First chapter: The Logogrpyh

The Globe and Mail

By Thomas Wharton

Thomas Wharton is an author and creative writing instructor at the University of Alberta. His first novel Icefields (1995), won the Writers Guild of Alberta Best First Book Award, the Banff Book Festival Grand Prize and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Best First Book in the Canada/Caribbean division. His second novel, Salamander (2001), was short-listed for the Governor-General's Literary Award and for the Roger's Fiction Prize. Thomas Wharton lives in Edmonton with his wife and three children. He is currently at work on a new novel.



We called it the English House. An incongruous mansion of white stone, it was by far the biggest and grandest house in Jasper. It had been built before the war by old George Weaver, one of the town's legendary figures. We called it the English House because of Elizabeth, the woman whom George's son, the Doctor, married and brought here to this little town in the Rockies. She had lived in London and in India, she always kept the trace of an accent, and she served tea and cakes every afternoon at half past three.

In my earliest memory of the English House I am five years old. My family has just moved to Jasper and I have wandered away from our new and unfamiliar home and found my way into what seems to be a giant's vegetable garden, with mountainous trees and towering sunflowers. I am eating peas off the vine, pods and all, when a girl appears suddenly at my side and asks me who I am. She is taller than me and a little older. Her long auburn hair falls all the way down her back, like the hair of a girl in a storybook. She is wearing a sleeveless green sundress and her thin arms are bare and dusted with freckles. I am so struck by her that I don't even think to answer her question.

A tall woman wearing white gardening gloves and a straw hat comes up beside the girl, puts a hand on her shoulder, and speaks kindly to me. She sits me down on a stone bench and brings me a plate of ginger snaps and a glass of lemonade. The woman asks my name, and I tell her. She asks me where I came from, but because we moved here only a few days ago I'm not sure how to answer. I point, to be polite, but I'm not sure if I'm pointing in the right direction. This makes me realize I am lost, but I don't feel afraid. I am safe here, in this garden, with the woman in the straw hat, whose voice is so kind and gentle. If I stay here, nothing bad can happen.

I eat my cookies and drink my lemonade and the girl in the green sundress sits nearby in a white wicker chair, holding her own glass of lemonade with two hands and sipping from it, not looking at me. I don't understand why she is doing this. I want her to look at me, and she will not. She sits upright and distant in her wicker chair, a child playing the part of a lady.

Just then a tanned blond boy, a year or two older than the girl, comes out of the house and bounds down the steps of the back porch. He glances at me as he passes, and then disappears through an open gate in the dark green hedge that is like a wall around the garden. The girl watches him go, but when he is gone she still won't look at me. Later memories have since merged with this one and place their father, the Doctor, in the background, a benign but distant figure.

For the first time I became aware of a family other than my own, of the mystery and glamour of lives unlike ours. This was my first meeting with the Weavers.

I found my way back to the English House often, and when I was older my mother would chide me for this, saying I spent almost as much time at the Weavers' as I did at home. I would drop by for an unannounced visit on weekends, even if Alec and Holly were away. Although I avoided chores at home, I would do them happily for Elizabeth Weaver. My father was the town engineer, and although I had no clear conception of what he did all day long, I knew that he did it in a paper-cluttered office lit starkly with fluorescent tubes, and that his work involved maps and blueprints and thick binders full of facts and figures. My mother kept house and cooked and liked to sing at church. We were happy enough but our life, it seemed to me then, had no drama, no mystery.

At the English House there was always something happening that seemed to mean a great deal. Jasper was a tourist town, and friends and relatives of the Weavers constantly came from elsewhere to stay, sometimes for an entire summer. There was a card party every Friday night at which politics and current events were loudly discussed. Alec and Holly seemed to be continually in motion, staging puppet plays on the lawn, going off on camping and skiing trips into the mountains, taking the train at vacation time to exotic places like Toronto and Vancouver. Mrs Weaver had many stories to tell of her childhood and of the bombing of her beloved city. People began to call her, with affection, Lady Weaver.

