Ragged Company

by Richard Wagamese

  “Yes,” she said. “I’d like that, Jonas. I’d really like that.”

  And my world became more. Every night we met at the shop and she’d look at what I was working on, then we’d head off into that great city by the sea and she showed me the world. I discovered Gustav Klimt, Ella Fitzgerald, and Zora Neale Hurston all in one splendid evening of browsing. I found Winslow Homer, Jelly Roll Morton, and Auguste Rodin one Saturday afternoon. I heard Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances while learning to cook machanka, a tangy mushroom soup from Czechoslovakia. It was a drizzly, foggy evening and I thought it the most sublime moment I’d ever had. Together we visited restaurants, galleries, nightclubs for jazz and blues, museums, and the great stretches of oceanside where she’d tell me invented histories about the people we passed. She brought me forward into a shining new world.

  Some evenings we’d read aloud to each other and I learned the why and how of words and books and fell in love with them too. Or if there was a project I was working on, she’d sit quietly in the shop and watch me as I shaped the wood, remaining motionless for hours while the slim shavings fell and the form of the piece emerged. Other nights, we’d walk. Just walk and feel the city breathe around us, down the length of bright avenues into the gloom of rundown neighbourhoods and shadowed parks, watching the changing face of the city until each of those nights became another kind of entrance we made together, another move deeper into the world we discovered together.

  When I fell in love, I don’t know. Only that when she kissed me one night in my small, shabby room with Chopin’s études playing in the background, I felt the rarefied air of heights I’d never imagined. In candlelight, we loved each other. She showed my rough, worn fingers how to trace the clefts and canyons of her, to follow the grain and texture of her skin, to carve her in long flowing lines with my palms. When I entered her it was like the vibrato of a great orchestra emitting a long, tremulous note into the void of the universe, a music unheard and spontaneous that changed the fabric of everything. We lay there, drenched in our passions, watching the candles melt away to nothingness while the light of another morning broke over the bare sill of my window.

  We were married a month later. She wanted a small, elegant ceremony without family or fanfare and we spent a glorious week in a cabin in the mountains of the interior before coming back to our work. With her urging and direction I sold more and more work and earned more commissions, so that within a year we’d moved into a small house with a garage in the back that became my private workshop. She’d come home at night and find me there and we’d walk together into the house that was our home.

  We had a cat named Cheever and a jade plant called Eudora, after the great comic writer of the American South. She spent a lot of time and love on the interior of our home and it was, in the end, a shelter, a haven, an eclectic, subtle extension of her, and I loved it. There was a veranda at its front and we sat there deep into the night, drinking tea and talking, listening to the great music of the ages pouring through the open window. She had sculpted my world so effortlessly that it became the line of her back in the morning light, the shine of her eyes in moonlight, and the swish of sunflower stalks against the veranda rails. We were happy.

  Then came Cameron Gracey.

  Cam Gracey was a railroad engineer. Or at least he had been for thirty years. He’d been pensioned off after one too many bouts with liquor on the job and he lived a block away from us. He was one of those drinkers everyone knows about, and he was avoided as much as possible. Cam spent most of his time watching soccer and rugby matches at the Beachcomber bar, where he’d parlay his pension cheques into wagers that surprisingly kept him in liquor and escort agency girls the neighbours reported seeing arrive at all hours of the night.

  He won big on a soccer match one afternoon and was headed home in his old red truck to celebrate his victory. He was drunk enough to overshoot his block and the neighbours who saw it say the turn he made onto our street was fast enough to take the truck onto two wheels before it levelled out and struck my Sylvan, who was crossing the street with a bag of groceries in her arms. The impact threw her fifty feet. When our next-door neighbour came to get me and I walked out of my workshop and into the hard glint of sun, I felt that great and glorious world closing in on itself. When I knelt beside her broken body, the only music I heard was a drone—heavy, onerous, and flat—from somewhere in the middle of my chest.

  She went into a coma. The doctors were able to mend her bones but they couldn’t coax her back to the light. I sat there by her bedside waiting. I read to her. I played her favourite music for her. I told her about our home and the woman I’d hired to care for it while she got better. For weeks on end I sat there, only leaving long enough to shower, shave, and return. I carved nothing. She didn’t wake.

  After four months they moved her to a private unit. The medical costs were high and I sold all of my work to maintain her care. I sold my car and began taking the bus to the hospital each day. The longer she stayed under, the more difficult it got to keep things going. Eventually I had to sell the things she’d decorated our home with, and as I stood there and watched the things she had loved so dearly being toted out to another home somewhere, I felt like the greatest traitor in the world. Pieces of her, leaving. After two months, the house was empty except for Eudora, the jade plant I slept beside on the pale wooden floors under the window facing the veranda where the music had once flowed.

  And then she woke up. I was shaving in her small washroom with the door to her room open.

  “What day is it?” she said in a small, dry voice I barely heard.

  I almost fell getting to the door. I towelled the shaving cream from my face and walked toward her bed with huge silent tears rolling down my face. I could hardly breathe. She lay there small and scared under the sheets, and she turned her head and looked at me. Those magnificent blue eyes were still the clearest blue I’d ever seen, and when she looked at me I felt the wellspring of hope rise in my chest like a crescendo.

