by Peter Unwin
Young Ramsay realized then that all of this had happened only moments ago, hours perhaps. His brother was bound hand and foot and hissing at him.
“Wake up, damn you. They left the knife.” Ramsay jerked his chin toward the belt, a wide scarlet centre fléchée, woven on the fingers. His brother fumbled at the sash until he located the dirk hidden against the buckskin. He had it out beneath the moon, a glorious dirk, forged in the shape of a diamond. Ramsay watched while his brother cut the thongs at his wrist and grabbed the dirk from his brother’s hand, severing the bond that kept his sore and bloody ankles together. He looked up and saw a heathen night.
“Watch, boy!”
He crept to the insolent red man, the one who had spoken like a trained parrot. “You have been mad and drunk all winter,” Ramsay mimicked. After he finished, he released his hand from the mouth of the Mississaugan. and moved to the other men and then to a woman and straddled her sleeping body. He had killed women before.
He looked across and saw his brother on his knees, vomiting, attempting to speak the name of his saviour. Around him the people lay on their woven mats, curled against the night. Ramsay put his foot into the first man and turned him, heavily. The children did not move. Their size alone enraged him, the size of their eyelashes, smaller than the fingers of a squirrel. Both of them were awake and silent. One of them made an effort to crawl off. Ramsay looked up and saw that the clouds in front of the moon had burst into flames.
23
THE BURNING CHURCH
Frontenac asked Outoutagan, “a bad Christian and a great drunkard,” what he thought liquor was made of. The Ottawa is said to have replied that “it was an extract of tongues and hearts, for when I have had a drink, I fear nothing and I speak like an angel.”
DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY VOL. II, 1701 TO 1740
LINDA FELL ASLEEP WITH VOLUME V (1801 TO 1820) on the bed, beside her where Paul would have slept. The short and pathetic life of Jacob Overhosler, an illiterate Canadian farmer falsely accused of treason by his envious neighbours, punctuated her dreams. “You are to be hanged by the neck, but not until you are dead, for you must be cut down while alive and your entrails taken out and burnt before your face. Your head is then to be cut off and your body to be divided into four quarters.” Great, she thought. Have a nice day. The poor soul blended into Ougier, Peter, 1775, who insisted the Newfoundland fishery was on the verge of collapse, and then committed suicide to back up his claim. She paged backward into Ouabachas (see Wapasha) chief of the Santee Sioux. Osborn, Mary, “you are to be hanged until dead dead dead and afterwards your body to be dissected.” O’Hara, Felix, “a sensible well-informed man.” Her disembodied neighbours flitted before her eyes; O’Donel, James Louis, (March 18, 1811), burst into flames while sitting in a chair.”
When she fell asleep, the rats were there again, crawling through the rusted gears of a ruined machine. She saw the letters L.R. tattooed on a man’s hard belly; his eyes opened, blinked, and sent out two shafts of light that danced on the ceiling above her. Help me, he said. She was almost positive that’s what he said. Help me. Help all of us. For God’s sake. We must put out the fire. But why did his voice sound like tin?
The cough of the walkie-talkies broke in on her harsh and loud, punctuated by static. She lay in bed listening to the urgent voices of men doing what they’re trained to do. I’m awake, she thought, and to prove it she watched the red emergency lights flash against her ceiling. For a moment they seemed to have the ability to hypnotize her. Then she was up, wearing Paul’s housecoat, she moved to the window and saw that the church was on fire, the Dormition was over, the Virgin had erupted in flames. Dark billows of smoke crept upward from the building, flashing into orange and uncurling behind the stained glass windows. Flames ignited the old window frames, guttering from the dark alter, and raced from the chancel into the night. Fire burned in the body of the church. She saw Corpus Christi set aflame by a candle. Linda watched, paying her ancient tribute to fire as the smoke escaped from the ceiling and poured upside down into the night, like black water. The roof shimmered for a moment, trembled, then at once blew open, shattering into tiles and glassy splinters, hurling black shards into the night on a column of flame and cinders. Her bedroom window became too hot to stand beside, the heat radiated through the glass and burned on her forehead. She watched as the church crashed in on itself and flamed in a bonfire of walnut banisters, oak panels, and pine spindles, a shower of incandescent ash circled upward into the night.
