Surely there could be no harm in paying a visit to a former student and her relatives?
Colin pulled off the highway at a coffee place where rows of Harley Davidsons glittered in the sunlight, mocking him for the roads he had not taken. He straightened his waistcoat and stood as upright as possible in the lineup behind a man in black leather with fringed sleeves. Dada’s Donuts, the place was called. He ordered a plain one.
Back on the road he drained the last drops of his coffee. It had taken two goes to get the car started. The Volvo was beginning to show its age.
“Fuck,” said Colin, into the coffee cup. He was disappointed that this was the first monosyllable that came to mind, but he quite liked the hollow sound that his voice made inside the cardboard cup.
“Book,” said Colin into cup, “tea.” Could these words have more integrity than a word like “crappomundi,” which he had once heard a student mutter while collecting her library books off the floor? The monosyllable as the thing itself was a silly conceit, like pitting the grunt against the drawn-out moan in a great competition to express a truth that, as the theorists had so lately discovered, no longer existed.
“Sam,” said Colin.
When he arrived, the young woman in question opened the cottage door and heaven was there, on the screen porch, for the brief span it took to say that he hoped he had the right place, and she said yes you do, and she looked at him as if he were as delightful as spring blossoms under snow, and she said, where is your bag? and he said, it’s in the car, and before he could prevent her she dashed away to get it.
Colin leaned against the doorframe, smiling at the insouciant rustle of the pine needles beneath her bare feet. How quickly those qualities of samnicity came rushing back to him: tough as a stalk, bony of finger and knee, together with his own shortness of breath at the thought that if she turned her head fast enough her ponytail might make a whistling sound in the air.
Then she took him down to the dock and it quickly became awful. Three seconds after they had been introduced, he could not recall whether Sam’s stepmother’s name was Myra or Myrna. Myra/Myrna gave him champagne with tiny Quebec blueberries in it to choke upon. The stepmother pointed out a grove of old growth white pine, and a boathouse that they were accustomed to rent out to a postman. In response, Colin commented on the tongues of light licking up the trunks of the cedars. After comparing the water lilies bobbing in the cove to poached eggs, he thought it better to stop.
Just beside the dock, a phrase from As You Like It was scored into the Canadian Shield, displacing the mossy covering that once grew there. Colin read it aloud, and as he began, he knew that all visitors to the cottage did the same thing:
And this our life, exempt from public haunt
Finds—
Samantha and Myra/Myrna chimed in,
Tongues in trees, Books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
“It’s a bit indulgent, I know,” said Myra/Myrna, laughing, “but we freshen up the carving every couple of years. We have a sharp chisel for the purpose. It reminds us to be grateful. Even during bug season. Benedictions in blackflies, wisdom in weeds, magic in mosquitoes….”
Samantha took up the refrain:
“Lechery in lichen, frolics in ferns, bathos in blueberries, pathos in...”
While she chanted, she tied her hair up. Colin looked away. It was impossible to witness the movement of her shoulder blades and not to wish to make a personal measurement of the space between the lopsided bikini bow and the slight shadow it cast on the middle of her back.
Pathos in professors. He had the worst possible case of it. The cherry tree is all that it does, Sam is all that she does, did, might do. Colin attempted to focus on the stepmother instead. Myra/Myrna’s skin was apricot, and her hair a darker shade. She was hearty as an apple, just as Sam was reedy as a stem.
“She’s my stepmother,” Sam had said on the way down to the dock, “after Dad died she brought me up, and I love her for that.”
Colin summoned his most interested voice. “So, Myrna, what is your particular field of expertise within economics?”
“Myra, Colin.” Sam’s stepmother chided him gently, nudging his ankle with her bare foot, “and I’m in real estate.”
Myra had well-tended nails, a jangle of bracelets, cropped pants. She wore a spiral toe ring in the shape of a serpent with a glistening red eye. Her look seemed to say, Sam is twenty-four, you can go ahead and ask her. But he could not. There are some things that you just cannot have, and if you try, you will make a fool of yourself.
“Is there a...? May I?” He waved his hand back up at the house.
