by Peter Unwin
“Makinak,” said Paul. “Michilimackinac, extremely significant. The turtle, the ancient symbolic emissary between human beings and the world of spirit. Long living. They carry the weight of the world on their backs, don’t they?”
“What is this stuff?” she said. The cairn of offerings reminded her of the white ghostly bicycles wrapped in mourning cloth, covered in plastic flowers and attached to lampposts and stop signs in Toronto, sacred spots where a cyclist had been killed, where life had come to an end in an instant.
“Respect,” Paul answered at once. “These leavings are respect. Why not? Or holding time together. Personally, I think what they’re doing is giving the finger to Cartesian duality. Someone put them there a long time ago. No one knows when. The paintings, I mean. They make knowledge, it’s a way of knowledge keeping, that’s what I think. Everything is part of the book.” This prospect was obviously pleasing to him. He added suddenly, “They are living things, like books. Living books. They read the dead to us.” Linda said nothing. She noticed for the first time that when her husband entered the bush, he became more fit, agile, he even looked younger. He was a shape-shifter, she thought.
They roped the canoe front and back to two deformed cedars that split the rock and picked their way to the top of the ledge. She sat with her legs dangling over a vast precipice feeling the fading warmth from the rock seep into her thighs, watching the serrated blue tree line beyond which lay considerably more trees, more rock, more lakes, and a smear of amber-coloured fog that seemed to chase the sun over the tree line. Linda felt the agitation of a dim wisdom floating very close to her face, like blackflies. It was out of reach, but close. It was not her wisdom. But she would take it. She would take anything that was there. Beneath her hand she felt the rock still warming. Was it hers? Could it possibly be hers, a wisdom that seemed suddenly everywhere? What had she been given to know and to keep and to hold? She knew little of rocks or turtles, nothing at all really. She knew something of microwave cooking, and a course of study that had revealed something she had known since a child: the endless reach and the power of written words. Nothing was real unless it was written down, she understood that. She knew the inhuman catastrophe that lay at the heart of her century. She knew lyric poetry was no longer possible. She grasped the essentials of good grooming but she was not privy, like her husband, to the seven calls of the loon, the last of which cried out to the eagle and said, “yoo yoo yoo, you are the king, not me.” She had entered a country of burning sun and impossible winters where on a remote rock ledge people left plastic Elvises beneath a faded painting of a turtle. It was her country, but she had no access to these workings that were strange to her and took place in languages that were unknown. Suddenly Linda was irritated by all of her appalling ignorance. How much of it there was. How stupid she had allowed herself to become.
They set up their fragrant Kelty tent in a vale of club moss, beset by sucking insects that swarmed there until the wind inhaled them away into a place of its own. Well before nightfall, Paul peeled back the moss from a nearby rock face overlooking the water, exposing a writhing mass of insects, musk, and dirt, and beneath that a pictograph, barely visible, the colour of rust and withering in its age. “It has something to do with the cardinal directions,” Paul told her. “Usually these drawings follow a south-east to south-west direction. This one’s unusual, it has a northern exposure. I have no idea what that means.” She watched him trace his body against the granite, pursuing ancient red paint, his eyes intent on the stone and his face pressed to it. The backs of his hairy calves muscled from the rock.
“What is it?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he answered, and laughed. “I can barely make it out. A horned man? A monster? Do you see a horned man? A monster. Do you see me?”
Truthfully, she could hardly ascertain the drawing at all. Among the rust of time, the algae, and the fungus, the prehistoric granularity of the rock, she had some difficulty making out anything. “A horned man?” she asked.
By ten o’clock, the main force of day had dropped behind the forest. Minutes later the world around them grew dark and cold and they went together into the tent.
