Claudia lifted the iron poker from the stand next to the hearth. She held it halfway up its wooden handle, bent her legs, turned out her feet, and opened her hips until she was in the en garde position. She swung the tip of the heavy poker in a slow circle, pivoted until she was facing the oblong mirror on the wall over the walnut sideboard that had belonged to her mother’s mother. Look what you made me do, look what you just made me do, she sang, parrying two imaginary advances. She shuffled backward and forward, then shot ahead in a lunge, the poker and her arm and her back leg forming a straight, upward line, the tip of her clumsy foil penetrating Smirnov’s mask, piercing his eye.
There was the smallest sound, like a teacup being chipped by a spoon.
The glass at the centre of the mirror began to fault, and then to spiderweb out in delicate lines.
Claudia stood frozen—the poker still outflung, her sore legs still tensed, looking at the mirror’s new blemish, unsure what to feel—until she decided that it was beautiful, and that she would leave it like that forever.
Fortunate People
JILL AND T.E. TOOK ME IN when I was at my most dissolute. I was recently unemployed, and unemployable. All evidence suggested I was a losing proposition.
T.E. was on the history board at the university from which I’d been dismissed weeks earlier. He himself was not implicated, neither in canning me nor in the events which led to my canning. We were only colleagues with sympathetic characters. Yet T.E. still said: “We have a room, and we’d love to help you out if we can.”
Wordless things can sometimes tell you all you need to know about a person. Shortly after he’d come aboard, when their first boy was just a few months old, he and Jill had me over for dinner. We all hit it off, and even then I knew I would like him. He must have sensed likewise. In T.E., I had found someone with a similar background to my own, and a comparable disdain for all of it, though he was better at concealing it than I.
In Jill I saw an easy acceptance, a personality questing for order and for contentedness with its surroundings—though with the earliest stirrings, I see now, of a resignation that these things might not come to pass. She was often happily weary, giving off the impression that her small family, and the chance to make things for them, were all she required to be happy.
Jill took photographs, very skilfully. Her camera was her eye; by watching her use it, you could come to understand what she valued. She trained the lens on T.E. in paternal moments, instances of tenderness toward the boys, of quiet interlocking. His large hand on Sam’s back, Joshua’s spindly arms around his father’s summer-reddened neck. T.E. rarely appeared alone in Jill’s photos. There was almost always a child.
She had deep Acadian roots and knew which seagrasses could be eaten, how they were to be cooked. She had alternate, more poetic-sounding names for everything that grew, crawled, or walked. Her French was effortless. She knew what to add to an empty white room to make it appear lived-in, comfortable. Her fingers were nimble and strong. She crocheted warm hats for her children, starting in summer and adding extra space to allow for their growth across the cooling months.
I remember her sitting in a folding chair beneath an apple tree while the boys splashed in a wading pool, and over it all the clouds pinned in place to a breathless sky. August, deep and hot. Jill’s hair—not yet grey—tied up, off her neck.
There had been a series of women for me: rich, fragrant women, women with long legs, wide-brimmed hats. I was dazzled by them, the sureness with which they navigated the world in contrast with my own confoundedness, and I have been left haunted by the person I became in their presence.
Similarly, I looked at the way in which T.E. and Jill lived—at the life they had carved from stone, together—and failed to see how I could achieve anything similar. The wordless understanding, the silent division of roles, the co-operation, the fire still present in their limbs, the desire they never bothered to conceal. Yet they were still porous, they had not stopped allowing wonder to penetrate them. They gaped at the world alongside one another, energized by their boys’ curiosity.
There was a daybed in a room Jill used for projects, crafts, for sitting. On the shelves, arranged sparely and tastefully, were photographs of Sam and Joshua, unframed, as well as European toys of wood and edgeless metal, puzzles, a bronze key gone mottled and dull, a pair of curved knitting needles, an old Jessi Colter LP. It was a neatly composed room, and though they offered it to me for as long as I might need, I knew that my presence—my duffle bag of clothing, and my shoes and belt and deodorant stick—tarnished it. I did my best not to spread myself out into that room, to keep my presence discreet. I failed at that, too.
