by Peter Unwin
“I traced a dozen pictographs,” said Paul suddenly. “Something is happening.” She saw him at the window, staring into the distance. “The sicknesses, I mean. It’s not getting any better. I don’t think it will stop.” She shut her eyes again imagining him as she had seen him before with the sky over top and him intense at his work, pressed against the rock, touching the tip of a Comte crayon onto the pictographs, applying a sheet of rice paper over top of that. The crayons had been her idea and, in the end, produced an entirely acceptable reverse image of the pictographs without impacting the original.
“You should have been there,” he said, looking at her. “Why weren’t you there?”
“You didn’t want me. You wanted to copulate with spirits. You were being mythopoetic again. Probably you were banging on a drum. Were you banging on a drum? You were having an affair. With that Animal person? With a drum?”
Paul turned and re-examined the reflection of himself in the window and was unsure of it, doubting its authenticity. He saw two waves of blondish fur turned that way by the sun and white sprouts of hair growing daily, to his annoyance, not to hers. In fact, Linda awaited his éminence grise with some impatience.
He turned from the window and crawled into bed with her again, slow and tired and well fed, shifting his way next to her the way a bear enters a dark den. His hulking form with its worn contours pressed against her on the mattress and immediately Linda tumbled into sleep where she found herself examined by the glossy eyes of a caribou. “You intend to kill me with your fire and your electricity. Kill me,” said the animal. “Take my casement for protection. Sunder my spirit from my frame. Eat my meat for strength. Your clan is in desperate ways. I give you my bones for your labours and you shall not want. Your clan is in desperate ways, tell me why have you done this to yourselves?”
Linda woke up suddenly and saw her husband’s sunburnt back rising from a chair like a porterhouse steak that had spilled over the sides of a plate. A stout and well-thumbed binder lay open and upright on the desk in front of him. Over her shoulder she discerned the outlines of the pictures he had traced at Hickson, Mirabelli, and Red Lake and many of the other places of their wanderings and of his wanderings. She saw the anthropomorphs, the man with the rabbit ears, the lines, the circles, the approximated animals, animals that no human being had seen but in dreams, tally marks and the abstract renderings that formed the bulk of Canadian rock art. His notebooks spread out on the table and he was writing in them, the pages filled with arcane jottings on Native medicine. His arcane thoughts. His attempts to enter a world that was denied to him. The better world.
Paul turned to face her. “Something has happened,” he said cheerfully. “I believe we’re being touched by a civilization that is fantastically alien to us but is part of us. It’s in us,” he said, staring at her. “We are becoming something else.”
POSTSCRIPT 3: THE DARK SOO
IN THE FAST INVADING DARK near Thessalon, she searched the incoming road for a skid mark she knew would be there but to her surprise wasn’t. She’d put it there on a dreadful night some years ago with Paul asleep in the passenger seat, the right front tire banging flat, a fox family on the asphalt, the mother haunched and stone-still as the hunk of steel came for her and her young. Linda had gone into a hard, shuddering skid that left her heart pounding and the van half off the road in the dark. The foxes were now a smear of fur and pulp on the tarmac like those photographs she’d seen of human shadows imprinted against the wall at Nagasaki after the bomb. Paul sick with it, vowed he’d never again drive a car or eat meat or slam the door on a Jehovah’s Witness or engage in any evil. While they changed the tire, turkey vultures and dung hawks wheeled over top of them and the smell of beached fish and seaweed rose from the shore. Linda saw nothing there anymore that reminded her of the stain of their brutal passage. She wondered if it meant she’d been forgiven.
By dark morning hours, she’d made the bypasses and green traffic signs that cluttered the outskirts of Sault Ste. Marie. An hour later the rain had nearly ceased and she let the van roll down a nameless unpaved road. The machine stopped for her beneath a mantle of spruce that dropped fat pearls of water on her windshield. She had always known that in such places lurked the drooling axe murderers who wore hockey masks and waited to chop her into bits. They had always waited in such places, she heard them rustling like skunks in the soaked underbrush waiting for the woman she had become, the lone woman, a woman alone. She rolled the windows up against the flies that rose despite the rain and snapped the sleeper to the sky and to the impossible stars, climbing into bed with her clothes on and the mangy old Hudson’s Bay blanket pulled across her, scratching at her chin. The cricket-clamour and patter of rain on the roof guided her at once into her dreams.
10
KENORA: THE FIRE
LINDA OCCUPIED THE MORNING BY herself, penciling a stack of freelanced manuscripts in front of the fading velvet wallpaper of a third floor room in the old Kenricia Hotel in Kenora. The entire sprawling joint was now a firetrap on the verge of being shut down, but it remained sporadically open somehow, a jewel in the north with its striking interlocked white bricking; it stood as proud as a castle on the skyline of the old town. The room she and Paul had rented glowed with the ghosts of bootleggers and American gangsters who had once lived large in it. The very broadloom blossomed with history, including, she had discovered, cigarette burns from another era.