POSTSCRIPT 2: THE BRIDGE AT GARDEN RIVER
THE TOWN OF WEBBWOOD CAME up on top of her, deserted and bare. No one in the streets. Not even a tub of dew worms for sale. Then came Massey, the steep, stony banks of the Aux Sable River far below where they’d camped. The tin sheds and Quonset huts and skinny trees, the towering hydro pylons that marched like giants across the land. These things formed the other landscape of the North, the one that no one bragged about or painted or put in photographs or swooned over. The North of rusted air compressors and miles and miles of frost fencing, the crushed packages of take-out joints, empty cigarette packs that skidded the pebbled shoulders of the highway.
Her husband’s Westfalia followed the flat green plains of the North Channel as if by instinct. Linda took it all in again as she had before, the sky, the dignified river, the dense green shoreline, the broken barns, such sad affairs left to fend for themselves, the roofs rusted and falling, like forgotten hairdos, she thought.
The Arts & Crafts of Indian People
Trust In Jesus Christ The Saviour
Weegwas Road
She geared down into Blind River, passing the Eldorado Motel on the outskirts. They had stopped staying at the Eldorado Motel on account of the terrible dreams she’d experienced when she slept there. She was in town, then she was out of it on a wide canting bend where the telephone poles leaned toward the river and looked like crucifixes. The wind riffled the grey surface of the river.
The Huron Shore
Les Territoires des Indiens
The Mississagi River meandered next to her, keeping pace with the van. At Garden River she saw the old baseball diamond flooded on the baselines. The bags had been left on the field in the northern way and a bloated and no longer entirely round softball lay near the mound. The road paralleled the train line now and Linda saw the train bridge spanning the river. Across the face of the black metal plates someone had painted in white loopy script This Is Indian Land. Someone else had rather carefully painted over is with was. The old solitudes, she thought. Us them. Is was. Both of them. Her. Her husband. All of us. Someone had tried to paint it back to the way it had been.
Is was is was. Us them us them.
She heard the engine chanting it as she drove deeper into the land: iswas … iswas … usthem … usthem … iswas … iswas iswas …
5
DOMESTICS
It is increasingly clear to me that the impact of aboriginal values and attitudes has shaped us more than we will ever dare to imagine.
PAUL PRESCOT: “PICTOGRAPHS, PETROGLYPHS AND PARADIGMS OF THE APOCALYPSE”
WHEN THEY RETURNED FROM THEIR honeymoon, they resumed their lives lived in their rented two-storey house directly across the street from the massive church with its large, forbidding sign that declared the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary and Theotokos of God.
South of them a desperate, noisy, and multi-generational family sold a variety of drugs to wobbly, skinny, tattooed men who arrived on bicycles and shouted or whistled up to the third floor. Linda watched from her bedroom window, in particular she watched their scratchy hunger, the foot-to-foot restlessness that knew no gods greater than the satisfaction of needs. Look at us, she thought, and watched fascinated because her whole life had been that. Soon the door opened and a bearded, overweight and this time exceedingly short young man came down the steps and with a swift Masonic-like handshake dispensed a small bulb of intoxicants and received payment with the same gesture. The penitent was gone at once, beyond the sign of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary into the shadows to seek his comfort with a pipe made of tinfoil.
One house north of them lived a man they knew as Karl, and his wife, Mathilde. Mr. and Mrs. Holderlich. A married couple, German in origin,
glacial in their features, slow moving, and nearly mute in their intimacy with each other. At one time they had been Weimar Republic lovers. Linda knew the story of how Mr. Holderlich had been found alive in a downed Messerschmitt in the desert at El Alamein and transported half way around the world to Halifax, from there on a prisoner-of-war train westbound; all the signs en route had been covered in burlap so the prisoners could know nothing of where they were. “It wouldn’t have helped,” he said. “We understood we were south of the Arctic Circle. That’s all.” Finally, they were removed from the train at a prisoner camp at Neys, Ontario, a provincial park since after the war, one she knew well — the high rock walls where the freight trains canted screaming around the wide bend. There, he had fed a local bear by hand. Lulu, they called the bear Lulu. He would never forget it. From her husband’s pictographic research at Worthington Bay nearby, and their camping at Neys, she and her neighbour had that remote watery location in common. Sometimes he talked of the Superior shore there, when he had been a young officer and the spray pounded through the barrack walls. Seasoned Luftwaffe veterans waking up soaking wet in the morning. It clearly impressed him. Enough to return when the war was over. Many of them had returned. In the afternoon, they were allowed outside the camp to pick blueberries without a guard. “Where were we going to go?” he said. He spoke of these times with great reverence, even the blackflies and the rickety tin boats from the Pigeon Lumber Company that took the prisoners upriver on the Little Pic River to cut timber for a dollar a day. They were young men, highly trained and playful, with great skill and energy. At a camp nearby they had built a luge run. On occasions, several of the local Canadian girls from nearby would come up close to the wire fence, and wave.
