All the Voices Cry

by Alice Petersen

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  After Summer

  Among the Trees

  Salsa Madre

  Champlain’s Astrolabe

  All The Voices Cry

  To Catch a Fish

  The Tenured Heart

  Vandals in Sandals

  Where the Corpse Weed Grows

  The Frog

  Mrs Viebert’s Prognostication

  Neither Up Nor Down

  Through the Gates

  The Land Below

  Neptune’s Necklace

  Scottish Annie

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  After Summer

  JAKE AND I GREW up without a mother, which wasn’t that bad, although we ate a lot of boiled peas. Back when we were kids, before Valmae came into the picture, Dad rented a boathouse every year for the whole of August, up at Lac Perdu, near Shawinigan. He spent the summer months growing a fat Hemingway moustache while the sun darkened his shoulders to the colour of beer. We weren’t supposed to sleep at the boathouse, but in early August, when the concrete city had baked hard in the sun, Dad would drive us up to the lake on Friday nights. We’d light citronella candles to keep the mosquitoes off, eat rubbery pizza and drink warm juice out of the cooler. When the bats came out we’d go up into the woods to pee before going to sleep in a row on the boathouse floor, listening to the water lapping and Dad breathing in the dark.

  On Saturday mornings Dad sat in the boathouse attic typing up the poems that he carried in his head during the rest of the year. The poems were mainly about women once glimpsed through panes of frosted glass, because he was a mail carrier with two kids and that’s about as close as he ever got. If you stood at the bottom of the ladder to the attic you could hear Dad up there groaning over lines about galoshes and garden paths, white terriers and white negligees, the day-long ning-nong of the bell and the endless wait for a snug fit in scented flesh.

  While Dad worked at his poems, Jake and I squatted on the dock making fat duck-farting noises by blowing through blades of grass. Sometimes we would stir the water with sticks, or catch horseflies and hand-deliver them into the webs of spiders. Dad was in his confessional and we were being mostly good. Eventually Dad would climb back down the ladder, his skin smelling of hot pine boards and the edgy stench of the bats that lived behind the rafters, and then we would all swing off the rope on the tree and drop into the water.

  I have this vision of Dad at the lake during the long summers, emerging from the waves, his chest hair plastered into dripping points. Shaggy Dad, Poseidon Dad, ever-strong Dad, and Jake and I screaming and clinging to him like monkeys while he dunked us up and down. And eventually he would say, “Clear off, I feel a poem coming on,” and he would grab a couple of beers out of the cooler dug into the shallows and disappear up the ladder into the attic to write, while we sidled off to the cliffs to look for fossils.

  Once we didn’t clear off. Instead we dragged a ladder out of the grass and propped it up against the boathouse wall. Jake was just peering into the window at the top when a rotten rung of the ladder gave way and he fell and knocked himself out.

  “Dad’s got no clothes on and he’s crying,” he said when he woke up, by which time Dad was fully dressed and driving us into town as fast as he could.

  It hadn’t occurred to us that Dad might be unhappy because we weren’t, and it was summertime, and Dad was just Dad. We knew he drank at night on the boathouse steps; the more beer he drank, the more bottles there were to get a refund on.

  Just after we turned fourteen, Dad started dating Valmae, and that was the end of summers at the lake, because there was no plug at the boathouse for her hair dryer. Valmae was a secretary at our high school. She took it on to rescue Dad from the two giant squid choking him in their tentacled embrace. First she moved in and began cooking balanced meals, which in itself wasn’t a bad thing, but then she persuaded Dad to give up mail delivery and open a dry-cleaning business. There was an office out back of the store where Valmae talked on the phone to tardy clients, threatening to send their suits and dresses to Colombia in a container ship if they did not come to collect them. Most companies don’t bother to phone, she would say. My father pressed the trousers. The heat made his hair damp and curled it behind his ears. I worked the cash after school. I liked the punking noise the receipts made when you stuck them on the spike. Jake refused to have anything to do with it.

