by Peter Unwin
Eventually, the village of Caledonia made an appearance above the trees, a white feed mill and a few listing antennae scouring the sky. With the keel scratching on the river bottom, they shored in the shadows of a creosote-soaked train trestle off which another gang of boys were tossing their half-bare huckleberry bodies, falling a great distance straight down, entering the river with a mushroom-shaped spout opening and closing over top of them. She envied them. She envied their beauty.
The van waited, his brown Westfalia. She noticed with some concern that it was embossed with indecipherable Celtic hippy designs.
“They were there when I bought it,” he said defensively.
“I didn’t say a word.”
She realized with some alarm that a strange intimacy had sprung up between them, whether she wanted it or not. Together they secured the canoe to the top of the van with a homemade octopus of stretch chords, bicycle inner tubes and nylon rope. Then he drove to an empty turnout and picnic spot with a vandalized bench on which I fucked Tanya had been ungallantly carved in deep proud letters on the surface. The bank of the river showed the Styrofoam detritus of budget fishermen: crushed worm tubs, heaps of cigarette butts, and thick webs of nylon line; an obligatory condom like a white slug, hung in the bushes.
He slid shut the cloth curtains on a retractable cot and pushed his body on top of hers. She didn’t fight him, she fought instead with a troubling image of skinny boys on the train bridge, ribs showing, their shorts hanging low on skinny hips. She had little notion of resolving a fight with a man without going to bed with him.
They were done quickly, first her shouting, him following, breathing wildly. Then he sat next to her, attempting to find words that were fitting to sudden romance and to love and the bold presumption that a lasting bond had been created between them. Linda reached into her pack for a cigarette and lit it without asking his permission. She was meaning to quit, and they always said yes anyway.
3
I WANT TO MARRY YOU
The chief difficulty anticipated by the Fathers is, in the enforcement of single marriage, to which the savages are unaccustomed.
THE JESUIT RELATIONS, VOL. 18, 1640
THEY WALKED THE WONDROUS AND murmuring city of Toronto among the people, the streetcars and the chestnut blossoms that hung down like fat white rattles from the trees. She held his hand. It seemed to Linda like the sort of thing a woman could allow herself do, perhaps even had an obligation to do at some point in her life. To hold a man’s hand in the anonymity of the city. Why not? What could go wrong? The afternoon was ripe and fragrant with the nectar of linden blossoms. American linden, Paul clarified, ominously. American beaver, for that matter too, he told her. The rain had finished, and to testify to his love a rainbow bent now intensely over College Street where the pavement shone silver and slick.
“I want to get married,” Paul said suddenly. Almost angrily.
“To whom?” she said.
“To you. Who else?”
“You mean in a church?”
“No,” he said. “Of course not.”
FOR PERFECTLY NO GOOD REASON, and in defiance of nothing she could put her finger on, Linda did what she always thought was reserved for characters in novels and bad movies. She did something she’d always thought was somehow slightly beneath her. She got married. She entered that place where no thinking person ever went. That she married Paul Prescot struck her as remarkable and even beyond ludicrous somehow. Until meeting Paul she’d preferred men to be caustic and more than slightly unshaven. In university she had dated and dropped an athletic, fair-haired boy for not being dark enough, not drug-addled, not tortured. He quarterbacked the university football team which didn’t impress her at all. She had no idea what football was really; some sort of foolish game that men played, for reasons she didn’t understand, or need to understand. She had assumed that all her suitors would be eminently qualified as men, meaning that with little effort they could tack a horse, translate Rilke from the German, roll a kayak and pilot small aircraft through large hurricanes. Paul, to her surprise, could only tack a horse.
Despite these failures, she found herself walking down a marbled corridor in the old City Hall building, where the walls were hung with framed photographs of an earlier city; one that was proud of its freshly dug craters. The future city would rise from such holes. They looked like bomb craters to her.
