by Tony Burgess
High above the turtle’s back four clouds are rising in columns from a common base. A planet is obscured by these clouds as they stack themselves, spilling upwards close to the edge of their definition, dimensions trebled by the sun. Their tips trueing the blue of the sky. One column sneaks the head of Shelley up through its body. The boy sees this and calls to his dog. The pair run off along the edge of the forest, toward the solid head, leaping as they go, disappearing from sight into a valley. The turtle listens as the dog’s barking grows fainter and fainter. He watches the far side of the valley and sees the two rise into an open hill. When they disappear into the woods, the turtle turns his body toward the lake and begins to drag itself forward.
When the dog and the boy finally stop running beneath the trees they release a chain reaction. Their afternoon starts over again after their run; they have entered a part of the forest that neither of them have ever visited before. And for this reason the world exaggerates itself beneath their feet. They find a collapsed picnic table and they smash it into the ground, kicking an orange knot high into a tree. The boy takes a knife of wood from the table and hides behind a tree for fifteen minutes, calling out instructions to Shelley. Shelley chases a scorpion into a grey puddle and the boy is in the tree pretending to cry. As the scorpion gives birth to her young, Shelley finds the wooden seat of a chair by the puddle and holds it up in his mouth for the weeping child to step down on. The boy stops sobbing when he notices three wasps wiggling between his knuckles. Then they find the butt of a gun that proves to be less exciting than the thing it was. After singing a song into the black tape wrapped around its thin end and raising it high, the boy flings it and it twirls like a seedling and bounces out of a water-filled rut. With his hand in the sun now, the boy pretends the wasps have returned to hum like rings on his fingers. He gets an erection and pulling his pants down he orders a nearby birch tree to remain businesslike. He lays his hard little penis on the shoulder of a low branch and orders an army into the suburbs of Pickering. Near him the blades of a traffic helicopter are slowing and Shelley has jumped into the cockpit, barking as an announcer in mirror shades roughs up his head with leather gloves. The boy looks at his watch, trying to imagine the hands as shadows. He builds a sundial and licks his finger, holding it aloft to see which way the sun is blowing. He pretends he’s a cloud and he stands between the sun and its dial. Behind him the tip of a tree touches the bottom of the sun, scratching its base, and sunlight leaks into the boy’s shadow. The boy pretends he’s a girl for five minutes, his little sister, carrying a note in her hand and looking for big brother. He becomes himself in order to receive the note. The note is for Shelley and the boy hands it to the dog, who eats it. When Shelley vomits up the note, the boy becomes scared and pulls on his pants. He checks his watch and coaxes the dog to follow him home.
The boy skips through the forest ahead of Shelley, who isn’t recovering very quickly. The dog’s mouth hangs toward the ground as he walks heavily. His tongue has a cap of dirt glued to its tip. The boy is mindless of the dog’s suffering as the distance between them grows. Eventually the boy leaps into the sunlight at the edge of the forest, leaving Shelley behind. Shelley turns his nose into the ground, flipping up a thick door in the moss. He twirls his tongue into the wetness of the black earth, dragging up the bright body of a worm which loops itself over an incisor. As he feels the worm roll toward the tunnel of his throat, Shelley leaps backward, gagging in horror. He runs with his head held low as if to receive blows until he trips on a log. He stops there, scooping the taste of blood from his mouth, and he makes a sound that the woods have heard virtually every day of every summer for the last three years. Shelley is crying. Ten metres to his right a rabbit sits up and locks its eyes on Shelley. The dog notices this and, swallowing back the salt of his tears, searches his mind for a way to greet this creature. His thinking is slow and he begins to panic, afraid that the animal will lose interest. An opening line arrives — something about the artist Caravaggio, or the film — but the bright face beneath it slides out of reach, pushed by the pressure of the rabbit’s stare. Eyes that Shelley knows have never ever seen a movie: let alone that one. The rabbit drops its head and bites into the stalk of a plant.
★
There are many ways to think about autumn skies. The stark distances between clouds, their hard grey never-rain-again name, the ache of the sun that will never again set, the cold wide fan of new trees and immeasurable sadness. This clean and perfect sadness takes the stain of summer, its blind forcing house, and graces it with moods like gorgeous and requiem. The autumn does for the summer what it could never do for itself. The autumn makes the summer intelligent. Sad sun, sad sky, sad earth. In the tomb of their lake the bass and perch bend in each other’s direction. They greet each other with pauses that end in a slight upward turn in the corners of their mouths. A giant carp glides its head into a grey drift, ghosting itself on the lake bottom and coughing quietly into the mud. The edge of the water sips gently at the shore, careful not to disturb, keeping its reach respectfully shy of the sun. On the shore stands a tree as tall as the world, black with cold, its breath slickening down its leaves. At the base of the tree lays a large snapping turtle. Its head has fallen from its shell across the ground, and its legs are piled quietly inside its body. On its back is painted, in white, ‘Hi Shelley.’ A dog licks the turtle’s shell, its tongue streaking through white paint, dragging the ‘H’ of ‘Hi’ into the ‘h’ of ‘Shelley,’ which is sad as well, in its own way. The paint breaks into beads against the dog’s uvula and they form tiny white dioramas through the door of his throat. A wall shakes loose, tornados and a stalled truck. Someone’s name appears on the singed tips of prairie wheat, and the dog’s tongue vanishes like a whip into a lover’s back.
