To All Appearances a Lady

by Marilyn Bowering

  But the pins and needles are back. The numbness. And I am lying on my back on the deck watching the stars. And listening to their singing in chorus. Learning from the emptiness.

  I do not know how we arrived here, how I navigated or dropped anchor. It must have been intuitive. I smile with satisfaction. At least that’s something I can do right. I am a pilot, if nothing else.

  Familiar figures—the Great and Little Bears, Orion, Cassiopeia, Perseus—overhead. On the shore, the flap, flap of the native camp laundry. I can see the outlines of the huddle of shacks, fish-drying racks, canoes pulled up on the shingle. Despite the laundry, the camp is deserted. Not even a dog barks.

  “How do you feel?” asks Fan. She is sitting on the hatch combing near me.

  “Fine,” I answer. I try to lift my hand, but it doesn’t move. “A little stiff, maybe,” I say. “It must be the damp.”

  Fan nods. “You want to stay here awhile and rest?” she says.

  “There’s nothing here, Fan. This place has been closed down for years.”

  “Do you want to go on?”

  I do not answer. “It’s not a good anchorage, as you know. Let’s see what it looks like tomorrow. I want to sleep.”

  She shuts up, as I intend her to. But sleep is beyond me. Not only the stars are singing. There are whales, great, strong companies of them calling and filling the depths below our little ship. The Orion, the St. Lawrence, and the Green were whalers here in Kyuquot Sound at the Cachalot Station. Perhaps we are being checked out.

  Blubber, meat, intestines, ambergris. Or a fetus eighteen feet in length.

  The whales go on singing all night long.

  —

  Charlie scattered swallows that tried to nest in the cracks in the cabin. Robert Haack improved the structure: he wanted it to stand. He had some dim feeling that he might stay here the rest of his life, living as a hermit or retreating to this spot when the demands of his busy life (for surely he had much ahead of him yet?) became too much.

  It was a time of pleasant confusion, when he made no plans but felt that plans were being made for him beyond his knowing. The mountain was the hub of the world, and he, Robert Haack, turned at its centre. He watched the green growth at the tips of the fir trees expand. He saw the wildflowers take their turns: after the lilies came wild pea and blue-eyed mary, and there were many others, which he couldn’t name. Bees jostled among petals, rabbits emerged from their burrows, and the sun steamed the damp out of the moss, which sent up yellow tendrils to wave in the air. His days were spent cheerfully attending to tasks to be done: kindling to gather, small branches to cut with his knife, food to prepare and to cook. He liked keeping a fire going and boiling up rabbit bones and nettles; he liked digging a trench to lead water from a nearby spring to a pool he used as a washbasin. He enjoyed cutting grass and drying it for a change of bed linen.

  And he liked himself: the great shock of reddish-brown hair that stood out from his head, the beard that covered his face, his calloused, nicked hands.

  And yet, as time went on, and especially at twilight, as the birds settled down for the night and the farms in the plains lit their lights and the dim glow of the city on the horizon rose to a certain height then spread flatly like a miasmic exhalation, he grew restless. Both he and his dog sighed.

  Robert turned the poem in his pocket. He imagined conversations with India. He examined what-might-have-beens. For it is only human to be lonely sometimes, and to people an empty world with lies to oneself. And to have regrets, and self-doubts, and to balance them with fantasies in which what went wrong goes right.

  And as for Charlie…well, if Robert Haack had been less engrossed in himself, more observant, he might have seen that his dog was troubled, might have understood why Charlie stood half the night with his nose up, sniffing, or scratched his backside on the cedars and pines, or groomed himself with close attention.

  Charlie responding to the change of planetary position as the earth tilted towards the sun. Charlie, not bored, but full of longing. For a dog has feelings, too, plus biology and a keen sense of obligation. For Charlie, despite the name Haack had given him, was a bitch in season.

  One night Robert Haack lay down on his bed of pine boughs and grasses under the stars on top of the mountain. He was too restless to sleep inside the cabin, where he felt confined. The stars turned above him, and down below the islands floated on their bed of trembling oceans. He felt dizzy with spring, as if a seed planted inside his brain had set out its roots and was growing.

