11.
July, I know. It began in July. July. Cauldron hot.
The cells dividing. Some right, some wrong.
I take Polly along the ice-fringed river. As usual, we meet the black dog with three legs. Apocat and Kata sit wreathed in smoke, bundled in blankets on the porch of their house. I flap my arm at them. They don’t register my presence. I am no less lonely, no less impatient, than I was last summer. I tell Polly that the months slip and slide while the seasons follow their course, with the usual traffic, and it’s nothing that hasn’t happened before.
Although instincts have lost their way and smokers on their porch won’t diagnose or solve the village’s ailment, my wife’s arm is mending. Every night, woken by her pain, I go out onto my sheltered promontory and sit with candle, glass of wine, shivering at my desk. What of Abi’s pregnancy? She was drunk. She got drunk with Danny. What have they done? What will they do next? Papagana. Pabbivinnar. Ayabmenang. Apanyer. Vatergewinnt. Babamafanikio.
On the hanging path, Polly at heel, I hear voices from the nuisance grounds and set off through the trees to the gully. On the shore of that intoxicated sea are two kids throwing pebbles at an engine projecting from the swamp. I recognise Gee and Harry. From the shaggy cutbank a family of crows caws down.
Almost home, a movement in the fence shadows catches my eye. The black dog with three legs stands his ground. Polly growls.
I crouch in the shelter of my wall in the afternoon under winter’s monumental blues. Our village is slipping. True. A consortium has been buying us out, house by house, farm by farm, for a decade. They plan a super quarry to the north, and say our town is perfect for housing and offices, a staging ground for operations. How big? Big. For what? For aggregate. To surface-mine aggregate. What does this mean? That the vineyards will disappear. Massive wheeled hoppers, crushers and washers will dominate the landscape. We’ll make money and retire into memory, loss of memory. Where we move to, what will happen to Danny and Abi, will matter less and less then not at all. Consortium. Conglomerate. Aggregate. Emma is organizing a petition against the developers; a research committee has been struck, and a committee to build a website and get the word out. We are organizing a series of town hall meetings for the spring. But don’t we need new families?
I pat my pockets and look out. Last July I sat in this spot watching Danny’s horses crop the curly grass below the vine hills. Apocat and Kata sat near the river, under the big tree, in a haze of dust kicked up by the rain, weaving their lazy baskets. Was I as worried then as I am now? We were all younger then.
Fine snow crystals land on my knees.
The rest of the villagers will be sitting in front of their fires, the year’s work done, all the merchandising and maintenance, and the girl’s pregnancy and the boy’s death no longer stir the bare branches, and mention of Danny’s illness won’t even change the light. Even though there are no wild horses, and machines fly overhead, the people will still doze before their dying fires every winter afternoon. The village has thrived through wars and complicated migrations and our neighbours’ worry and envy and confusion. We kept our noses to the ground. When the fires go out there’s the sound of laughter, hooves, then stillness and night.
One windy January morning we met at the river to say goodbye to Danny. We were a small group waiting under the big tree, all of us freezing by the time he appeared leading three horses. He looked miserable. He stroked the face of each horse. He kissed Lucy and Abi, shook Tom’s hand, hugged Emma and bowed to me.
“Last time you left,” I said, “we were both young and did not say goodbye.”
Kata and Apocat appeared trundling downhill between two mounds of snow-covered vines, sun surging behind them.
“We had to see you,” Kata said, “before you ran off.”
Danny hugged her. Apocat smiled and drew her shawl tight. To the east boiled the sun, a wild anxious balloon, and the horses whinnied and nickered and stamped in the gusting wind, and Abi took their reins and led them back up the path while Tom and I kept Danny company to the edge of the cultivated hills and along the river.
At the Greyhound stop beside the bridge Tom ranted about the quarriers’ plans to build new roads and a subdivision.
Danny lit a joint. “That’s not news to me.” He staggered, coughing, then gripped my shoulder. “I have told Abi she can depend on you and Emma.” He turned to Tom. “We all know the land out there is useless for agriculture and pasture.”