The house itself fascinated me. In its many rooms it held more books than I had ever seen in my life. They covered the walls, they were scattered and stacked on tables and chairs, they lined the stairwell to the upper floors. I remember being in a sun-warmed room in that house one day, too shy to touch the books on the shelves, but inhaling their perfume and gazing out the window, across the treetops to the distant icy peaks of the mountains. In some way it seemed that the inaccessible heights out there were intimately connected to the mysterious depths of these unknown books.

The Doctor and Mrs Weaver had begun a family later in life than most couples. They were already grey-haired when Alec and Holly were still quite young, an oddity which lent them the air of indulgent grandparents
towards the whims of their children. One summer afternoon Holly and her schoolfriends held a carnival at the English House, decorating the grounds and the hedge with painted paper streamers, and even moving old furniture out of upstairs rooms and onto the lawn to serve as seating for the magic show and the tumbling act. I was allowed to help set things up, and to let people in at the gate. The one black boy in our town was recruited to play the part of a captured Zulu warrior. Holly herself dressed up as a gypsy and told fortunes with a homemade pack of tarot cards. She draped sheets over a large p­atio umbrella and two old dining room chairs to make her fortune-telling booth. When it was finally my turn, near the end of the festivities, I sat down across from Holly in that dark, intimate space, mute with adoration. She turned the cards over one by one, and spoke in a soft murmur, with oracular slowness. She told me I would travel, and I would become famous, and I would marry someone from a faraway land.

Here was my fortune, told to me by a Weaver, but I didn't want it. There was nothing I needed beyond this moment. If I could just stay here, in this enchanted pavilion at the English House with Holly Weaver, I would never need anything else. She finished speaking, and stared at me. My time was up, and I grasped for a way to stay longer. One of the cards Holly had set down was blank, and I asked her what that meant.

"It means something terrible is coming," she said ominously, and waved her hand to dismiss me. "Now go, before I tell you."

Alec's contribution to the carnival was to display, without the slightest trace of vanity, his prowess at hatchet-throwing, a skill he had honed on many camping trips. His father had set up a target in the yard, and Alec hit it squarely again and again, taking a long step back with each throw. He was four years older than me and lived almost always outdoors, in winter or summer. It seemed to me when I dropped by on the weekends that he was a­lways preparing for a hiking or skiing trip, or coming back from one. He told everyone that someday he was going to explore the Amazon rainforest. Although he was kind to me, like the rest of his family, we were not friends—I saw him as too grand and heroic a being for there to be true friendship between us. In my fantasies, Holly and I would live together in the English House as husband and wife, and Alec would visit us often and tell us amazing tales of his travels around the globe, and this perfect life would go on without end.

The summer I turned twelve Alec was killed in a rockslide, while climbing with friends in the Victoria Cross range. I did not go to the English House for a long time afterward. Holly was absent from school for weeks, and when she returned, I found I could not talk to her. She had become as sealed off, as impenetrable as the tarot card with no name. She talked back to the teachers, and was caught smoking outside the school. She did drugs, and went through a string of boyfriends. We met a few times over the following years, but we never talked about Alec. One day she was gone—her parents had sent her to live with relatives in Vancouver.

After Alec died, I did odd jobs for Mrs Weaver, at my mother's instigation, helping her in the garden and running errands. She was in her mid-fifties then, a tall, slender woman with thick, severely-framed glasses. She was mostly alone in that big house, and keeping it up would have been a heavy task even for a younger woman.

One Saturday afternoon I came over to see if she had any work for me, and found the garden full of people. They were relatives of hers from England, it turned out, who had not been able to come to Canada in time for Alec's funeral. I was going to leave, but Mrs Weaver brought me into the midst of her guests and introduced me. I had hoped Holly would be there, but she was nowhere to be seen. Mrs Weaver sat me down, just as she had all those years before, and brought me something to eat and drink.

One of her cousins, a frowning, elderly man, began a volley of questions, interrogating me about the details of my life here in the Canadian west. He asked me what I liked to do, and when I said I liked to read, his eyes brightened. He told me he had been a librarian before he retired, and he asked me what I liked to read. I began a cautious listing of my favourite books, afraid that at any moment he would pounce on a title and condemn it as unworthy. Some of the books I mentioned made him wince, while others got from him a barely perceptible nod of approval. Later, when I was about to leave, Mrs Weaver took me aside and told me to come back tomorrow, as she had something for me.