part one
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
This is a love song for John and Leisha’s Mother
It wasn’t easy. I might not write another.
★
CHRIS KNOX
That night I had terrible dreams I was killing people. When I awoke it took some serious self-examination to convince myself that I was not repressing real acts of murder. So completely vivid was my sense of guilt that I felt nothing short of running through a full account of my life could provide me with the peace of mind I needed to fall back asleep. In spite of the three hours I spent combing over the details, I have, to this day, a very persistent certainty that hidden inside me is the revolting knowledge of days when I wasn’t quite myself. I now suspect that my inexplicable bouts of exhaustion are due to the massive effort of keeping those days behind me.
1
THE NERVOUS POPULATION
Down in the strange hooves of Pontypool’s tanning horses scratches one of Ontario’s thinnest winds. Cold as a needle and far too complicated to ever leave the ground, these picks of air snap at fetlocks, blackening the legs of horses. The anonymous wind gathers its speed in turns around a cannon bone and tears across the ice of a frozen pool. It feels the behaviour of more famous systems and is consumed by the complexity of its origins, breaking into mad daggers and splintering into the phantoms of horses. These horses, vacancies now, or maybe caskets, are places for the wind to rest. And when a wind rests, its heart stops and it is dead forever. The horses on the ice, built from the corpse of a breeze, skate towards each other, not breathing, but intelligent. They leap inside their crazy minds and begin to make plans.
On the shore of the pool the other horses, ageing and brown, unglue their heels from the burning snow and align their bodies with the grain of the sun, counting the minutes, eight in all, until the first warming rays fall from the star’s coat and drape across a horse’s back, raising its withers and bathing its dark crest. The horses of leather and bone and cheek and thigh climb towards an open gate in the cedar fence that surrounds the pool. On the southern post claps the fat orange mitt of a man in a bulging white coat. In his other hand he swivels a bucket, clanging a m
etal dish against its sides.
The horses, five of them, roll in a line through the gate and are swallowed by the south shadow of the barn before they disappear into an open door. The man closes the gate and, swinging the bucket, follows a shallow gully of mud wending through the snow to a beige truck parked at the side of the road. He walks around the vehicle kicking the heavy ice that juts out, like teeth, from its underside until it loosens and falls, intact and old, onto the soft shoulders of the road. After circling the truck twice, swiping and kicking at random, he tries the tread of his boot in the access step and climbs into the driver’s seat.
Beside him on the passenger seat is a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Its leather cover is striped with road salt, the tar spine is pot-holed. The inner lining and mulling have surfaced through ruptures. Books X and XI are marked by curled strips of pink paper that would open to the story of Orpheus. On these pages are scribbles and strokes caught in the fresh yellow paths of a highlighter, and in the margins illegible markings run the full length of page after page of the book. The man drops the bucket on the passenger floor, spraying a new chain of spots across the volume, which he turns over and presses for a second into the upholstery. He pops open the glove compartment with his huge orange thumb, lifts the book in the soft potato of his mitt and drops it on a stack of crisp white flyers.
Across the top of the flyers, in lettering flown with ears and arches, are the calligraphied words: “The Pontypool Players Present King Lear.” Beneath this: “directed by Les Reardon.” The opening performance is dated today. The man, who is in fact the same Les Reardon, claps the glove box three times until it closes. He removes his gloves and starts the truck. While he waits for it to warm up he turns on the radio.
If you’ve just tuned in we’re asking the question: Was it really our responsibility to feed the deer this winter? The problem is that the severity of the season has made food scarce. So a huge number of the deer population are not expected to survive. This huge population is a result of, is caused by, a previous government’s winter feeding program.
Les squints out through the salted windshield looking for rampant feeding programs. Or deer. He finds neither.
So what we’re asking today is this: Should we just put the whole business back in nature’s hands, or do we go on spending tax dollars to wreak ecological havoc just so a few shortsighted animal lovers can feel all warm and fuzzy? That’s the question. Hello caller. What do you make of this?
