by Patrick Lane
Done, he pushed the bottle into his pocket. He rolled his head back and rested on his heels for a few minutes before taking a deep breath and getting up. The whisky fumes were in his head now, a dizziness that eased his body until it too vanished. He stayed like that until his eyes cleared.
“Okay, okay bear,” he said.
At the sound of his voice the bear stopped eating. Art’s eyes were closed. He was standing perfectly still. When he opened his eyes the grizzly had raised itself up on its hind legs and began to turn in the narrow space between the rusted vehicles. It look to Art like the grizzly was dancing, the meat between its legs, its belly protecting the torn slab.
Art stepped down off the dump’s rim and picked his way to a pile of broken boards. When he stopped there the bear dropped on all fours and then lifted up again. Art knew if the grizzly decided to charge it would have to make its way over the clutter and detritus of the dump. Yet it would take only a minute or two to reach him. By the time the grizzly got to where he was standing Art knew he’d still be in the dump trying to make it back to the rim. He wouldn’t have a chance. And the farther he ventured into the dump the closer he’d be to the grizzly and by the time he got to the dress there would be no way he’d escape a charge. He remembered how fast the grizzly had been when it chased after the black bear.
Art moved to the edge of the pile of boards, took three steps, and dropped off onto a swirl of loose gravel beside the box of what looked like the back half of a rusted-out Chevy pickup truck. He stood on the loose rocks, faced the bear, raised his arms, and turned in a circle.
He turned again and then waited a moment, trembling, but the bear didn’t charge. Instead the grizzly spread its great front legs, its paws turning in on themselves the same way his hands had. They faced each other and danced.
Art dropped to his knees when the bear dropped down. The grizzly snuffled the air, picked up the last of the moose meat in its jaws, and made its way up the slope on the other side, disappearing into the trees. He knew the bear hadn’t gone far.
Art stood up then and made his way to where the dress was hanging. He balanced carefully on a crushed barrel beside the timber and was about to reach up and take the dress down when a breeze caught at the stained satin. The cloth moved desultory, the clean white folds gliding among the bloody ones.
Images from Caen and Moerbrugge fluttered in and out of his mind like elusive moths in a field of shifting grass, their tank rearing out of a ditch, three chickens roosting in a tree without leaves, the chickens dazed, the corporal, Alvin, picking the birds off the branches like plump apples, a small boy smiling when Art gave him half a chocolate bar, a blonde woman standing in the mouth of an alley beckoning him, two little girls behind her hiding behind a broken door.
He stopped, his hand inches away from the dress, and looked down at his feet. A horde of wasps and flies had risen from below the barrel and swarmed around his legs. Stretching as high as he could he took hold of the collar and lifted the dress off the spear of wood. The dress hung weightless in his hand as he lowered it down upon his arm, making sure the satin didn’t touch the crumpled metal below his feet. He didn’t want the dress to get dirty. When it was safely in his hands he began to roll it up, the fabric turning in on itself, a small flake of dried blood flittering away, a single wasp following it down to the crushed metal below.
The flies and wasps tried to slip into the folds, the wasps whining and the flies intersecting the air in precise geometries. The insects didn’t matter to him, their needs their own. When the dress was rolled up tight, the insects lifted from it and wreathed his head and shoulders. They circled until he could no longer see clearly, the dress a thing his hands cared for by themselves as they pushed the rolled satin inside his jacket against his chest.
As he pulled up the zipper a wasp crawled across the back of his hand. It stopped to rest upon the knuckle of his thumb. Art stood very still and waited until it had cleaned its eyes and lifted away from him. He leaned then against the timber and looked out over the dump. His eyes went from rim to rim, wall to wall, hole to hole. Everything was quiet except for the endless buzz and hum of the flying creatures as they fed and searched among the cracks and crannies everywhere around him. The grizzly was gone.
He took the mickey from his pocket and raised it to his lips. The shakes quieted as he drained all but an ounce. He placed the palm of his hand against his jacket, felt the small bundle as he stared at the wreckage around him.
