by Patrick Lane
A half-hour later they were far south of the mill. They’d passed the church where Myrna waited, a lamp burning in the window. Joel didn’t say anything as they went by. He had to finish things. He had to clean things up.
They stopped where the swamp dwindled away, great rock cliffs jutting up from the river where the rapids began.
A small cove curved past their boots, the quieter water gathered to the inside of the river’s bend. Joel placed the skulls on the gravel and waited while Emerson searched out the cupped slab of cedar driftwood he needed. When he brought it back Emerson placed the three skulls in the red curve, tying them there with twine he’d had tucked in his pocket. Joel held the skulls down while Emerson knotted them there, the skulls in a line from smallest at the back to the largest in front. The shadows of their eyes stared out at the river between the mountains.
Done, Joel took up the cedar canoe with its cargo of skulls and carried it to the corner of the cove where the current pulled past with the full force of the river. He could hear the faint, far rapids north of the outfall of Mad River.
Joel passed it to Emerson. “It’s yours to give to the river,” he said. “Your bones were made here just like the bones of the bears.”
The two of them had knelt down as Emerson placed it on the water. Emerson held the cargo of skulls a minute, the feelings of each boy his own and belonging to no other.
His hand sure, Emerson had pushed the craft out into the river, a curled wave catching at it and throwing it sideways into the heavy waters beyond. The two of them had knelt there in the last hour of the night and watched until the skulls disappeared in the mist.
When Emerson got up from his knees Joel had stayed where he was, listening to Emerson’s boots on the river gravel and then grass brushing against grass, a sound only the wind could make, and then he was alone and there was only the river. Joel shifted and leaned against a driftwood log that was sticking out of the bank, looked up, and saw a meteor streak across the sky. It left a stream of smoke behind it as it passed over the mountains. Joel waited until the burn turned into streams of mist, melting into the cirrus clouds coming out of the west. The colour of the sky, the moon’s light shining through the path left by the meteor brought words into his mind and he spoke them aloud:
There’s a girl who remembered me for me.
It was before I ever came to the deep river.
She heard me down on the lakes when I was lonely.
It was her laughter brought me here through the snow.
Her stone and my stone and the stone growing inside her.
There is a light in everything I see.
By the mountain she sings for me a river’s song.
Joel had said the words. They came into his head and he said them and then he said them again so he wouldn’t forget them. “It’s a poem,” he said, amazed. He was almost afraid to say the word out loud. Poem, he said. He said it and then he said it again. He thought, maybe, if he was brave enough, he’d say the poem to Wang Po some night when he was down there. And then he wondered if he was brave enough to say it to Myrna because she was who the poem was about.
He’d stayed a few minutes more and then followed the river out of the dawn light and passed through the swamp the way he had made himself remember it. The lamp still burned in the church window. It shone through the new glass and as he walked out of the swamp and up the long slope to the church he stopped, a small cedar tree shading him. The church door opened and Myrna came out onto the porch. She hadn’t seen him yet but something in her blood had drawn her from the room into the morning. Perhaps it was simply the light, the unseen sun streaming its rays across the tops of the eastern range. Or maybe just the sound of the birds in the dawn chorus crying. She’d stood in shadow, but Joel could imagine her face looking out for his coming and he was, he’d realized, at last coming home.
He’d put his hand in his pocket and felt the pebble Isabel had given him, the Chalsey Doney warm against his thigh. It had been with him throughout the night, sometimes warm and sometimes cold, but it was a deeper warm now than he’d felt before. He took it out of his pocket and held it in his palm. The pebble glowed, the green band shining with something that wasn’t light, the pebble burning. The small bit of shining rock was also coming home. Joel closed his hand, held up his fist, and saw the shadows of his bones shining through his skin. He turned then home.
He lay there in the bed with Myrna and he remembered it all. The pebble was on the windowsill and he saw how it caught the light of the morning sun, the green band shining. Myrna’s mother had told him to return it to the tree and that was what he would do, but not yet. He turned onto his side and as he did Myrna also turned, the warm animal smell of her filling his arms, and she said, “Joel, you’re here.”
And he said, “Yes.”
* * *
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THE NEEDLE LAY ON THE FLOOR beside Art, his arm bent and hanging over the side of the bed as if broken from his shoulder. A leather strap lay coiled on the floor, the shed skin of a black snake. Late morning light angled through the window above his head. It burned across the wall and carved itself into an ancient newspaper from 1914, glued there by a man who was going to a war he would not return from, by a light he could not reach, a wound made from nothing but a star. On Art’s chest lay the cat, her paws folded around the mouse she had brought back from the world as an offering, the cat’s lean black body rising and falling with Art’s life. The cat’s purr melted into the river’s breathing as it made its way to the sea.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
* * *
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I WISH TO EXPRESS MY GRATITUDE to McClelland & Stewart, including Anita Chong for her early help with this novel and John Sweet for his fine copyediting. I especially owe a great deal to Melanie Little whose consummate skills and immense patience, kindness, and understanding helped me complete the novel through the months of my recovery from a debilitating illness when at times I was barely able to edit a sentence let alone a paragraph or chapter. As well, thanks to my agent, Dean Cooke, for his support.
I wish also to thank Arthur Waley for his translations of Chinese poetry first published in 1918 and Kenneth Rexroth’s translations in One Hundred Poems from the Chinese published in 1965. Rexroth’s own poetry as well as his essays and translations proved a guide to a young first-aid man in a small northern town more than half a century ago. I owe them both a great deal. Rexroth’s translations of Su Tung P’o’s poem “Epigram” from the Eleventh Century and Ho Ch’e Ch’ang’s poem “Homecoming” appear in this novel.
My wife, the poet Lorna Crozier, cared for me through the last two years when I was very ill. Her fierce love kept me alive through many long days and nights. The Sung Dynasty poet, Hsu Chao, wrote, “You can find shelter in my heart.” And in my wife’s heart I did, I do.
PATRICK LANE’S first novel, Red Dog, Red Dog, was a national bestseller, a finalist for the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and was longlisted for the Giller Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year. Lane is one of Canada’s pre-eminent poets, and his distinguished career spans fifty years and more than twenty-five volumes of poetry. His memoir, There Is a Season, won the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence and the inaugural British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-fiction, and was also a finalist for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, the Hubert Evans Non-fiction Prize, the Pearson Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for Non-fiction. He has been a writer in residence and teacher at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, the University of Victoria in British Columbia, and the University of Toronto in Ontario. Patrick Lane lives near Victoria, B.C., with his wife, the poet Lorna Crozier.
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