Les rotates the dome at the end of his turn signal. The switch sends a blue stream into the path of a wiper. He repeats this tiny twirl with his fingers, and he mimics the sounds made against the windshield by sucking his tongue through his lips.
I don’t think there’s any question. This is what nature wants. Let her trim the population.
OK. You don’t have a problem with preventable mass deaths?
It’s not the ones that die that are important, it’s the ones that live, the strong ones.
Survival of the fittest, eh? You got it.
OK. Sounds good to me. Hello. Who am I speaking to?
Les rolls the window up until it seals. He breathes onto its surface, and in this opacity he draws with his finger a man in a hat. He puts a pipe in the man’s mouth, but it looks more like an oar, so he wipes the window clear with the mitt he lifts from his lap.
Peter. Listen, a living thing’s a living thing, and if we can save them we should.
But aren’t we just contributing to the problem?
No. We’re responsible for the problem, and our responsibility is to protect these herds.
Says who, Peter?
Me. I say so.
Well, if you say so Petey. Hello?
Hello. I just can’t stand to think of those poor animals starving in the cold, mothers with their little does shivering in the wind. I think it’s terrible. How much does it cost to feed them, anyway?
Well, actually, nothing, it’s always been a volunteer thing, but hey, that’s not the point. It’s not a matter of economics, it’s really a matter of what nature wants, and somehow I don’t think she spends a lot of time caring for a surplus of weakened animals at the expense of a healthy population.
2
A HEALTHY POPULATION
Deep in the woods a female deer lies on her side as thirty baby deer slide easily from her birth canal on an immense sluice of effluence. As the moon appears above the trees its tidal effect on the afterbirth is visible. In the morning, children in full hockey gear skate across the purple and red ice, weaving around an obstacle course of tan corpses. Several of the deer stand frozen, and the children cut down all but two. They become the opposing nets of a makeshift hockey rink. A heart thawed over a small fire is used to draw the centre line and goal creases. A great deal of time is spent disembowelling the baby creatures so that their frozen feces can be used as pucks; however, having never eaten, their little bodies are as clean as packaged straws. The children settle for the mother’s hoof, which twists off easily.
As the sun climbs to a height that the clouds can’t reach, its rays smooth down the amniotic ice, turning it silver around children who slide out of control. The hockey players drift horizontally, like beads of mercury, losing the hoof, while they grab at the exposed backs of baby deer to keep themselves from being drawn along on their bellies toward some remote, invisible cliff.
Les pulls his truck onto the highway and, flicking off the radio, lifts a cell phone from his side to dial a number.
“Mary, howdy, Les here. Yeah, they’re good. Hey, what do you think of doing Ovid?”
Les makes a right up a long ice-covered driveway and stops halfway between the highway and a brick farmhouse that stands alone on a white hill in a field. Long rows of dark soil break intermittently through the snow.
“I know, but we could adapt them.”
Les reaches over and pops open the glove box and pulls out the book. Encircling the steering wheel with his arms, he turns to his marked pages. A powder of crystals swirls in through the driver’s window he’s cracked open again, glittering the book. Les tries to blow the pages clean but his warm breath melts the ice that sinks through the letters.
“A horror story? They want to do a horror story?”
Les tosses the book onto the dash and pulls off his toque, letting loose a six-inch whip of grey hair that he pulls back over the top of his balding head.
“I was thinking about Orpheus. Now that’s a horror story.”
Les stares out the side window while he listens, occasionally rolling his eyes, and at a distance he watches a man with a rifle emerge from the woods.
“Ed Gein? Now who the hell is Ed Gein?”
While Les listens to the story of how Ed Gein redecorated his farmhouse with body parts, he can’t shake the story’s dramaturgical inevitability as a home-shopping network sketch. Besides working for a livestock farmer, Les plans to direct the Campbellcroft High School yearly theatrical production. His ambition is to elevate a small troupe of drama students to a recognized regional company. He has printed flyers for productions of King Lear, Oedipus Rex, The Rez Sisters and Artichoke. Flyers that no one has ever seen. Les Reardon now believes that he is also destined to write the play he will direct. He wants to adapt the mythology of Orpheus into an outdoor spectacle — to include the music of the forest, the photosynthetic process, its colours and its honey and the trembling of stones, the abdomen of bees and the shadows of snakes. He wants to conjure an Orpheus, be possessed by him. And you know, Les thinks, people love outdoor theatre. Like in Toronto, the Shakespeare-in-the-park thing. I could have an annual Orphic festival. Except. Except now these kids want to do a serial killer. These kids think they discovered the low brow thrill allegory. So, it’s the Ed Gein Home Shopping Network-in-the-park.