by Peter Unwin
He awoke poking at his jaw. He got out of the tent and scoured the rocks at the treeline for blueberries and found them in meagre clusters. He drank from the lake but had difficulty raising himself. His legs burned from the inside. They had been worn out with the love of walking. Walks of three or four days’ duration had been nothing. Unbounded walks. His glorious legs, he felt the burning in them. It was a sign for him to sit down, but he stood and went to the wall of stone and to the paintings. The forms were expiring, leaving only figures of rust. The paint was medicine, and he touched it. The canoe, no larger than his fist, contained six warriors, stick men, stick everything. The artist had no interest in form, not like the Kalahari, or the Lascaux artists. Everything content, a short-hand of urgency, of a time fast coming.
Two letters, L and R, crossed into four of the drawings. Ornate letters with grand serifs that spoke of a pork-eater who knew his own initials. Paul put his fingers to the stone. The face of it lunged to him. He wanted in it, to join the rock, in beyond the surface. “I’m in,” he murmured, looking up at the great wall of stone. He was crouched in a place of power, and conjured two dark-haired lovers with their fingers dipped in ochre and animal oil, the hematite mined at the old pits at Wawa, painting on a four-billion-year-old face, picking insects from each other’s hair. Mishe Mucqau loves Ohbahbahmwawa-geezhhaqoquay. For all eternity. For fifty bucks.
My mother will be dead, he thought and then spoke, strangely into the air, “I loved my mother, I love you.” He cast about for the presence of others, dreamers who had been here before, holders of otter bags. Men and women who loved their mothers.
He heard a fox bark. The rooting for grubs and snails, the unfathomable orchestrations of the forest began, the cacophony of twitching insects and groaning branches. When he woke, the sun was up but invisible behind the black rock of the peninsula, flooding the day in green. Paul felt his teeth on fire. He began to write in a notebook, signs fading from the rocks. Too much scrutiny. Scrutiny washed them away. Thought. Words, Language. What are these things now? The door’s closed on the rocks. Don’t know them, the songs. Or the dance.
The entire day, he ate nothing. The infection in his mouth cooled. At twilight he went into the tent and did not dream. Every part of his body ached. Hours before dawn he was out of his tent, his tent a cold sagging membrane now drenched with dew. It would rain, he could smell the rain coming in. He began a chant to the roots and the shrubs he had gathered. “I am the roots and the shrubs and the ferns and the bracken and the tidal pools. I am the songs.” He could sometimes not keep his father’s baritone from sounding behind the thick fog of years gone.
Paul leaned back and found the cold rock with his flesh, scratching his neck on the moss, soft as the nuzzling of a cat. A patch of rock tripe broke away and fell to the ground. He held it between his fingers, tripe de roche; vulva-shaped wings of grey and black. If I go mad with starvation, I will eat this, he thought, like the Jesuits. He inhaled the cold, fecund stuff. The terrible song of insects seared across the rock, along with the rattle of grasshoppers. Their orchestrations seemed to swarm behind his eyelids. He felt he was being watched now, and soon he saw a deer twenty paces off in the shadows. In one effortless gesture the animal flexed its neck and body, leaped a fallen beech tree, and was gone into the forest. It seemed afraid of something.
The disappearance of the deer frightened him. He roused from his position, exiting the woods to sit upright on a rock, facing Superior. Paul felt the nausea of hunger and the readiness to accomplish great things. He saw himself at labour, a greasy body hauling baskets of hematite from the pits outside of Wawa, transporting them on the paths to the rock cliffs at Agawa, to heat in pans, to make the paint.
He reached down and collected a handful of cobbles.