Tom said: “They do not know shit.”
We stood, breaths crystalizing, and watched the river; the edges were frozen and in the middle eddies spun debris; the surface purled and settled into a gold sheet in the early sun.
III
12.
So Danny has left for his essence of sun, and a consortium is buying up its last puzzle pieces. I cannot say how much my own processes have coloured things (I am suffering — gastritis, the doctor thinks, and acid reflux, as well as the back agony), but the present isn’t all my own doing, obviously. Last summer’s visiting kid-scientists, staring at their screens more than at us, have tapped change’s hieroglyphics on the sunny field, on the village green. To what purpose remains to be seen. I knew their parents’ generation; I do not know them. A few years ago I watched Abi, Gee, Harry and James play together in the glass room I built for our school. As ten-year-olds, James and Gee were loud show-offs, while Abi and Harry were sober, inquisitive, introspective, and they listened. Emma fed the kids lunch and nursed them when they were sick. Indeed, I’ve spent more time watching children than tracking any other fauna or flora and have discovered one thing: Comes a time when children outgrow their parents’ stories and want only the ones they tell themselves; with the great sagas of their lives yet to be lived, they invent the world. Loud, ill-mannered, selfish, pimply, cruel, passionate, thoughtless, clumsy, forgetful, lazy, sleepy, deaf, obsessive, they burst from their families like shooting stars and found their own versions of life on what appears to them to be an uninhabited rock. I have had life enough to observe some of these aliens all grown up, quietly kind, magnificent, serious, attentive and thoughtfully in train to their own offspring that look to me now like dots crawling in circles.
My own kids seemed miraculously potent, then turned impenetrable. What Danny sees in Abi, I saw and see: her quick body, her wise grace. What he is to her, I could not say. I cannot say.
Emma challenges me to the bone, for which I am grateful. Yesterday we fought about Danny until she held her arm in the air, which reminded me we are still vulnerable. She got drunk with Danny. They rode off north for a lesson in July, the heart of summer. North with a couple of litres of wine and she fell from her mount. Wine at his cabin; the fall on the way home. Danny did not get her to the clinic before she passed out, and the doctor was not due for a day, so she was airlifted to the hospital. I was terrified that she’d broken her back. This lesson, adventure, mishap, way-point, had all the earmarks and half-imaginings of an affair — they’d ridden off my map and it felt as if we’d been preparing for this, the three of us, for a long time, and it was the precursor of some radical conversion.
She thinks I’m avoiding her when I’m labouring outside, long hours on the wall days it’s warm enough, until I’m in darkness, fitting the stones by touch alone, the brandy bottle leaning in its purpose-built niche.
Actually, dear earthworms and children, it’s my creator consciousness, undifferentiated, what’s behind all voyages, homecomings, that is burrowing deeper into the work.
“Look,” I say to her when she joins me at dusk. “These rocks are pure matter for change to write its signs on.”
“It’s bitter, that wind. Will you come inside?” She is wrapped in a big padded coat, her face pale.
“Can you tell me exactly what happened out there with Danny?” And I fit another stone in place.
She gives a snort. “All summer you were either out here or following the children or talking to that tent couple . . . Will you come inside? W
e need to talk about these mining people.”
“In a minute.”
“Charles, it just happened. I fell off my horse. It just happened. Look at me. You have your head down all the time.”
“I know. It’s true.”
“How do you see the rest of our lives together?”
“Peaceful, I hope.”
She stands shivering and I want to leap the wall and take her in my arms but don’t.
“Charles, what is it? What do I have to do?”
She can’t knit because of her arm. I should help her on with her shirt. She winces. Her pain’s a grating thing, terrible to witness. Her voice is compressed by it.
Emma and I were drawn into the Home School idea when Annie died. We pulled down the west wall and built a glass extension and bought curtains and cushions and mats and soft balls of all sizes. Emma organized and supervised work and play. I taught science and art and told stories.
