by Patrick Lane
Deep in the heart of the dump was the grizzly. The great bear lifted with a paw the end of a fractured piece of broken cedar wall, flinging it aside, nails jarred loose and boards flying, beneath it some pocket of gore he had smelled buried in a hole. His long grey snout lifted for a moment, coursing the air, a stunned swarm of flies tearing briefly apart before re-forming across the grizzly’s shoulders. Almost blind, it turned its heavy head toward Art and snuffed the air as if trying to catch his scent, but there was no wind, no breeze, only the heavy stillness of the dump, the rummaging of the other bears.
Twenty feet below the timber where the dress hung was a cardboard box. Some tremor from the wall the grizzly had moved made what was left of the fractured lath and plaster fall over and half a side of green moose ribs and spine folded out across a scarred bathtub ten feet away. The side of meat was instantly taken up in the jaws of a black bear sow. As she bolted through the dump toward the safety of the trees, two yearling cubs squealed after her, clambering over junk in pursuit of her find. Behind the three of them a black bear with a missing ear raged as the scent of her find reached him. He heaved his bulk over a mass of broken lumber, trying to catch her as she passed and take from her what she’d found. The sow turned at the edge of the dump, claws tearing at the broken gravel, her cubs scrambling partway up the trunk of a dead fir tree. She turned and straddled her prize, rearing as the boar came at her, swiping with her paw at the boar’s shoulder. He ducked her blow and grabbed at the meat. She roared and dropped down, taking a corner of the wet slab in her jaws, the boar biting, pulling back, her huffing wildly as she reared away, the mottled ribs and meat ripping apart and the boar sliding back down the slope into the dump, a piece of the torn moose side hanging from his jaws, the sow above him holding the rest. She retreated with it to a tangle of saskatoon bushes, her cubs crying piteously as they slid down the tree to follow her.
The black boar didn’t watch them go. He turned to the meat he had stolen, ripping thick gobbets away, swallowing chunks whole, glutting as fast as he could. Below him the grizzly heaved his heavy body up the slope, the smell of rancid flesh swirling in the grizzly’s flared snout. The two bears roared as they met, the black bear falling aside, a chunk of green fat in his jaws, the rest of the side gathered between the grizzly’s paws.
Art didn’t hear, he didn’t see the black boar flee, or hear the grizzly grunting as it carried in its jaws what was left of the moose side back to the heart of the dump. Art was staring at the dress. He knew whose dress it was.
He had taken the hem of that dress and rolled it in his hands up over the belly of Irene McAllister, her blood squeezing wet between his fingers.
THE SWAMP AND THE CHURCH clearing below, Joel sat upon a drift stone behind sprayed needles of stunted firs, the afternoon sun glancing off the branches, the beams slipping across his eyes so what he saw was mostly light. Far off in the distance he could hear the last desultory banging of the chains in the empty flumes leading up to the burner, but the mill was far away from him now. He had come back across the swamp and climbed to where he could look down at the busy world of Myrna.
Wisps of white burner smoke drifted down the river and lost themselves in the forest on the other side, but he did not see them pass. He was watching the Someday Church where he had lain with her that morning. After leaving her he had gone back to the bunkhouse where he had collapsed on his bunk and caught two or three hours of sleep. When he came back to the church he heard the ruckus and, instead of walking into what was going on, climbed a little ways up the slope of the mountain to watch and wait from behind a low frieze of brush. He wasn’t far away.
Myrna was sitting on the corner of the porch packing dry moss into a pillowcase. Even from where he was he could see the pansies stitched on the cotton, the flowers so alive they might have grown on the yellowed fabric, a kind of work impossible for him to imagine anyone doing, the painstaking weeks it must have taken to draw coloured threads though cloth and make out of them images where there were none before. It was a painting made with thread and he thought it was a wonder. His own mother had pillowcases like that but she hadn’t done the stitching herself. The ones she had were done by Joel’s grandmother and weren’t used, but saved as treasured mementoes from another time.