“Mamaquishawok,” he recited and hurled the stones at the sun, delighted as they transformed into butterflies, weaving, driven in every direction. There were children about, everywhere, and they squealed “mamaquishawok.” The colours fluttered and weaved through the sky in front of them. There, he thought, I have given butterflies to children. What more could a child want? The stones fell to the ground. He’d given butterflies to the children. He’d give them song too, but song had already been gifted them by the birds. The birds, God bless them for giving their songs to us. For teaching us to sing, from which came speech. “Thank you for giving us butterflies, Mr. Prescot.” They were so very welcome, all the children of the earth. The stones fell to the ground and he heard the insane sound of cicadas sawing in the forest. His hunger transformed into an insistent clutch at his belly directing him to the water, as if to eat it. He shut his eyes and felt that a headless form was about to erupt from behind him, but nothing happened, only the shuddering fear from an old prophecy; if you do not move you will be destroyed.
He moved from the water and struggled over the rock back into the forest to the Pukaskwa pit. Before its cobbled recessions he went to his knees as he had done as a child, addressing God, calling forth the names of those who needed protecting. Who did not need that? What name could not be called out? Hunger coursed through him. He was ready now to topple into time. He lay himself carefully in the pit and felt the twilight fall on top of him. It was not entirely uncomfortable, the cobbles knuckling the bones of his body, his eyelids crushed tight. The world first, then the end of it. Linda’s chest pressed against his back, he felt her breasts and her forearm on his hip, but realized he’d only made the first shallow pools of sleep. Linda. He wasn’t sure if he’d spoken her name out loud. Her name. She was unzipping some sort of leather folder, they were on a train, he was writing in his notebook, writing the words that had struck him like a hammer, appearing in front of his eyes on paper: It is increasingly clear to me that the impact of Indigenous values and attitudes has shaped us more than we will ever comprehend. More than I will comprehend.
The night entered at last, dropping with the meteors that flamed from far Cassiopeia.
35
WAKING UP
This savage woman was assured that if she were strong in her Faith, the Devil could do her no harm, especially if she no longer believed in her dreams. “I hate my dream even in my sleep,” said this poor creature.
THE JESUIT RELATIONS, 1640
“LINDA? IS THERE COFFEE?”
The words were spoken by her husband, but sounded haunting in the rock caverns on the shore where they had always sounded, where they had originated in time immemorial.
“Linda? Is there coffee?”
She turned to the elderly man, the poet of renown with the bristling nostril hair, the seer, the pontificator, but he was no longer beside her. Not surprised by this, the inconstancy of men no longer surprised her, she found herself impulsively rubbing the white circle of pale flesh that showed around her finger. Her wedding band had slipped into a barrel of trembling isinglass, she remembered now. She was dreaming, she thought, with relief. The relief gushed through her. If she dreamt, it meant that those bothersome men sitting on that fallen cedar, circled in sunlight, the one in particular, marked by a noteworthy ugliness, it meant they were not real, were not anything to her. One of them she knew, had seen before, she knew him in some capacity, whether he was real or not. His tattooed body conveyed a dangerous kind of attractiveness, the very kind that she’d forsaken in her life, if only recently, today even, or tomorrow. His skin was charred black in places and veined with a complex network of tattoos, and his head, she noticed with great annoyance, was a seething tangle of snakes, green snakes. His hair was entirely made up of vipers, snapping like whips at the air around him, gulping at the flies. For some reason this annoyed her too, she had no faith in snakes. She approached him boldly, even insolently.
“You got a head full of snakes, mister. Are you trying to tell me something?”
The man made no response, but to remove the pipe from his mouth. Then, in a terrible sickening moment, his head detached from his shoulde
rs and lunged at her, crazily, like some sort of toy she remembered from her childhood. His head, the snakes, his stricken face came at her from a distance, a balloon shape, spiralling wildly, until its very eyes were up close, peering into her own eyes, hungrily trying to enter through them. It was always like this, she thought. It was through the face they came at you. Linda felt herself rise up from herself, unfolding her body as if from a prayer position. Her hand held the electric hair dryer Paul had given her. She had not used it in some time; the last time, she believed, had been to defrost the freezer, now it was in her hand, like some charm that would see her through the most impossible of situations. She knew even without bothering to check that her initials L.R. would be monogrammed ornately on the leather case that lay on the ground. She whipped the device to the level of her eyes and clicked the trigger. “Made in China,” she said. “Say goodbye to unsightly and unwanted curls, mister.” The snakes hissed and flapped hideously in the blowing heat, their skins fell in smoking shards to the ground and withered into ash. The man’s muscled torso wobbled and she stood back in fear, aware that something was trying to expel itself from inside him. Something terrible. At once his body erupted soundlessly with a bloody rain of flesh, and fragments, and then it was over, a puff of red vapour, dark bits, and the smoke of a life that had ended violently. The birdsong returned, tentative at first, from the forest around them.
