“The Rock is drunk,” Otto said, turning away. My father, on the other hand, tapped his pipe out on a tree and refilled it, saying, “Speak of trolls and they rustle in the hallway.”
Sheltered by the low eaves, there is less snow up here on the boardwalk that joins the assorted cabins and studios together. There’s a banging sound coming from the summer kitchen. Perhaps it’s squatters. The artists won’t mind squatters. They share everything. I can see from here that the storm door has been wedged open by a drift. I might be offered a hot drink. We might have a talk about my Baba Yaga problems. Squatters know a lot about society, being in it and out of it at the same time. This is snooping, Freya, it will gain you nothing, peering in at the empty easel, the jar of cobwebbed brushes: At every doorway, ere one enters, one should spy round.
I’ll just trot along and have a look.
Many summers ago a new dog took off on us, spooked by the unfamiliar give and snap of the forest floor. Otto and I wandered the woods all afternoon whistling and calling. Eventually we arrived here at the colony. We heard raised voices inside the summer kitchen, and the heavy groan of female exasperation. And then the avocado shot out the door, powering into the sunlit grove.
How richly endowed with feeling, how proper it seemed to me at that moment, to hurl avocados in times of passion and of rage. The sunlight descended through the canopy of trees in blue yellow shafts, illuminating the bright thistledown of the Rock’s hair where he stood blocking the doorway. She meant to get him, the throw was hard, but passion warped the trajectory. Sailing past the sculptor’s ear out the screen door the green missile landed on the rock in front of us, its froggy innards slipping out from beneath the tough skin pushed awry.
At that time there was no electricity and no road access to the cabins on the lake. Otto and I were still bringing our food across by canoe. The waste of the avocado suddenly appalled us both. We crept away in silence.
Today I would not say no to rage, or to any other kind of feeling.
What is this banging in the kitchen? A can has just thudded out through the screen door, tumbling low and making heavy progress. Looks like some one has been trying to open it with a screwdriver. Tossed aside, smeared with ketchup and flour, the side dented, the label slashed with what look like—claws. Ye gods and mortals. Speak of trolls and they rustle in the hallway.
Any minute now that bear will sense me with his flour-frosted snout, hunger and frustration all he knows. Now I cannot hear anything except for our breathing, the bear’s and mine. Baba Yaga and Red Suspenders and passion be damned. A bear is not a sustaining illusion. A bear is.
Oh my. Where have I got to in all this?
Shuffle back shuffle back, clatter off the walkway while the crows lift off the treetops and all the voices cry, Freya, Freya, we walk in the woods alone my dear, walk in the woods alone.
To Catch a Fish
POOR MAURICE. He failed, but until I walked in the door at the cabin neither of us knew that it was a test, to catch a fish. How much easier for both of us if I had presented him with a room of straw to spin into gold, or had asked him to grow a peony, with a sunrise in its midst and the clouds of morning gathered in its petals.
Here is how it happened. I had been walking into the deepening dusk for an hour, just a grey-haired woman with a backpack and a stick. Not that a stick is much use against the ranging horsefly. Still, I don’t mind flies. They are alive, and so am I. We are two species sharing the same pink evening air, the short green fields and the rectangular lumps of vanilla fudge that resolve into cows when I put my glasses on. I told Maurice not to come and get me. For the first time, he had his own guests at my cabin that night – Stewart Blaney, the antique dealer and his new wife Noreen. I was happy that he was making himself at home.
Here’s how Maurice’s voice sounds, booming out into the twilight, causing the birds to twitter with anxiety and the fish to stir in the waters.
Oh ho, Stewart, Noreen, glad you found us. Bienvenus au Lac Perdu. Were my directions adequate? It’s the real boondocks out here. Come on in. Bathroom, second tree on your left past the screened porch. Don’t look so worried Noreen. Come and sit down, Stewart. Isn’t this view tremendous? There you are Noreen. Wine for the lady. Yes, Freya will be in soon. She’s en route from Quebec. New granddaughter. Over-protective grandma. You know the story.