I returned as early as I decently could the next day, my curiosity getting the better of my shyness. Mrs Weaver had me haul a heavy, scuffed leather suitcase up from the cellar and out onto the patio, where I heaved it onto the wrought iron table and she opened it.

The suitcase was full of old cloth-bound books, their yellowed pages smelling of a­ncient dust, of cellar damp, of long habitation in places I could only dimly imagine. The books were mostly compact editions of wrtiers like Swift, Austen, Dickens and Stevenson. There were also books I'd never heard of, like Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico, and Hynes' The Lost Continent: The Story of Atlantis, as well as a few translations, including illustrated children's editions of The Odyssey, The Three Musketeers, and the Arabian Nights.

A grey cat hopped onto the table, took a sniff of the books and slipped away, uninterested.

In those days I liked the glossy new paperbacks they sold at the local bookshop, and so I was dismayed at first by the worn condition of most of these books, although I said nothing to Mrs Weaver. One book in particular had no cover at all, and even seemed to be missing its first and last few pages, their remaining ragged stubs still attached to the naked threads of the binding.

After the war, Mrs Weaver told me, paper was a precious commodity, and all over London the salvagers roamed, collecting any unwanted printed material they could get their hands on. She was volunteering in a relief kitchen at that time. She had not met her future husband yet. One morning, when she had some time off, she went home to visit her mother and found a team of salvagers carting off the family's old books. Her mother had decided to donate them to the war effort.

In a blaze of indignation she stopped the departing salvagers in the lane and proceeded to rescue what she could. The books were piled haphazardly, many splayed open, their pages spotted with raindrops. They looked stunned, she told me, lying there in the cold. Like they had just been woken from a dream.

Mrs Weaver told me she was looking to find the books a good home, where she was sure they would be read. They were mine, she said, if I wanted them. She didn't tell me that these books had been intended for Alec, but I knew.

A sudden gust of wind caught the coverless book and turned its pages. They stirred and fell back softly, like the wings of some mythical bird. Suddenly I was intrigued, caught by the desire for something unknown that seemed to be about to reveal itself to me. These dusty volumes were no longer relics from a cobwebbed cellar stocked with pickling jars, they were mysterious treatises from another world. I didn't know it then, but this was my first glimpse of what I have come to call the logogryph, the elusive creature that lives within books.

"Look through them," Mrs Weaver said, "while I make us something."

She left me and went inside. I picked up the coverless book and, bringing it up close to me, inhaled its faint exhalation of elsewhere. Quickly I read a couple of paragraphs from the middle of the book, about a young man who seemed to be pursued by some nameless menace. The uncertain plight of this character vaguely pleased me. I didn't know who he was or what had brought him to this moment of danger. The story was unchained from plot, from origin and consequence. It was not one story told to the exclusion of others. It was every story, and anything was possible.

When I hauled the suitcase home that day, I began the coverless book at the beginning. I moved through the sentences with great excitement and yet a vague sense of regret, knowing that I was heading toward a meeting with the young man I had met earlier, but that in the process the world of infinite possibility he lived in would become one single story, and that this story would come to an end. For the first time I was aware of another figure lurking at the edges of the story: the writer, the person who had imagined me, the reader, and had set down a trail of words for me to follow.

I soon found out the book's title and author. For a while I lived within its story, until another book tempted me away. I could tell you its name: the novel is well-known, but what mattered that day was the possibility of the book's still unread pages, its dreams of what other books it might be.

A few years later the Doctor died, and Mrs Weaver moved to the coast to be with Holly. Somebody else came to live in the English House, and I never went there again. It was around that time that I began writing and illustrating my own stories. Over the years I heard less and less of the Weavers, and what little I heard about Holly was not happy news. The further they receded from me as real people, the larger the Weavers grew in my thoughts and imaginings. Every time I sit down now to work on a story I think about the nameless, unread book I encountered one morning in the garden of the English House. I think about the Weavers, and then I start to write.