Linda had exchanged armoured heels for a pair of sandals that slapped sensibly on the basement corridor. I am not clacking, she told herself. The world is clacking. The world is clacking itself to death with its sicknesses, with its money-greed and all of its burning and toxic outputs, but me, I’m wearing sensible shoes and getting sensibly married although what the sense was in that she could hardly explain to herself. There was something about the man that assured her, she did not really know of what. She enjoyed the weight of him in bed next to her at night. It felt extremely normal to her.
At the end of the corridor, Paul paid for a marriage licence. “Under the circumstances, I don’t think it’s necessary to go Dutch, do you?”
“I’m broke,” she confessed.
The clerk who processed the forms was, it seemed to Linda, wickedly good looking, broad-toothed, far too attractive to be real. She couldn’t take her eyes off him and was suddenly convinced he’d been planted there by cunning bureaucrats to convince incoming brides like herself that their decision to stake themselves to one man was as laughable now as it had always been.
Paul tugged her by the hand down the hall as Linda disciplined herself not to stare back at the clerk. She attempted to console herself in the hope that he was gay. Was she not doing more and more of that? She walked out of city hall, feeling like a girl yanked too soon off Santa’s lap.
Paul had expressed a wedding day desire for a dim sum lunch at the Miss Saigon on Spadina, and there, out front on the street, among the Hong Kong umbrellas, the woven baskets and vegetables that she didn’t recognize, he changed plans. One of the subterranean deep-throat contacts that he maintained with librarians had made him aware of the original translation of Johann Georg Kohl’s Kitchi-Gami: Life Among the Lake Superior Ojibway that had been located in the recesses of the Robarts Library. He was desperate to get his hands on it, to touch it, smell it, to feel the grime of old wood fires on the dried pages.
Instead of dim sum, they ate hot dogs off a cart. She was not unwilling, and he was a connoisseur of hot dogs, especially those sold from the street. The hot dog, he lectured her, constituted the cornerstone of Canadian cuisine and he was deeply suspicious of any other food group. “Without the hot dog we are truly fucked,” he insisted. Excellent hot dogs, garnished to the verge of sinking, sold to them by a cheerful Ukrainian octogenarian wearing a head scarf over which she had jammed a woolen cap with tassels.
“We just got married,” Paul boasted. “Right now. In this world. Can you imagine that? Getting married in this world?” Linda saw that he was grinning foolishly.
The woman nodded. Apparently, this sort of thing happened all the time at the corner of Spadina and Queen, and she accepted his tidings with the steeliness of a bartender. At last she relented.
“You are very lucky. Yes. You are a lucky man. For you have this beautiful woman and the beautifulness of love, yes? Very much you have that. Look after it, yes?” Solemnly she blessed their union with two cans of orange soda. “For you is free,” she said.
4
WEST OF CHAPLEAU
The origin and purpose of these deceptively simple paintings remain a mystery.
SELWYN DEWDNEY, 1962
THEIR “WEDDING JOURNEY” AS HE insisted on calling it consisted of a three hundred mile canoe trip deep into traditional Anishinaabe waters that included stopovers at such romantic hot spots as Ooze Lake, Scum Lake, Black Bog Pond, Missing Horse Creek, and Dead Horse Creek.
“Glue Factory Lake is next,” Paul sai
d from the stern. Linda didn’t doubt it.
Her neck stiffened on the second day and stayed that way for a week. She undertook twenty-seven portages, not all of them killing, and learned the art of front packing which to her horror meant slapping another knapsack across her chest when her back was already burdened by one. She scratched at ticks, mosquitoes, red ants, blackflies, caddisflies, deerflies, horseflies, mayflies, no-see-ums, fish flies, spiders, herman bugs, curiosity flies, and something that Paul alarmingly called a “dog fly.” She didn’t want to know.