My granddaughter Tessie is six weeks old and already sorting out the difference between day and night, clever little thing. Her fists curl up like fiddleheads. Mia is marvellous, rushing about with diapers and laundry, laying Tessie down like a fish in the scale, crowing over her daily weight gains.
What’s that Stewart? How long? Six weeks alone in the bee-loud glade. Yes, bloody loud, exactly. Bored? Me? Not at all. Swim each morning, a walk, books. I’ve been digging compost into a peony bed for Freya. My word, the Giant Hogweed is the stuff of nightmares. Strikes you blind you know.
I think I’ll pick a few wildflowers for the table. They won’t be up to Maurice’s standard—hawkweed and viper’s bugloss are hardly offerings to bring a peony grower. Maurice with his strains and names. To tell the truth, peonies have never appealed to me. Showy at first, they soon become so shaggy and overblown. I prefer my weeds with their shy flowers and tenacious root systems.
No, retirement suits me just fine, but don’t get me wrong, the goddess of Real Estate was good to me. I have ridden the waves, so to speak, always holding onto the basic notion of what makes a good investment, and I was prepared to put the work in, just as Freya and Otto did here. The value of this property has increased, not just because of their input, but because the city has grown closer. I believe that Otto carved the newel posts. Very good with his hands. Learned his craft in Eastern Europe.
Maurice is intuitive about cultural things, and he’s a talker, which is marvellous after Otto’s silence, which became heavier as he got older. Wine, flowers, the best recording of a Strauss opera; Maurice always knows. I’ll be on the point of feeling under-informed when he’ll say something about the dense blue of the woods across the lake, or snort at the explosion of a four-wheeler on the road, and I know that he understands. We come at the same thing but from different angles.
No, there are no motorboats on this lake, which is a pity. Hard to get the wind in your hair in an antique birchbark canoe. I’ve been meaning to ask Freya if we can change the rules. It’s all done by communal agreement. No, of course you wouldn’t want the locals with their Sea-Doos, but there’s nothing wrong with the chug of a vintage motor. Didn’t bother the fish back in the twenties, so I don’t see why it would now. Freya’s a bit of a purist in that regard. I believe they only put the electricity through here about ten years ago. Amazing isn’t it, what you can do by lamplight? Now then Stewart, none of that.
Maurice has walked this country road to the post office and back several times since I have been away. I can see him thwacking at the heads of yarrow with his stick, whistling to the blackbirds, imitating, fitting in, as he does. I wonder if he burps back at the frogs. There is an old-fashioned courtliness about Maurice’s onion-skin writing paper that lures me back to him, like breadcrumbs tossed out for birds.
My dear Freya,
Before dawn I donned the bug suit, raked the poor earth beside the driveway to a fine tilth and went about flinging poppy seeds like a figure in a French painting. Three blue jays shrieked their advice from the hemlock. A positive tempest yesterday. Hurricanoes and waterspouts raging over the lake and thunder fit to crack the heavens. Come to me soon, and see the bed that I have prepared for you.
Until then, my darling F., from your darling M.
Grief dulls the edges of life. But love, like rain, washes the morning fresh and makes the next day possible. I have been so relieved to feel my spirit quickening at the thought of Maurice; to marvel again at the smooth decline on a man’s thigh just below the hip bone, to discover tenderness stealing in even as I visit the supermarket and observe the pale white rootlets at the end of a bunch
of chives. Otto was my husband, but Maurice is my lover. Maurice is teasing and skilled, which means that I stride towards him in the night and that I am surprised and greatly pleased by what we make possible together. The sweet stress of pleasure makes me feel green and hardy. I can smell the lilac on the evening air.
And now, my friends, you are going to fish for your supper. I believe that the local poissons are ready to leap onto our hooks in the best bucolic style. Lake’s teeming with them. Come on down to the dock. Don’t forget your hat Noreen, wonderful hat.
