Written in Stone

by Peter Unwin

  “Another one,” he said to a figure that appeared to exist in black and white, moving into the dark, emerging briefly with a small glass. Disappearing once again. “Another one.” It was like prayer. There was nothing else to say.

  The drinks lacked any therapeutic value at all, not counting the brief half-hallucination in which he saw his father swaying beside him, intoning in his baritone lines from the Hymnody of the Church Universal, “When the strife of sin is killed … When the foe within is stilled …” He consumed two more drinks, largely because his teeth had begun to hurt again, a pulsating pain that came out of a recessed pocket in the back lower gum. It should have been looked after, would in fact have been looked after had he not forgotten his appointment. He comforted himself with the knowledge that a vial of yellow pills was stashed in his pack somewhere.

  Still tasting the wash of his last drink, he entered the Kenora bus terminal and went downstairs to relieve himself. In the bathroom a young man was attempting to have a bath in a sink. It was an old habit of Paul’s, peeing in bus station bathrooms. Back upstairs a number of Native women sat in dispirited plastic chairs and waited uncomplainingly for a Grey Goose bus to haul them out to God’s Lake Narrows or some similar place.

  Twenty minutes later he was on the road, exhausted, his eyes shut as the highway pulled him southeast out of Kenora, the bus clinging to the grey asphalt. He opened his eyes long enough to read a billboard wheeling by on the roadside: Are you vaccinated? It’s not just a good idea. It’s the law. Another sickness on the earth. Paul tried to will himself to sleep, but managed only a dull state in which waking dreams wound their way through the wheels of the bus.

  BY MORNING HE WAS AT Marathon among the leaning pickup trucks of the sports fishermen, the grey rocks and brilliant water. The white sprawl of the pulp mill crouched beneath the mountain, steaming and feral. Soon he spotted Joe Animal waiting for him, perhaps he’d been standing there all night, for days even. His black hair hung below the battered green baseball cap stained with sweat. Red Man Chewing Tobacco, it read.

  “You look great,” called Paul.

  “Don’t I.”

  Paul transferred his gear to the boat and they pulled away from Marathon harbour in a blue-painted Peterhead borrowed from the Pic Mobert reserve. Through some decades-long evolution that Paul was only vaguely aware of, the vessel had migrated south from the upper peninsulas of Nunavik where it had been engaged in the walrus hunt in the sixties. It sat low in the water, but the tall narrow cab toward the stern reached to the air, giving the boat a nervous dimension, as if waiting for a particular wave to topple it. There was a persistent rumour that Marilyn Monroe had been on this very boat, more than once. She and Clark Gable. A door made of mahogany took up half of the cabin wall. Paul was not confident the boat was entirely waterproof, but felt no urge to ask questions about it. He leaned against the door exhausted as the vessel thumped along the gleaming sandbars and gnarled spider-stumps of dead trees crowding the shore.

  The vessel cleaved northwest through the sapphire water and followed the walls of rock to what was likely Point Isocar on a map and in the same latitude as the Kuma River which he knew expired into the Caspian though he had never been anywhere near that part of the world. What useless knowledge we are stuffed with, he thought. Me in particular. Michipicoten, the island, floated out of sight and out to sea. For a moment, the island crested the water like a ghost ship. Michipicoten. He had tread on it, and recalled vividly the collapsed fishing shanties there. Michipicoten. Some said a piece of it had sunk the Edmund Fitzgerald. A great sea creature lived there, kept guard over the copper. The copper could kill a man, had killed many. The island fell behind him. He inched his binoculars along the shoreline, scanning slowly, deliberately, the way a Cree guide had done in front of him on the Moose River, taking a quarter hour to complete his survey, moving the glasses imperceptibly, as slowly as the earth’s rotation. Paul gave up quickly. The pitch of the boat, the spank of the water, and the shoreline magnified four hundred times by the lenses sickened him at once. He fought off an urge to spit over the side. The rock shore seemed to demand this gesture from him. Instead he wiped his hand across his lips. As he did, the gold of his wedding band flared in the sun.