There was something still out there that made him uneasy. There was something that wasn’t quite right, but what it was he didn’t know. He looked at the chaos and confusion, the glut and turmoil of the waste, but nothing caught his eye, nothing explained his feeling.
Irene, Irene, Irene.
Was she out there too?
She had to be. Where else was he going to put her but here.
He picked his way back to the rim of the dump and the clearing where the D4 tractor with its blade was parked under the trees. The marks of its tracks were scored into the earth as they led to the dump’s rim and then down the narrow cut that led into the wreckage. Where Jim must have driven it.
Art thought and thought, his head a mess, the dump, the tractor, the stuff McAllister had taken from the trailer, the dress. And then he remembered. He had to show Claude the dress. That was what he had to do.
THE SOUND OF THE HAMMERS ceased and the dragonflies hovered, the silence gathering the world to itself. The first sound breaking was the river’s weight soughing at its banks like a prisoner at his walls. And then came birdsong, the sparrows quarrelling in the berry bushes, the wings of a grouse breaking the air as it lifted from the dense grass by the swamp’s edge, and too, the leaf and needle sound, a rush as of rough hands moving on an axe handle, a handsaw’s brush on bark, the whisper of a woman praising the day, Myrna lifting her arms, her broom held high in her two hands, her cry of “Yes.”
“Come,” Mister Turfoot called to the others, “rest awhile.”
Joel rose up on his knees, his hammer hanging from his hand, the board he had set in the corner not yet nailed down. He placed the hammer on the floor by the tobacco can part full of two-and-a-half-inch nails. It was the last board and he had thought to finish the job when the youngest son, Stan, raised his head to the window hole where the old sash had been removed and told Joel to come outside. The boy was shy with him, only his eyes showing from under his tousled blond hair. “Father says to come, Joel,” his voice quiet against the wall he pressed against. Joel looked up at him and saw the boy’s head pulled down out of sight as suddenly as he had showed it. It reminded him of himself at Alice’s window and for a moment he felt that peering in windows was a thing that children do, not men.
Joel poked at a board with the hammer and watched out the window as the Turfoot family put down their tools and set themselves in the shade to drink cool water from a pail. He tried to understand why Mister Turfoot hadn’t taken him into the swamp and shot him. Instead, Myrna’s father had talked to him like he was grown, a man, not a boy, asking him to start work on the floor and he had, picking up a hammer and a can of nails and going into the church. When he did, Myrna had run in from where she’d been hiding and taken him whole into her arms, his hammer and nails falling on the floor. “Joel,” she said, “you’re here.”
Joel had held her for a brief moment, then disentangling himself he’d gone back to ripping up the old boards under the altar where they were worn and by the stove where they were charred and partly rotted. Myrna stayed beside him. It felt good to have her there. It felt good to be doing work on the church, wanting to help Myrna, the baby too, inside her growing.
And Mister Turfoot?
Joel hadn’t said a word to Mister Turfoot. He wasn’t ready for that yet.
As the boards came up he’d piled them to the side where Myrna squatted with a small hammer, pulling each one to herself and tacking out the old nails, straightening them on a loose board and dropping them in a jam jar. Be
side her was a small bag with the candle stubs from the altar. She told Joel all the while that some of the boards could be saved while others would make kindling for the fire, the candle stubs good for starting wet wood to burn. “You never know when you’ll need a spare nail or wax shavings,” she said. “And we’ll need wood for cooking and even more when it’s winter. We won’t be wanting our baby to be cold.”
He wondered again at her joy in everything around her. He didn’t say anything for a while and Myrna said into the quiet, “Will we, Joel.” And then again, “Will we?”
Here he was, almost married, and he was going to be a father too. And a baby and how do you look after one?
It would have to be looked after.
What was happening?
What was he doing?