  A couple of years after Dad hooked up with Valmae, Jake slipped the net and hitchhiked to Big Sur. Four years passed and Valmae spotted him on a home-renovating show, making a plywood stereo cabinet on a suburban front lawn, satisfying women across North America with the kerthunk of his nail gun and the hiss and judder of the compressor. He was giving the camera his long, lazy grin and he had his ball cap at a howdy-pardner tilt. The dentist always said that Jake had too many teeth, but he had enough for television.

  After Jake lit out I stayed on, typing out my angst one finger at a time on Dad’s Olivetti in awful, badly spaced rhyming verse about hideous misunderstandings and imagined perfect communion. After I had written each poem, I would shred it and let my geriatric gerbils make a nest of my thoughts.

  I haven’t spent my life looking for a mother, and I certainly haven’t looked for one in Valmae. Valmae keeps her hair pretty. She sews sofa cushions. She is a wreath-of-dried-flowers-with-seasonal-bear-on-the-front-door kind of person. I haven’t missed being mothered, but I’m kind of missing Dad. Valmae has him cornered like a bull, down on his Hemingway knees, helpless beneath the weight of house and car payments. Every day he’s slapped by the coats on the electric rack at the dry cleaner’s as they flare out and twirl around the corner. But he seems happy. I have to be honest about that. Maybe Dad has a good time between Valmae’s satin sheets.

  The other weekend I went out to buy a chair just like the one Dad used to sit on to write his poetry. Dad’s chair had a woven seat made of some kind of hide, thick and yellow like old cooked pasta. We always thought of it as catgut since Dad emitted such excruciating yowls during his bouts of work. The chair had no screws in it—just wooden plugs, and when Dad stretched back, the chair creaked from the hip joint. Not a comfortable chair, but a speaking chair that moaned along with Dad’s efforts to express himself. Of course we had to leave it behind in the boathouse with all the other stuff that was never ours.

  I drove out across the plain toward St. Antoine, thinking of the time when it had been boreal forest, and how the rustling leaves must have roared in the wind, like the sea in the fall. My dog had her head out the passenger window. Flecks of saliva whipped off her tongue and stuck to the rear door. There never was a dog with so much saliva, or such perpetual anticipation of the good to come.

  The antique store was a real barn of a place, hung with moose heads and ancient egg beaters and leather pouches of oxidizing fish-hooks. Most of the furniture had been scraped and repainted, as if the years had not given it enough story, so story had to be added to it.

  I asked about chairs and was directed upstairs to a stifling room under the rafters, filled with golden light that came through panels let into the ceiling. At one end were stacks of tables—end tables, side tables with barley-twist legs, dining-room tables, bedside tables with drawers, washstands—so many surfaces for putting down cups, saucers, books, typewriters and beer bottles. And there were hundreds of chairs spooning into each other: battered, scraped, loose-bottomed, straw-filled, hidebound chairs, which meant that there were also hundreds of lapsed poets, hundreds of adult children looking for lost fathers, and hundreds of family stories about stepmothers, which, when it came down to it, might not be so different one from another. The weight of all those chairs hanging among the raft
ers filled me with panic.

  After Valmae came, there was none of the tangy essence of bat left about my father. The moist air of dry cleaning softened Dad’s poems and turned them to powdery mould. And now Dad’s going to marry Valmae, and after I’ve signed him over as a going concern I wonder when I’ll be talking to him again, because it’s his life now, and he’s chosen to live like that, with her and her dried flowers. I just wish that Jake would slouch on in with his arms crossed over his chest and smile in his lazy summer-dog way, because I really want to take him out for a beer and ask him if he thinks that we somehow made Dad feel smothered when we clung on to him. I mean, when he dunked us in the water, did he ever wish that he could let us go? And now that we are twenty, has he at last let us go? And if he has, what is it like to tread water alone, without even a chair to hold onto when the spring floods come?

  Among the Trees

  WHAT REMAINED OF Hugh had been delivered to Jan in a corrugated cardboard box, marked Temporary Container. Jan knew that Hugh would have been delighted, he would have positively roared with laughter at the aptness of the label, given that he had made it his life’s work to celebrate the passing of time. She held the box with both hands while she made her way uphill through the bare forest, her coat snagging on the dead branches of fallen spruce. Eventually she arrived at a high rock where the cliff fell away towards the lake in a jumble of boulders and moss and clinging cedars. Across the lake chilly banks of cloud lay along the hills, and the birches stood arrayed in white stripes against the cocoa brown and blue of the land. It was as good a place as any to do the scattering.