The phone rang. Her phone. It sounded like music. Like a song she’d heard before. She wasn’t surprised. There would be a voice on the other end of it. Help me I’m on fire. My consciousness is burning. Please help me. The world is burning.
The telephone rang with a melodious patience that suggested many years of shared history, a song in search of itself, unhurried, even resigned. Her arms drifted in the dark to the bed table, not really an arm, a thing remote from her, an appendage belonging to someone else. She felt the press of plastic on her ear.
“Hey.”
In the street, the firefighters manoeuvred frantically, shooting water at windows, smashing them beneath the force of the jets.
“The church is on fire. Fort God is burning. Didn’t I tell you that would happen, I mean, sooner or later?”
Paul laughed.
She heard a dull cheer in the background. It would seem Paul was whiling away his life without her in a dubious Irish bar along with the audible gibberish of a half dozen televisions.
“Are you all right?”
“The church is on fire. I’m watching it on television.”
“Yes,” she said. “You’re all right?”
“I’m fine. I’m drunk. A little. Not Peter O’Toole drunk. What are you doing?”
“I’m proofreading a seed catalogue. I’m watching the church burn.” Another film crew had arrived and debouched expertly from the van. She watched them leap out of their vehicles, wielding walkie-talkies. Cameras were cocked and aimed at a woman in a long leather jacket holding a microphone. She knew the routine: first the fire. Then the filming of the fire. Then the commentary.
“It looks like Christ’s blood,” she said suddenly.
“What?”
“It looks like Christ’s blood streaming in the firmament.” She had a vivid picture of what this looked like, a flood of rich red fluid, thicker than blood, searching the land, arcing the sky, like a comet.
“Ah, the firmament.” Paul cleared his throat. “That old thing.”
“Your books came,” she said. “A box came, they’re here.”
“Good.”
“There’s something else. I was talking to someone.”
“What? What did you say?”
“Someone called. From the media. Someone’s looking for you.”
“Who?”
“Some reporter. I don’t know. I can’t remember his name.”
“Was his name Gratton? Arthur Gratton?”
“Yes, that’s who I think it was.”
She heard her husband laugh.
“The guy’s an asshole. You think I’m an asshole? This guy’s a superior form of asshole. He has a doctorate in being an asshole. What did he want?”
“He has some questions,” she said quietly. “He wants to know about the L.R. site at Port Coldwell.”
“Good. Questions are good.”
“I don’t think so. He says the site’s not authentic. He thinks L.R. stands for Loretta Ramsay and that she painted the entire site. It’s bogus. The whole thing is bogus and that you’ve been taken in. You’ve been had, Paul.”
“He said that?”
“She said it. She wrote a letter. Some sort of manifesto, I don’t know, she sent a copy to him. Not just to him. Those paintings you wrote about, the Port Coldwell ones? She painted them. It was her.”
They
were silent, linked by a telephone wire, staring at different glass surfaces. She heard the squawk of radios from the street, the hissing disquiet of the place where Paul was. In front of her, a telescopic hose unfolded upward over the flaming roof, and she watched as the water burst furiously from the nozzle.
POSTSCRIPT 6: PIT STOPS
THE GREAT FALLEN MOOSE DISAPPEARED behind her. It had taken forever. Then the van took pity on her and pulled over to the shoulder of the highway for Linda to cry. Her head collapsed to her chest, her upper body rocked the seat as her grief sought to rise. She felt herself dissolving into an old hippy van, Paul’s only possession. The acid cleanse of tears washed her face. Then she started up again, sobbing evenly now, driving into Hemlo, where the gold waited in the rock. She was driving, she realized, in the aftermath of the great fire, the Wawa Four, or Five, she could never remember what number it was. There were so many lately. The branchless trunks stuck up like pins from the charred land. In spots the black earth still smouldered, giving up puffs that danced like veiled figures.