T.E. had an analytic mind, a statistical bent, and was always organizing his thoughts on every given scenario. “It seems unlikely, given what I know,” he told me, “that you’d try anything with Jill.” It was a late-summer evening, warm and wet. Jill had gone to bed, leaving the two of us, a deck of cards, a bottle of wine, and the radio.
I assured him he was right, and he was. There is fair game, and there is the sacrosanct. I’m not too fallen to see the difference. At the very end of the evening I embraced him, heard his beard scratch against my collar, felt a warm tear on his cheek.
The boys were marvellous animals, creative, energetic. They laughed and screamed and played with such enthusiasm. The very precise and unique contours of their relationship were in place from an early age. They often communicated wordlessly, with gesture or a slight sound. They locked their arms around one another’s necks and held whispered conferences.
I tried to be someone they would appreciate, a fun-uncle type, one in whom they could reveal something of themselves they wouldn’t show their parents. I believe that children need such a presence in their lives. But I could never escape the feeling, when among them, that they maintained a wariness of my motives.
Only once, that I can remember, did their suspicion slip aside and allow something that felt like a genuine connection. I’d told Jill and T.E. that I wanted to repair the step on their back deck, which was suffering from rot so complete that the wood had gone soft and crumbly as bread. Sam was curious, and eager to help. He knew where the tools were kept in the old garage, so he went there and tried to lift the red metal box off the shelf. I came along after him and took the thing down, holding it by its handle while Sam held his arms over his head and placed his palms against the box’s underside, trying to help take some of the weight of it.
Before I began, Sam wanted me to tell him what each tool was called and what it did, so we laid them all out on the deck’s grey planks.
“That’s a screwdriver, called a Phillips. See the end, a kind of plus sign?”
“Yeah,” he said, examining it.
“Phillips. That’s a claw hammer. Puts nails in and pulls them out, when you need it. That’s a stud finder. Press the button.” Nothing. “Must be out of batteries.”
“What does it do?”
“It finds wood where you can’t see it.”
Using scrap wood from other projects, I restored the step. I also vowed to apply fresh stain to it and to the rest of the deck as well, to forestall further rot, and to make it less splintery beneath the boys’ bare feet. I never got around to it. The step, I’m certain, is still bare wood, and the rest of the deck cries out for a new coat, going to dust and paper, closer each day to collapse. But I had intended to do it, with all sincerity. And then the holidays came, and snow.
I was an awkward addition to their family Christmas, but they were so gracious that it hurts me to think about it now.
At New Year’s, there was a party which T.E. and Jill insisted I attend with them, thrown by neighbourhood friends, no children. They’d hired a girl from across the street to sit the boys, fourteen, very responsible.
“You’ll have a great time,” said T.E. “Very nice people. And wonderful food.”
“I’m dressing up,” said Jill. “I never do. You don’t want to miss it.”
&nb
sp; I had a shirt, black pants. T.E. lent me a coat and a tie. I felt unnatural in them, but my friends insisted I looked nice. I’m still not able to determine whether I actually did, though I have seen photos. I’m still inside my own head, feeling what I felt then.
I wondered that night, and have wondered since, if their motivation was to find me a new love. There were several women there, single, a few single mothers, and one woman whose marriage was clearly hanging by its last threads and who seemed open to being led away. Women in their thirties, with intelligence and amassed wisdom, good boots, clear eyes. They were all lovely and comfortable, easy conversationalists, distracted but seemingly sincere. I thought about falling in love that evening, but decided against it. It was easier to drift among those people, smile at their remarks, eat their food, without worrying about what they’d think of me in the future.
