Grave Song is available through the author at 

johnpassfieldnovels@gmail.com

The Story 

In 1874, millionaire silver-mine owner, Robert Chisholm, returns from Chicago to his home town of St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada to erect a memorial gravestone to the memory of his family, all seven of whom died between 1828 and 1835.

In an attempt to come to terms with his loss, Robert Chisholm becomes obsessed with seeking forgiveness from the only living person with whom he can claim a link to his lost family, the daughter of his hated brother-in-law Henry Mandeville. Robert Chisholm’s meeting with this lady, and his attempt to find meaning in his devastating loss, bring back vivid memories of the members of his family and of pioneer life in Ontario, as it was lived against the backdrop of the world-wide cholera epidemic of the 1830s. 

My Personal Connection

I grew up in St. Thomas, Ontario, and lived as normal a life as anybody could have lived. I went to school, played baseball and hockey, watched cowboy movies on Saturdays and went to Sunday School on Sundays. The idea that I would one day be a grave digger in a church yard was very far from my thoughts. During my childhood, my uncle, Claude Davies, was the sexton of Trinity Anglican Church, in St. Thomas, and also had care of the Old English Church and the adjacent graveyard on Walnut Street. This pioneer church – often referred to as the Old St. Thomas Church – was consecrated in 1824, and maintained by the Trinity Church congregation and opened for church services in the summer. At that time, anyone who wished to could muse about such remnants of earlier ways of living as the box pews of the pioneers, or wonder at the balcony which looms over the pulpit and which offers no visible means of access. 

In spite of his limited income, my Uncle Claude became a world-traveler, and during his extended vacations, he would arrange for others, including family members, to cover his numerous duties. At such times, I would help my grandfather, Walter Davies, to hand out the prayer books and hymn books and to ring the bell on summer Sunday mornings.  As I got older, my brother Bob and I would cut the grass of the graveyard, and I remember being constantly challenged by the unevenness of the grave markers which were buried in the ground. At breaks, I would read the cryptic references to the lives of the commemorated dead. As we grew to be teenagers, my brother and I, after a few lessons in the craft from our dad, would dig the occasional grave to earn some extra money. 

At the time that my brother and I were gravediggers at the Old English Church, in the early 1960s, my maternal grandmother, Eltrida Kennett Davies, was buried in the graveyard, an easy stone’s toss from the Chisholm Family Monument. 

By the time I decided to write about the Chisholm family, in 1998/ 1999, my grandfather, Walter Davies, my grandmother’s sister, Melina Kennett, and my father, Cyril Passfield, were also buried, about the same distance from the Chisholm Family Monument. At that time, I would go to see my Uncle Claude, the former sexton, then in his nineties, and take him for drives around the county, which included trips to the Old English Churchyard to see the graves of his parents, Walter Davies and Eltrida Kennett Davies. My mother, at that time, was a victim of Alzheimer disease, and her death, during the writing of this novel, provided the rather grim death experience that I gave to the mother of the protagonist, Robert Chisholm, while my mother’s funeral acquainted me with the words from the Anglican burial service, which are quoted in the novel, and from which I derived the title, Grave Song. 

At the time of the writing of this introduction, in 2008, my uncle, Claude Davies, the sexton, has joined my mother, Gertrude Davies Passfield, and the rest of the Davies family, in the Old English Church graveyard, after living a very lively life of ninety-five years. Our conversations provided, I am sure, much of the sense of connection-despite-loss that I feel so strongly about concerning my own family, and the sense of appreciation for the lives of the dead that one can feel when chatting with someone who has known them all for so many years. I should also add, though, that the chats that my ninety-five year old Uncle Claude and I shared were cheerful and laughter-filled, and without any sense of bitterness at all. Although I hope that the bitterness of Robert Chisholm strikes the reader as authentic, I would attribute the darkness of that mood to my sense that the story – despite its Southern Ontario pioneer setting – is based on the pattern and the tone of the book of Job. No doubt the fact that I was undergoing an intense and prolonged period of grief, due to my mother’s lengthy illness, and mourning, for her merciful death, contributed in some way to Robert Chisholm’s Job-like brooding; however, I prefer to think that in large part, the protagonist’s dark mood was sustained, during the writing of the novel, by my realization that the members of my family were fortunate enough to have lived the long and happy lives that were denied to the family of Robert Chisholm.

