Gutenberg's Fingerprint by Merilyn Simonds

Author:Merilyn Simonds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Copyright © Merilyn Simonds, 2017
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2017-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

SAVING GRACE

A week after the image trials are done, I walk into Hugh’s studio and find him cleaning up. Garbage bags sit plumped on the floor. The counters are swept clean.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m straightening up. I do this every few years, you know.”

I open a garbage bag and peer in.

“There are proofs in here! The first pages of my book!”

“Yes. So?”

“What about archives?”

“What about them?”

I think Hugh must be teasing me. He isn’t.

“They’re just proofs,” he says. He stops what he is doing and stares at me with genuine puzzlement. “It’s okay, don’t worry, we have those pages printed. We don’t need that garbage.”

To him, a proof is just a way station, one of many along the path to a finished page, which is all he really cares about.

I am pulling out the crumpled papers smeared with ink from the filthy rags he’s tossed into the bag.

“This breaks my heart, Hugh.”

I mean it. I can’t throw anything out. My basement is stacked with boxes of letters and photos and mementoes from my parents, my husband’s parents, my long-dead aunts and uncles, my grandfather’s wedding tie, his christening outfit. If a thing is old, if it has no apparent practical use, if there is a word scribbled anywhere on it, my sisters ship it off to me.

“We need these, Hugh. How will anyone ever know how we got from there to here?” I gesture wildly from the type in the hellbox to the pages stacked on the drying counter.

“From where?”

It’s me who is speaking a foreign language now.

“There. Wherever we started. We’ll keep the end result, but what about the process?”

I still have the deck of cards I made when I was ten, each back coloured in a blue and red design, each front copied from my parents’ bridge deck. I have that Linotype slug with my name in italics from my first visit to the compositing room when I was a cub reporter in Stratford. I have every draft of every story I have ever written.

“The process is over!” Hugh exclaims, waving his arms as if to make all the garbage bags disappear so we can end this ridiculous conversation. “The trial is finished! Move on! We’ve got work to do!”

But I’m hauling paper out of the bags, salvaging what I can, tossing the rest down around my ankles until the floor is adrift with pages.

Hugh stands there, hands on hips, shaking his head. “And I thought you would come in shouting, ‘Oh boy! Look how clean the floor is!’”

I rummage under the counter and in the back corners until I find a decent-sized cardboard box.

“This,” I say with all the firmness I can muster, “is the archive box. Don’t throw anything in the garbage. Throw it in here. Understand? I want all the proof sheets. All your scribbles, all your notes, your tests, your smears of ink.” I want to ask him to date the pages he saves, but even I know that is asking too much.

“All of it, understand?”

Hugh nods meekly, but I catch his smirk.

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