The other man, the silent one, stood now and came to her in measured steps, the shells trembled on his body. “If you want me to be your husband you will have to put him inside of you.”
Linda was somewhat appalled by his audacity. “I already have a husband,” she said, aware immediately of the inadequacy of anything she could say.
“Both of us,” he said. “Both of us must go in you.” He indicated the blotted and blood-soaked bits of his companion already seeping into the earth. “Both of us must go inside you.”
SHE WOKE TO THE WHOOPING cry of a cardinal, high and repetitive like some infernal machine, entering her room with the sunlight and the comforting noise of the city. She loved this sound. She loved the way it crawled into bed with her. A choir of birds, a racket of squirrels that chittered at the air, a child laughing. Many children laughing. Many bells ringing.
She opened her eyes to the stucco ceiling and the hum of distant diesel trains northbound through the corridor of the metropolis, sounding whistles into the hiss of the expressway. Above everything soared the laughter and crudities of the workmen. Linda got up from bed and saw them descending from the scaffold dressed in head scarves, waving spears, their triumphant bare and sun-blackened arms raised in victory. The church was done, suddenly it was finished, the dome, built in bronze, shone in the sun. On a sudden impulse the men turned and like mad drummers began pounding their hammers against a wooden board that leaned against the wall.
36
QUO VADIS
The boys are warned, so as soon as a nightmare or a bad dream oppresses them, to give up the affair at once, come down from the tree, and return home …
JOHANN GEORG KOHL, 1855
HE WOKE TO FURIOUS CROWS that broke through the morning and carried off any remnant of his sleep. The black shapes above him shifted in the trees where the moss hung from the branches, and roared at him as they twitched from one tree to another. To endure the contempt of crows was necessary now. Paul propped himself with his elbows against the cobbles of the pit, but found it more difficult than before. Touching his jaw, he felt his fingers sink deep into the swelling. It was remarkable he’d slept at all. He took long breaths and fumbled with a notebook that was damp and spongy. Probably the pen didn’t work. This was a good thing. More pens shouldn’t work. Especially his. Slowly the nerves in his legs activated in a peculiar re-awakening until he felt strong enough to lift up and carry himself out of the pit and a short way through the bush.
When he made it there Paul discovered his campsite in ruins, the tent smeared and collapsed as if a balloonist had crashed on this very spot. The nylon food bag lay shredded like tissue on the forest floor thirty yards away, wide open. An animal had ripped his pack from the trees. Grains of rice lay on the ground. A lone red bean, shreds of plastic, wax paper, and the vial of pills, empty since yesterday. Paul located his remaining notebook. Its top margins had been chewed. The raccoons had come. He was unpleasantly hungry now, dizzy-hungry, and he stopped for a moment to recover, leaning against a tree where he clutched his notebook and coughed.
He remained there for some time, several hours maybe, but not a day. It couldn’t have been a day. Yet when he moved it appeared the sun had rolled across the sky like some great stone. At points, the insects swarmed him in intense waves. Several of them screamed in his face. Immense blue dragonflies droned in front of his eyes. A fly landed on his lip. Stupid fly. How could it possibly know where his lips had been? Did it imagine it was immune from the germs that bred on his lips? On the lips of man? Paul forced himself to chuckle.
