by Peter Unwin
“Rules ought to apply,” he shouted. “Don’t you think?” He did not have the faintest idea of what those rules might be or how exactly they applied. The basic rules of home and the niceties required of living with people. What were they precisely? What was home to someone who was constantly in motion? He thought of home as a place that was more like a boat with a fifteen-horsepower engine or a book-lined room where a gloomy man drank too much, a place where as a single man he toasted bread, ate boiled eggs, and once a year ran a vacuum cleaner over the carpet whether it needed it or not. He thought of home as a place that a woman had made. Without her, the wind rattled the beams. Paul was almost childishly hopeful that by throwing himself into a sofa chair, putting his feet up and listening to ponderous music on Sunday afternoons he might get into that home by the back door, or fool himself with imitation, maybe fool her too.
Linda brought in tea in chipped cups. Everything they owned was chipped. Neither of them noticed or cared or even had a sense that it was possible to care. To have a cup, to have something in it to drink. Enough was a feast, he insisted long ago, sipping on some hot drink. They sat like opposing potentates who were unsure of their realms, on different chairs, not needing to speak. He had an afternoon flight to Regina, followed by a taxi ride through the wide city streets that would be framed by elm trees. From there, he would proceed north up Highway 11 in the company of a Pic Mobert resident with the unlikely name of Joe Animal, a man she’d never met and had begun to suspect did not exist. Joe Animal? Really? But why not? She’d grown up with a girl named Mary Christmas. Strangely, she believed she had once dreamt of the man. The two of them were standing side by side above a dream pit on the north shore of Superior somewhere extremely remote, looking down. From an oblong-shaped tin she was tossing ashes into the cobbled pit and held the container toward him, so that he might do the same, but he shook his head. “I suppose I shouldn’t be doing this,” she said suddenly. “No,” he said. “You shouldn’t, neither should Paul.” The man said nothing else. He didn’t have to. She understood somehow that this man standing next to her was Joe Animal. This was the man her husband planned to join up with along with a third person from the Canadian Rock Art Association, an ambitious name for an organization with neither a mailing address nor a telephone, and administered by an eccentric high school teacher paralyzed on his left side following a stroke. From there, northbound to Weyakwin, Patuanak, La Ronge, by freighter canoe up the Churchill River to the Hickson and Mirabelli lakes, into the big flat water of the Mirabelli, and the pitted rock faces and the pictographs. There were places there still, he had told her, that when you put your foot down on the earth, you were the first white person to have ever done so.
Linda wasn’t going. He had not asked. It wasn’t a point of contention with them. She’d made a pact with herself never to be the needy wife, could not in fact imagine a fate worse than that. To be a wife was concession enough. Consciously, Linda had engaged in a strategy to treat her husband as a live-in stranger who shared a house, a bathroom, a bed. The bed was the easy part and, increasingly, a past that swelled with each day. A husband, she had decided, was someone who deserved to be treated with politeness, aloofly. In general, she thought the strategy to be working. Although there were cracks in it. There were cracks in everything, she told herself. Even heaven had a crack in it.
She embraced her husband at the door. She put her arms around his hulking presence and kissed him, squeezed his ribs, and felt him take her up into the vortex of his own excitement over a journey about to start. Linda stood in the doorway and watched him depart for the airport in a limo that had pulled up in front of the house. Solemnly, followed by a grin, Paul made the sign of peace through the open third of the window. In the faint bulbous residue of blue exhaust, the window closed tight and he was driven beneath the old Norman castle of a church where the Virgin Mary was annunciated, out of the reach of Rover’s scorn, and beyond her. Beyond their city. He was about to take to the skies and the rivers. It felt like betrayal; she had no reason why it felt that way.
She heard the phone ringing already as she closed the door.
7
JOE ANIMAL
An officer of the Mounted Police told me that when on duty near the International Boundary Line he had heard there was a wonderful cave some miles distant, containing Indian pictures. This he visited and found stone couches within and drawings upon the wall. Conversing with several Indians he was told that two young men had gazed upon the writing and consequently they were killed.