Outside, the bush planes landed and lifted and droned carrying fishermen and mineral prospectors deep into the woods. She heard them as she worked. Pilots dropping their planes onto the bay, taxiing to the long pier by the town laundromat, and hauling a bag of filthy bushwhacker clothes inside for a wash. Taking off again when the laundry was done. Beneath her, Main Street bustled with sharp air and western oil money. She stood by the window and watched swaggering men visibly on the lookout for a big score, the trophy pickerel or natural gas deposit, or diamond vein. Fortunes were getting made out there while she fiddled with a stack of writings that depressed her endlessly, including an incomprehensible self-help book for vegan dog owners called Feeding Fido; Meat-Free Meals for the Dog You Love.
When she’d had enough, she put her work away and pulled on a sweater; it was time for her unofficial, unpaid secondment to the nonexistent offices of the Canadian Rock Art Association where she would compile her husband’s enthusiasms into mind-numbing manila folders containing mostly lichenometry data. Today she would not do that. Today, instead, she went down the stairs into the northern street. Despite the presence of overweight carpetbaggers and bushwhackers packing chunky wallets, the intersection of Main and Princess showed many boarded-up storefronts and yawning windows. Spindly decorative trees sprouted from concrete boxes along the sidewalk. A torn yellow sheet suspended in the window of Francine’s Watch and Giftware store stated ominously, Everything Must Be Liquidated. Everything!
She took the long sweeping walk around Kenora harbour, in no hurry, inhaling a premature Arctic chill that came down off the Ungava land mass. The wind moaned in the hollows of her face. She stopped periodically, on the lookout for the sturgeon she’d seen earlier, its grey and white body basking out there in the water beneath the sun. But the fabled and enormous fish refused to rise to the surface. She saw instead Husky the Musky, a giant muskellunge tourist attraction made of papier mâché, painted green, mounted near the beach at the lakeshore, frequently vandalized, its mouth open extremely wide, as if frozen in horror.
In an hour, she had walked the lakeshore and entered the fifth floor room of the Lake of the Woods District Hospital, filled with light and scored by the symphony of a game show that blared from the television. By the window of the lounge, Priscilla Prescot sat humming the same snatch of a forties swing tune she’d been humming the day before. The serene royalty of the crone affixed itself in a halo around her. Ninety-six-years-old, glowing with a faint and dignified absence. Several of her teeth were missing now.<
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“Lillian,” Priscilla said softly.
“Linda,” she corrected, as she had done before, but the woman ignored her and pressed a button on a control panel imbedded into her chair that made the television go black. “Oh, my dear, why is it I should be going on like this? It is time for me to be over with, isn’t it? I’ve lived too long Lillian, too long. I’ve done everything there is to do. Everything except this. Really.” She gazed distastefully around the room. “My teeth are falling out,” she added with grim pride.
During the span of her rather enormous life the woman had traipsed the largest diocese in the world, the naive and often stunned companion of the Reverend Joshua Prescot D.D. during those vigorous years when no amount of liquor could bring the man down. From the Attawapiskat to Kapuskasing, from Matagami on the Quebec side to Missinaibi in the hard bush above Iroquois Falls, she had negotiated the immensity of it. In the aftermath of one of her husband’s binges, she had helped him transport a grand piano fifty miles down the Chapleau River, straddling it across two Peterborough canoes that had been lashed together with her own stockings. Silk stockings sent to her without her husband’s knowledge from an admirer who was killed in a tank battle at Aquino. Such stories once abounded and now she was forgetting them, every day.
“Did I ever tell you the time —”
These sudden discursive turns of the old woman’s memory delighted Linda. They were like birds carried by a wind that had stopped blowing, beautifully plumed birds that never ceased their singing.
“No, tell me please.” It felt right to her that she should end up at the bedside of an old woman attending to memories from an earlier and different world. A world that was never coming back. She sensed the comforting presence of things that existed and were entitled to be forgotten in the passing of time. “Tell me,” she urged. Tell me everything I have wanted to know. Tell me everything. Everything there is. Everything that has ever happened. I want to know. I must.
“Manitoba, it was Manitoba. I was your age. Younger even. Much younger. I was standing in front of the Hudson’s Bay store, Josh was inside, Paul wasn’t born yet. And the fur brigade came down because that’s where they got paid at the Bay store there. They all got paid there. And that’s what they did, they went in and got paid and then they got drunk. I mean they got drunk. We forget how drunk men can get. Maybe timbermen, back in the day, they used to get drunk like that but really, my goodness. They made the stuff themselves. Moose milk they called it, lugging great jars of it about everywhere. Get drunk, stay that way for four months. I remember they started being sick, they started puking. They went to their knees by a ditch and they were all throwing up. This was at the Osnasburgh House, way up there. And here were these men lined up and puking themselves a regular storm. And that was it, you see? That was the last fur brigade ever. The very last one the Company ever hired. It was all over. I was such a young woman, a girl really, I had no idea. No one did. Here were these men vomiting in a ditch and three hundred years of history was coming to an end. That’s what it looked like. Men puking in the snow beside the ditch. Sometimes that’s what history looks like. It all ends my dear, everything. It just comes to an end like that.” She made an effort of snapping her fingers but very little came of it.