“We’ll get wood in,” he said, tired of trying to figure everything out, Myrna’s excitement catching hold of him in the way it did up on the mountain with her, him feeling now like he did after they were naked and breathing under what seemed the whole sun, the heat beating down on their bodies. “There’s lots of deadfall along the edge of the swamp,” he said. “But I’ll need a chainsaw and I don’t have a chainsaw. I don’t even have an axe or anything.”
It was quiet and Myrna said into the silence, “Don’t worry, Joel. Father’s got extra of almost everything. He’s got a chainsaw too. And my brothers will help us haul the wood. Emerson will know where to find it. He knows every tree everywhere, just like Mother does. He even has names for them.”
When Joel didn’t say anything she got up and reached down a hand, a great smile on her face. “Let’s go outside and sit with the others,” she said, the breeze off the river blowing in her hair.
Joel sat back and hunched over his knees as she left, saying, “I’ll be along. I just need a minute.”
In the first moments with her gone a hundred things lurched into his skull. The first one was Alice. He could see her sleeping in her bed, her bare arm showing, and Irene too who’d cut herself and disappeared. She was there too, her legs bleeding. And there was Art and his war, Wang Po and Nanjing, Myrna, the baby, the smoke in Wang Po’s room which Joel could smell just thinking of it, the Someday Church he was working on so Myrna could have a home for the baby, the baby, the baby, and all and everything, and Alice too.
If I don’t move I’ll stay here forever, he thought, his muscles so tense he was sure if one more thing happened he’d explode.
And.
“You better go out there,” the words coming close to his ear, Joel’s body a green stick bent and ready to spring. He didn’t move to see, knew it was Emerson. He hunched tighter, not knowing where the boy’s knife might be.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Emerson said, “and you can stop thinking about her right now.”
Joel turned his head slow.
Emerson was behind him hunkered on his heels, close enough for Joel to touch, but far enough away not to.
“What?”
“I know you look at that girl behind the store. And don’t tell me you don’t. I seen you staring at her nights, perched on that chunk of cedar by her window. Well, you can stop that. You’re with my sister Myrna, her and the baby she’s having.” He took a breath and added, “Yours.”
“You don’t know what I’m thinking,” said Joel, his arms crossed tight across his knees. He took off his hat and laid it down on the floor. Wiping his forehead, he glanced at the hammer just within reach and saw Emerson’s foot push it aside, the boy’s body balanced on one bent leg as he did it and then drawing the other foot back under him once the hammer was far enough away.
And then there were steps on the porch, feet shuffling on the new boards as if someone were struggling to move on sore feet. Joel looked to where the door used to be, the opening filled with Myrna’s mother, Isabel, her long cotton dress draped white with faded flowers on it hanging to her swollen ankles, her feet stuffed into bead-dibbled moccasins sewn in bird-wing arabesques.
“You go now, Emerson,” she said. When neither of them shifted an inch, she looked at Emerson until he looked back, her head cocked to one side, her long hair with streaks of early grey swinging. “You,” she said to him, not unkind, but direct.
Joel didn’t move, but Emerson did. He slipped to his feet like he was made of water falling upwards, so fluid the gesture of his body. Isabel raised her hand as he ran by her, his rough yellow hair passing like parted wheat between her spread fingers, his thin body a stream weaving through the narrow space between her hip and the door frame. “There aren’t a thing that boy won’t do, but that I love him for it anyway,” she said. “He brought me two white-streaked feathers from a young eagle this morning. He said they fell from the sky.” She hummed for a second or two a tune Joel didn’t know, a lightness as of feathers falling. She looked long at him as if judging who he was and who he was to be.
“Myrna will feel the same about who she’s carrying. She’ll have the same love when she has her a son,” she said in words that were music. It was as if she was singing what she said. He wasn’t sure if she was even talking to him.
“I figure it’s a boy she’s carrying. The baby’s high up. Could be she’ll have a boy like my Emerson, but that isn’t likely, there never being any like him before. Still,” she said, “no one’s cast the reeds so there’s no knowing. My sister Thelma has a way with casting truths, but she’s out in Saskatoon visiting her husband’s folks, they’re close to dying. But there’s young ones on the way—there’s no end to babies. We’re a family that knows how to make a child, you can give us that.”