Black Creek.
Swedish Creek.
The miles snapped behind her. She drove outside of time on a road that went forever.
AS LINDA DROVE, SHE WAS aware of herself once again standing in the blue-ish basement in the Thunder Bay coroner’s office that towered like a castle over Red River Road. The coroner apologized for wearing a medical mask and admitted eagerly, without her asking, that he was having trouble with the northern winters. “We are Bangladeshis,” he said suddenly, happily. His entire family was having trouble. He wore enormous black-rimmed glasses. Her husband lay on a steel tray beneath the lights, a thin strip of flesh sliced from his left thigh, the wound showed there. Self-inflicted, performed with a Swiss Army knife, the knife she’d presented him on his fiftieth birthday. “Would you know ma’am, please, why he might do something like that?”
In the veiled window a white-frocked assistant sprayed down a gurney, a soothing hiss. Low Muzak on hidden speakers. The room smelled of vinegar. Light was coming in from somewhere.
“It is not necessary for a woman to engage in the ritual of self-mutilation,” she said quietly. “Is it?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“In a quest for vision, it isn’t necessary, just a man.”
Just a man. The coroner had removed his glasses but not his mask.
“There is a peculiar thing, ma’am, I must say so, it’s not the tooth. A very impacted tooth, and infected yes, infected very much. It is that your husband’s legs, the bones, the major bones, I found empty of marrow. Almost completely empty.” He had no idea how this could possibly come about. “There is an insect,” he said without conviction, “that will do this. It has a Latin name. But this is an insect of Brazil. Not of here.” Had her husband been lately to Brazil? No, her husband had not been to Brazil. He would not go south. Only north. There was no meaningful way for her to say this to him.
24
THE NEWS IS THE ONLY THING IN THE WORLD THAT NEVER CHANGES
The Glue the Native saves out of the Sturgeon is very strong and they use it in mixing with their paint which fixes the Colours so they never Rub out.
JAMES ISHAM 1740
ARTHUR’S PIECE APPEARED THE WEDNESDAY morning of a news week in which a Tallahassee housewife cut off her husband’s penis with a pair of fabric scissors and was immediately offered her own television show. As a consequence, Paul’s public crucifixion was less public than it might have been: Toronto Artist beats Academics, Aboriginals to “Ancient” Drawings. Linda read that stinging quartet of barely coded words; Artists, Academics, Aboriginal, Ancient. Arthur’s piece insisted that the Native Studies departments of North America were in a tizzy. The dean of Trent University’s Native Studies program made it clear that any relationship the university may have had with Paul Prescot was on a part-time, contractual basis, and in the past.
“Mr. Prescot has never defended a doctoral dissertation, nor is he currently employed as a professor at this institution. He has once or twice appeared as a sessional instructor and guest lecturer, but beyond that he has no affiliation with this department, or any other,” clarified the Dean.
Loretta Ramsay was photographed squatting on the floor with a bowl of paint in one hand, tracing thick lines on a board with the other. “Loretta Ramsay (Waunathoake), is committed to creating a living art within the context of her people.” According to this “young iconoclast,” she’d rendered the pictographs on Port Coldwell as part of a campaign to “atone for the horrors that the conquerors visited on this Island and on every one of us.” Yes, she stated, Paul Prescot’s books, especially Apocalypse Already, were based on her own rock paintings. They were what she called “healing bandages applied to the wounds of a technological world. It doesn’t surprise me,” she went on, “that researchers insist on seeing my art in terms of war and destruction. It’s what they know. It’s what they’re comfortable with, and what they’re taught.”