In the second week they traipsed the deserted paths of a dead bush town called Nicholson. The inhabitants had once slicked creosote onto the black train ties of the continental railway there. That is why the place existed, he explained. Linda was barely listening. She stood in the raw heat and saw that children had been birthed here in the long grass beneath the sun. Their rusted disintegrated toys lay in the dense foliage along with immense rotted cog wheels that no longer turned, tin chimney stacks that no longer smoked, machines that had oxidized and evolved into carbon-rusted fossils in the bush. Desolation and the high burning siren of the heat bugs plowed through the sky. She stood next to her man, her husband now, a pair of mute acolytes staring at the old wooden church made out of knotted deal and barn board, standing in front of them like a grey and ancient person. What modest prophecies had been made from a pulpit of bark, she wondered? That you would come to an end and that you would do it in the deep loneliness of your very own self. That you would seek the support of strange rituals. In the support of a mate. Both of you would stagger hand-in-hand, bowed down by the miracle of waking up together in the morning in the same bed. You would eat much fish and fornicate beneath blankets made of rabbit fur beneath the blinking and countless stars. You would beget and be gone, forget and fall catastrophically into one or more of hell’s circles. Let us now sing together, she thought.
Precisely as she was thinking that the church collapsed, the scarred wood, the rusted nails rent already apart by the shifting of the years, all of it fell down in front of them. The structure groaned audibly at first in a faint wind and yielded inward, giving up the dead husk of itself and collapsing into a heap of smoking boards. Two furious crows shot from the trees with an echoing cry of “Quo vadis, quo vadis.” Then abrupt silence. In the scalding sun the cicadas stilled themselves to mourn this fallen thing.
“Jesus Christ,” said Paul, shaken.
SOMEWHERE WEST OF CHAPLEAU, THEY camped beside a remote lake inhabited by giant pike. At twilight the massive fish broke the water, twisted like marlins and slammed down hard against the surface sounding like gunshots. Later, when the sun went down, she lay beneath a display of northern lights that made her cry. “The arch-angels of God,” Paul said. She knew nothing about the northern lights, only that particles, like people, got charged negatively or positively and energy was released. Overhead, the universe drew itself in the shape of a horse and reared through a meadow of stars, galloping to the centre of the sky, legs kicking. Blood-coloured shafts of light flew from the dusty region of its heart and melded into a bleeding veil of green and red, billowing like a boneless thing from the ocean. Linda began to cry. The face of her mother lay in wait for her within the agitated sky, broken, freighted with damage and its own private pathos. In such nights of bleeding celestial splendour, it seemed possible for every human face to be wiped clear of the agony it had known.
Paul draped a blanket around her shoulders and pressed against her with his knees while the fire snapped. With noticeable uncertainty his hand caressed her shoulders. Displays of grief not based on text or prophecy or the violation of the world troubled him. His hands smoothed her beneath the blanket, but she was gone from his touch into a place that was bigger and took no notice of either of them. The curtain of light swung to the earth. Linda was humbled by the stunning size of the sky and the pinwheels of galaxies that rotated into careless infinities. Everything she had ever hoped to be bobbed like flotsam into the red heaving ocean of the borealis; her carefully chosen junk furniture rescued just in time from the garbage truck — away it went like debris stuck to the side of a maelstrom. Her collection of music, the honks of angry jazzmen addicted to heroin, her unsuccessfully re-upholstered armchair, the tenuous friendships, some of them half-remembered, all of it fell away, upward, into the upside-down universe.
USING PAUL’S FISHING ROD, SHE hooked a large pike in the shoals of Wawa Lake and beat the life out of it with a stick. She became a fisher of women, cleaning the great fish under her husband’s guidance and tossing the pink and purple viscera of its innards to the cobbles on the shore where the gulls flopped at once, only to be sent screeching away by the high and imperial shadow of a lone osprey floating to the bank. She separated the gnashed labyrinth of the pike’s backbone, feeling the curse of its complex y-bone spine and one dead eye. She sawed handfuls of pinkish-grey flesh off the creature’s back and tossed them into a spitting black cast iron pan, ate it with her fingers. She had never done this before. There was always someone else who killed her food for her, out of sight in remote abattoirs that smelled of animal terror.
The fish had fought to the very end, slamming the exhausted length of itself against the rock and flailing against each blow delivered to its brains. Linda had no experience bashing out the brains of living fish. With a shaft of twisted root, she smashed it repeatedly and angrily, bringing the ancient weapon down with a sickening thwack against its body. Scales flew from it and clung to her hair. Was it male or female? she wondered. Did it have fishy children it loved and cared for? Or did it eat them too? Did it grieve? Did it prevaricate and commit adultery? Before she’d finished eating the white meat, a bone caught in her throat and she gagged violently so that Paul held her head forward and eventually put a dishtowel between her teeth. The bone came out later in a ball of bread that he insisted she roll about inside her mouth.