“Of course, make yourself at home Professor P. The bathroom’s just down the corridor from the kitchen.” Myra stood up to let him past. “We’ll be waiting for you.”
There was a splash and the dock swayed up and down. Sam was in, her narrow form gliding under the water.
It had been a long time since Professor Pilchard had taught Shakespeare. As You Like It, he seemed to recall, was set in an enchanted forest where members of court fed each other strawberries and disported themselves in idleness. Sam’s dock was indeed a setting for such pleasures, but something about the act of inscription bothered him. He felt that the words ought to float up like smoke from a thin-stemmed clay pipe, hang in the air, and then be off. The sermon in the stone is that everything wears away. The book in the brook is that water runs on. The engraving seemed rather, and he hated to apply the word to Sam or to her family: vulgar. Make yourself at home Professor P.
Relieved, Colin returned to the living room where he sat a moment in a chair covered in golden velvet with a pattern of black lozenges. His glance ranged over the objects in the room. There he found a mixture of furniture from across the decades, unconnected by any overarching aesthetic vision except for the passage of the sun, principally a purple fun fur beanbag chair, and an enormous radiogram now functioning as a sideboard. Colin set the champagne glass down on the arm of the chair. He contemplated the bubbles that had attached themselves to the blueberries at the bottom. Perhaps the thing itself was not a cherry tree, but a bubble. Sooner rather than later, a bubble pops.
The professor moved his hand as if to wave the thought away, and the glass flew onto the floor, where it shattered, discharging its cargo of blueberries across the tiles.
“Oh dear,” he said.
He thought about returning to the dock to confess to Myrna/Myra that he had broken one of her champagne flutes. But that would necessitate apologies and muddled groping on the floor with paper towels and the creation of shared memory—
“Do you remember the first time that I met you, you broke one of my grandmother’s—”
“And you thought you would never forgive me—”
“But I did. And then one day you brought round to the house, a complete—”
Bathos in blueberries. Colin did not want shared memories with Myrna/Myra.
He ignored the broken glass on the floor and leaned back, staring upwards to where bright spots jiggled and swayed in the angles of the ceiling. Sam was down there stirring up the bay, and the jittery light on the ceiling was caused by the movement of her body in the water, but Sam was unaware of his regard; neither subject could see the other, and yet between them they had created this flickering object. Could the thing itself be some kind of charged space between two blind subjects? One of the greats must have already phrased the thought memorably, elegantly, in a couplet. He sent a shadowy messenger off into the archives to look for the reference.
Colin sighed. Adrift on his raft made of copper-bottomed pots and Beethoven string quartets, he became aware that he would much rather be in his office than here, risking it all in the forest, for the sake of Sam and a flicker of hope.
Fool. A monosyllable, Shakespearean, holding at once the carnal capital F, the L of a love that dithered about like light on the ceiling, and in between the puckered mouths of the supplicants. He
would not be a fool.
Coward. A word of two syllables with which he could be satisfied. Associate Professor Colin Pilchard, Coward. He patted his waistcoat pocket for his keys, picked up the pigskin bag from beside the screen door, slipped outside and crept up the path towards the car, giving thanks for the uncaring silky whisper of the pine needles beneath his feet.
Vandals in Sandals
MAX WAS STILL ANNOYED with Bea for having clipped the wing mirror on the way out of the garage. The mirror hung limply, broken at the bone. Bea felt bad about it, since the van was new. She looked out at the poplar leaves spinning on their stems. She knew without hearing them that the lush sound of well-waxed summer leaves had been replaced with a clattering like rice wafers. Fall was coming and after that, nothing but snow.
“Can’t we open the windows?” Bea asked, “I’d like to hear the leaves.”
“Air conditioning. Better to keep them shut,” said Max.
From the back seat Cammy’s little brown hand appeared with an apple core.
“You can throw it out the window here, sweetie,” Bea said. “It’s the country.”
“Don’t encourage her to litter, Bea. It’s all someone’s frontage,” said Max.
Bea looked at the maple seedlings and the crooked fence and the darkness of the firs behind.