The sun moved swiftly behind the trees and the clouds came on like dark draperies that were turbulent at the bottom. He drank water from a wineskin and when he opened his eyes it was dark, either with weather or the night, and he knew the Milky Way would not be seen this night. It wouldn’t course across the universe carrying the souls of every single person who had lived and died. Paul shivered. He realized he’d been dreaming. His smallness was suddenly unbearable and he was thrown back with fear onto the strange moving objects of his boyhood dreams, the freight trains and a terrifying snail that appeared to crawl forever up immense curtains when his eyes were shut tight and his father was in a mocking rage in another room. Paul was ready to enter sleep. In the speck of darkness, he heard a train shuddering down the tracks, unsure whether he was awake or not.
When his eyes cracked open, he heard the crows shouting at him, in Latin it seemed. He waited for the wash of dreams to flood him. Linda, in jeans and a sweater stood in front of him. “You have been mad and drunk all summer,” she said sternly. Tears surfaced on his eyes and he heard the rains pattering first on the dense canopy, then rattling harder, dripping through it until the moisture fell on the sponge and the rock of the forest. The dream ebbed from him and he clung to what he could; Linda warming her hair with the portable hair dryer, the one he’d given her.
He realized he couldn’t get up. Something seemed to be lying on top of him like a fallen tree. Tears fell from the sky. He couldn’t get up. He needed to get up and tell her the truth, but there were no words, simple or not, there were only things and memory; the endless bushwhacks through tight woods, ragged ferns scratching them, the Assiniboine River, in a canoe ducking beneath fallen logs to avoid decapitation as an eagle shot over top, its shadow passing across her face. For a strange moment, he’d thought the eagle had flown directly into her face and emerged from the other side.
Paul tried to make his way back toward the pit and the cobbled stones that waited there. Nausea twisted him. Halfway, he stopped and attempted to vomit. Nothing came of it, except a few drops of bile that burned on his lips. He staggered forward and cooled his mouth on the cold white cobbles and when he drew away a line of saliva joined him from lip to stone. He made it to the pit and folded himself into it. Removing the red Swiss Army knife from the pocket of his trousers he pried the blade open with his fingernail. “Here,” Her long neck loomed in front of him. “It’s for you,” she said.
The blade shone as Paul pressed it to the fabric of his right pant leg and opened a seam, probing further now pushing beneath the skin through the fat. He would invoke his skin as the Récollets did, whipping themselves with briar, and torturing their own flesh for the visions that resulted. Paul saw the blood race down his legs and wondered how Enno Littmann would have handled this, that grandiose cataloguer of Ethiopic manuscripts, most of them purchased for the price of a few rifle cartridges. Littmann would do it differently. Littmann would be in a library, sunk into plush upholstery, learning to read and write C
optic Egyptian in less than three weeks while the swish of gaslight illuminated his own personal fifteenth-century copy of the Apocalypse of St. Paul.
His eyes were shut. He felt the sweat break on his forehead. The gaslight flowed down his legs. The blade found its way beneath his skin and slid down and he did not scream. For the first time in two days, the pain from his teeth left him. Then he screamed. The sound was not unpleasant to him and did not even appear to be his, or to be from him in any way. A wafer of his flesh came free. It looked like a piece of Arctic char. A pulp of his skin the size of a nickel rested in his hand, and he convulsed, as if jabbed with a cattle prod. Paul cried out and began to shake. After the spasms passed, he put the wafer of flesh to his lips, tasting salt, and lard, pork fat, and the grease of man. His saliva was bloody when he spat it out. “Linda,” he spoke her name deliberately. He needed to get up. It was imperative that he get up and go to her.
Paul tore a patch of moss from the rock and pressed it to his thigh. What had he done? What good was it to be mutilated and have no visions? He removed a kerchief from his pocket and wrapped the moss to his wound. Exhaling, he tried to get up but his shins wobbled and he went down again, knees clashing on the stones. They have taken my marrow, he thought, they have taken it and eaten it. The endless hiss of Superior cleansed itself against a rock. It was not daylight any longer, he saw. It was starlight, or moonlight bright enough to read by, but the shining of the white meridian hurt his eyes and a steady pain pulsed from his legs. How had that happened? It occurred to him that all the quartz veins of the planet were burning blood.