by Peter Unwin
As they squatted up top on the scaffolding with their tool belts, she watched them, saw the tanned torsos and black grottos of hair showing in their armpits. When the sun was full up, they took their shirts off and she sat at her desk and looked through the window at them, waiting for them to fall, which they didn’t. They moved without concern, like squirrels.
She forced herself to look away, down at the sheets in front of her. “Do you have visions of veggie patch paradise with flower-filled borders, a sandbox for the kiddies and a gravel-lined dog run?” In fact, she didn’t have these visions. She didn’t understand how such visions came to a woman. In a dream? Perhaps after three days of fasting in a menstrual tent a vision came to a woman of the purest of veggie patches, burning on the retina of her third eye. The purest of veggies, the most holy of gravel-lined dog runs. What a woman dreams of. She didn’t know exactly what a dog run was. Like a mill race maybe.
The doorbell sounded twice against the silence of the house. She got up at once and walked downstairs to oblige it.
Paul stood before her, grinning. She had the feeling he’d been standing there all night. It did not surprise her that he rang the doorbell to his own house. “I’m ruined,” he said cheerfully. “Dying of exposure. Can I come in?”
He’d left the house with two bags, but had returned with one. It was the first thing she noticed.
“You’ve managed to shed some of your baggage,” she said.
He didn’t laugh. Neither did she. Instead he swung a canvas sack from which he removed a dented gold-painted tin with a bottle of Abelour scotch inside. He clapped the container on a table. “Would you like some breakfast?”
“I’ve eaten, thank you.”
He removed the bottle but didn’t drink from it, instead he picked up the canister and examined it.
“When I was a boy, our house was afloat with these things,” he said, and then he coughed.
WITHOUT SPEAKING MUCH, THEY RETURNED to the symbiosis of their marriage, to its habits and peculiarities, to its open secrets. There had always been something glacial about their love, she knew that, something unstoppable. It moved, but it moved invisibly. “I’m back,” he had said to her, in a hollow, theatrical way. “Yes,” she said. “Like the cat in the hat.” She did not say it, but suspected he would leave a pink ring around the rim of the bathtub. They always did. Linda did not say whether she was back too. I have never gone away, she thought.
They lay in bed like two ships abreast. Paul exuded a heaviness that rose from him with each breath, pressing against the ceiling. How many families had filled this house, she wondered? Wives and husbands, trembling as they held each other? Do you forgive me? The question seemed to emerge from the pores of his body. She didn’t want to hear it spoken. She heard it rattling in the minds of men. Forgive me, please. So many who had need of being forgiven. An entire world full of them. What sort of goddess was she to do that? Or woman? She imagined, somewhere in the black afternoon of the Labrador winter, among stunted trees, the ragged figures carrying the body of a young woman aloft. Forgive us all? It must be done now, before the end comes.
Paul was half awake. He lay beside her again, his wife. He had a past again. The rope of his memory, she held the other end, without her it was only him holding on to a half of it. He was distracted. There was a confession he wanted to make. Do you forgive me? He muttered these words into the dark. “Do you know what I need to be forgiven for?” For the people that I am? That which I am a part of? He could explain that to her, she would understand.
“Does anyone?” she said.
He lay beside her, wondering if he’d perhaps gone blind. Somewhere between the first people and the newcomers his eyes had failed him. He should sit up in bed and make a hardboiled statement about their love. He did, but the words did not sound like his words. “Just don’t bring her back here,” was all that she answered, half asleep. “Don’t give me some wicked disease.”
He felt the time pass strenuously from one moment to the next. “I love you,” he breathed. He looked at his wife’s face as she lay on the bed next to him, her face. He knew it better than anything.
“I love you,” he said again. But she was asleep.
26
THE FACT CHECKERS
In Newfoundland, Demasduwit, one of the last of the Beothuks, was captured and died…. Isabel Gunn disguised herself as a man and worked as a labourer for the Hudson’s Bay Company until her secret could no longer be hidden.
DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY, VOL. V. 1801–1820
IN THE MORNING SHE ROSE before him and went to her desk to ponder Vesuvius; the herbs, fennel, feverfew, hyssop — very attractive to bees and butterflies and hummingbirds. He came downstairs soon after and, without speaking, they resorted to the old rituals. She was responsible for the coffee, their drug of choice. It was not clear how that particular responsibility had fallen to her. “Hey white man,” she often said. “Here’s your coffee.” Today she said nothing.
They hovered around the coffee pot in the kitchen, sucking on the narcotic bean, feeling the heat in their mouths and throats. When he was done, Paul left the house with a loose air of purpose and returned with an armful of newspapers including somehow even the Thunder Bay Chronicle News. He spread the papers on the kitchen table and read with a mounting chorus of hoots and chuckles. With a collapsible pair of camping scissors, he cut out stories that he taped into a large notebook. His Doomsday Book, he called it.
HE DRANK LIKE AN ATHLETE only to damp the thirst of his efforts but did not become drunken or sodden or maudlin. Three deep grooves showed between his eyebrows, popping into existence to accompany the new him. He had accepted his fall, he told her. He had accepted the loss of whatever reputation he had, his few books, several strident articles in obscure journals, rarely cited. He was scourged clean, fallen, free to be another man that lurked in the same aging body. He was dead of exposure. Like all of us, he said. The prospect of dying of exposure was in fact deeply intriguing to Paul. He had a great respect for men who died of exposure, exposure to the elements, exposure to what was inside you. It was all media exposure now and he couldn’t imagine a less interesting way to go. There was a time when he was fond of quoting something he’d read about Captain Scott’s demise on the Antarctic barrier ice, his body frozen solid in what the author had called, “an attitude of sleep.” Not sleep, but an attitude of sleep. The distinction appealed to him. Only Brits were allowed to expire in an attitude of sleep, the rest of humanity just fell down and froze to death. Scott’s last diary entry: “We are getting weaker. I do not think I can write more. For God’s sake look after our people,” was a favourite of his. She’d find a note stuck to the fridge; “Have gone for a quart of milk. I do not think I can write more. For God’s sake look after our people.”
With a glass of scotch at his elbow, Paul scissored articles from newspapers. The leftover sheet he made into a hat and put it on his head. Mad as a hatter, he said. In his notebook he compiled a great deal of confusion, four column inches on a family knifed to death by the daughter’s boyfriend who was later picked up wandering on the shoulders of the highway in a trance and holding a carving knife. An elderly woman found decomposing in her bed. A man who bit a dog. A dog that got cloned. He was constructing a quilt to cover the times. He was sewing everything back together, he said.
She stood in the doorway, annoyed with him. Annoyed even with her own annoyance at him. She knew couples whose relationship depended on an ongoing and fervent annoyance with each other.
“Paul, what did you do to that woman to make her hate you so much? Were you too paternalistic, too caring? Did you tell her how to do everything? Show her the right way to hold her fork?”
“She ate with her fingers,” he said, extracting several more column inches about a Korean family that had contracted H1N1, and whose house was burnt down by neighbours. He flattened it into his book. “It would
seem that if you grind up the brains of cattle, throw in a few steroids and then feed that stew to other cattle, things go very wrong very quickly. On the other hand, you keep horseshoe bats in cages next to caged marmots, hedgehogs, and Chinese cobras at a food market …” He knew this approach was not going to work. “Ramsay is her family name,” he said quietly. “She is the offspring of an odious fellow named David Ramsay. That’s what she believes. I don’t think she is frankly. Have you heard that name? Ramsay, David. Not to be confused with David Ramsay, the American, who wrote a book about George Washington and was then shot dead by a madman.”
She recalled something appearing from a sheet of creamy thin paper, words that seemed somehow to emerge from an afternoon when the blossoms of Herr Holderlich’s pear tree fell on her shoulders. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography open on the backyard grass, a blue jay shrieking. Rale … Ramezay … Ramsay. There in the Rs, something had happened, she could almost remember it; a man had done something hateful. He wasn’t the first one.