The church below him had been deserted for years, a house that had once been given over to God. Joel knew part of its story, the disuse and neglect that had left it a shell of what it once had been, no hymns now ringing from the windows, no sermons chastising those who had gone astray. The mock steeple tacked onto the front of it looked to him as if it might fall if a heavy wind were to touch it. It’d be a real danger if Myrna was going to try and live there. If he was going to live there.
If.
Joel wondered for a moment why boys from the nearby farms or the village hadn’t burned the old church down by accident or even on purpose. It’s something he might have done had he grown up on a farm around here, a deserted building like this an invitation for him and some of his friends to at least vandalize it. Knowing what he’d seen of it inside and out it looked like some of the vandalizing had already been done.
He had been sitting quietly for half an hour watching Myrna and her father, Arnold Turfoot, his sons, her brothers, all of them at their tasks. Beside the church was their wagon stacked with oddments of lumber in various dimensions and a dozen bound bundles of cedar shakes. The old horse had been unhitched and gaunt as ever was grazing upon sparse hummocks of grass at the edge of the encroaching forest. Its ribs stuck out, its hide stretched over them. As he watched, one of the Turfoot boys, the smallest, carried to the horse a wash basin, the water in it scooped from a pool nearby where the creek came down from the mountain. Some of the others were cleaning up around the church, picking up shingles and shakes fallen from the roof and then carrying them over to the clearing where they were splitting them into kindling with small hatchets.
Joel listened as Mister Turfoot spoke to the son as the horse drank from the basin.
“You’re a good one, Stan,” his father said, his hoarse voice rising up in a scraped whisper to where Joel was sitting.
“That horse loves him the same as he loves Emerson,” echoed Myrna, tufts of soft moss in her fingers as she felt through it for twigs and cones. “I think Stan may grow up to be as wild as Emerson.”
“Stan needs caring for,” said Mister Turfoot. “To tell the truth, the three of them need to be,” and he gave half a grin as Myrna cried aloud, her round face pink with laughter.
Wanting to hear more closely, Joel slipped off his log and, crouching, made his way down a little through the trees to a rock at the edge of the clearing that he could hide behind. He needed to hear more clearly what they were saying. Maybe they’d be talking soon about Myrna being pregnant and about her thinking he was going to live in the abandoned church with her in the same way as if they were married.
He figured though that he knew what they were thinking, what with the work they were putting in on the church.
The two oldest boys were clambering over the old roof tearing off tattered cedar shakes. The biggest one was Tom, the other one Eldred. They were replacing the old shakes with clear ones from the bundle they’d carried up the ladder to the roof from the wagon back. The broken-open bundle was tipped precarious against the steeple, the shakes slipping easily to hand. The tic and toc of their hammers tapping nails fretted the air, the roof turning into a crazy quilt of cedar feathers lapping. Why the Turfoots thought such a patchwork would keep the rain and snow out of the building was beyond Joel.
Myrna was talking to her father.
“Joel will be here real soon,” she said. And when Mister Turfoot didn’t say anything she said, “Oh, I know for sure he’s coming. You might pretend he isn’t, but you know he’s coming just like I do.”
“We’ll see,” her father said.
“Don’t you tease me,” she said. “You don’t know him really well yet. He’ll be here soon as anything. I know
it.”
Mister Turfoot dropped the two-by-fours he had dragged from the wagon. They clattered on the pile he’d made by the porch. “Well,” he said, “I figure he isn’t very far away. What was his name again? I forget.”
“You know his name, Father. I’ve said it enough times and Emerson has told you over and over. It’s Joel. His name is Joel.” She looked up from pushing a last clutch of moss into the pillowcase, suddenly excited. “If he’s so close,” she cried, “where do you think he is?”
“Close by, I think. So’s Emerson. I’m pretty sure the two of them are pretty near.”
Myrna tied off the pillowcase, knotting the ends tight. As he spoke she dropped it beside her, her face pink with blush.
“Where is he?” she asked.