“Okay.” Bea took Cammy’s applecore. “I’ll save it for the compost. Where’s the trash container?”
“Here.” Max pressed a button and a compartment slid open. “Don’t forget to get it out later,” he said.
“Are we there yet?” asked Cammy.
“The agent said it was around here somewhere.” Bea looked at the map again. “So we’ve passed Lac Perdu, right?”
“Thought you were doing the map.” Max was unsmiling.
Oh give it up, she thought. Get a grip. It’s only the wing mirror. She looked out the window again. The road curved past a stand of beeches. The layered quality of their branches seemed familiar, like hands outspread, pleading for calm.
“Slow down,” she said. “I think the turnoff’s back there, after the beeches. Before the dumpsters.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes I’m sure.”
Max made a U-turn, and they drove back past three dumpsters overflowing with Labour Day discards. A tilting pile of tires leaned into the ragweed. Nearby, a useless sled lay in the sun, its slats warped with damp.
“Look, a sled,” said Cammy. “Can I have it?”
“It’s trash,” said her father.
“But I could fix it,” Cammy insisted.
“Look we don’t have time to pick up trash for you, as well as for your mother.”
“Sorry Daddy.”
“Don’t worry, love,” said Bea. “If we find a cottage to buy we’ll get you a new sled. How about that?”
The van started up the hill. With a click all the doors locked. Bea didn’t like it. The van was just too much. The roadside was bright with black-eyed susans, some pure yellow and fine as stars, others rusty as old nails. Day lilies had seeded in the ditches, and tendrils of purple vetch fingered the greenery. They sped past a swampy area spiked with dead trees. A nerve in Bea’s jaw tingled with recognition; she knew this road, she knew these trees. Once upon a time, a boy called Yves had shown her a heron perched high on a skeletal branch in this very swamp. Bea had been ten, spending the summer in a rented cottage with her parents.
Yves lived in the neighbouring cottage. Together, the children explored the surrounding land. Once he plucked at her sleeve to draw her attention to a young fox chasing flies on the path in front of them. Bea thought that nothing could equal the fox, but she was the first to see the weasel slipping along under the rock fall, its dark body undulating like an animated moustache. One afternoon they watched a pair of catfish herding their young about in the shallows. Yves made gestures indicating that the parents ate their babies. Bea watched the tiny wriggling commas with renewed interest. Another day she showed him a snake, run over and flat as a shoelace. The next, Yves showed her a discarded shoelace, flat and braided as a squashed snake.
Inside the cottage, Bea’s parents played cards by lamplight and went to bed early. The lamps emitted a soft ball of light, not bright enough to do anything by, except, as she realized now, conceive a second child. Each morning, Bea washed the shadow of soot out of the glass chimneys. At the end of the summer, they beat out carpets, took down flypapers, pulled the curtains and drove one last time down the bumpy driveway. Bea saw Yves out the back window. Small, he waved from the dock.
The day of the heron, they had been heading out to swim in the lake at the bottom of the hill, but when Yves reached the end of the driveway, he turned and ran uphill instead, shouting for Bea to follow. Just when she thought that she could run no more, Yves started back down the hill into the dip where the swamp pressed close to the sides of the road. Hot and sweating, they passed into a band of water-cooled air, entering a chilled land, where ghosts dwelt in the sunlight. The yellow daisies shone like stars beside the road and the heron rose up in flight. Yves and Bea flapped their arms and ran on down to swim. She kept her T-shirt on. His strong brown legs glistened when he came out of the water, wet as a salamander.
Now the road had been sealed. The day lilies still filled the ditches, although hydro workers had cut the tops off the pines to make way for cables. Max kept driving, but the road ended in a driveway leading to a summer camp and a cliff face. Bea knew that already. She had climbed there with Yves, searching for fossils.
Bea had to put her glasses on to read the words spray-painted onto the rock. She flushed and looked at the map. Petit Hibou, ça m’empêche pas de continuer à t’aimer. Yves.
“Funny name for a girl,” said Max. “Old Yves sounds a bit desperate. It’s quite the custom round here to proclaim your love on a rock. Remember all those names on the way up to La Tuque?”