  He slept well and warmly, however, and yet when he awoke before dawn, he was colder than he had been all winter. For Charlie, who had always been with him, whom he counted on, who had snuggled next to him through all kinds of weather, had gone.

  There was the usual calling: at first casual, then more concerned. There were forays to the edges of the mountain, glances over cliffs, scrambles into caves. But Charlie could not be found. And in a little while Robert Haack knew he would have to go after him.

  It was a fast but painful climb down the mountain this time, anxiety making Haack clumsy and his heavy heart rendering him insensible to the beauty of his surroundings. In the fields there were mares plump with foals, and stick-legged calves trembling against their mothers’ flanks. Lambs flicked their tails and gamboled. But Robert Haack trudged through it all with his mind on his problems. “Charlie!” he cried at intervals. “Here, boy, come on, boy, here, Charlie!”

  At length, a thin farmer with red hands, controlling the skinny beige horse that was pulling his wagon, pulled up beside our pilgrim. In this country, in this season, where every man had his own good reasons for going where he was going, there was no need to explain. Robert Haack climbed aboard silently, nodded at the farmer, asked the one necessary question, took in the farmer’s no, and said no more.

  Although in his mind the loss was like a bell tolling, a wolf howling. For Charlie’s desertion had hurt Haack bitterly.

  For when you think you count on nothing, then find that you are wrong, that the one thing you depended on without even knowing it is gone, then truly you are on the edge of oblivion. For a man can live so long as he knows he knows himself, but without that certainty he is lost.

  (“It’s almost morning, Robert Lam,” says Fan. “Why don’t you get some rest?”

  “Not yet, Fan. I want to know what happened.”

  “What does it matter, Robert Lam? It is only a story about a dog. Can’t it wait a little?”

  “Not any dog, Fan. As you said to me, this was a particular dog, Robert Haack’s dog. I feel I am getting to know her.”

  “As you wish, Robert Lam.” She pauses two beats. “I am worried about you. You do not look well. You are very pale.”

  “If I want your advice, I’ll ask for it, Fan,” I say resentfully. “I’ve always looked after myself, and I’m perfectly fit, thank you. I got us here, didn’t I?”

  She looks at me reproachfully, and I search my memory for details of the last stages of our journey, but still they elude me.

  I touch the Chinese coin in my pocket for luck.

  “I want to get it over with, Fan. I just want to see it to the end.”)

  —

  Buildings appeared singly, then they clustered in groups like raisins in a fist. The track grew rutted, and the wagon rattled back and forth from crest to crest, creaking and rocking until Robert Haack felt ill to his stomach. They passed a schoolhouse where children stood uncertainly as Robert Haack shouted out to them, “Have you seen my dog?” But one of the little girls nodded and pointed cityward.

  The roads branched and forked, and the nearer to the town they travelled the less the streets were like accidents and the more they wove the tight mesh of a net.

  Until, when the farmer dropped him off at the corner of Johnson and Government streets, Robert Haack felt caught. He turned in a circle. The same streets followed the same old gridwork, the same signs swung on hinges, the same smells pooled in doorways and poured from wind
ows.

  He felt like a fool. While he had been up on his mountain watching the world spin, here time had stood still. “Here, Charlie, here!” he began to cry, needing a sense of purpose.

  He shambled down the street, a strange, unkempt figure with a wild beard and threadbare clothes. His loose boot soles slapped the boardwalk.

  “Here, Charlie, here!”

  There were peddlers and gamblers, ex-miners and prostitutes. There were restaurants and general stores and cigar manufacturers. But Robert Haack kept his eyes lowered.

  “Here, Charlie!” he cried over and over. He examined niches and alleyways, open stairways, deserted buildings, slop pails at the rear of restaurants. Strange dogs curled their lips and snarled.

  “Here, Charlie, here,” rang out his chorus. It was an exercise in futility, an exercise in love.

  And then finally, just off Cormorant Street, in the utter darkness of the juncture of two brick buildings at the rear of a right-angled alley, Robert Haack spied two familiar gleaming eyes. It was Charlie!