Otto and I put the dock in the water in 1973, the year that Mia was born. Each summer I sit down there in my Adirondack chair watching the fish hover over their nests in the beer-brown shallows. The parental gesture is protective, gentle and enduring. I have seen generations of fish come and go. Matriarch of fish: fish-mother, that’s me. Last July I spent hours brooding over the fish fanning their tails above the silt and all the while I thought of baby Tess developing in the womb. How I wished her well in every sinew and soft bone.
First blood to the lady Noreen. Marvellous. Bit small, but there’s nothing like a tasty mouthful. Hup. And another. Refill Stewart? My mother used to talk about days like this with the Laurentian Club. Lac Edouard was a positive turmoil of trout. Local guides, tea boiling in a real Australian billy. No, these fish are Perchaudes. A bass with a big or a small mouth. Can’t remember which. Does yours have a large mouth, Noreen? Marvellous quality of stillness here in the evening. The recipe calls for a pound of fillets, but these little chaps should do us nicely. And now, my friends, to the kitchen.
Otto and I courted on the back of a motorbike in the streets of Prague, but I insisted that we make our home in Canada. Qui prend mari prend pays, they say in Quebec, but in our case it was qui prend femme prend famille, and I had a large one that I could not leave. We built the cabin together, replanting maples, tending to the moss, hiding the roof in a turf cloak spotted with hawkweed stars in the spring. When I saw the joy that Otto took in holding Mia when she was a baby, I thought that I had done the right thing, bringing him to Quebec, taking him out of his element.
Let me just get this avocado going here, and the garlic, like so. I get wonderful garlic up at the market. Rosy as a breast each clove – they bring it in from Provence. There’s a village there and garlic is all that they do. The village down the road does breath mints. Oh that blessed Oka cheese. Now you my lovely Noreen, may take your knife to the chives.
I entered just as the meal was being served. The lamp on the table illuminated simple platters of baked potatoes, unctuous with melted cheese, fresh greens, a sprinkle of herbs. Upon a red enamel serving dish, the tiny bodies of the mother fish lay in a fragrant heap, dusted in flour and spices, cooked quickly in fresh butter and drizzled with a lemon and lime sauce. I kissed everyone on both cheeks, smiled, took my portion, and left it on the side of my plate. The meal progressed, the wine travelled round and round, and finally, finally, the Blaneys left.
“Great people, the Blaneys. What it is to have friends, eh Freya?”
“Maurice, those people are not my friends. You just ate my friends.”
We failed each other. I could not make Maurice see how the work of thirty years could be thus betrayed in a skillet, and as for Maurice, well, his response was to call me a dear, silly old thing, which only transformed me into a nasty beast with prickles.
After that things went as you might expect: a silent bed with two far-flung continents in it, the inevitable return to town, and my return to the cabin, alone. Maurice must have crouched on the shore with his knife, scraping the fish as the dusk deepened around him. All summer long, translucent scales have worked their way out of the sandy beach, curved like a baby’s fingernail, but fluted at the edge.
The Tenured Heart
FROM BEHIND THE wheel of the inert Volvo, Associate Professor Colin Pilchard conceded that up in the woods, life, no longer simple, develops myriad complications. Accustomed to the striped shade of the university library, the academic body (pallid, unattached, in need of a haircut) becomes wreathed in rashes of unidentifiable origin. The academic mind, calibrated to accommodate issues and theories, finds itself at a loss to construe the rapid passage of the ground shrew, the wisp-thin lines of the spider’s web or the irrational oscillations of the poplar leaf. The tenured heart, usually preserved in the dim formaldehyde of ethical behaviour, tends towards unconstrained lurches.
The women down on the dock could be considered a case in point. About now they would be raising their eyebrows at the silence that followed the strained twirling sound of a motor lacking the juice to start. Apparently, one of them had left the headlights on and car doors wide open, with the express purpose of letting the battery run down. Colin leaned back and let out a broken adolescent yowl at a rip in the vinyl ceiling of the car. The culprit would be towelling her hair dry, her backbone still sparkling with water drops. Her name was Sam and she was a perfect naiad; she could have been born wearing the pale blue bikini.