  The boat skirted the great bend beyond the mountains, then straight north in easy reach of the shore. He preferred it that way. In a moment the clouds eclipsed the sun. He wrapped his jacket against the cold, smelling an old watery danger. He returned the binoculars to his eyes and held them there despite the pitching of the vessel. Again, the magnification jolted him and made him nauseous. From his pocket, Paul retrieved a small plastic water bottle filled with Cointreau and drank from it. He was drinking Cointreau. This felt ominous. Only the dinosaurs drank Cointreau. Look what happened to them.

  The door swung open and clapped against the side. Joe Animal, inside, leaned against the wheel.

  “Mr. Animal.”

  Paul knew he would be grinning stupidly even though he could not see his face. He had perfected the art of grinning foolishly. The man wore a chequered woolen shirt with packs of emergency cigarettes cached in various pockets. “Joe Animal. You ever going change that name?”

  “I’m thinking ‘Fred.’ ‘Fred Animal.’ You like that?”

  “Fred is good.”

  “Fred is dead,” said Joe.

  Paul tipped the Cointreau into his mouth. Tastes rotten, he thought, though in fact he felt the sweetness flow into him like a river and at once felt the urge to embrace everyone, all of his friends, even those who had died. Especially those.

  Somehow, in the face of an obliterating wind, Joe Animal had managed to light a cigarette.

  “You want a drink?” yelled Paul. It did not feel right to be in a vessel captained by a man who was not drunk. Something un-Canadian about that. “You want a drink?”

  “Maybe.” Joe Animal appeared to be ruminating deeply on the subject. Long ago he had come to the conclusion a man could be sober, so long as he was careful about it. He could be sober as a judge, though in fact the only judge he had ever met had been blind drunk and drove his car into a ditch after trying to buy a bag of weed off Wendy Maracle during the Serpent River powwow. If he recalled it right, she wouldn’t sell it to him. “It don’t make me no wiser,” he said.

  “It’s not Wiser’s. I don’t have Wiser’s.”

  “Wiser’s makes you stupid,” said Joe.

  “I have Cointreau.”

  Joe Animal looked at him. “No shit?”

  “Be careful now. Cointreau is a product of monasticism. Without monasticism we wouldn’t have Cointreau, or Benedictine or even Chartreuse. The drink I mean, not the colour. Interesting how all those sequestered and womanless monks spent half their lives in prayer and the other half making top-drawer booze.”

  Whether that was interesting or not did not show on the face of the other man. “If it wasn’t for those monks the world would not be reeling across the universe looking for a toilet to be sick in.”

  “Yes it would,” answered Joe.

  Paul thought it was possible he was about to be sick as well. He looked across the water to steady himself and saw two loons shoot by in a perfectly flat trajectory, their dark wings whisking the air in a rhythmic one-two. His nausea proved brief, leaving him as he scrutinized the fowl and their impossible aerodynamics. From his reading in Kohl he tried an old Native trick that could supposedly stop a loon in flight and make it circle their canoes. “Orray,” he cried. “Orray.” The loons ignored his call and vanished like two black shells fired from a shotgun.

  The man watched Paul Prescot trying to be like a Native person from one of his books and was filled again with a dubious feeling about where they were going. As far as he knew, those things on the rocks, they could be something you had your kids do to get them out of your hair, he’d told him that; you said Johnny, take this bowl of sturgeon oil and crushed ochre and
go over there and don’t bother me. But once, as a child, he’d shored deep into Quetico, on a cobble beach where the rock face showed the old drawings, and his aunt took him aside and said, “You don’t go anywhere near those things, you listen.”

  “You should be careful, Paul. You should.” He rolled his cigarette from one corner of his mouth to the other and managed to avoid any trace smoke from entering his eyes. He had not read the man’s books, but he had nothing against books. He held books in esteem, the way he valued an oiled .303 Savage rifle. As a grown man, he’d read several books, all written by Louis L’Amour. He could quote from one: “I haven’t been much of a wife to you have I Jim?” “No Lottie, you haven’t.” It couldn’t get better than that. He’d tried a novel by Zane Grey and another about a man who had a job that involved breaking the necks of spies and saving beautiful women. He’d read some pages of a book by John Steinbeck because he liked the name. He thought he would change his name to Steinbeck. Steinbeck Animal. Or maybe Joe the Steinbeck Animal. It had a ring.