Linda read on. It seemed for the last ten years, Loretta Ramsay had been inscribing her figures on the rocks of remote Ontario landscapes; “Sewing them,” as she put it, “on the bleeding world.” These claims were backed up by the authority of Walter Prendergast, a scientist with Beta Analytic, Inc., and leading expert on mass spectrometry analysis. Why leading, she wondered? Why not just expert? According to this leading expert, the substance he examined was no more than twenty years old, probably considerably less than that. “A good facsimile,” he said. “The giveaway was the bonding agent, vegetable oil. The kind you can buy in the supermarket. It’s a lot easier to find than sturgeon oil. There was also no shortage of basic oil paint, the kind,” he said damningly, “that you can buy in a Canadian Tire store for a couple of bucks.”
In the same piece a certain Kelly Davidson, Professor Emeritus at the University of Regina, and authority on Mayan script, insisted it was time to revisit what he called “my Scandinavian hypotheses,” a theory proving to his own satisfaction that the Mazinaw Rock drawings, the Curve Lake pictographs, along with the Hickson Mirabelli site, were all the work of artistically minded Vikings who instead of raping and pillaging spent their summers painting obscure figures with outstretched hands on the rocks of the Canadian Shield. “There has never been clear proof of Native authorship of these sites. I have seen identical ones in Sweden and I have no doubt that the Vikings left them here as trade markers and proof of willingness to engage in commerce with local people. Three horizontal lines could represent the passage of three moons, meaning we will be back in three nights to trade for copper, or furs, or whatever they wanted to trade. Why not the Vikings?” he asked.
A council chief from the Curve Lake band was interviewed and insisted that from what he knew “a clan system was spelled out on those rocks; wolves, loons, crows, bears, herons, power lines coming out from the head of stick figures, tell me what any of that meant to the Vikings? The skyscrapers of Manhattan were built by the high steel Mohawks of Akwesasne. No one is out saying that the Empire State Building was built by Mohawks. Or outer space people for that matter. Why no story there?”
Paul was left with flesh on his body, but very little of it. Three times the piece referred to him as a professor, which he wasn’t, and an academic; “Professor Prescot is not the sort of man found outside on a Saturday morning playing road hockey with the neighbourhood kids,” wrote Arthur, suggesting he was the sort of man who you would find out Saturday morning doing that. “You might try looking in at the Faculty Club where he will be comfortably seated, reading critical theory.” The piece ended ominously:
“Calls left at Prescot’s last-known residence, the Waverly Hotel in Toronto, were not returned. The Institute for the Preservation of Aboriginal Rock Art, established by Prescot with funds from a federal grant in 1984 does not have a listed telephone number, and beyond a post office box with a Kenora, Ontario address, no longer exists.”
FOR THE NEXT T
WO EVENINGS Linda lay on the sofa and watched the story play out on her screen, where it appeared with some insistence and was swollen by several Euro-supremacists, Carlos Castaneda groupies, nutbars, and Piltdown Man believers who waded in and advocated a spiralling network of conspiracies. Professor Seth Blumrich, of McGill, caked in makeup, restated his position that the pictographs of the east boreal region were painted by aliens from an uncharted planet in the Andromeda Galaxy. He was insistent on this; it had to be the Andromeda Galaxy, no other galaxy would do. A retired NASA scientist appeared on television and made it clear that ancestral aboriginals had the power of flight. How else could they have escaped from Atlantis, which he insisted had been built on the Lake Superior reef. The expert had derived his theory from what he explained was, “an extremely close reading” of the Prophesy of Ezekiel, who witnessed his first spacecraft in 592 BC. Richard Kimball, a scribbler with the Arizona Daily Courier had it from an impeccable and unnamed source that the rock carvings on the Hopi Reservation near Mishongnovi, Arizona, depict “a definite connection between Indians and visitors from outer space.” According to Mr. Kimball, of the two hundred flying saucers seen over Prescott, Arizona during the summer of 1972, at least half of them were piloted by Hopi airmen.
The segment ended with Paul Prescot, an expert on Canadian Aboriginal rock art, revealed as a man who could not distinguish a daub of prehistoric sturgeon oil from a three-dollar can of Canadian Tire oil paint.
25
THE RETURNING
FOR WEEKS THE WORKERS HAD banged away at the blackened shell of the church, hacking at it, tearing off the scabs of melted black tiles.