by Peter Unwin
“He’ll get himself all worn out like his father. Bad hearts, the Prescot men, I mean they have good hearts, but they don’t have strong hearts. I believe somewhere they have little holes in them. And bad teeth too, they have bad teeth. Have you learned that? They won’t get them looked after, will they? No they won’t. They’re too busy with the business of God and the meaning of life to spend an hour in the dentist’s office. They’re out there, re-routing rivers and leaving their mark on history or whatever it is they’re doing, meanwhile their teeth are all falling out.”
She shook her head and both of them, as if in agreement not to speak any further, turned and stared out the window. Together their eyes lingered on the grassy lawn below that plunged to the darkening surface of Lake of the Woods.
11
LORETTA RAMSAY
The cup of life will almost be spilled. The cup of life will almost become the cup of grief.
THE PROPHECY OF THE SEVEN FIRES
PAUL STOOD IN THE STREET watching the northern sky shine with a clarity that cast a visible outline around the town of old Kenora and everything in it, the wires, the frames of the billboards, the sooty rooftops, even the branches of the trees. The sun had climbed to mid-sky a long time ago and refused to move any further. He took a final longing look at all of it before ducking into the clammy press of Ned’s Diner, a classic grill and soda bar of the kind fast vanishing from civilization. Paul had resigned himself to the idea that there was nothing he could do about it. All civilizations collapsed. Even his, especially his.
He took his place inside the restaurant alone. Linda was back at the Kenricia, sound asleep, and he felt suddenly estranged from her, a feeling of drifting away from her, and wanted her powerfully now to be beside him. He felt a strange anger that such a feeling could exist. Paul sat down and scanned the place. Generally, he allowed himself a broad standard for judging northern restaurants, there must be no animal guts on the walls and the cook must not be drunk. Or rather the cook could be drunk but he must not be waving a carving knife at the waitress or the customers.
On the wall in front of him hung a red Coca-Cola sign, dented and probably salvaged from an overgrown baseball diamond. The booths were straight-backed, and upholstered in crushed horsehair. Men and women in polyester jackets stitched with dream catchers, recovery wheels, and the names of remote reserves sat staring out at Main Street through windows clouded with steam. The place smelled like pea soup. A sign propped against the cash register stated We Support First Nations Hockey. On the wall hung an ancient poster of Janice Joplin in mid scream. Next to her a framed embroidery of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer.
“God grant me the serenity,” Paul read, before lowering his eyes to the menu. An Italian place at one time, still was, he thought, frequented by Anishinaabeg mostly. A noble Greco-Italian-Canadian-Ojibwe joint that proudly served spaghetti “Italian Style” with an order of fries on the same plate and a small Greek salad on the side. His multi-cultural country, he loved every bit of it. Every mouthful. Two sodden orders of poutine drifted by at eye level and he had the powerful notion they were being taken out back and slung to the bears.
He first saw the young woman sitting on a vinyl stool at the counter, tracing a length of her hair behind her left ear with a pencil. She had a notebook open and was sketching. He was undone by this gesture. The neck, the neck, he thought. To neck with someone.
He spread his own work on the table, a sketch of a man with rabbit ears and a pole-sized phallus. He pretended to shuffle papers beneath other papers, glancing again at the young woman, regretful of her, somehow, that she even existed. Her face … it was impossible to him. Faces like hers lit up the world. Because of faces like that, he thought, men invented the compass.
Paul arranged his papers on the table, folded the menu. It was time for food and appetite and he was pleased to see her slide from her stool and advance coolly toward him, aggressively even.
“Pickerel. You have pickerel?” he said.
“We have pickerel. One or two left.”
“One or two?”
“The cook has one or two,” she said crossly. “The season’s ending. Pickerel season is ending.”
“Yes, it’s ending. Everything is ending. Pickerel, please. Mash instead of fries, no gravy, coffee later. Thank you.”
She wasn’t paying attention to him. Her head tilted, the hair fell in knots over her left shoulder and he saw that not all of it was black. She was staring at the papers on the table. “Those are pictographs.” It was almost an accusation.