Linda sat in the light, staring at her mother-in-law, and stroking her right arm. She was so feeble, barely ninety pounds of her remained, her hair so white, so drained of lustre, her skin translucent as parchment. She knew this feeble woman had travelled ten thousand miles by dogsled and half as many by snowshoe, or perhaps her mother had; Priscilla’s stories and her mother’s stories mingled now in Priscilla’s memory. One of them had somehow played an advisory role in the late revisions of E.A. Watkins’ Dictionary of the Cree Language, and had been present at the last treaty gathering at Naongashiing to which she’d travelled sixty miles by canoe through a maze of islands, each inhabited by its own spirit, while baby Paul lay in the middle, diapered in a bag made of moss that had been slowly baked to make sure no insects remained alive in it. The boy lay between the thwarts of a canoe, staring up at the sky. His mother wore a pair of beaded moccasins sewn with sinew and embroidered with porcupine quills. Of course, Priscilla was not old enough. Her mother’s memories had become her own. That woman had been friend to Edwin Turner, the first Indian Agent of Keewatin District, a small energetic man who conducted his official affairs from a small ketch. In a series of lengthy and passionate letters, he’d convinced a fading Italian diva to board a tramp steamer and come to Canada to be his bride. For the next twenty years, as he nosed his way through the countless bays and inlets of Lake of the Woods, his game Italian wife planted herself in the bow of his ketch belting out Verdi’s Rigoletto to tone-deaf trappers who fried bannock in bear grease, staring up through the trees as her mezzo-soprano soared its way into the boreal twilight.
The old woman drifted from the mist of those greying afternoons and flitted in and out of decades that were gone, barely remembered, touching down on brilliant days; at twenty-two years old, volunteering at Chorley Park military hospital in Toronto. On burnished wood floors she helped amputated veterans acquaint themselves with their artificial limbs by dancing with them. She forced herself to smile as their hard prosthetics continuously stabbed her toes. They couldn’t feel a thing, and she clenched her teeth against the pain, looking out the window at the leaning trunks of the white pines of the estate. She smiled strangely. Only the vast land and her marriage had made sense to her, and that not much; the loud and burly form of Joshua Prescot, the minister, her husband drunk or sober.
“Dearie dear. Sometimes I don’t know if who I am is what I remember or what I’ve forgotten.” For a moment she was gone into that other world that increasingly belonged only to her, where men paid a dime for a dance. At least that is what she thought took place there. Fireworks over top of them while couples clenched below the lights of the fairground.
“Tell me about the fire. You said you would.”
The woman sighed. It was necessary that she begin positioning large memories, untangling them like fishing line from the scramble of the hours and years that had piled up on her. “Well,” she said. “It started in the bush didn’t it?” Linda was not meant to answer, only to sit, to listen, learn, and one day, from the rooms of her own great age, to remember them, maybe repeat them. “It starts in the bush.” Priscilla waved her hand at the window indicating that for all she was concerned the great conflagration was out there still, moving toward them, extinguishing everything, even her memory, especially her memory. Memory was the only thing that burned really. “Eight miles an hour, that’s what my father said, forty miles wide, shaped like a horseshoe. The fire was moving at eight miles an hour and you could hear a noise, the flames, cracking things open and burning up all the air. A great whooshing wind, like war it was, and after three days we knew it was heading for us because the animals started to move. Right into town, they came over the railway tracks down Second Street, and they had to cross a bridge to do it, the bears and the wild dogs, the skunks, snakes and no end of deer. Even fishers, there were two fishers, side by side, and I remember that because I’d never seen a fisher before. I only ever saw one after that either, and it was stuffed in a museum. Every kind of animal, the streets were filled with them. I was seven years old and I was with my mother in the Kresge’s department store, and she touched me on the top of my head and said ‘Look there’ and right in front of us was a deer, a big buck with these spreading antlers, and it stood with its feet splayed looking extremely foolish, the way a deer does when it’s standing on the highway. Very ungraceful, standing on a wooden floor next to this great bin of women’s underwear. Second floor. It had come up the stairs you see. These tiny wooden stairs.”
Priscilla Prescot sighed mightily and shifted on the pillow. “That husband of yours, dearie? My son. Is he here?”
“He’s in the archives at the museum.”
The woman’s
dark little eyes aimed themselves worriedly at her. “You watch out for him. He has mighty ideas. My bloody goodness.” She laughed herself into a wet and alarming cough and then came out of it. “He saved the world, my son. In a dream. Twice I’ve had that dream. The same both times. Paul is in it, all painted up like a Hollywood Indian and the world is on fire and turning into ash right in front of me, and Paul puts his lips up close to it and he whispers something to it, and then I wake and everything is all right. I know it is. And there’s Paul smiling at me. Oh, he was always one for the ideas. You watch, one day those mighty ideas are just going to wear him right out. He always wanted to be something that boy. He’d rather be a porcupine, I think, or an otter. God knows.”
Linda looked blankly at her. Her mother-in-law had always expressed the belief that Paul was in some special need of being taken care of, but was never so tiresome as to suggest that his wife ought to be the one who did it.
“Is he drinking?” the woman asked.
Linda paused. “No, not now,” she said.