  “Orray, Ooray. O-raaay.” Outside the cabin, Paul was trying to talk to the animals again. Some people could do that. Some couldn’t. His grandmother would not shut up when it came to talking to animals. Whitefish in particular. She lured them on to her line with a continuous chatter. For a moment, as the coastline came closer, he entertained a vision of himself entering the American Vista Casino at the Red Cliff Reserve in Wisconsin wearing his black, ironed shirt, though who would iron it now that Wendy Maracle had emptied her rifle into his truck was unclear. There were some women that shot up your truck and that was it, they weren’t coming back. He could iron his own shirts.

  PAUL HUDDLED OUTSIDE WITH HIS back against a board on deck, using the gunwales to keep the wind off him. A notebook pressed his knees. Dear Linda, he crossed it out. This was the hardest part. My dear wife my my … He couldn’t get it right. My mother is about to pass now, he wrote, she admired you very much, did you know that? Did you know I just wanted to revive myself from the rituals of our marriage, of any marriage? He could not write this. He saw his fingers spread on a sheet of paper. Have I let this love go away that we made together and fought for? Has this happened? Have I wrecked the house where we lived? Dear Linda, I have no business telling you this, I barely feel myself here beneath the engine of the boat and this water. What a foolish thing. I would rather express myself with teeth on birch bark or fingers on a stone … There was nothing, he realized, nothing he could write that could tell what she meant to him. He wrote brokenly now, trying to inscribe himself on the pages of his notebook.

  31

  IN OTHER DEVELOPMENTS

  “If they come carrying a weapon and if they seem to be suffering, beware. Behind this face is greed. You shall recognize the face of death if the rivers are poisoned and the fish are unfit to eat.”

  THE PROPHECY OF THE SEVEN FIRES

  SHE STOOD IN FRONT OF the black door with a peek hole drilled in the middle. The door opened and Arthur Gratton stood in front of her before turning his back to indicate she was to enter. Inside the room, a television droned dimly and revealed grainy footage of a bog or a cracked riverbed laden with the rotted hulks of fishing boats. A woman’s voice explained the Aral Sea had drained away and was gone. It wasn’t coming back. “Officials estimate that thirty thousand fishermen have been left without a sea to fish in.” She seemed utterly thrilled by the prospect.

  Arthur turned from the screen. Behind his right ear a fist-sized pewter bust of Stalin stared sternly at her from a shelf.

  “How’s your husband?” It excited him to say this. He put his finger under her chin and turned her face to his. The Aral Sea gave way to a backwash of tinny music. “Play scratch and win. With your busy lifestyle you don’t have time for a common headache.” The words seem to materialize out of the air. He took her bottom lip between his knuckles and squeezed it hard enough for her to wince. “Darling,” he murmured, “darling.” She turned away, but he put his finger to her and lifted her chin. She was to look at him.

  Her arms hung down uselessly.

  You don’t have time for a headache.

  Suddenly he slapped her.

  “There,” he said.

  He took her by the hair and tugged her into his chest, forcing her to look at the black eyes that drilled from his head.

  More doctors recommend.

  “Everything’s fucked,” he whispered. “Especially me. I’m especially fucked. He pressed his hips into her. “There,” he said. “Open your eyes.” He touched her on the side of the face. “Open your eyes.” But she didn’t. He slapped her gently this time.

  Her face stung.

  The television roared.

  “Turn it off,” she said.

  He shook his head. “The soundtrack of history. Get used to it.” He put his fingers to her face again.

  She closed her eyes, but couldn’t protect herself from it. “From Halifax now.” The voice droned. A six-year-old boy in a Halifax schoolyard had kissed a girl. Police summoned. Zero tolerance they said. Why zero? she wondered. Couldn’t we afford just a little bit of tolerance. One little bit of it. For the sake of the children. For the sake of love. Just one percent.