  “Why are you crying?” she asked.

  “Because you came back,” I said.

  Then I heard the words that took all remaining light from my world.

  “Do I know you?”

  Amygdala. That’s the word. Amygdala. It sounded like the name of a great and final battle, and for me it was. The accident had damaged the amygdala in her brain—the area responsible for emotional memory. Along with other significant memory loss, Sylvan could not remember who I was or the tremendous love we had shared. To her I became a kind stranger who entered her room each day and told her stories about a life she had lost all touch with. She just sat there while I told her how we met, how we fell in love, and about the home we’d built together. Just sat there looking at me with those beautiful eyes that no longer held the gloss of love within them. Merely confusion. Blankness, like a slab of wood.

  Her brain damage was such that she could not retain memory of anything. The doctors had to tell her every day who they were, who she was, where she was, and who I was. But I went there every day. Went there with the hope that this day would be the day that the sun broke through the clouds and she’d turn to me with the squinting look that always said she saw me and be my girl again. But it never happened. Each night I’d ride the bus back across the city, saddened and empty, until I couldn’t afford the cost of the extended care facility she was moved to and had to sell the house in order to keep her there.

  I moved to a small room in the Astoria Hotel. A welfare room where my veranda was the fire escape. I’d sit there long into those empty nights watching the grey and drizzled streets, smoking and drinking until I was dull enough to sleep. My bus trips to the facility became less and less frequent. I couldn’t bear seeing the face that had once looked into mine so lovingly now so empty of emotion, so closed to possibility and so lost to experience. I couldn’t stand being so close to the heart that had beat against my chest, filling me with the warm, languid flow of belonging, and feel its hopeless distance
, its oceanic impossibility. It haunted me. Her face haunted me and I couldn’t stand having the depth of my love go unanswered, be so unrecognized, so unremembered.

  Drinking helped. The booze cut through everything and made it go away. I’d sit in my room and drink and drink until I would lean out into the darkness and emptiness of the night, vomiting and sick, yelling, cursing Cameron Gracey, amygdala, and Jonas Hohnstein, the great carver, the artist who could not create a bridge to close the gap between us. I drank. Eventually, it’s all I did. It’s all I could do because I didn’t want to surface to the blankness, the emptiness of my life. I drank until, finally, even the Astoria kicked me out and I landed on the street.

  I left then. I took what money I had, caught a bus, and landed here so many years ago I can’t recall. I became a rounder, and until Amelia approached me in the park that day I didn’t want another person near me. Near enough to know how much I hated myself for not being able to save her and, in the end, for deserting her, leaving her behind like she’d never mattered, like she’d never existed, like she’d never given me the world.

  Fucking movies. Who’d have guessed? It was the first time in forever that I’d seen light, and it touched me, filled the empty, filled the coldness. This one. This Affair to Remember? I wanted her to stand up too. I wanted her to toss that blanket covering her legs into the corner and stand up strongly, walk over to that man and kiss him with all the passion in her. I wanted her to do that. Not because it would make the story better. Not because it would be more romantic. But for me. For me. Just for me. So I could see that sometimes stories end the way they should and love remains as it should: undefined, unrestricted, and open like a pair of arms.

  It is like blue, you know. The blue of that evening sky and the blue of the eyes I haven’t seen in forever. Haunting. Eternal. Blue.

  Do you remember love?

  Most certainly.

  How do you remember it?

  Hmm. Like light, I suppose.

  What kind of light?

  Like the light that comes first thing in the morning. You know, on those nights when sleep eludes you and you find yourself sitting alone watching the sky, waiting, the hours slipping by you unnoticed, and suddenly there’s a change to it all. Nothing you could ever pin down with language, no name for it, just a subtle shift in the colour and the nature of the sky.

  Yes. I’ve had nights like that.

  That’s how I remember love. Arriving without fanfare. Just a subtle shift in the sky and when it happens it’s like watching morning light arrive—everything around you takes on different shape and form and texture, the world becomes new.

  Yes. That’s the magic, isn’t it?

  Magic? Maybe. I like to think that we attract it, that somehow we are the creators of it, that our lives allow us to build a little chamber inside of us that calls to it, beckons, lures it like a lightning rod calls the bolt from the sky. We create love with longing. Longing is the lightning rod and it sits within us all. I know longing. And you’re right, it makes us ready, eager, anxious.

  You’ve learned a lot.

  I suppose. Strange how that happens too.

  What do you mean?

  I think I mean that becoming, changing, evolving is like the light you describe as love. You move around the world and suddenly there’s a shift and you realize that you understand, comprehend, know, and it changes everything. Changes you. You’ve changed.

  Can’t help it.

  No, I suppose you can’t.

  Do you remember the next part of the journey?

  Like it was yesterday.

  It was yesterday.