T.E. was hunched, uneasy, stand-offish. It makes sense when I look back on it now, but I really had no idea then. I was as ignorant to what was going on as Jill was. When midnight came, I watched Jill throw her arms around his neck and kiss his cheek, but he did not look at her. He seemed to be looking out the window, toward something I could not see: a future, I now think, which looked nothing like the life he knew.
Jill looked fresh and happy. Younger than she ever had, for as long as I’d known her. That said, I don’t know that I ever found Jill beautiful. It was beside the point, I saw from the beginning. A love would hang between us, but one that romantic or sexual feelings would have only profaned. Those were not our roles.
She was so steady and measured through all of it. It was heartbreaking and admirable. It taught me something about how one should carry oneself when the chips are down.
Only once did she ever show me anything raw, something she couldn’t contain. An animal intensity. It lasted only for the briefest of moments, and then it was gone. It was a breath, a blink.
It was a year after their dissolution. She had rented a house in Tadoussac for the month of July so that she and the boys could find themselves somewhere quite different to make memories of this new life of theirs, the life without T.E. Jill said I should come visit for a weekend, so I made the drive from Montreal and ended up staying six nights, sleeping on a cot in a turret atop the strange house, windows on all sides, reached through a trap door and a ladder down to the second floor.
One breezy afternoon, we walked on the rocks where the St. Lawrence meets the Saguenay. The footing was slippery, the water cold. Jill and I sat in the sun, watching the water glint, a freighter in the distance on its slow path west. The boys were hurling pebbles into the river. They had been warned to watch themselves, to show caution on the wet rocks, but Sam slipped anyway, disappearing from sight before popping back up, his hair wet. He stood in water up to his armpits and called for his mother, screaming in terror, though the danger appeared minor. It was possible he might slip from where he was standing and go under again, but as long as he stayed still he would be fine. And yet the fear on his face was something awful.
Jill said, only, “Oh God, Sam, hold on.”
By then I was on my feet and racing toward the shore. Slowing as I neared, I made to crouch so that I could pull him up, but my feet went out just as Sam’s had, and I wound up in the water standing next to the boy. I very quickly lifted him under his arms and placed him on a dry spot of rock. His mother reached him a moment later and threw her arms around him.
I expect I seemed a bit ridiculous standing there in that cold, shallow water, but then Jill fixed me with a look that was the most ferocious and inflamed that I had ever seen on her. Her skin was flushed and her lips shockingly red. There was something undeniably fierce in her just then, and I wondered later if she hadn’t seen me differently in that moment, too. But by the time I was out and drying myself on the sunny rocks, it was gone, and nothing between us was different. For that I remain grateful.
We walked back along a rocky trail and down to the wharf, me feeling quite humiliated, my shorts and shoes and shirt soaked and clinging to my body. Sam was wet, too, of course, but was perfectly happy. It’s terrible to think that I might have felt better had he seemed more affected, more upset, but I believe that might have been the case.
At the place where the beach stands below Tadoussac, just before the grand old hotel, we made to cross the road. A woman driving a small motorized scooter stopped to let us by. Behind her, a man in a green pickup truck, unaware of us, swung wide around the scooter and continued on.
Sam and Joshua were walking just in front of me and did not see the truck coming around, so I put my hands on their shoulders to stop them in their tracks. As the pickup passed, I raised my hands in a gesture to the driver. He must still not have seen the boys, because he smiled warmly and waved back at me.
Pigeon
I WAS THE MIDDLE of three children.
The eldest of us, our sister Charlotte, was living with our aunt in Toronto. Just sixteen, she was already working in a coffee shop, determined—she had told us—to put our branch of the family squarely behind her. Charlotte taught herself guitar, and later travelled to Vancouver and eventually Los Angeles with a band for which she sang and wrote songs. Whether they’re still together and making music, and where she or they might be, I can’t now say with any authority. Someone told me she’d had a daughter, but I don’t know for certain.
With our mother gone from our lives, that left me with Gavin—three years my junior—and our father, Caspar Milledge.