JOHN MCLEAN M.A. PH.D, 1888
THE MAN WAS WAITING FOR him on a sagging dock on the Churchill River where the pike hung in the weeds like transmissions of energy, quivering green and slender in the shallow water. An old hide-coloured freighter canoe with a twenty-horsepower motor knocked against the dock. The man who stepped out of it was mustached and beer-bellied and his black hair hung from under the same tattered tractor cap he always wore, on which an expanding stain of sweat was working its way. The cap had an air of impregnability about it, so did the man. Red Man Chewing Tobacco was stitched in gold letters across the cap. Paul had never seen the man without it and was not entirely sure that it was physically possible to remove the cap from his head. It was not possible for him to conceive of Joe Animal without this tractor cap. Beneath the rim of the cap, a hand-rolled cigarette rested on the man’s lip and hung down like a line of spittle.
“You look great,” Paul offered.
“Don’t I,” said Joe. His forehead showed large as a rock face and he leaned in as if he intended to crush Paul with it. The man’s lips were ample and floated on his face with no apparent means of being fastened there. To Paul, the entire face resembled an old baseball glove that he’d owned as a kid. He was tempted to remind the man of that. Despite the individual wreckage that made up the parts, the face was comforting and familiar like a well-used map.
Paul strapped himself into the lifejacket that Joe handed him and positioned himself carefully in the bow of the freighter canoe.
“Where’s Raphael?” asked Paul. “Is that his name, Raphael, that guy? That weird guy? I thought he was coming with us.”
Joe Animal spat his cigarette end into the water. “Raphael was in the hospital. Only now he ain’t. I called. He’s dead. He got the pig flu. Or that other one. His wife told me. She’s not doing so great either.”
“Jesus,” said Paul.
Joe nodded, but said nothing. There was nothing to say about it. They paddled without speaking. Paul would have spoken gladly, his companion not so much as a word.
After an hour, Paul attempted to provoke the man into language.
“The trouble with you Joe is that you’re not phlegmatic enough. In the old days you couldn’t read about a Native who wasn’t phlegmatic.”
“I wouldn’t know that,” said Joe Animal. “Seeing as how I can’t read.” It was a falsehood the man was unusually insistent about. For a moment, Joe Animal was tempted to repeat to Paul, once again, that he was the lone and illegitimate descendant of the Earl of Sandwich and an English show girl. He’d read about such a girl in a half-burnt magazine that he’d found in a hunter’s camp near Hawk Junction. The magazine was actually called Hot Chicks in History and stated, on absolute authority, that the young woman possessed the finest legs in all of Europe. Duels had been fought over her. Men mortally wounded in the fog at dawn. Her name was Eliza Vestris, she was a nineteen-year-old actress and her legs had been cast in plaster by a sculptor. “Such a leg,” said the sculptor, “is always sure to fetch a high price.” Joe liked the sound of that. He had good legs himself. There was a woman who had told him that, years ago. He remembered. He came from a long line of men and women with good legs.
The freighter canoe thumped alongside a world of green, abundant green, a vast green hemorrhage of trees that reflected in the chill and now almost purple water. A heron drifted over top of them as still as an aircraft. To
Paul, it felt like there was not the slightest deviance from green, the universal green textured differently in the trees, the marsh grass slightly less green, the leaves of the birch trees darker green than the marsh green, the green world, the wedges of green, the greenness of his wife’s thumb. There was nothing that Linda couldn’t make grow. He thought there was something brilliant about that. Suddenly he missed her immensely. He had made a mistake, he thought, coming here.
“Everything’s green,” he said lamely.
“Green,” said Joe. “Yep.”
At nightfall they camped in separate domed tents, both of them snoring viciously and in tandem while the stars shot over top of them.
IN THE MORNING THEY WERE on the river again. The water had darkened. The cliffs rose in steep and black formations, straight out of the water, icebergs made of stone, and the rock tripe hung down in sheets, dark and vulva-shaped. Windigo cabbage they’d called it. Famine food. Paul had tasted it. Franklin’s men had peeled it off the rocks and eaten it on their journey back from the Coppermine. Half the men starved, others took to cannibalism, Franklin ate his boots instead. Two centuries earlier, on the U.S. side of Superior, the Jesuits had eaten the rock tripe and gone mad. Father Menard, irascible, hateful, holding a cross in an outstretched hand, actually running through the woods in an effort to convert les sauvages. Chased them into their own homes. Paul had written about Menard; he vanished out of La Pointe in a desperate search for souls, his body never found. For a moment he considered what it must be like at the end, to be broken like that, eating rock fungus.