Now he tended a neat garden with an exceptionally fecund pear tree and was supported capably by a tungsten knee, a pacemaker, a silver walker, and two artificial hips of which he was vociferously proud. “German engineering,” he had said to her without a grin. Despite this personal robotic hardware, he managed every autumn to haul himself up a stepladder to harvest each and every pear on the tree, even those that hung over the fence into the backyard she shared with Paul. All this while his wife begged him to come down off the ladder. He was strangely admired for this, although Paul suspected him of vague war crimes and avoided him. “We have all committed crimes,” he said. “Some more than others.” She was friendlier to the man. The Holderlichs were also loving owners of Rover, a battle-scarred cat of renowned street courage. During the boiling summer days when the orthodox church doors across the street had been wedged open to cool the sweating supplicants, Rover entered the arched doorway without concern and stomped down the aisle of the church, marking the chancel and turning around only to exit with disdain.
IN THEIR RENTED HOME SHE and Paul practised the strange religion of themselves.
He was in the middle of negotiating his somewhat churlish terms with the academy. There were meetings with chairmen and chairwomen and occasionally chancellors, with hiring committees and firing committees and what he was pleased to privately call the Titty Committee at whose meetings strategies were plotted to thwart the ancient lechery of male professors. “We could always gouge out our eyes,” he’d suggested in the ornately Biblical cadence that he learned from his father. “It would be a pleasure,” answered a battle-scarred humanities professor of Wiccan inclinations, blowing on both her thumbs in preparation for the joy of gouging out Paul’s eyes. She’d survived a massive breast cancer and lived her life in the shadow of a son lost to hard drugs. Paul was enormously fond of her. He would miss her as he would miss the raw eccentricity of the true-blue types, their devotion to the Tractarians, or their ponderous musings on Lady Cecily Waynflete, their ability, when drunk, to speak Latin with a southern Ontario accent. Aside from those colleagues, and there were more than a few, he was tired of the very light in the halls and the life-draining that went on inside the walls made of brick and mortar. He was tired of something he could not put his finger on. The sickening indoor-ness of the whole thing. That’s what it was. That is what kills me, he told her. It kills every one of us. The damn indoor-ness of our lives. “The indoor man in his head is dead. So there,” he announced. He wanted to take his research outside, outside of anything that was known. Paul had long been a somewhat indifferent contract faculty member, a sessional lecturer in a Native Studies program. His doctoral dissertation, written in his early forties, had been deemed indefensible, a committee member had labelled it preposterous, another had warned of racial overtones. Whatever it had been, it was happily published by a downtown firm that eventually sold seven thousand copies of it.
LINDA WAS CONTENT TO DREAM at night, to dream when she napped. She looked forward to dreaming. When she was not dreaming, she freelanced the written word. She ghostwrote an unlikely manuscript: Eugenta; My Life As An Orphan by Lydia Smith, a woman who found peace in Jesus after being kidnapped off the Trans-Canada Highway by aliens. Lydia was a small woman, and mild, entirely normal in every way. Linda composed text for an antidepressant meant for people she believed had every right and even an obligation to be depressed. She edited Starburst: The Complete How-To of Floral Arranging. She wrote a children’s version of Kidnapped at ten cents a word and saw the finished product handed out at gas stations to anyone who filled their tank.
