Written in Stone

by Peter Unwin

  “She signed it,” answered Linda. “Her initials were on it. The legs that walk by themselves.” She swallowed another mouthful of whisky.

  “Sure, well they belong to someone, someone else maybe. You, I bet. Linda Richardson, that’s you right? I know that. It was you. Why not? You’re a person, right? Everyone’s a person. Even Mr. Nobody. Even God is a person.” He grinned at her, his face had lapsed into an easy and ready drunkenness, but the rest of his body was sober and even alert. “Believe me, someone dreamt them there a long time ago. Hey Joe,” he said, but the boy did not seem to hear him. “Joe, whose initials are those, on that rock there?”

  “What rock,” the boy shot back, not looking away from the screen.

  “At Coldwell. The Coldwell site.”

  “Hers,” he said, not looking. “Lillian.”

  “My name’s not Lillian.”

  “The kid knows things. He’s pain in the ass.”

  “My name is not Lillian.”

  She saw that a cigarette was folded in the pickle jar lid and that he had another one going. She reached over and took one from his pack. “I haven’t smoked in twelve years.”

  “Well sure, if you got ’em, smoke ’em, right?” He inhaled happily. “You know why the gods are always screwing us around?”

  “Yes, I do. It’s because in heaven, they don’t have any tobacco and we do.”

  “Because in heaven, they don’t have tobacco,” he said, “and we do.”

  “I knew that,” she said. She thought she might be shouting. Why did men never listen to her? Linda once again entered the ancient ritual of tobacco, feeling herself float upward with a sinew of smoke. In her first dizzy exhalation she saw Joe Animal looking at her carefully.

  “She had to say those things, you know. She had to tell those lies.” He gulped at the air, fish-like. “That’s what I think. She had to tell those lies, and that newspaper guy, he had to tell those lies too. That was their job.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To get Paul away from you, get him out of your bed, I guess. It had to happen. You’re not going to have any dreams with Paul snoring like that. I camped with the guy, remember. He snored worse than me. Sometimes a person’s dreams are important.” Joe Animal squirmed on the sofa, reaching for another smoke or another drink or both together.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Me neither. I don’t know, I mean, someone’s got to dream right? It’s got to be someone. You, me. He was big about that. It’s the visions, see. He thought that.”

  They sat across from each other not speaking. The television emitted a jubilant song about improved bleach molecules.

  “He was into the prophecy stuff. Visions and everything. Maybe he thought that girl was, you know, a false prophet. It’s all screwed up. I had this cousin once, he’s dead now, swore he could cripple a man by blowing smoke at him. He says hocus-pocus, only he says it in an old language, and the next thing you know the marrow in that guy’s bones has gone all soft and he can’t even stand up.”

  “This guy was your cousin?”

  The man nodded.

  “And he could destroy the marrow in a man’s bones?”

  The man shrugged.

  “Did he kill Paul?”

  The man shook his head.

  “You have a lot of cousins.”

  “Yeah. I do. Don’t you?”

  She said nothing.

  “Sometimes a man and woman, they got to get away from each other for a while, right? That’s what happened.”

  “He’s dead,” she said stonily. “He died of exposure and blood poisoning from an infected tooth. There was no marrow in his leg bones. That’s not the same as getting away from each other for a while.”

  “So he got in the path of some wicked medicine, I guess. Some of those guys are serious, I mean, a dog comes into their room the next thing you know that’s them in the dog. They can be in the rock and then be men again. Or in the bear and then out. I heard of it happening, I have. My father’s seen it. He told me.”

  She watched her hand reach out for another glass of Paul’s liquor.

  “He thought he had to go out there and have some big dream or something, didn’t he? A vision. He didn’t dream nothing I bet.” He sucked on the drink, making sure that every gram of it made it onto his tongue. “I bet Paul didn’t dream a thing. If anybody, it was you, why not? Maybe it was you. It wasn’t me. Maybe it was me, and I just forgot.” He assembled himself into an uncomfortable posture with his body. “Probably it was you.”