  But what was this? There was no leap forward, no joyful reunion of dog and master, no emotional release as they discovered each other. Instead, Charlie stood her ground. And now that Haack’s eyes had adjusted to the dimness, he saw that there was a second dog with its paws up on Charlie’s back. And Charlie’s tail was flagged aside. There were a few rapid thrusts, which Charlie received with equanimity, and then the dog dismounted and turned its back, still tied to Charlie.

  The dogs stood calmly, Charlie regarding Haack and the other dog facing the wall.

  Naturally Robert Haack understood at once the mistake he’d made. He even smiled about it, although it was a painful moment for this man who had considered his dog his confidant.

  “Okay, old girl,” he murmured, “but I wish you’d told me. What’s a dog like you going to do with puppies?”

  Robert gave the matter some thought, then eased the two dogs, still attached to each other, hand in glove, into better light. He had heard from somewhere, perhaps from his father, that if you can break the tie of two animals, that is, before they are ready to part, then the mating won’t take. He had been told how to do it, although there had never been an occasion for him to use the technique.

  It was a moment of trust. Of Robert Haack in himself, and of Charlie in Robert.

  “Easy, boys,” he said, edging closer while drawing the dogs into the open. “This is the way the Indians do it.”

  Concentrating fully, thinking only of Charlie, who could barely survive as it was and who would never, he was sure, be able to care for a half dozen offspring, he knelt down between the two animals. Who both turned their heads to watch him. He thrust his hand up the male dog’s anus to search for the nub of the gland that, he’d been told, would release the hold. He twisted his hand and probed. The male dog whimpered in outrage. Charlie trembled.

  Nothing happened.

  Robert Haack bent his head to his sleeve to wipe away the sweat that ran into his eyes. He was aware as he crouched there that people had gathered to watch. He did not care. Charlie was his dog and she was his responsibility. He had to help her. He had to keep on trying.

  “Come on, you buggers,” he said. But still the dogs stayed tied. At last Haack withdrew his hand to rethink the whole matter. As he puzzled, a pair of feet on the periphery of the onlookers crept closer. There were other feet also, and some laughter and murmuring. But there was something about this particular pair of feet that finally drew his attention.

  Still contemplating the problem, plus the relationship of dog to man, Robert Haack looked up.

  And saw India. “Robert?” she whispered. He could tell that until that moment she had not been certain that it was him.

  “Robert?” she said again with an unfathomable expression.

  Slowly, as if in a dream, he rose to his feet. The set piece of dogs broke apart, and Charlie took off at a run with the male dog following. Robert tried to speak, but he couldn’t. Where were the words to explain what had happened?

  Stumbling, blinded by shame and in a rage at the injustices that starred his life, Robert turned away from her and, moving with dignity, but walking faster and faster and ignoring India’s calls to him to wait for her, he found an opening, and, pushing through chickens and past heaps of rubbish, lost himself deep in the underpinnings of Chinatown.

  SEVEN

  Cachalot Inlet.—The southeasterly and westerly winds blow through with great violence.

  BRITISH COLUMBIA PILOT, VOLUME I

  “You have cut yourself shaving,” says Fan, pointing.

  I put my hand to my cheek. My fingers come away sticky and covered with blood. “That’s funny,” I say, “I don’t feel any pain.”

  She shrugs.

  It is early morning. A calm day at anchorage at Cachalot Station in Kyuquot Sound. Blue jays screech at us from the shore. Swallows flutter and dive above the ruins of the oil house. Although thirty years have passed since the station was operating, its outlines remain. Besides the oil house, there is the wharf, and the slip for hauling out whales; the fertilizer dryer and cutting-up platform; the trying-out tanks; and bunkhouses, cook shacks, and staff bungalows. It was all left as it was so that as soon as the market improved, the whaling could be resumed.

  The station grounds are overgrown with brush. The beach is a shambles of broken timbers and rocks. Behind the station clearing there are heavily forested hills. The screaming jays are joined by kingfishers, which dispute the territory.

  “Not much here,” says Fan as we row away from the Rose in the little reel dinghy.