While Linda prostituted herself for petro dollars, her husband finalized a dense study on Pietism and its Moravian origins at the Seminarium Groenlandicum. It was in doomed stories of Moravian piety Paul sought his country, in the company of fellow fanatics, heaving through rock channels in fur-skinned boats, crammed with terrified guides and gibbering missionaries. All of them believing in the impossible.
WHEN WINTER CAME, THEY CLIMBED into his increasingly dilapidated Westfalia and drove to the National Library where he sat for hours pouring over the photographs of J.A. Mason. He was fond of one in particular. It showed a Dogrib medicine man, dressed in black flapping garments as he leaned from the front of a York boat peering into a future that lay somewhere on the Great Slave. His name was Godeh.
“There is a fellow,” said Paul, “who possessed serious medicine.” She understood that Paul was after that himself, serious medicine. Medicine that could kill a man or make a girl fall in love with him by blowing smoke in her face. The possessor of these arts could also freeze his rival’s mouth into a horrible paralyzed grin, or remove the marrow from his rival’s bones. The details fascinated him endlessly. “I’m looking for an antidote for science,” he told her morosely.
They drove back to Toronto in a snowstorm, the highway subsumed by it in brief intense gusts. The storm stopped as suddenly as it had started and revealed great crusts of white like frozen waves rising out from the dark on both sides of them. Linda sat curled, blanketed, on the passenger side. She was aware of the contentment of driving, of feeling chunks of distance speed softly beneath her while warm air blew through the vents, and the world outside froze. Everything was remarkably still.
He looked at her. “Now this is living. Isn’t it?”
“If you don’t get us get killed, it’s a type of living,” she conceded.
“Just be thankful you’re not lying in some millionaire’s waterbed with a champagne flute between your fingers. That actually happens to some people. What we have is a blessing.”
She did not disagree. There were blessings in this world, she knew that. Even if she did not know the extent of them.
He gestured to the land, the pine ridge and the white and snowed-in earth that seemed to scream its beauty at both of them. He was about to go Church of England mystical on her mixed with some Theroux and Hopi Native, she knew it. In a second, he’d be quoting Pauline Johnson at her.
“To be out. Outside, I mean. It’s a blessing. The only thing that matters, like the musings of the dung beetle.” He looked at her then swung his attention back to the road. “To be outside, outside of us. To have our feet on the rocks, to piss in the bus
h. To be outside our souls. Go out! I command thee, get ye hence from the lands of the indoor plumbing and the two-for-one cheese pizza. Get ye outside to commune with the trout lily and the white-throated sparrow. Bleat like a leopard frog,” he commanded. “Weep like a willow. I command you to weep like a willow.”
Linda pretended to be asleep, but felt his eyes on her, and could not stop herself from grinning. He thumped her on the shoulder. “It used to excite you, this kind of jabber.”
“Not really,” she said. “I was just pretending.”
“You drive,” he said.
6
LEAVING HOME
SUNDAY AFTERNOON, HE SAT WITH his feet up listening as Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand brooded from the stereo. This is what people did on Sunday, he thought, surely. They played a warped three-disc Polygram recording bought for a quarter from the discard table at the local library, the third disc so scratched it couldn’t be played. “The Symphony of Six Hundred and Thirty-Three and a Third” he called it. He knew very little about music. He considered the classical composers to be gods of strictly European origins. They were untouchable. Only women could humble them. And they did. More than sometimes. He understood that about the great music of Europe. He had never been to the continent, had no desire to go there.
He watched Linda as she moved from one room to another. She was attractive, the way she moved. He had watched her for some time. He felt he had been watching her since he emerged from boyhood. He had been given eyes for this, for her and for the world. Paul could barely imagine a time when he did not watch this woman as she moved about a room, moving from one to another.