  “Me?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he trailed off miserably, as if it was her fault. “I fix small engines. Two stroke, four stroke engines. I like playing blackjack at the casino. That’s what I like. What do you like?”

  Linda thought she was about to cry. She felt her eyes burning with salt.

  The television had gone silent and the boy was now standing on the carpet. “We need to get going,” he said. “We need to go.”

  “Why?” Linda was unable to stop herself, to pretend she didn’t want them there, both of them with their semi-mute easiness. She wanted them there desperately. “Where are you going?” She was not prepared yet to take on the bullying company of herself. Not yet. She wanted them in her house with her.

  “West,” said Joe Animal as if he had stated the most specific of destinations. “West. To Wisconsin.”

  “Yep,” the boy chimed. “That’s where the food grows on water.”

  “Rice. He means wild rice.” Joe Animal flexed the muscles of his upper body. “He can gather up all the rice he wants to. That’s him. He can poke around in those caves looking for stuff. Rice. Really. I don’t eat the stuff, never have. I knew a guy choked to death on a grain of rice at Garden River. I stay away from it. I go to the casino. The Red Rock Casino near Bayfield, up lucky highway thirteen through the Reservation.” He drained his drink and erupted proudly. “It’s winning time. My time. Our time, all of us. It’s time to be winners,” he repeated, with less confidence. He looked at her and the boy and then around the room as if he meant to include even the wallpaper in his generosity. “It’s time to be winners,” he said again, more softly.

  The boy nodded. She saw that his eyes were closed and that his face beamed.

  “Everything is good now,” said the boy. “Look.”

  Her own eyes had shut for a moment, and when she opened them the boy was standing next to her, nudging her.

  “Look.” In his hand he held a small bird, black, flecked with white. It was the starling that had slammed against her window and fallen into the hostas with its neck broken.

  “It’s dead,” she said.

  The child squeezed softly with his finger and the eye of the bird, the size and colour of a peppercorn, opened instantly, vivid and alert, indignant even, eager to see everything all over again. The tiny throat heaved and the bird righted itself in the boy’s palm, but showed no inclination to take flight.

  “It’s not dead. It’s alive.”

  Joe Animal frowned. “Stop bothering the damn birds. He’s always doing that.” His drink was empty and his jean jacket was folded across his arm.

  The boy tugged open the front of his T-shirt and folded the bird beneath it, against the warmth of his belly.

  “Okay pal?” The man moved heavily toward the door like a sheepdog separating his herd. The boy searched the room with a last wide, slow sweep of his head. He seemed satisfied with what he saw.

  “Goodbye, lady. I like you. I like your face. You have big dreams I bet. Do you remember them?”

  “Never,” she said at once.

  “Yeah … dreams. That’s how I knew.” He seemed unsure what to say next. “To come here, I mean. To have sorrow. Sometimes you just need to move, right? Or everyone gets sick.”

  Li
nda put out her hand and felt stupid doing it. She wanted to hug him, to desperately hug him.

  The boy hesitated and shook her hand limply, even whimsically, giving her a northern handshake without any pressure at all, a handshake soft as lake foam, one that made it clear he’d not come back to this place again. He was merely passing by and she would never meet him again. He’d be back in God’s Lake Narrows where he belonged and he would never be seen by her. He looked at her strangely. “I’m not blind,” he whispered, grinning.

  “No,” she said. “You’re not. Me neither.”

  Joe Animal nodded at her, and they both turned and edged out the door.

  39

  THE COMMENDING

  AT A RUTTED INTERSECTION, THE Westfalia left the lane of its own volition and veered onto a dusty trucker’s stop where it crushed the gravel and shuddered to a halt. She had landed, but the earth still reeled in the space in her eyes and the molecules of her body. She had landed in a place of gasoline and woodpiles, worms, cold beer, overnight and seasonal campsites; a lone Johnny On the Spot loomed. She was here finally at a roadside diner that sold Jiffy Pop and bottled water for when the lakes and rivers ran with poison.