For forty days and nights she burned. She’d started out from a Toronto street across from an orthodox church where the sun went down in a blaze of yellow behind the tree tops, where the church bell gonged and where she separated her plastics from her glass. She had ended up north of Pickle River in the cold morning impaled on a layer of roots and grit left by the glaciers. Her body ached. She tramped through cedar swamp and third growth fire slash. She tripped over the roots of pines and cut her face on the boughs of black alders. Her neck stiffened and her skin became covered with insect bites. At times, she felt only intense fury toward that whistling man in the back of the canoe. His shirt was off and his skin seemed to be sucking in the sun like a parched wanderer in the desert. Husband. The man was her husband, she reminded herself. How had that happened? What drugs had he dropped in her drink to dupe her into doing that? She’d been a reasonable enough woman and now she was married? To a date rapist? There was no other explanation. Linda drove her paddle into the water and allowed herself sudden flashes of fury toward her father, that reserved and kindly philatelist who had grown vegetables from seed.
In the morning, she disentangled herself from the smell and the clench of Paul’s long draping arms. She got outside of the tent in a hurry and for no reason at all she urinated squatting like a girl child, pissing on the waxy leaves of the blueberries.
“Can you spell your name?” he said, watching her with some interest through the screen. She sucked the air into her nostrils, feeling the tang of its hostility and exaltation and ancient rock. There was no sickness here in these lands, she thought, staring at the dense bush that was as frightening as it was beautiful, even in its sun-infused clarity. She realized that her neck had ceased its daily seizures of complaint and pain. Her neck felt fine.
In the morning, they packed silently and professionally like seasoned Nor’Westers, took to the canoe, and were gone into the silent water. She was water bound, gliding through great glassy pools that in places filled so tightly with water lilies they clutched the canoe, slowing them to a near stop. Paul tried to get
her to sing the old French-Canadian paddling ditties, but she would have nothing to do with that. “What?” he said. “Are you too much a downtown girl to sing a little En roulant ma boule?”
“Piss off,” she said, grinning, and waited for the next predictable argument with him as he tried to improve her forward stroke. “Reach the upper hand high, plant the blade, don’t lean forward.” She tangled with her ambition to be a life-long disappointment to men, to all of them, him too. Him in particular.
In the mid-afternoon they rested, Paul with his back against ancient granite, sketching with a charcoal pencil in his notebook. He crammed the pages with shaded stick apparitions of men, animals and fish. Stick-figure men with rabbit ears or fingers that showed the spindly length of some webbed creature or a horned beast. He enjoyed the sensation of forming such shapes on a bare sheet of paper. Later that day, at pre-twilight, when the sun cooled noticeably in the pines, he let the canoe up against a sheer granite embankment and stood upright holding the vessel firm to the wall. “Look at this.”
Linda rose carefully and felt the sickening quick back and forth plunge of the canoe before it settled upright and steady. His palm was already tracing the figure on the rock, enticing it to come forward, to emerge.
“Turtle,” he said. “It’s a turtle.”
She saw a rusted stain the size of her hand and the colour of very old blood. The pictograph was hardly visible to her but it glowed with antiquity, a granular ancientness like the hide of something prehistoric. Suddenly she saw in her mind’s eye withered sheaves of wild grass, snowbound, and bent in stiff winds. The vision had come to her before, the death of someone, of something. She turned her head.
Further down the rock face, on a ledge, a short distance away from the pictograph, lay a heap of human offerings assembled in a pile; a pair of crusty stovepipe trousers folded in twine, a plastic figurine of Elvis Presley wearing a blue jacket, several guitar picks, a black plastic comb, a pine cone, a plastic flower, prayer sticks, a fistful of cigarettes held together by fishing line. Even a dinner set of blue enamelware shone in the heat.