  One For The Dead

  MANITOU NODIN. The Spirit Wind. That’s what the Old Ones say blows across Creation when a great truth is revealed. Maybe not so much the big mystical kind of truths, because they are only shown once in a great long while, but the simple heart truths of simple men and women leading simple lives, the kind of truths that are told in darkness, in quiet rooms, or on verandas in the dusk. That’s when Manitou Nodin comes. That’s when the energy of life is released and the breath of Creation blows across the face of everything. It’s a giving-back wind. Giving back the breath of life to chests tightened through the years. Giving back the flow, the spiral of energy that connects everything, to a life lived in slow motion or none at all. Giving back relief, salvation, some say. Grace, the Ojibway call it. You can hear it if you listen hard enough. It starts with the heaving of a sigh, the push that delivers truth to the world, and continues through the rattle of speech along the vocal cords—moving the air, pushing it, becoming the breeze—and changes suddenly, becoming the wind in the branches, the soft swish of clothes on a line, a sound carried from miles away. It becomes alive in the world.

  When Timber finished his story, I heard it. More a hint than anything, but I heard it. Manitou Nodin. The Spirit Wind delivered in the voice of this great, sad, haunted man. This friend I had been with for years but never really known until now.

  “Thank you,” was all I said.

  He turned and looked to the sky again, toward that impossible blue that hung there like a promise. None of us knew what to say. I didn’t. We sat there in a silence that was like that summer night itself, all fat and self-contained, waiting for Timber to tell us how to breathe again. He just looked at that sky, his hands gripping and releasing the railing, gripping and releasing, gripping and releasing. Finally, he turned and looked at us, filled his cheeks with air and released it slowly.

  “She should have stood up,” he said, and then he turned and walked down the steps toward the street.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  He stopped. Without turning around he sighed and said, “I don’t know. Walking, I suppose. Just walking.”

  And he walked along the front of our house and disappeared.

  Manitou Nodin. The Spirit Wind. It doesn’t always blow from the direction you’d choose.

  Granite

  HE DIDN’T MAKE IT BACK that night. He didn’t make it back the next day. Digger and Dick went to the downtown core twice to look around but didn’t see him anywhere. James filed a missing-person notice with the police and we waited for word. The house was quiet. The silence was pervasive, sepulchral, unnerving. As evening approached again, we made a small supper together, listened to some music, and bided our time, hoping that we’d hear his step on the veranda and he’d return in good form, tired but safe. Sunset called us out to the veranda again and we sat, each of us looking down the stretch of Indian Road, waiting for the familiar shape of our friend to emerge from the depths of the city.

  “The hard part is that he could go anywhere now,” James said. “With the money at his disposal, he doesn’t need to stick to the usual places. He could be anywhere.”

  “That’s true,” Margo said. “He’s hurting and he’s somewhere trying to take care of his wounds.”

  “Damn,” I said. “I never thought. I never considered. I thought I was renting a charming romance. A tearjerker, yes, but not one that held such a trigger.”

  “You didn’t know,” Margo said. “You couldn’t have known. Amelia didn’t know and she’s been with Jonas for years.”

  “Me neither, Rock,” Digger said. “It ain’t your doing.”

  “I suppose that’s true. A part of me accepts that, but there’s another part that knows how movies approximate life and how those approximations sometimes ignite things in you, make what you’d prefer not to recall suddenly real again, illuminated, cast in front of you on the screen. It’s rough when that happens unbeknownst to you. That unexpected confrontation with self is dramatic when your whole intention is escape.”

  “That sounds awfully autobiographical, Granite,” James said.

  “Yes,” Margo said. “Does it happen a lot for you, Granite?”

  I looked at all the houses down Indian Road. I could have told them the names of each of the stones used in their masonry, could have spoken of their qualities, their essential perfectio
n for the task or the enhancement at hand, could have talked of the quarrying necessary to make them available. It was all background information in a larger, more complicated story, the flotsam and jetsam of a life, the details of the construction and demolition of the structure that contained them, the truth of me.

  “It happens a lot,” I said, finally. “And the truth is, I don’t know why I go back. The movies were supposed to be escape. They were supposed to be a seat in the darkness, a darkness I pulled around me like a cloak to keep the world away. The trouble is that they are the stuff of the world, the stuff of life, all the great internal stuff, all the hurt, grief, joy, turbulence, pathos, tragedy, displacement, rage, tenderness, and love. They are all of that. At least, the good ones are. The sum of our experience. The only escape is to avoid them and I can’t do that. I can’t do that because I love them too much. Love them because they do remind me, love them because they do take me back, love them because they do allow me to relive, to touch again, to hold again all the things I thought I didn’t need anymore.”

  And we sat on the veranda and I told them my story. I told them everything. I spoke across all the years and all the hurt, all the departures, all of the dying and all of the living, the fading of the light, the drawing of the shades, the closing of the doors to that great stone house and the silence it fell into, total and complete, like it had become to me. I told them of my own leaving, the coda, the great thematic echo, the dwindling note of Granite Harvey in all he had been.

  “Wow,” Digger said when I finished. “You’re as friggin’ homeless as I was.”

  One For The Dead

  WE TALKED all through that night. When it got too chilly on the veranda we went inside, lit a nice fire, and sat around it on pillows. Six of us brought together by worry and joined by words from another great, sad, haunted man. As that fire burned, I told them my story and I told them about the shadowed ones who had brought me each of my boys and, in the end, Granite himself.