Abi, Harry, James and Gee, the last of our kids, came to us when they were about six. Her first day, Abi smuggled herself through the crush of other children and slipped out of the window into the garden, jumped on her bike and was gone. Next day, she would not come inside. She was fierce and headstrong and wouldn’t sit with the others for weeks. Of course she reminded me of Annie. When at last she came into the glass room, she stayed beside the open door. I have never met any person so lost to rain or wind, some twirling, flitting or sleeping detail.
Each year there were fewer students, parents preferring the exuberant village school, but we kept things going for eighteen years, until there were no kids left under twelve.
Third brandy by the wall. Mid-afternoon, late winter. We are a gentle people, used to easy laughter. A hundred years ago when we were young . . . What should come next? I’m not sure whether I’m having trouble with memory or trouble with time. Where is my glove? Accidental displacements seem more imperative than consortiums and potential mining concerns. I keep losing work gloves, for instance. Though I have always lost gloves. My mother was always admonishing me for losing a glove. I begin with two gloves, then there is one. I’m in one time, then another. At the centre of my expanding orbit is the other glove, the lost glove opposite to the one I have that proves there once were two, hugging my fingers out there at the end of my arms, flapping or pointing. Alley-oop! Non-locality. And then a new pair.
I need both my work gloves because the rocks are rough. Leather, with well-stitched seams. Gloves help the work and work makes the man.
The three kids passed the house early this morning, going toward the dump. They were insubstantial through the wobbly window glass: Abi serious, Gee taunting, the tall boy Harry aloof. Reunited, I guess. It’s not that I don’t care about politics and the future of the village, it’s just that the wall and gloves and the comings and goings of these young people fascinate me more. I opened the door to a few spring birds already singing madly and greeted the kids. They were not gentle, they were full of harsh laughter. They come to us, we don’t control them, and in their presence we are not so sure of ourselves, of who we are, not so free.
Emma knows my obsessions, of course she does. She sees through my notebooks, my wall, my visits to the river and the dump. She thinks the wall interesting but too much, too long. When will it turn? she wants to know. What are you dividing? You will run out of land, she says. I tell her it doesn’t want to turn. It wants to go on and on. Well it can’t, she says. And neither can you. That’s why I’ve started the sandy path. And then what? she asks. Oh, then we’ll find out. Alley-oop! Two points and a line.
Getting lost, losing place, being wily, using cunning, getting away from family, finding truth. I don’t know how to engage it all, but when I praise this wall, lay my palm on frozen stone on an afternoon like this — crows marking the day, crows guarding the nuisance grounds with its castoff belongings and secrets — I feel life spinning around me and know what I am.
I have seen the sea, had dreams of storms, smelled the tide when Danny told his stories. If he so loved the sea, why didn’t he ever go back? The horses he captured kept him here. The ponies gone wild, brought home, adapted and bred once more to stable and pasture — he accomplished that. A wall that doesn’t end cannot contain anything. An incomplete and temporary division at best, as Emma would point out if she wanted to bring in her Noah or Job. She thinks I live in a state of doubt. And yet she’s kind and patient, even with her broken arm, and she only half-turns her face away when I question her faith.
This morning at breakfast she told me how self-centred, how self-absorbed I am becoming.
“Yes I know,” I said.
“You never listen. You will not meet me here.” She touched her chest. “I want a real conversation.”
“Self-absorption keeps me at my task.”
“You take pleasure in nothing but yourself.”
“I’m at least a puzzle, right? Fascinating, right?” I said.
Our breakfast almost finished, I looked out of the window and saw the kids passing, opened the door to birds, etcetera. Time and place and walls and hills were scrims and backdrops.
“What are we going to do?” said Emma.
“In so far as I’m part of this?”
“What?”
“Part of all this down here, with God up there?”
She made her annoyed clicking sound. “Did you talk to Apocat and Kata about the consortium?”
“No. I forgot.”
“You will?”
“Yes.”