  Out of nowhere, a dog appeared, advancing fiercely across the pavement. Within inches of her it melted in adoration and glossy eyes and proceeded to wield its dry and cracked muzzle obscenely between her thighs. I have done all this before, Linda thought. It was not déjà vu, it was only the repetition of physical things on hot tarmac beneath the same sky with the same droning of trucks on the highway. I’ve met this dog before; have pushed open the screen door that yields inward with the creak of summer cottages and the grumble of a tin bell mounted on the doorframe. She heard again music from a radio that couldn’t be seen and light from a television that wasn’t to be heard, a black and white screen with a horizontal line of interference drifting down the face of it, blinking on what looked to be a curling match but could have been anything.

  The woman who owned and ran the Neys Diner stood in front of her, small and silver in colour, with silver hair as well. Two burgers hissed indignantly on the grill.

  “Howdy-do?” the woman offered.

  Linda saw the sign announcing a sale on Deet, and yesterday’s cinnamon buns. It had been there last year, she was sure of it. The same sign, same cinnamon buns. Same sale. Trout lures the size of her hand hung on the wall next to bottle openers and fierce tinned hams. Decks of playing cards wrapped in cellophane. They had met this way before, more than once, she and this older woman.

  Is your husband with you? She was about to say this, surely, but stopped herself. For all its vastness the north was a small place where people knew of each other. She’d heard something, she remembered, she knew better than to ask. Her own husband was out back smashing at a heap of wood with an axe, where husbands should be.

  She knows he’s dead, Linda thought, or has left me for someone younger or his drinking polished him off. You could count on it being one of that holy trinity. The two did not know each other’s name, but shared a knowledge of the grandiosity, the ridiculous-ness and, even the usefulness of men. Men they had followed, for their own reasons, beyond the oaks and the maples into the pines, into black spruce and the borealis. This made them complicit.

  “You were here last year.”

  “Yes, and the year before.” After a moment Linda added, “and the year before that too.” The woman nodded and rotated her attention from grill to TV and back again.

  She left the truck stop with a loaf of bread and a litre of water and was outside on the gravel. The old Westfalia took the key and responded at once, leaping across the surface of the Trans-Canada and down the sloping side road, across the double rail line where track signals shone votive red, on through bush to the campgrounds at Neys.

  At the park gate she was processed by a young dark-haired woman tanned with health, a dark-eyed beauty. She saw a brilliant future rested on her skin, and tried to summon up some envy for the girl but couldn’t. Instead she received a piece of paper with a red number scrawled on it. Her reservation in the woods.

  “Enjoy yourself. And by the way, you have to boil the water.”

  “Yes,” Linda said, and unable to stop herself added, “for rivers shall run with poison and the fish shall become unfit to eat.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Give it five minutes,” resumed the girl. “It’s an advisory from the medical officer, she wants it boiled.”

  “Everything needs to be boiled.” God, she thought. Did I say that? Am I becoming one of those?

  She restarted the van and rolled past the gatehouse. On the first bend, she was forced to brake for a wolf that padded wearily across the road, its tongue out and lolling. Linda was shocked to see how thin the animal was, a pale, dehydrated tongue hanging loose and long. A cub scurried behind fearlessly. In their hunger neither of them paid her any mind at all. She accelerated and suddenly Lake Superior showed between the trees appearing like a jewel that had just arrived there, shimmering with an intense white glitter. A low approving groan came from Paul, it always did at this spot. “For Christ’s sake … For Christ’s sake, Paul,” she said out loud.

  Linda backed the vehicle into the campsite and prepared to execute the old drill, this time alone. She hurled the roped tarps to the packed ground and at once the chipmunks advanced on her like the most obsequious envoys, furious for food. As she set up the old Kelty tent she inhaled its smell of must and bodies, Paul, herself and a hundred thousand miles. The smell of Minaki and Wiikwemikoong, of wood smoke and Rainy River, and the Assabaska, with the wind sleeting off the lake and the great bucks leaping like hares over the bald trunks of fallen trees. She smelled mosquito coil and north wind. Her life, she thought. This is what my life has smelled like. It smelled like Paul.