  She opened the box for the first time and looked doubtfully at the granular presence in the plastic bag. It was not Hugh in that box. Hugh would never have had anything to do with a plastic bag, or a twist tie. Hugh was already out mingling with the other molecules in the air. He had always been everywhere and nowhere in particular.

  Time to scatter, and she saw herself walking behind a plough, flinging seed in wide arcs. She could hear his gravelly voice, It may be the most useful work of art I ever create. Ashes are good for plants. Here darling, she said to him internally, try arranging this. She flung them out of the bag and they fell over the cliff edge not in a poetic swirl, but in a pattering shower like a fall of drops from a tree long after the rain has passed.

  Jan had been twenty-two when she inherited the antique log cabin on the edge of the great forest of the Mauricie. Her grandparents, tweedy Anglican folk with quiet voices and expensive shoes, had recognized that Jan alone of all the Toronto clan would not immediately sell the fishing camp at Lac Perdu in exchange for a manicured rock in Georgian Bay. There had been no animosity in the family when the bequest was revealed. As Hugh put it, Jan’s family was territorially gifted, and there were enough properties of one kind or another to keep all the descendants happy.

  Built by wealthy Americans in the late nineteenth century, the cedar-lined interior of the cabin had acquired a rich patina through repeated suffusions of sunlight, wood smoke and evening tobacco. Jan had studied albums of minute snapshots of men and women in knickerbockers posing with their catches, while narrow-eyed local guides crouched in the background, sleeves rolled up to expose their hard, sun-darkened forearms. Jan had an interest in photography and an interest in history, and now she had inherited enough money to indulge in both.

  About this time Hugh found Jan in the way a very young woman sometimes dreams of being found and trapped under the hot spotlight of a powerful regard. The art gallery had been full, the people arranged in small clusters in front of the paintings, gesturing with their wine glasses, some ignoring the paintings altogether and living only for the subtle readjustment of the room as each new person entered it. Jan was wearing the ruby silk that she had cut on the grain and the fabric swirled over her thighs. She feigned indifference to the stocky figure with his shorn white hair bristling like filaments, but at any time during the evening she could have told you exactly where “Hugh-the-sculptor” was to be found. A day later, a chance meeting at the liquor store and three bottles of Chilean red wine resulted in hours and whole days in bed and out of it, as their two bodies locked together and tumbled again and again off a high cliff into the warm air. Jan’s life could not be the same afterwards. Hugh made the idea of answering the telephone in an art gallery seem like ridiculous work. Jan resigned from the job and began to take her photography seriously. She took Hugh off to spend the summer in the cabin in the woods.

  At the beginning a great crowd of friends visited the cabin. Seated in a protective ring of citronella candles they ate berry compote off leaves and argued late into the night. When the mosquitoes became unbearable, they stripped and swam out along the drunken path of the moon. They were a mixed bunch, all happy to escape Toronto. Vernon Hasp, the film maker, and his girlfriend, Tiny, made the long drive across to Quebec in a convertible. Tiny brought bowls of the whipped tofu and lemon delight that she manufactured in great quantities and which, as Hugh said, transmuted the contents of one’s stomach to liquid gold. Zach Singer, the oboe player came, and he played while ageless Frédérique Cyr danced, the humid air making a puddle of the mascara beneath her eyes. After supper, Gypsa McNider recited poetry in the clearing under the birches, her batwing sleeves arcing through the air as she declaimed that the amount of love in the world was constant. Her partner Tim lounged in the shadows rolling joints.