They moored the outboard at the rock face. Paul took his camera and began to snap the rusted blots, a canoe the size of his fist, inhabited by three stick figures and what looked to be a cross; an X figure joined at the top and bottom, two dots that might have been eyes or suns, blind eyes, he thought, dead suns. The figures were in the shape of an hourglass, and possessed five fingers. He put the camera away.
“What do you think?” he said. He expected no reply. There was the click of a cigarette lighter, and then Joe’s deep and remote voice.
“What they drawed is what they dreamed. That’s what I think. I know that. What do you know?” The man paused for a long exhalation in which he watched the smoke leave his mouth and begin its journey.
Paul stood and made a sweep of his hand to indicate how the painting would be composed, here, in this spot in a craft like this one, a clay paint bowl in hand, a finger for a brush. Most likely a finger. He was only guessing. So much of it was guesswork.
They drifted a few metres, clapping gently against the rock, until they reached the lines. Three rust-coloured lines stacked horizontally at eye level. Joe Animal spoke: “That first one up there, eh, that first line. You know what that is, right?”
“No. I don’t. Neither do you.”
“I do.”
“Who told you? Was it one of your cousins? One of your many cousins?”
“That’s right. Cousin Clarence.” He pointed. “That first one, that’s the Canadian National Railway.”
Paul looked closely at the horizontal stain three inches long welded to the rock. It was a tally mark, nothing more, he was sure of it. He had no idea what it tallied.
“The second one. That’s the Canadian Pacific Railway. The third, you know what that is?”
“The Trans-Canada Highway,” said Paul at once. It would have pleased him enormously to appear knowledgeable in front of this Native from the Pic Mobert reserve, a man he had come to know, against the odds. A man he probably did not know at all. “The Trans-Canada Highway,” Paul repeated. “The Highway of Hope.”
Joe Animal shook his head and grinned. “The third one is the end of the world,” he said cheerfully.
8
RENDEZVOUS
SHE STAYED AT HOME PRUNING tomato plants, monitoring the yellow roses, saying good morning and then good afternoon to Mr. Holderlich, who made his regular appearance in the backyard. She made phone calls and pitched story ideas to editors who were rarely interested. She was rarely interested herself.
Mostly she leafed through the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Her father had gifted her with a new volume every year since she was twelve. Their creamy yellow covers had foxed and turned a red brown over time, but the spines remained solid. Even if her spine did not. Her entire collection occupied a bookshelf in the living room, from where it radiated authority. Inside each of those volumes, the words lay packed and dense as plankton, swarming always without exception toward the death of a man. The books were full of men. They all died in the end. They were all men of the book. Even her. Through the years of her raw and often undressed youth she’d developed a consoling passion for those hefty volumes, and wondered if her father did not have some personal motive in insisting that she have them. To give her something else to do in bed? Her father had been an indifferent lover. She knew this because her mother had told her, had told her several times in fact, once suddenly, blurting this to her in his presence, viciously. He hadn’t said a word. Linda was barely thirteen, and had tried to die within herself in the moment. Her mother was unfolding fast, the bottles crashed, the evenings died in agony. The mornings could barely be roused into life. Her father had loved his wife to the bone. Linda, too, she told herself the books had been a way to solidify her character, to make her upright, filling her with facts. To give her a spine. Many spines. Given that her own life was such a mess of longing and dreams, of jealousies, fears and obligations, reading those confident biographies was medicinally soothing to her, men like Claude Guitet who got up in the morning and “consolidated France’s position in the New World.” Why hadn’t she got up in the morning and consolidated France’s position in the New World? She considered it a major triumph to get up in the morning and consolidate a cup of coffee, without which there was no chance of her consolidating anything else, especially herself. In Linda’s experience, the historical imperative was likely to take a back seat to the dry cleaning and was accompanied by the guilt of having, for the second time, cancelled an appointment with an embittered and perhaps unstable woman who had agreed to re-upholster her favourite armchair. Only afterwards, entombed, stone dead, written up in a book, set in type, and laid out in columns, would her life, or anyone’s life, appear to have made any sense at all.