  The last peg had been pounded neck deep when a truck pulled up to her site, a white and green provincial park vehicle with a bear cage in the back. The park superintendent wore a brown uniform and leaned his torso out the window.

  “You need any help there?”

  She felt the salacious confidence of his voice, and his eyes going up and down her like a paint roller. Wanted to know if she needed help. Of course she did.

  “No. Thank you.”

  “There was a bear in the camps up top. Big bugger. Took a porterhouse steak and a pound of butter from some jerk’s cooler. Guy left his cooler out. Really.” He shook his head and looked at her, letting her know he ranked her ahead of such people; city folk who brought forth bears with their unwashed fry pans and city ways.

  “You be careful,” he instructed her. The man drove off and Linda sat on a picnic table, numb in her body, feeding soy nuts to her chipmunk. She knew from experience that chipmunks were not partial to soy nuts and ate them only out of loyalty to the nut family. It was one of the compromises made in their frantic lives. Years ago, she’d watched a chipmunk chew the face off a dragonfly and scour out its brains with the intensity of a child licking ice cream. It had felt wrong to her, obscene, the blank pleasure it took. She entertained no illusions about chipmunks.

  Soon the first of the trains boomed against the mountains, the screech of its wheels piercing the woods, uncurling across the sooty stanchions over the river, echoing off the mountainside until it rang all about her. Watery plates of sound settled in the trees and up the river valley. The earth trembled beneath the weight of it. When the train was gone, she lay down and slept outside the tent lying in the blueberry mantle dreaming of a strong, unfettered man with a rattle in his hand and who danced with a woman whose laughter seemed to emerge from her very pregnant belly.

  When Linda’s eyes opened, she saw a blue kingfisher sweep the shoreline, and then directly before her the waxy green leaves of the blueberries came into focus and she craned her neck to chomp the tiny blue balls, leaves, twigs and all, raking the matter off th
e stems with her teeth. The way Paul had eaten, she thought, at the end. From the treetops the crows made their distinct cry of Quo Vadis, cawing at the sun and at her. “Quo Vadis,” they cried. What is your direction? Who is your partner? she thought.

  EATING BREAD AND FRUIT FROM a nylon bag, she waited until the sun cooled in the trees. A bank of dragon-shaped fog broke from behind the cliffs and advanced on the lake, as if on its belly. Turning from the blank mass of it, Linda went to the van and removed the tin canister from the passenger seat. Then she was back on the beach, the cool white sand extending in both directions, broken only by the driftwood, like so many skeletons randomly emerging from it.

  She walked the crashing shore until she reached a concealed stream trickling from the mountains, cleaving the beach in its run to the lake. Linda went into it pausing, knowing from experience how cold it would be, exhaling as the creek water cut her ankles, then her calves and the water closed her throat and rang old fillings in her teeth. When she reached the other side, she pivoted, gasping, toward the forest, into a black opening into the bush and started in on an animal trail that was dark and murmurous with birds and insects.

  In minutes she was through the dense bush and back on the rocks where she hopped the pools, recklessly, until she stood at the heaving Superior shore. The waters slid upon the rocks like the opening and shutting of a great eyelid. Removing the dented tin of Aberlour’s from under her arm, she faced the lake and tried unsuccessfully to pry it open with her fingernails. It was harder than she’d thought it would be, the business of finishing with Paul, the theatrics of commending his ashes to the water. She could barely get the lid off the tin.

  At last, she fixed her thumbs beneath the rim and popped the lid. She heard at once a breath, her own breath, a loud terrible sigh, and in her exhalation she felt Paul flashing upward to the western sky, leaving behind the tin and the grey ashes of himself. He was leaving her, leaving her lungs. “Paul,” she tried. The wind lifted a skiff of his remains and took them, whipping them to the side of her, scrambling them across the stones.