Elizabeth and After by Matt Cohen

what would eventually become the R&R but was then still the Richardson mansion. The core of the structure had been built by Caleb Richardson, a blacksmith who arrived in 1837 in what was then the mere hamlet of West Gull. Lucas Richardson, the logging baron, was Caleb’s oldest son and Luke Richardson’s great-great-grandfather; he had a son, Lucas Jr., who took over the house and carried on the logging tradition, making his fortune cutting primal white pine so tall and straight it was sold at the Kingston shipyards for the manufacture of masts. In 1886 Lucas Jr.’s son, Allan Caleb Richardson, started the custom of throwing his home open to half the county every New Year’s Eve; the parties would be an annual event for exactly one hundred years.
    Allan Caleb Richardson’s years in the mansion, years when its magnificence was well known to men in top hats and ladies in layered frocks, years during which genuine European paintings in gilded frames were added to the Great Hall, the diningroom furnished with a grand piano once owned by an Austrian prince, the kitchen expanded and refurbished with the latest in black cast-iron stoves, a special bread oven, sets of matching ceramic sinks half the size of bathtubs for washing the vertiginous stacks of dishes generated by lavish dinner parties, years that flowed from the dizzying heights of Queen Victoria’s reign down to the rat-infested trenches of the Great War—those years were West Gull’s idyll of peace and prosperity. In that golden age, logging and farming kept bellies full and money rolling in, barns and pastures thronged with sleek contented livestock almost begging to be roasted and laid out on the table, fields were green and fertile and milk foamed with butterfat. Photographs from that time still hang in the Great Hall, and the largest of all shows Allan Caleb Richardson and his wife, Eileen, in the midst of their grinning liquor-happy guests, gay and stout with the fat of the land, the muscle and sinew and blood of their hundreds of workers.
    Then came the drumbeats of war. Colonel Sam Parker galloped across the country on his toy horse handing out his toy rifles, and of the 187 township men who went to war, half were sucked into the French trenches, chewed up by shrapnel and hunger, pickled in mud, shredded by bullets. The rest came home as they could. Arms or legs missing, metal plates in their heads, lungs scoured by mustard gas, the real and imaginary memories of their collective past transformed into a dark nightmare they would never stop dreaming. That, too, is recorded in the photographs: a small train at the West Gull station house disgorging groups of men in uniform. Some walked tall, others hobbled on crutches. On stretchers were two bandaged shapes who’d survived seven thousand miles of cart and sea and train in order to die at home.
    From 1921 on, the photographs are organized into annual albums guarding memorable images from each year along with photos of the New Year’s party itself. As the years pass, the backgrounds begin to include automobiles, radios, electric lights, once an airplane in a field—the whole glorious parade of man-made splendours. In the 1940 album Carl found a full-page portrait of William McKelvey. Sixteen years old, raw wrists protruding from a suit that fit him six inches ago, lanky face still waiting for its flesh, he is caught with his eyes open wide, a startled wild animal with his thoughts wiped clean under the pressure of this historic moment. Another picture shows him more relaxed, posing with a few other youths who’ll soon step out to the stable to drink and talk about the one thing on their minds these days: this new war and whether it will end before they get sent there; this new war and whether it will be like that other one—the Great War—the war that left widows still young enough to take to the dance floor before midnight; the war that left a list of names so long it required ten minutes to be read out