She bent close to the table and he could smell her now; it was as he suspected, patchouli oil, the ancient somewhat sickening scent that had once drifted from head shops, poster counters, and the skin of wild teenage girls with loose long hair from decades ago. He was surprised that it still existed.
“Port Coldwell,” she said. “Those drawings are from the pictographs at Port Coldwell.
“Hickson Mirabelli,” Paul said.
“No.”
Paul laughed. “Yes. Hickson Mirabelli.”
She looked at him almost furiously. “They look like the ones at Port Coldwell.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’ve been there. I’ve worked with them.”
“Worked with them? You’re an artist then? A magician?” She made a display of astonishment, as if he had made an observation that distinguished him from other men. Something secret had dropped between the two of them, for a moment he felt that.
“I’m here for the summer, I study in Toronto and yes I am,” she laughed. “An artist. How did you know that?”
“Because you’re working in here. Because of the way you look,” he added recklessly and regretted it at once. She didn’t seem alarmed. She was used to it.
“Tell me about it, your art,” he added quickly. “I’m interested.”
She examined him intensely. “I work with aboriginal motifs. Exclusively. Native rock, pictographs, petroglyphs, those,” she pointed at his papers. “That’s wild.”
“You’re First Nations?” It was a misstep, he felt it as he said it.
“Yeah, well,” she took up the menu. She was gone, pointedly gone ten minutes and then she was back with the food, the pickerel streaked with gold grill marks, the potatoes steaming. She put the food on the table. He saw that her face had the power of a sun, and that everything existed within it.
“I’m supposed to be Cree, way back on my mother’s side. My name’s Ramsay, very old name. Très distinguished.” She made a disgusted flare of her nostrils to indicate what she felt about the whole business of that. He’d been forgiven, he could see. “I’m the distant offspring of someone famous. David Ramsay. He wrote a book in 1807 called The Life of George Washington. But he was shot. He was shot three times in the back by a man he didn’t know. Just walked up to him in the street, kablam, three times.” She laughed oddly. “He was a lunatic. A hatter. A mad hatter. They were all mad because of the mercury. I’m mad too,” she said, and smiled.
Paul nodded. “You got off to a good start.”
“What do you mean?” Suddenly she was cold again and noticeably suspicious.
“A good start. To be an artist. Or a shaman. To be mad. It’s all the same.”
This pacified her. “What are you?” she said suddenly.
He was surprised by this sudden attention, flattered even; it felt like she had shone a bright and marvelous light on him.
“I thought you would never ask. It so happens I’m the world’s leading authority on aboriginal rock art, east of the Rockies.” He flourished a cracked leather pouch from next to his thighs and unzipped it, withdrawing a copy of Pictographs, Petroglyphs and Paradigms of the Apocalypse. He laid it on the table.
“Hey,” she uttered. “I have that book. I’ve read it.” She turned the copy over, and quickly surveyed the picture of Paul Pres
cot, a younger Paul Prescot.
“You’re that guy.”
“That guy. Me.”
“You’re not a fucking anthro are you? Or an art critic?”
“No, I’m not,” Paul assured her. “I promise.”
12
AFFAIRS OF THE HEART
His survival, apparently without much disfigurement, was credited to the application of native remedies: immediate submersion in the lake, a purgative recommended by the Ojibwa leader, Ayagon, and the treatment of his burns with swamp tea and larch-pine salve.
DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY VOL. VIII
BY WINTER, HIS WORK IN Kenora was done and they were back in the city in their rented home living their rented lives, lying in bed with books in hand, her with her cream-coloured dictionary packed with men who invariably died. The hall light threw a cube of white through the doorway and onto the wall by the bed. Tenderly, even with reverence, he stroked the dark mole that adorned the back of his wife’s left shoulder. He was aware that at various points in her life that mole had been the source of considerable attention from mankind, or at least men, thrusting itself out against a background of unforgivably white skin. It floated on her like a lost contact lens, offering the possibility of sight to any man who could claim it. It had been stroked, sucked, kissed, bit, scratched, photographed, analyzed, philosophized and masturbated over, and now absently, in ever tightening circles, Paul searched out the ridges of it, patting the air around it as if the thing itself was not connected to her body. Decisively he pulled his finger away, only to return it, beating a tap on the surface of the mole this time, keeping beat to whatever came next. He knew what was coming next. He dreaded it. He was not the sort of man these things happened to, he had always known that.