SEVEN DAYS INTO HIS ABSENCE, Paul called her from a lonely truck-whipped phone booth at a gas station on the side of the Trans-Canada. She heard a dark, vast country echoing on the line. He had come down south to the Lakehead. She heard the passing horns of immense trucks. Was she up to anything? Would she like to come up? Meet him. Why not? A rendezvous, an assignation. “A French weekend,” he called it. Come on up for a French weekend, it was only a day’s drive. Okay, two days. She could take the bus to Thunder Bay if she didn’t want to drive. They’d sit up on Hill Street and watch the freighters limp out to sea. The strip malls, the railway sidings. A massive Finnish Breakfast at the Hoito? Maybe watch a baseball game between the Thunder Bay Border Cats and the Traverse City Pitt Spitters. What wasn’t there to like? Are you coming? Why not? Please? Linda? Darling? Come.
With a small suitcase and basket of green Bartlett pears harvested with permission from Mr. Holderlich’s tree, she stood in a ragged line of passengers in the blue fumes of the Bay Street Bus Terminal. Like all of her fellow travellers, she was lost in the terminal loneliness of bus stations. Seedy men shifted from foot to foot, clutching racing forms like letters from someone who had once loved them. Pigeons flew in all directions through the sooty rafters. Every few minutes the great muster of her country crackled through bleak speakers mounted in the ceiling; Greyhound Coach number one fifty departing terminal gate five to Vancouver via Parry Sound Sudbury Espanola Heydon White River Pancake Bay. Such names, such places. They sounded like a gorgeous litany of lovers to her, of muscled thighs that stretched for more than two thousand miles. A journey that ended in a place called Hope, British Col
umbia. All journeys should end there, she thought. In Hope, in the mountains where the cold air smelled of the pines breathing.
Linda sank into her seat and pressed her forehead to the glass. She slept briefly until Toronto was behind her. Soon, outside the window, she saw off-roads leading to port towns that were unknowable, where the sun dissolved into streaks of fuchsia. Barely legible signs stuck up from the earth; the wages of sin is death. “Are,” she thought. Surely the wages of sin are death. It was the copy editor in her. Was she ready for the coming of Jesus? Sure, she was. Why not? Come on down. Bring your wife. Home-cooked meals and the guaranteed repair of small engines? Fine. Pizza, hamburger, mini golf and the coming of Jesus. She wasn’t ready for any of it.
Linda sat up front, down one seat from the driver. A sign bolted above his right shoulder sternly prohibited the transportation of caribou heads and stuffed game animals. Another sign directly above it informed her it was against the law to engage the bus driver in conversation. The fine was two hundred dollars. Despite this prohibition she soon realized the driver was speaking to her in a steady even monologue that required him to swivel his head in her direction and leave it there for alarming lengths of time. She watched the twin headlights of the oncoming traffic shoot close and then vanish behind them.
“You don’t hunt, do you? Me, I hunted. Yessir. Not no more but I used to. Used to get myself a deer. Just one. Only one. Every year.” He swivelled his head away from her, checked the road, found it satisfactory, swung back. “So I got me this critter lined up. Put a bead on him. Fired. Bang. Folded that animal right up. Folded him completely up. He’s spinning through the air, hits the ground. I goes over. Knife out. I’m ready to slit that critter’s throat. What’s he do? Shakes his head, gets up, goes running off. Goes running right off. You forget how strong an animal your deer is. Yessir.” He gave her a knowing look before turning away. Linda leaned deep into her seat, smelled the faint medicinal smell of long-distance buses, heard the soft exhalations of human life and gurgling babies, the tinny sound of headphones 5plugged to ears, and was gone, gone into a fast coma-like sleep. She dreamt that the particles of the road were breaking up in front of her, the trees shattered like frozen things. The rivers ran with tar and pizza boxes floated down like wreckage from a lost civilization on its route to the oceans.