A Short Story

By the autumn of 1998, I had written a series of short stories which were based on incidents in my life, and it occurred to me that the situation of two teenagers digging a grave, with its echo of the grave digger scene in Hamlet, would make a good framework for a short story. I titled the story “October”, as the graveyard setting and the time of year suggested a contemplative mood about the inevitability of death as the natural end to life.

The premise of the story is that a man comes upon the two teenagers digging a grave and is quite fascinated by the echo of Hamlet, which he had read, or perhaps acted in, in high school or college. The man’s fascination at talking to authentic grave diggers is played off against the boys’ insistence that they are actually not grave diggers at all, but merely two high school students who are earning some extra money. As the man wanders off to explore the graveyard, the younger of the two boys begins to muse about the old church, with its family pews and prisoners’ balcony. When the man returns, he asks the boys about the large family monument – the one that records seven deaths in seven years – and mentions that the pioneer families would celebrate, and mourn, the milestones of their lives right there in the churchyard, an idea that coaxes the young gravedigger into further thought:

And then the man said something strange. “Funny to think that the weddings and the funerals would all be here in this churchyard. Birth and death and everything, all right here. Believe it or not, there were people dancing right beside these gravestones. Fiddle music? Fife maybe? Whatever they would play.”

He hadn’t thought of that. It was interesting to think about. And the rest of the afternoon, as he shoveled and scooped and threw the dirt, he kept thinking about the monument.  

There were two stories about the monument. One came from his uncle and the other came from a man next door at the old folk’s home. One was a storm on the lake and a family curse. The other was a plague and a silver mine. The guy who survived all this had come back many years later and built the monument.

The mention of the people whose lives were commemorated by the building of the monument leads the young teenager in the short story to imagine the visit of the survivor, in 1874, to the site, and his conversation with the stonemason, whom he has hired to create a memorial to his family:

The tall man bent and lifted up some dirt from a little pile. "I want the monument right here," the man was saying. "I want maybe angels there and the whole thing in white. I want their dates and ages too, and anything else that's nice that you can think of. Each one gets a section of their own and the whole thing as big as you can make it." As he spoke, the dried grains dribbled from his fist. "I want them all to be remembered... all of them. And put some angels on it too," he said, as his eyes turned towards the man beside him.

Although I was vaguely aware, when I was young, of the story behind the Chisholm Family Monument, I had, by the time of writing, learned a number of details that I used to enhance the short story.

Research

I remembered a booklet that I had purchased a number of years previously and given to my sister, Ann Passfield Snyder, as a present. It was entitled Myth and Reality: The Chisholm Family in Elgin County (1819-1835) and was written by George Thorman, who was one of my sister’s favourite teachers. I scanned the booklet for details which I subsequently used in the short story. At the same time, although there were many dates, and references to the family in legal documents, there was almost no personal information about the members of a family who had all perished so far back in time. This meant that most of what I was writing arose out of an imaginative recreation of the situation, based on my own sense of how a person would feel who had lost his entire family so early in their lives. 

The Idea of a Novel

As I worked on the short story, I began to realize that I was imagining much – in terms of setting, situation, dialogue and psychology – that would not fit into the idea-framework of the short story. It was at this point that I decided to write a separate story of the Chisholm family, one that I assumed would be a novella, but which developed into a full-scale novel.  I decided that the longer story would be told as the memory of a protagonist, Robert Chisholm, that he would recall the lives and deaths of his pioneer family, and that he would seek closure, in 1874, at the time of the building of the monument, by returning to St. Thomas and meeting with a person who was the closest living link to his dead family members.

Further Research

I then plunged into further research on such topics as the Chisholm family, the Old English Church and St. Thomas and Elgin County in pioneer times, farming practices, the cholera epidemic of the 1830s, monument-making, horse-raising terms and Great Lakes shipping practices of that era. In addition, I made many visits to the church and the graveyard. A St. Thomas lady, Dorothy Mayer, was extremely helpful in arranging for me to photocopy relevant historical materials.