She hummed again the same tune, looking down at him.
When Joel blinked, she said, “As for you, you get up off the thoughts you’re having. They’re just confusions caused by doubt and doubt is the preoccupation of weak men. I brought food down from the house. Father and the rest are sitting out there in the shade. That creek water is good for drinking. It’ll be fine for cooking with too. It’s just back in the trees a ways. Arnold will be running a hose line and soon enough you’ll have water here. The lot of them are probably eating about now. A rest has turned into a meal. Well, we don’t have time for that right now, do we?” She looked out the window a moment and Joel figured it was to see if Emerson had gone.
“Emerson’s not far off,” said Joel.
“Don’t you mind Emerson,” she said. “I think we need to have a talk. Don’t you?” She held out her hand, small and soft to the touch as he took it and wondered how it could be soft knowing the work she’d done and did. She gestured to him and he rose to her bidding and followed her outside into the sun.
There was no one in the clearing as she walked across the ruts of the road to where the horse slept, one hoof toed down and the rest of its body balanced on the other three legs, snoring, Isabel saying, “Yes, yes,” to the horse as they passed, her affection agreeing with the momentary peace the animal had found. Joel walked a step behind and to the side thinking how of all the people he might have talked to about Myrna and the baby, Isabel was the last one he’d have chosen.
But then he thought, who else but her mother?
When they got to the edge of the clearing she parted two cloudberry bushes and stepped through onto a narrow animal path, one the deer and moose had made over the years as they followed the marge of the bog, here and there a cleft print pressed and marked in mud from the rain. He ducked through the gap and fell in behind her, Isabel’s bulk filling the available space in front of him, barring any chance he might have had of seeing where they might be going other than knowing they were moving south along the edge of the swamp. As she walked Myrna’s mother started singing.
The words sweet dreams of you rose up only to fall quieter when she touched the sad words in the refrain. Joel hadn’t heard the song since he was back on the Lake. It made him think of Alice and how he was going to have to forget her and start anew like the song said.
Her voice slipped away, Isabel stretching out the last notes in whispers.
It was quiet for a time along the trail until they passed through a barrow of logs jammed up against a gravel bank left behind by some long ago spring flood. Isabel hummed a bit more of the song and said, “I do love Miss Patsy Cline and her sweet dreams.”
Climbing up the side of a swale, gravel running under their feet, they came over a slight rise to an opening in the forest where an ancient cedar stood, its river-side bark charred from a long ago lightning strike. The wound had healed, but the tree bore the scar, a black ribbon running like a snake’s tongue twenty feet up the trunk. The few living limbs hung high up, their green fans swaying sultry in the heat. Below them in a broken chorus hung a torrent of branches from far-off years, the trunk festooned with their broken stubs, some of them ten feet long, a frayed startle like a worn wire brush, the trunk climbing among them into the sky. Beside the tree was a massive stone, a great one maybe left behind by the glaciers. Around it were strewn small rocks and pebbles, each different one from the other as if struck from different mountains.
Joel hung back as Isabel stopped by the stone and took from the side pocket of her dress a pebble with a stripe of green curling in a band around its intense red. It was no bigger than Joel’s thumb. She rolled it across her palm and, turning toward the tree, threw the pebble high in the air. Joel followed its flight, the green band flashing in the sun as the pebble fell back into her hand as a bird might to the nest it had left.
Still facing the old cedar, she spoke again in the way people do who have spent time talking alone to themselves.
“Nothing’s easy, not love, not nothing, but we can make it better by letting what was go. We have to turn yesterday into what used to be, yes, we do. What we have is today. What we have is now. You taught me there are no choices, there’s only doing and doing what’s right and what’s good. I listen, for how else know a sparrow’s wings in first flight, the songs of the beetles as they burrow in the moss. Here I am with this young man who’s going to be the father of my grandchild and I am filled up with love for my Myrna and for him.”