  Hugh always sat well back in his chair, legs splayed, hands clasped over his stomach, arguing and drinking and drinking some more. He was a sculptor, and nature was his medium, for Hugh’s art celebrated the transience of the day. He spoke of creating with the fundamental drive of a bee or a robin, but it was his personal mission to make manifest the passage of time. A spy out before dawn might glimpse Hugh crouched close to the earth, aligning the cedar fronds on the path to the dock, so that they all pointed like arrows at a newly sprung toadstool capped in neon tangerine. Days later, the fronds would be discovered placed in concentric circles honouring the fall of the same toadstool, its head now pockmarked and saggy with spores. Hugh alone knew how to rearrange a cobweb with a needle, scratch fern fronds onto a clear sheet of ice. The sight of Hugh lying face down on the dock, herding the skipping silver slips of the water beetles into a corral made of reeds threaded together on a horse hair filled Jan with the desire to shout out loud at the magnificence of life. His mode of being challenged Jan’s conservative roots and attracted her, held her, and she would not, could not stop giving him her love, for his art, for his vision, for his great arms and fists and for the gold cap on his tooth.

  “Stay,” she said to him. “Stay always. My forest is your forest, my woods are your woods, my leaves your leaves, my lake your lake, my streams your streams.” She could remember the silly loving burble of words even now.

  Once Hugh made Jan a stained glass window, pieced together out of slips of mica leaded with reeds, glued with pine sap, girded with willow. The window was an impossible gift, and theirs was an impossible relationship, and yet it had lasted. For twenty years, the summer colony in the woods had been a place of refuge for artists of all kinds. Hugh did not know, but after a gust of wind shattered the mica window, Jan had searched the forest floor for shards. She kept them in an envelope under a floorboard in the bedroom.

  In the beginning, Jan had considered Hugh’s renunciation of permanence to be a grand and free gesture, like the operatic trilling of the hermit thrush or a soprano practising in a neighbouring house. She had honoured his anger when he had discovered her photographing his work. Hugh had knocked the camera out of her hand into the ferns, where she later picked it up, unharmed. Get out, he’d said. Get out of her own place. Extraordinary to think of it now, like that. And afterward he knelt before her and soaked her wraparound skirt with his tears.

  “Your spirit is wide, Jan, like the horizon,” he said, stretching out his arms to receive her. So she forgave him, and with him she felt forgiven.

  Sometimes Jan found it unbearable t
hat Hugh should have seen her aging. She ought to have drifted in and out of his life like one of his time-limited sculptures, here at dawn, gone in the evening, with the last trilling of the hermit thrush. Now she saw herself standing in the cold forest with an empty cardboard box in her thin hands. Her hair is shorter now, and she keeps it dark by artificial means, but she knows it disappoints people to come across her from behind, to have her turn to face them with the ridged pools of sleeplessness beneath her eyes.

  Just as once upon a time Hugh found Jan, so he eventually found Crispin, one summer night in a bar on the Main in Montreal. Crispin was quick, wiry, and witty. In another century, he might have been a velvet-clad poet relishing his dreams, but Crispin was a water-colourist, producing exquisite works of the old school. They sold well. Dreamy clouds are never easy to achieve, but Crispin had a knack for painting the wide sky of Quebec on fire in the evening or nacreous at first light. Crispin’s skies caught at the emotions, hinted at spiritual depths, but remained guileless, because when it came down to it, they were just sky, just water-colour.

  Jan still has a photograph of Crispin at that time, lithe Crispin wearing a black halterneck with diamantes that stretch in a glittering curve into the hollows of his armpits. Earlier in the day, they had pulled up the chains and anchors on the dock and had paddled off on it as if it were a raft. Crispin swam around in the water, his wet head coppery in the sunlight. For a while, they had all wanted him.

  Jan had tried hard. She maintained outward appearances with meals and money, but somewhere she lost the knack of renewing her love for Hugh each day and she found herself acting more as she felt she ought to, rather than from desire. The parties in the woods changed. Vernon Hasp’s documentary about other men called Vernon Hasp attained cult status and he began to hold court in his own penthouse where he could see himself reflected in sixteen panes of glass at a time. Tiny drifted off to farm organic carrots. Frédérique died from complications following a hip replacement. Their places were taken by Crispin’s friends: students, actors, musicians shouting at each other about Derrida and hip hop. Hugh was often absent from Jan’s bed in the morning, but the woods revealed little trace of his work.