“He was an Indian killer. David Ramsay. He slaughtered them in their sleep, with a knife. Men, women, the children even, scalped them all. It’s a declaration of war to do that. He knew that. Became a folk hero for doing it. You know the sort, the man who heroically rescues himself from drunken Natives, dispatches them to hell. That sort of thing. In truth, he was drunker than any of them. It was his booze as matter of fact. He was selling it. Quite a piece of work that fellow, the dark side of being Canadian really, and that’s who she is, who she believes herself to be descended from. I don’t think she is but so what? It happened quite close to here. The crimes that call to us from the past. It’s because of him. Atonement. The last of the Beothuks, Mary March, Waunathoake, the crimes that call to us from the past. She calls it that.” He slugged his drink to the bottom, placed it on the table, and turned to look at her. “I don’t recall being any more odious to her than anyone else. You, for example.” He tried to smile. “Perhaps she needed to crucify someone. We all need to crucify someone eventually. It was my turn. I was due, wasn’t I?”
“And she painted the L.R. site on the Coldwell Peninsula? You couldn’t tell that? I thought you were an expert?”
“Well,” he started. “An expert, yes. Of course, she didn’t paint it. You could spend your whole life looking for that site without ever coming close to finding it. Let alone faking the writing on it. That would be the easy part.”
“She said she did.”
“She was lying. Don’t you see that? She was atoning for the crimes that haunt us from the past. Lying through her teeth. She was making a career for herself, God bless her. They all have to do that now.”
“It was in the papers. On television.”
“Yes.”
“Those paintings were carbon dated. They found paint, real paint, like you buy in the hardware store.”
“You can’t carbon date rock paintings. You know that.”
“Yes. But you can date other things. You can analyze them, you can determine what they are. Whether it’s oil-based enamel from a hardware store. Or whether it’s sturgeon oil. They did the analysis.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know.” She was irritated now. He was nitpicking. “Someone in the news. An expert. One of those experts that forever get dredged up.”
“Like the ones they pull out of thin air.”
“Is that what they do?”
“Apparently they do. Prendergast. Walter Prendergast? That man? With Beta Analytic Inc.? Right? Am I right?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Walter Prendergast, believe me. Lab technician with a D.Sc. from the Université de Paris? Just happened to be kicking around the Algoma District in Ontario during blackfly season, running a lab out of a local college and waiting for a reporter to send him a hundred micrograms of carbon from a rock painting that is situated somewhere, and I mean somewhere on the north shore of Lake Superior. Superior for God’s sake. It’s the size of Portugal. Somewhere between Missing Horse Creek, and Dead Horse Creek? but on the coastal side, right? Is that how it worked? Somewhere east of Aguasabon Falls but slightly west of Chigamiwinigum? Is that it? She canoed forty-foot breakers and put in rather handily at latitude forty-nine degrees north and west of the prime meridian at latitude forty-seven? Closer to forty-six really. She just showed up there?”
Linda watched him with some uncertainty as if Paul were suddenly another person standing there in her husband’s body. Three months ago he’d been invited to give a lecture at the Art Gallery of Ontario on the subject of historical Aboriginal rock art. The lecture had been cancelled.
“I don’t know how it works,” she said.
“Beta Analytic Inc., is based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Was based in Fort Lauderdale. They closed down shop three years ago. It doesn’t exist anymore. That reporter made it up. Don’t ask me why, and her, she believes she’s related to that man, Ramsay. That’s what I think, that’s what I found out. That was my crime. I was snooping. I was an old man in a young woman’s room. That’s never right. I found some stuff, a folder. She’s got everything, the genealogical charts from the archives, even transcripts from the Western Historical Society get-togethers. Those meetings were held in nineteen-forty-four. There’s not a lot. She’s got it all. It’s in her head, a great big murder spree. It galls her. She’s on fire with it. She wants to make amends.”