Out the window, an unstained sheet of snow bedded the tree branches and dragged them downward to the ground thick and pristine. It was as if a new world had fallen upon the earth, hiding the old one, hiding its wounds. In the basement, the furnace coughed and began asthmatically to breathe through the vents. The Greek Orthodox Church chimed in the cold. Four times the bells sounded. Four clarion calls into the night.
Paul got up abruptly and left the room. Linda remained on the bed counting the chimes while he went below and made tea for them. Reaching over, she pulled his notebook off the bed table and saw that he was glossing George Nelson’s letters on the Cree and Northern Ojibwa religion, your lands are distressed, keep not on the rivers. Paul had underlined this heavily.
She rolled away and went back to her own book. Her plan was to read every volume of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography before her life ended. She had advanced beyond the Ms of the seventeen sixties; Mineweh was dead, knifed in his tent, his famous silver tongue made silent by death. Montcalm awaited his defeat. She was skipping now, randomly turning the thin pages.
Paul re-entered the room, quietly like a butler, stooped over a tea tray of all things. She had not seen it before. She didn’t know they owned a tea tray, or what part of the basement he had dug it up from.
“Lin,” he said, vaguely. He so rarely called her that.
His voice rose huskily and freighted. She hardly recognized it.
“I’ve met someone.” That’s all he said.
There was a pause before a slightly insane snort escaped her. She only half-prevented herself from laughing out loud.
“What do you mean? We meet people every day.”
It was a mistake to speak. It wasn’t even true what she said. She did not meet people every day. She met them in books. People who were brought down with a musket ball. Linda sensed that everything she’d taken for granted was on the edge of being over with. An enormous knife had fallen between her and her life. It was gone with those few casual words. Everything that mattered was made of words. Paul had met someone. A large-looming someone, a Biblical someone. Had he met her on the Red Road, the true path? Or maybe it was the road to Galilee, or the laundromat?
“I’m sorry, I don’t know how else to say that.” He looked at her pleadingly, “I don’t know what to do.”
His words knocked into her. She was suddenly startled that he could do this to her, that he could still knock her at all with words, or with anything. She’d thought that the knocking moments of her heart were behind her in regard to her husband. This man, this strange and stupid miracle that he was. She had taken him for granted, she realized that, like a tree that had always been there that she could climb and find shade beneath.
“You don’t know what to do?” she repeated. And then again, more softly. Linda understood perfectly well it was not the loss of a ferocious passion that made her heart knock. It was the understanding that if Paul in a moment of frankness felt compelled to confess to an affair he was having, then maybe she had an obligation to confess hers too.
13
ARTHUR GRATTON
… He had a great fluency in speaking and a graceful Elocution that would have pleased in any part of the world. His person was well made, and his Features, to my thinking, resembled much of the Busts of Cicero.
DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY, VOL. II, 1701–1740
THERE WERE REASONS SHE DID not want to confess about the man she was having an affair with, but the most troubling thing was that her affair was somewhat stupid, even to her. She did not perceive of Arthur Gratton — that was his name and she enjoyed the feel of his name in her mouth — as bumpkin-stupid in the manner of people who sat in restaurants and jeered at the government and mocked people with educations. He belonged to an elite order of intelligence marked with postgraduate degrees earned abroad. It was a confident stupidity; incisive, urbane and it manifested the cold side of the city, of any city. Arthur Gratton, she had come to realize, was one of those scathing incisive people who carried powerful electronic devices in their briefcases and could demolish a man’s reputation with a flick of a key. She understood that such men had no idea how to dress a deer or weave a fishing line from bulrush fiber or, for that matter, make a menstrual pad out of it, as Paul insisted he could do and, in fact, had attempted to do for her north of Superior, failing rather catastrophically. Instead they could eviscerate a public servant or a politician in an afternoon and be having a drink by dinner. The man wrote articles for keenly intelligent magazines, appeared on television and spoke hotly and intensely, with wit and arrogance and a noticeable jawline. She enjoyed seeing him on television, it made her giggle. Men always looked foolish on television. The way they tried to appear smart, smarter than someone else. It seemed so important to them somehow. These men with their privileges. There were so many of them; women, too, now, in their scary makeup, the ranks swelling every day. It seemed to Linda she couldn’t get up in the morning without their heads ballooning and shouting from televisions and radios, desperate to opine. Desperate to make people like her giggle. They were so desperate to say things. They would never grow old, their teeth would never drop into their soup. Their heads were stuffed with opinions. She despised them all. She had in fact spent her semi-conscious life in flight from such men, every one of them, and now she was shacking up with one, something she found both nauseating and arousing.
Linda had examined her excuses for getting into bed with this man and put them down to the demands of her body which she rarely questioned. In many ways he was the polar opposite of her husband, even the bipolar opposite, she sometimes thought. Arthur Gratton was selfishly, compulsively, and perversely hungry for her. He wanted her in every way possible, wholly naked, part naked, he would take her fully dressed if he had to. He had said as much. It was a type of compliment. He once cheerfully confessed that he fantasized her revolving on a rotisserie for all eternity. A small electric rotisserie. He controlled the speed, and direction. He wanted pictures of her, sketches, her breasts, toes, fingers, the fur on her ears, he wanted binary parts and fragments of her, the totality of all her fragmented selves, and from these fragments he had constructed his
Venus; Linda Prescot, née Richardson.
She quickly accepted this as the way it should be. The man was arrogant, but he was aggressively and faithfully starving for her which for some reason she found agreeable. He had fallen so deep into the habit of her that she had almost, without knowing it, conceded him status as an acolyte of her flesh. She even took his phone calls in the middle of night when her husband was away. He was away more than ever. She didn’t ask. She wondered if she cared. She loved her husband; she would never be capable of hating him. She listened to Arthur’s panting, she tolerated his obsessions, she was one of them.
She knew of Arthur Gratton that he had grown up in a fanatical Christian sect in a small town in Saskatchewan, population eighty-three and declining steadily. When he was a boy, his father had been decapitated by a salting truck on Highway 39 and Arthur was bused home from a Moose Jaw public school to find his living room packed with sect members writhing on the floor, speaking in scabrous tongues. The event was a “fire fall,” he told her, performed in its daemonic intensity in front of Arthur in the hope of indoctrinating him. It didn’t catch. He had recoiled in horror. By the age of seven he was a skeptic. He didn’t believe in the transfiguration of the Lord Jesus Christ, or the divinity of hockey teams. He was a critic of Santa Claus, debunking the great man from lecterns behind which he stood like a pint-sized Lenin. The boy climbed on his desk and urged his classmates to wipe the department store pixie dust from their eyes. He denied the existence of Santa Claus and for this was expelled from school, run out of town by liberal orthodoxy, he insisted. He was virulent toward even the vaguely spiritual or the mysterious. His dreams were not worth the fathoming and vitamins were a hoax, massage was a fraud. He wanted yoga banned. He left his first wife because she booked an appointment with a chiropractor. “I lost her to a cult,” he told Linda sadly. Whenever he was having drinks with a woman, he told this story. Chiropractic and voodoo, it was the same. As far as he was concerned it was all part of a gooey New Age conspiracy to turn the planet into a politically-correct neo-fascist Pilates class for postmodern vegan feminists who would all spout postmodern nonsense in favour of the marginalized voice. The margins were for losers. He was in favour of the centre, the voice of fact and truth. His voice, the voice of himself uttering the tenets of a world that had lost control of its utterances. “That’s me,” he said. He made it clear he would have no truck with an alternate universe that had been birthed from a moiety of muck returned from the sea by an otter or some other creature. She despised him slightly and she quickly had grown tired of sparring with him.