“If it was me had got a girl with child, then I’d be more than sitting up a mountainside watching people work,” Mister Turfoot said in a loud voice. “I’d be down here helping with the fixing up of this old church that’s turning into a house for him and you right in front of his eyes.”
Saying that, he hitched at his pants, loosened his belt, and hooked it higher on his waist, his thick fingers grappling with the tongue, the brass buckle tight across his belly. Brushing his hands, palm to palm as if breaking a walnut, he clapped them suddenly together, the crack a sharp cry in the quiet. He looked up into the trees where Joel was sitting behind the fir, and said in his hoarse voice: “You, Joel, come down here.”
And then as if an afterthought, added quieter, “Emerson, you too. You’ve done enough tracking of this fellow for one day.”
There was a silence in the dry glade, the shatter of a dragonfly’s wings at the edge of the bog the only sound to break it.
The quiet stayed quiet for what seemed to them all as forever.
“Come on now,” Mister Turfoot said, “there’s work to be done here on your new home. And Emerson,” he said, louder as if speaking to one who was by nature recalcitrant, “you put that knife of yours back in the scabbard where a knife belongs. You play with it too much, you hear?”
Joel turned at the sound of dry gravel sliding slow behind him, Emerson passing him by. Joel waited a moment, thinking he might run, and then followed Emerson down to the clearing where Myrna was waiting.
* * *
—
ART PICKED HIS WAY ALONG the crumbling lip of gravel where strands of yellow grass and bracken trailed along the broken edge of the dump. As he gazed into the pit, he saw the wreckage of a blasted street in Moerbrugge, a ditch full of broken walls and stones. He saw again a child in the rubble, a girl whose face had been burned, her hair melted, and her mouth a dark O that made no sound, a silence that stared at him just as it did when he dreamed himself staggering through the ruins trying to find her, the twisted streets leading him nowhere. He had picked her up from the cracked stones and charred timbers of a blasted house and carried her in his arms to the medics working on a soldier in a side street near the bridge. The older medic looked first at him and then at what he carried and told Art she was dead.
Art thanked him as he carried her over to a torched truck whose tires had melted in the battle and sat on the cracked bumper. He held her in his arms for a long time, her small mouth open, her lips burned black away. He didn’t know how to put her down.
A broken street in Moerbrugge after the battle, but was it Moerbrugge? Maybe it was Eecloo or Oostkamp, or was it in Belgium at all?
France? Maybe Caen, yes, in Caen.
Holland was Godelieve. Dank u, dank u, Godelieve’s mother, thank you, thank you.
He pulled his arms across his chest and held himself to stop from crying out.
And he did, his cry inward, a sound he swallowed.
The trembling vestige of the drug was burning in him like a wick in the last of a candle. He started to shake, but he held himself tighter, no matter the sweat, no matter his hands.
He wasn’t in France or Belgium and he wasn’t in Holland.
He was at the dump where Irene’s dress was hanging.
His arms took themselves apart, unwrapping themselves from his chest. It took what seemed a long time until he could start walking again and when he did he tried to ignore the cramps in his belly, the sweat running down his back. His eyes were almost clear as he went step by step along the precipice, the steep bank falling away into the hole. As he moved he kept watch of the bears on the other side of the dump.
The black sow had made her way back from the forest where she’d been hiding. She was on the opposite bank now, her cubs crowding behind her, their grunts and whines all fear and hunger. The smell of rotting meat hung wet in the air. The dump hung in the air. All the odours of days going on days under the sun rose up in a miasma redolent of every unimaginable thing thrown away, discarded, relegated to oblivion, all of it rotting, flies seething.
France.
He wasn’t there, not anymore. The burned girl he’d carried and held in Caen was a trick his mind had done when he looked at the garbage in the dump. She wasn’t Godelieve. The girl in Caen had no name, no lips to speak a sound, no voice. For a fleeting moment Marie’s face slipped through his mind, her dark hair brushing against his cheek. Her hand was over her eyes and, startled, he glimpsed her standing down in the dump by the rusted door of a truck that had been pushed into the oblivion, and then she was gone too, melted away.