July had already been in bloom a few weeks when Colin had received the invitation to visit the cottage at Lac Perdu. The lake below the university rose up in a cloud and hovered among the trees, the sun winked off the windshields in the parking lot, but the concrete corridors of the English department remained as still and dry as an ancient seabed. In the dim light of his office, Professor Pilchard idled in his computer chair. He was halfway through an email.
…wondering if you would be interested to join us for a weekend at our cottage on the shores of Lac Perdu? I know that it is far from town, practically in another country, but the water feels like velvet at this time of year.
Some three years earlier, in the course of her Master’s degree, Samantha de la Tour had attended closely to Professor Pilchard’s group discussions of writers who regularly lost all their friends and relations in labyrinthine libraries, who made mosaics out of dull fragments joined with pale grey effusions of guilt, who repeated themselves until the meaning rose like spume over surf, evanescent and impossible to recapture from one day to the next. Colin Pilchard made it his business to listen to his students as if they were instruments in an orchestra and he conducted his tutorials accordingly, setting the bright and the dull voices against each other, adding new ideas to further the development, and using his invisible baton to direct the chorus towards a falling cadence of mutual consent. Occasionally he pre-recorded his opinions, so that he could sit back and argue with himself in the third person, employing the same discernment as his students.
Among these students, Samantha de la Tour stood out for her refusal to accept any interpretation without question. Sam, who could pour her attention onto a text like a thread of clear water that magnified as it ran. Sam, who had flashed into the department for two years, perched on window seats, and darted out again, like a cardinal on the wing. Graduate students: now you see them, now they are gone, gone. But where? to teach Japanese people to speak English, to work in advertising, to survive for three months as poets, to retrain as lawyers.
I hope you won’t think this invitation inappropriate, but since my MA at Rook U is long since finished... Let me know, and I can send you directions.
Kind regards
Sam de la Tour
Consider it Sam? He had dreamed of it.
As he drove northeast towards Sam’s cottage in Quebec, Colin Pilchard contemplated a conference abstract about the monosyllable as the thing itself, because the monosyllable says what it means to say in one sound. This was not a theory that Colin had made up himself. Virginia Woolf, a thoroughly respectable writer, has said as much, somewhere. Colin made a mental note to look up just where. In the meantime he revisited the idea of the thing itself; the object that was itself alone, and perfect. The cherry tree is all that it does, says Fenel-losa (reference available on request). Leaves, berries, roots and blossoms, the tree stood complete in its functions, not desiring money or love. You could not have it—that much was certain, if anything was, because once you had
a cherry tree in your pocket, it was not alone any more, and neither were you. All you could have was wanting it. Oh dear. Such a complicating thing, desire.
Desire. Colin knew the various forms that it could take—light-stepping, feverish, all-filling dream of air—let’s shut out the daylight and meld our flesh and blood into something rich and sweet, then emerge eventually for brunch, wet-haired and blind in the afternoon sun. It was natural, between the ages of 15 and 35, to feel this way on a regular basis, once, if not four times a year. Even in the past year, Colin could not deny that he had experienced a definite physiological response to the new administrative assistant: small, dark, compact as an old-fashioned cigarette case. He overran his photocopying allocation ruthlessly during the winter session, all for the pleasure of being pistol-whipped by Tulipa Ferrari’s sharp tongue.
Still, Colin shied away from the physical logistics of entanglement. He worried about his weight and the moment of displacement; if a woman should invite him to share a bath with her, for example. And of course love does not last, and does not improve, but only atrophies. Do not all the novels demonstrate it? The fever that does not bring about death or lifelong separation from one’s parents abates and clears up. One only has to survive the dangerous years (15 – 35, as mentioned above); to build a life raft of useful things strapped together with webbing—a good pepper grinder, a modest wine collection, the complete recordings of the Beethoven string quartets, a gaseous golden retriever called Calliope—and then one is ready to ride out the tempests.
All the Voices Cry Page 4