There was a sustained silence out of which Linda suddenly said, “You must have found her so beautiful.”
“No. Not really,” Paul said quickly. But he was lying. There was the matter of her face. “Her face,” he wanted to add. He couldn’t stop himself. “It was her face,” he said softly, staring into nowhere. “I think she reminded me of my mother.”
He laughed ruefully.
27
SAVE YOURSELVES MY LAMBS AND LOVELIES
FOR SEVERAL DAYS PAUL HAD the topographical maps on the table in front of him. He’d already assembled his camping gear with the same sort of fetishistic devotion with which her father had fixed his stamps into binders. He would visit his ailing mother, he said. Priscilla had taken a turn. When that was done, he was going back out on the land. The Port Coldwell site. His reasons were vague to her. Atonement or vindication. He had no interest in proving Loretta Ramsay a fraud. It was something different. “I am going there to save the world,” he said. He looked at her without smiling.
“You do that.” She sat at her desk proofing a galley page on Hosta plants, and the twelve species of the variegated weigela (tough, versatile, and easy to grow). The variegated weigela was also attractive to hummingbirds, but she had not seen a hummingbird in a very long time. No one had. “It’s because they’ve deforested certain tropical islands,” Paul had said. He named an island she’d never heard of. It was mid-July without hummingbirds. A close hot summer spent in the city. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d spent the summer in the city. She looked up from the pages, the workmen were there, high up in the rigging of the church roof, shirts off, their skins long ago tanned almost charcoal, topped with yellow hard hats. She stood up and went downstairs where her husband was assembling his gear into two large packs.
Paul pressed against her in the hall before the door. He was remote and determined, like an actor in a war movie, she thought, before he goes under the lights to fake his death. She found the moment of their departure almost unbearable. At any moment she feared he would take some personal item; a ring, a chain from around his neck, and place it on her body. He wore no chain. Instead he wrapped his arms around her like hawsers holding a boat to the shore.
“Linda,” he clung there. He was not good at this clinging, neither was she. “I want you to look after yourself.”
“I do that,” she answered coolly.
It was true. She knew how to do that. He knew that about her too, she was good at it. She followed him out the door to the van and slid
the key into the ignition. The vehicle responded to her at once, the way it had so many times. It always felt like an animal to her, taking something from her hand, and visibly grateful for it. They made their way across town to the bus terminal without speaking, the wires and the buildings did all the talking. He stared out at the city like a child who was new to it all. Gawking at it. The buildings, the countless windows that reflected lives constantly in motion, the teeming wash of people moving in all directions on the streets; the bicycles and the food deliverers, the wheelchairs. The city drenched him in its life. It always had. He would always leave it, always come back to it.
Several times Paul reached out and laid his left hand on her thigh, but did not appear entirely convinced it belonged there and removed it. She was aware of the crush of Chinatown traffic pushing her to the station, the streetcars, the taxis, and delivery trucks crushing her forward like a vessel stuck in the pack ice.
“Terminal bus station, this is it,” he said gloomily.
She parked on Chestnut Street and soon they stood together in the familiar grey hardness of the place, breathing the loneliness of the bus station with its diesel and blue fumes, the grit in the air, and the gamblers in depressing suit jackets that were creased for all time, clutching racing forms. The names of towns and villages fell from the speakers, Ipsala, Wabigoon, White River, Sintaluta. Shining Tree, Parry Sound, Garden River. Manitoulin. “Last call,” said the woman’s voice on the speakers. Last call she said, almost with relief.
For the first time she didn’t envy his going out into those names. Suddenly she was appalled by any place that wasn’t home. All of those ridiculous places that did not have her bed in it, her sofa, her books. She was sick of motion, impatient with the endless distance between things. They held each other next to the muddy hull of the bus. The luggage hatch slammed shut. Paul boarded. A few moments later, she watched the bus pull away.