The sow on the other bank was holding her head low. She was licking at the dirt where the slab of meat had been, swinging her head side to side, snuffling every few moments at what breeze there was riding up from the river valley. The black boar that had attacked her had retreated high up the side of the dump near the mountain’s rise, leaving behind what was left of the chunk of moose meat he had tried to swallow before the grizzly could get to him.
The grizzly was below Art, the bear hunched down between the rusted hull of a Dodge coupe and the undercarriage of a Reo truck. It was tearing at the slab of meat. Every few minutes it lifted its huge head, its nose coursing the air. Up the slope from the grizzly was the dress. It hung from a broken timber, swaying slowly as though there was still a body in it, something thin and alive, moving.
Art’s head was weary now, the opium and alcohol in his body elusive, almost gone. He was drenched in a sweat from the drug heat, from the withdrawal. He had used too much back at the cabin. Everything inside him was thin and sour. It came out through his pores smelling of viscera.
The weariness was a part of him now. He stood as still as he could, looking down at the bear. The grizzly knew he was there. The bear had tracked every step he had taken, measuring with its ears and nose how near, how far away he was. He could feel the bear smelling him.
Art felt as if the grizzly had chosen him.
Every living thing in and around the dump, every wasp and fly, mouse and rat, crow, raven, dog, or wolf was known to the grizzly. The bear was afraid of none of them. It knew every creature on the dump needed to live and each was willing to risk much to survive, even if it meant another’s life. Hunger drove the maggot and the fledgling, the mothers of both willing to die or kill to save their own. Of all the creatures on the dump, the grizzly had respect for only two, the black sow because of her yearling cubs, and Art because he was a man.
What Art wanted was hanging from a timber halfway down the slope, thirty feet above where the grizzly ate.
Irene’s dress.
Art closed his eyes and heard the knock at his cabin door again. It was Jim McAllister. He had come to Art’s cabin and got him to go up to the trailer and help his wife, his Irene. And he had. He had done what he could. But none of that made any difference now. What mattered was something terrible had happened since then.
If he had the dress he could show it to Claude. Claude would know then he’d been telling the truth. He’d have to admit that McAllister’s wife had disappeared. With the bloody dress in front of him Claude would have to do something.
Art had to have the dress.
Jim couldn’t get away with dri
ving his wife to such an end as to mutilate herself and then, what, vanish? Or did Jim drive her to cutting herself? Or was it something she did to herself because she wanted to? He remembered the spiderweb of scars on her arms. He had seen such lines before, women cutting themselves. But for her to just disappear? Where? To the dump? Here?
Was she still alive or was she dead now?
He squatted on his haunches on the rim of the dump and stared down at the bear as it stared back at him. He felt the grizzly knew him. He remembered the bear had been close to him on the way to McAllister’s trailer last night. The grizzly had known who he was. He felt it in his bones.
Now the grizzly was waiting again. What was it the bear wanted him to know?
And as he asked himself what that was he felt a sudden heave in his belly and a blow of nausea struck him. He rocked forward onto his knees and tried to puke, but there was nothing in his belly. There was only the last fumes of the whisky he’d drunk. He dry-heaved, choked a moment on his own spittle, and spat out a clot of phlegm streaked black with blood. He coughed and spat again, holding himself until the tremors in his stomach passed.
He reached inside his jacket pocket then and took out the whisky. The bottle was a little more than half full. He held it up and stared at it in wonder. He thought he’d finished it. How crazy he was, he thought. He always saved some, didn’t he?
He unscrewed the cap and raised the bottle to his mouth, took a mouthful, and let it go down slowly in dribbles, the liquor sliding to his belly where it flowed into a pool of sharp, exquisite pain. He felt like throwing it up, but held the whisky down and took another drink. He drowned his teeth and pushed the liquor down a bit at a time. Each time he swallowed the pain was less and then it was gone.