky or the bodies of other women—but instead, like many young working men of his time, he found God. In his case, God was waiting in the form of a rainbow east of the Quarry Road, not far from the plot where my mother lay buried.
    This event occurred in the month of October, an early morning following a night of heavy rain.
    In a cloth sack slung over his shoulder he carries an octagonalshaped piece of limestone (about the size, say, of a cantaloupe) which he intends to place on his dead wife’s grave. He climbs the fence at Taylor’s Corners, taking a shortcut through a field of stubble, over the soaked uneven ground, when suddenly the sun bursts through, weakly yellow at first, but quickly strengthening so that the heat reaches through the fibers of his gray cotton shirt. He looks up, and there it is: the rainbow.
    Of course he has seen rainbows before in his life, always stopping, in the way of country people, to admire the show of watery iridescence. Rainbows, after all, do not occur so frequently in southern Manitoba that they go unremarked. "Look at that," someone or other is always sure to exclaim, pointing skyward, and then a wishful thought might rise up, a vague notion of impending good fortune or at least an alteration of mood.
    At this time in his life Cuyler Goodwill had not yet begun his long immersion in Bible study, and could not have quoted, had you asked him, God’s post-flood declaration to Noah: "I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a Covenant between me and the earth."
    At the same time, he is not by any means an ignorant or superstitious man (though limited in formal schooling), and he understands the general principles of rainbows, that the prismatic effect is caused by the refraction, reflection, and dispersion of light through droplets of water. He understands, too, the evanescence of the phenomenon, its insubstantiality—he is, after all, a man who works with stone, with hard edges and verifiable volume. The arc of a rainbow cannot be touched; its dimensions are not measurable, and its colors fade even as they are apprehended. There is a belief, for that matter, widely subscribed to by simple people, that a rainbow cannot be photographed, that its fugitive and transitory composition resists the piercing lens and the final proof of chemically treated paper.
    But the rainbow that appears before my father on that October morning in 1905, a mere three months after his wife’s demise, is different, its colors more vibrantly distinct, its shape as insistent as a child’s crayon drawing. This rainbow seems made of glass or a kind of translucent marble, material that is hard, purposeful, pressing, and directed. Directed at him, for him. He has not observed the bands of color taking shape; he knows only that it is suddenly there, solid and perfect, and through its clean gateway shines a radiant slice of paradise.
    At the moment the rainbow makes its appearance he is standing, and the next moment kneeling, by the grave of his wife, Mercy.
    He, a stonecutter by trade, has set her