That first summer, after we’d been out of school a week, Dad rented a little wooden cottage for a week at Six Foot Bay Resort. He was thirty-eight years old then. His hair had not yet begun to thin—it was thick and dark brown, and he wore it a little bit long, swept to one side. He had a pushbroom moustache and a perpetual stubble on the rest of his face, though he shaved often and usually smelled faintly of Brut aftershave. He was of average height and naturally thin, but with the ambient doughiness of a man who gets little exercise and who is drunk more nights than he isn’t. He appeared, I know, normal for those times, in that place.
We drove up to the resort in his battered Oldsmobile, listening to the one and only cassette he kept in the car: an album of Cure remixes. Skittery, echoing noises bounced between the speakers, and Robert Smith sang from the bottom of a well. Our familiarity with that tape did nothing to rob it of its strangeness, which increased as the sound gradually degraded, the layers slowly stripped off the magnetic tape by wear, time, and oxygen, the music becoming incrementally more hollow-sounding and alien. It was not the sort of music my father generally listened to, but someone had given him the tape, and he listened to it endlessly—trying, I think, to understand it. He wasn’t a person who listened to music for pleasure. Songs, for him, were a kind of puzzle, a riddle, as though by solving them he would learn what made other people happy. Years later, Gavin would suggest that he might have been trying to find our mother.
Dad said on the drive up that he was going to teach us to fish, though I had never known him to do it, and though neither Gavin nor I had ever expressed the faintest interest in it. Two days into our week there we hadn’t put a single hook in the water. The whole first day we didn’t even leave the cottage; he sat in a deck chair, read magazines, and drank beer, while Gavin and I passed the same half-dozen comic books back and forth.
Early on the morning of the second day, our father woke us excitedly.
“You’ve gotta see this!” he shouted, so we followed him outside. Parked out front was a four-wheeled off-road golf cart. “I rented it for the day.”
Gavin was clearly excited. I pretended to be, but in truth I harboured a fear of anything motorized. When I was much younger I’d had some kind of premonition that I’d one day lose a limb, or possibly even my life, to such a thing. I don’t know why, exactly, but I’ve never totally shaken the thought.
After we had Corn Pops and big glasses of Sunny Delight in the cabin’s tiny kitchenette, we started out. A strong, hot wind riffled the lake
and the trees over our heads. It was early in the morning but the heat was already enough to make you think twice about moving. Our sweaty thighs stuck to the cart’s vinyl seats.
Dad lurched the vehicle forward, had it stall, and then restarted it, before moving us along more smoothly across the resort’s broad lawn and up the gravel road which led into it. We began the first half of the day, as the heat grew caustic and the air stiller and stiller, slowly navigating the back roads of cottage country, piloting the very loud cart along snowmobile trails, fire routes, and gravel access roads. We stopped at rocky outcrops overlooking coves and inlets, and at the heads of trails which snaked down through cottagers’ properties toward the lake.
Our father was looking for a specific rock that he and his late brother Bert had discovered as boys. He’d told us about it before. It was, he said, the perfect spot to jump into Pigeon Lake: a fifteen- or twenty-foot drop into bottomless blackness. They did all manner of dives, cannonballs, and backflips. Even swam from there to Fothergill Island, which was rimmed with beach and criss-crossed by trails. He told us it was a place perfect for adventure—that the summer their parents rented a cabin for a whole month was the greatest summer of his life.
He was lost in his search for this spot. Much of the time, he seemed to forget Gavin and I were even there. Other times, he muttered to us about trees or bends in gravel roads that he was adamant he recognized. “Yes! It’s right around here. That tree looks familiar. We’re close, boys.” Each time he was wrong, but every error only fuelled him with a new desperation to find the right place. So we’d climb back into the cart, Gavin on my lap in the passenger seat, and our father would fire the thing back to life, and we’d rumble off to the next site.
Lands and Forests Page 11