  “What did you expect, Fan? Eighty men slicing up blubber? They were Japanese and Chinese crews, mostly. When the station was closed they all went home. There was no reason for them to stay.”

  “It seems a strange place to have built the station at all,” she says. “Why here? Why not somewhere more sheltered?”

  “The men who built the station were businessmen, Fan, not sailors. It looked like a good anchorage to them, and that was enough. Besides, the whaling boats weren’t meant to remain tied up. They were working boats, out for ten days at a time, then taking on stores and coal and going out again. They say that when a storm hit, the whalers ran north to a bay on the other side of Kyuquot. The manager didn’t like to see them tied up alongside the factory.”

  We bump up against a rotted piling. I roll up my pant legs and step out of the dinghy into a foot of water. “You could earn good money then, Fan,” I tell my stepmother as I haul the dinghy up the shingle, wincing as I step on barnacles. “As much as ten thousand dollars a season as a skipper, or three thousand as a hand. There were tennis courts here then, and they hunted game for pleasure. The mail steamer, Princess Maquinna, called in regularly. It was not an uncivilized existence.”

  We are standing on the edge of nowhere. The birds have fallen silent. The mountains press us near to the rim of water. When we walk, clambering over the fragile, decrepit tangle of boards, ocean debris, and rusted metal, I have to shake my head to clear it of a noise like running water. I shake it, it clears, then the noise begins again. I stop still to listen.

  “What’s the matter, Robert Lam?” asks Lam Fan.

  “Hush, Fan, I tell her, I’m trying to hear something.”

  We both stand listening. “I don’t hear anything,” she says. “There is nobody here, you said so yourself.”

  I start to walk again and immediately stumble. When I look down to see what my feet have caught on, I stumble once more.

  “I can’t feel anything, Fan!” I say. “My feet have gone numb!”

  “Five minutes ago you complained about cold water! I don’t know what you’re talking about, you are not yourself.”

  “But I am, Fan, this is me, Robert Lam!”

  She regards me coldly. “Sit down then and get hold of your thoughts. I have told you before, you read too many books. They are not good for you. You should get out more, take up sports.”

  “Play tennis, F
an?”

  “You know what I mean. Now look around you and pay attention.” I do what she says. I see the outlines of some buildings overrun with grass. I see the green of the forest, the mottled blue sky, the blue-green water. I hear a stream running, outside, not in my mind, and when I look for it, find it tumbling down some rocks a few yards behind me.

  A hummingbird flies up for a look at the beached red dinghy. The sun shines hotly through a haze of cloud. I wipe the sweat from my brow.

  “Oh!” gasps Fan. I look up at her quickly.

  “What is it, Fan?”

  She averts her eyes. She toes a hole in the beach. “Nothing, Robert Lam, it is nothing important.”

  “Fan,” I say warningly. “Don’t do that to me. Whatever it is I am better off knowing. Don’t keep me guessing.”

  She takes a breath. I watch a butterfly settle on her wrist then skitter away, plant to plant, along the beach. She lets the breath out. “It is your face, Robert Lam. When you wiped your hand across it, your eyebrow came off.”

  She still won’t look at me. “I don’t think that’s funny, Fan,” I say. “I thought you were in real distress, that you were worried about me. God knows I’m worried enough about myself. I told you, I can’t feel anything in my feet.”

  “Please yourself, Robert Lam,” she says. “You asked me to tell you what I saw that disturbed me.”

  “I’m still waiting,” I say crossly.

  The hummingbird returns to the dinghy, then it whirrs along for a look at Fan’s red fingernails. “Ha, ha!” I cry. “That proves it, Fan. I knew you were real.”

  It is her turn to be cross. “You are such an idiot, Robert Lam. You know nothing about nothing, body or spirit. I’m going back to the Rose.”

  “You can’t go without me!” I complain like a child. But she has gone, and I am left sitting on the uncomfortable beach all alone.

  “Bitch!” I whisper. Then, “Bitch!” I shout as loudly as I can. The ugly word echoes round the hills, shaming me. The birds, the butterflies, the comforting susurration of my surroundings, all quit. “Who is this man,” says the quietness, “who carries such ugliness in him? Who is he?”