“What does it say, Daddy?”
“It says that he won’t stop loving her. Little vandal.”
“What’s a vandal?”
“A person who wears sandals and writes on walls.”
“Vandals in sandals.”
“Yes, and Goths in socks.”
“Vandals in sandals and Goths in socks, Goths in thocks. Thocks in Goths.”
“Do you think we could open a window now?” Bea’s voice was sharp. The brittle sound of the late summer leaves came to her. The locusts roared in the banks.
“Looks like this is a dead end,” said her husband. “I guess your hunch was wrong.”
“I guess it was, I’m sorry,” she said.
“No problemo, it’s a nice day to be out for a drive, isn’t it Cammy? In our sandals in the new vandal.”
“Vandal sandal candle dandle.” Cammy launched into the rest of the alphabet.
The words fell like light blows. Bea endured them all. Surely, she thought, it won’t always be like this. They turned and drove back down the hill, past the swamp, past the empty branch where the heron had been, past the daisies, and back to the dumpsters at the bottom of the road.
Where the Corpse Weed Grows
ISABELLA’S SKIRT BRUSHED through the ferns at the side of the track, collecting burrs, hooked seeds, the hem dusted yellow by the furry tongues of pollen-bearing plants. She had found the skirt in a costumes sale. Now what she needed was an old crone (she consulted the back of the park brochure) of Atikamekw ancestry, someone bent over, wise in the ways of plants and their healing powers, devoted to helping true seekers like herself. In the absence of a crone, the woman in the ticket booth said she would find a park warden at a hut called Espérance.
Isabella wrinkled up her nose. She had so wanted to feel the quest with the whole of her body; to cross a boggy patch, sensing the step and suck of waterlogged ground, tripping on rocks and roots as she hunted for the plants. But the track resisted her. It remained gravelly and dry.
A horsefly that had been buzzing around her went very quiet and Isabella hoped that it was not c
aught in her hair. She was beginning to regret not having removed the hair extensions after the show closed. They were much longer strands than her natural hair, tinted deep green, and now they seemed heavy and hot. The director wanted his Ophelia to look like she had already been floating in the river for a while, because he said they were all ghosts, doomed from the beginning, and no one in the audience could pretend to be ignorant of how Hamlet turned out, so the audience, through their expectation, became complicit with the drive of tragedy. Whenever he said complicit (and he said it often) he passed his hand over the shaved crown of his head. The director was brilliant; Isabella adored him. She did anything that he asked her to do, anything at all.
Isabella was always at a loose end between shows, which was why a personal quest seemed so attractive. It began with a pamphlet from the health-food store. The pamphlet described a herbal product called Elcarim, proclaiming its value as a potent cure for cancer. In the 1930s, a nurse had received the recipe from an Indian healer. She mixed and bottled huge batches of the stuff with which she healed the sick across the province. The pamphlet listed the plants used in the formula, describing how the nurse had given up the recipe in a sworn affidavit, extracted on her deathbed. Sworn affidavit. The phrase was so romantic. Isabella wanted to be that nurse.
She decided to gather the ingredients and prepare the Elcarim herself. First she needed a trug to lay the plants in, and then there would be boiling and steeping, leaving the mixture in the dark, straining, reheating, and finally offering her mother a cup of the liquid, which would surely taste bitter and earthy. Honey, perhaps she could add honey, if Moira needed a sweetener.
Isabella made the preparations necessary to spend a weekend away with Moira, booking a motel that she could not afford, hauling her down the stairs and into the car, tugging the seatbelt tight around her bulk. Moira was collapsed on the couch at the motel now, her body hidden in the great flowered folds of her dress, the non-paralysed side of her face working with effort at the donuts in the box, one eyelid tugged downwards by the frozen waterfall of her face. After the potion had been prepared, the Elcarim would pour through the massive body in a thin stream, for good or for harm working its way along the veins. Her mother would nod, give thanks for such a dedicated and loving daughter. And then she would die.
All the Voices Cry Page 5