  “In other developments.”

  Arthur had put his index finger into her mouth, his free hand was on her stomach, and was about to stomp across her body, like a beast over the savanna. He squeezed her between the legs, his foot between hers, spreading her limbs. He said a word, several words. She was to go to her knees. Get on your knees. “If you don’t mind.”

  “People must open up their hearts …” The words circled from the television, a crying Native woman with the remnants of a black eye. A police officer had taken a photograph of a steak knife, put a caption on it. Squaw killer. Internal review pending. Linda watched her on the screen, the woman cried; “They desecrated my sister’s body.”

  “Don’t come,” he ordered.

  She had no intention of coming. She wouldn’t come. She would only go. She would go to where Paul was. Clearly, he was writing to her at this moment with a headlamp on, burrowed in his sleeping bag, Linda dearest the lights over Chapleau, the long evenings of our wedding journey, you cried beneath the aurora, I could not take my eyes off you.

  “Open your eyes.”

  She had no intention of doing anything like that. She was sick of seeing. “I can make you do whatever I want,” Arthur said, but he did not sound certain of it. He didn’t sound certain at all.

  She realized Arthur was frightened. Beneath the fabric of his clothes; beneath its weave, he was frightened. Like everyone. All of those men who hid behind a cascade of opinion. He was one of them. He’d told so many lies. He’d written them, he forced them into people’s language. What people, she wondered. He’d made liars out of all of us. He was turning people into lies, putting truth into a machine. He was one of them.

  “You fucked up our stories,” she said wildly. “You took them, you made copy out of them. Now there’s no way to get them back. They’re all locked up in there.” She pointed to the television screens. He paid no attention.

  “You need to do what I want you to do.”

  She sensed this was a lie too, his behaviour. He needed her in order to write his stories, for them to mean anything.

  “What are you trying to prove?” Linda formed a wedge with her forearms, snapping outward and made room for herself to breathe. Arthur slumped against the wall and for a moment she thought he was about to cry, that he was crying already. She looked at him, collapsed, the crows shot out from the sockets of his eyes crying, quo vadis, quo vadis.

  “Where are you going,” he said suddenly. But she turned on him, and left.

  LINDA CAME HOME IN A cab driven by a solemn man wearing a caftan. They sped swiftly around stalled streetcars and fallen bicycles. He glanced over his shoulder, occasionally, smiling at her. He brought the cab to a stop
in front of the church.

  The machine sulked away and, as it did, the blare of an ambulance filled the space under the trees. The sound funneled up between the houses, dopplering a weird semi-tone of hysteria that ended when the ambulance pulled up and braked on the sidewalk before the Holderlich’s house. The door popped on the passenger side and at the same moment the front door of her neighbours’ house flew open, and Mrs. Holderlich appeared wearing a housecoat, wailing.

  “Help him, my husband,” she cried. “Help the poor man.” Her voice keened off the church. Two emergency workers rushed the house and the woman went in after them. Harriet, was that her name? Henrietta?. They had spoken in the aftermath of the burning church: “Where is your husband,” she’d demanded with considerable suspicion.

  The older woman went swiftly indoors into the house she had shared for fifty years with the man who lay in an awkward way at the bottom of the stairs, hardly breathing. In the darkness, neighbours appeared in doorways and front yards dressed in housecoats. Women who had survived Treblinka and were stout now, they stood gravely on front porches. The veteran cat, Rover, looked on from a distance approving of none of it as Mr. Holderlich was carried out on a stretcher with a yellow fleece blanket spread over top of him.

  32

  THE PREPARATIONS

  The following spring he went on a hunting trip with his Indian friends and later described the adventure, which included

  an encounter with an alligator-like reptile: “there layd on one of the trees a snake wth foure feete, her head very bigg,like a Turtle, the nose very small att the end.”

  RADISSON, CITED IN THE DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY VOL. II