Structure: The Pioneer Story (1820-1835)

I started with the idea that I would give each of the members of Robert Chisholm’s family – who were little more than names on a gravestone to me – a trait, or interest, which would allow the survivor to recall the hopes and fears, pleasures and disappointments of each of their lives, inside the framework of the death of each one. I imagined the father’s wry sense of humour, Alex’s brash pride in his legal knowledge, William’s squeeze box playing, Franny’s love of horses, the mother’s Bible reading, Anny’s school teaching and Lewis’s drawing and horse racing. There were few, if any, hints of personality or areas of concern in the historical record, but the invention of these indications of personal interest allowed me to imagine each of these long-dead characters as a living, breathing, suffering and joyous person. In addition, I decided to structure each of the major chapters on one of the rituals of pioneer living – such as a harvest, a funeral, a church wedding and a barn raising – in order that the novel would depict the life cycle of the community of that time. I have written elsewhere of my slowly-developed sense – largely unconscious as I was growing up in St. Thomas as a boy – that Southern Ontario offers a very unique and attractive version of the patterns of experience and the rituals of culture that are familiar to all communities in all places and in all times.  

Structure: The Story of the Monument (1874)

It was in my mind from the earliest conception that the return visit to St. Thomas of the survivor, Robert Chisholm, would be an emotional experience that would provide a dramatic point of view from which to tell the story. The idea that the story should include two time periods – the 1830s, when all of the family members save Robert Chisholm died early deaths, and 1874, when Robert Chisholm returned to St. Thomas to erect the monument – was reinforced by my wish to avoid writing as novel that would appear to be a series of short stories – one about each member of a family – which are connected only by their names. A hint in the historical sources gave me the idea of the role of Emily Mandeville, the person whom Robert Chisholm meets, in 1874, and whom he tries to help, while attempting to avoid talking about the deep emotions that have blighted his life for forty years, and which have come very close to the surface with the building of the family monument. That Emily Mandeville, too, has a story which she is reluctant to discuss makes the tension of that encounter even more dramatic.

The Creative Imagination

The kind of novel that I am writing is an imaginative recreation of the lives of people whom I was not privileged to know personally, as evoked by the contemplation of their recorded experience in the light of our common humanity. The result of the planning and writing of such a novel is a fusion of researched and lived experience, a blend of historical details about the Chisholm family and memories of my own family experience. For instance:

-in the Chisholm family, life was lived on a farm, they attended the Old English Church, the father, William Chisholm Sr., worked on the Great Lakes, the daughter, Frances, died from an accident with horses, and so on,   

-while in my family, my father was a carpenter who spoke lyrically about the grain in a piece of white oak and taught my sister and I how to feed an apple to a horse, my mother explained the term “miserable sinners” and felt the suffering of others to an intense degree, and there were such minor details as a forgotten Christmas present.

Both lists could be made much longer, of course, but the point is this: if the writing has been successful, the reader of the novel will not be able to distinguish the origins of the drops of experience that flow from two distinct family streams, but will concentrate on the patterns which the blending of the two family experiences reveal, as the characters of the novel encounter the realities of life that are common to all people in all generations for all time.  

Creativity and Reflection 

When I submitted the short story, “October”, to a writing teacher, Bernadette Rule, she asked me to write a short note about the historical origins of the story. The note became quite lengthy, and it was the writing of that note that allowed me to explore the Chisholm family story in a way that led to the realization that there was a novel waiting to be written. The experience of writing that note was so valuable to me that I continued to write exploratory notes for every chapter of the novel as it progressed. The practice  proved to be such an aid to creativity that it could be said that I taught myself to write my first novel by discovering the advantages and exploring the possibilities of keeping a journal about the writing of a novel. Those notes will be published as In Search of Form and Meaning I: The Making of Gave Song.

Grave Song is available through the author at 

johnpassfieldnovels@gmail.com