“We have to bring the band on board.”
“We will, Emma.”
“And ask them about Abi.”
Polly scratched at the door to be let out. Good Polly. I got up and let us both out. This little dog knows the truth. Truth is, we need to sniff the ten thousand things. I need brandy in the morning, at noon, at five, and Polly needs to walk down the road away from home along a brightening lane through melting snow. Let responsibility drift. We need time free, to be answerable to no tradition, no conception. Polly needs to mark her boundaries. I need to study the crumbling roadbed that once led whole and true to Emma; her arm is mending; I think she is telling me something like this: fix yourself or else. The else is the starlings in formation, the long line of family — a little diminishing tribe, tinier and tinier in the past or future.
Emma doesn’t trust me, but I don’t mind that. I won’t tell lies. Stories are not lies. I slip the brandy from its little cave and tuck it inside my jacket, then go down the road to drink with Apocat and Kata in their neat, ramshackle bungalow. I ask what I intended to ask; what they say isn’t useful. Here is the gist, here are the bones.
13.
The weavers watch me pour golden liquid from the bottle into teacups, then sip, sip, take turns to name smells from the village that apparently waft in through their open kitchen window.
Kata throws cardboard into the stove. “Consortium,” she sneers. “What do outsiders always want, Charles?”
“Land,” I say.
Apocat rocks on her heels. “It is a very cloudy day,” she says. “Boy, it is just one big cloud up there.”
“Pay attention, Apocat,” says Kata. She turns to me. “She is gathering herself.”
“A little more brandy, perhaps?” Apocat muses.
“Can’t dance without music,” says Kata.
I pour. We drink. They tell me to feed the stove. They tell me to smoke.
“Your friend, Danny,” says Apocat, “needs to keep his life a bit longer.”
“Will he?” I ask.
“Danny has an appetite,” she says. “There’s no better point in any contraption. Look at that red glow. A man is ill. A boy is dead. A girl is pregnant.”
“What about the girl?” I ask. “What about Abi?”
“Animals are at the end and beginning of everything,” says Apocat. “Look at that red cloud. All that lonely mess.”
“So what do I tell Emma?” I ask.
“You say to her these strangers want the
land,” says Kata. She touches her sister’s knee. “But why do they, Apo?”
“Just like you people, they want to control the future,” says Apocat.
“How do we fight them?” I ask.
Apocat still is staring at the sky. “You must touch him.” She comes down to earth and grins. “That window is a disgrace,” she says, then looks into the shadows. “This house is a mess all the way inside. It’s forever since we cleaned up.”
14.
Not long before my father died, he and I built a bonfire of curved branches from a dead tree the wind had pulled down. He was ninety years old, unsteady on his feet, in his last winter. He climbed the hill face, undergrowth over rock, to fetch the branches while I bucked the trunk, the heavy rounds rumbling down into the clearing in front of their house, Mother watching from the big window. We tended the blaze all afternoon, Dad and I, speaking little, and in the dying light my mother joined us. There we were, three winterers engaged in small conversation, and I realized they had made me before they knew how to make anything; that our triangle around the fire was the cornerstone of what I had made, or told. The flames flared with explosions as my father threw on heavy dry limbs.
Almost sixty, I can still feel those rounds thudding, that hefty cornerstone tipping. Even though I tried to make a fair copy or facsimile or version or carbon of myself, of them, I’ve sent only one true emissary into the world, a son, and he just took off and vanished. The glass school was Emma’s project. Mostly I’ve just made stories, and this landmark I’m building is probably not any kind of amazed unknowing, but hubris pure and simple.
Speaking of amazed unknowing, the night before he died my father told me he was not my father, that my mother had had a long-lasting affair that ran parallel to their marriage. Fantastical confession but credible because my father spoke it with such a sense of unburdening that there was an audible gasp that must have been air trapped behind the news. And then he fell asleep across the kitchen table and I had to carry him to bed, my mother fluttering moth-like around his intermittent breaths.
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