Given

by Susan Musgrave

  That night Angel appeared in my room, sitting at the foot of my bed, the heaviness of his presence tugging me from a troubled dream. He looked hungry, and he sucked his thumb as if he could draw sustenance from it. While I watched he began pulling out his eyelashes, too, the way he’d done in my dreams ever since I lost him. He would dip the eyelashes into something sweet — honey or molasses — then suck the sweetness from them while I watched, helplessly: the dream always ended before I could reach him to feed him. Sorrow is nourishment forever.

  In the jungle town where I’d taken Angel to the curandero, the women believed that when a child dies his soul becomes a drop of dew in a hummingbird’s eye, one that wells up, like a tear, then wanders the world looking for a woman who has lost a baby and wants to have another of her own. The curandero advised expectant mothers to drink water that had been boiled with gold jewelry in it and wear perfume chuparrosa — hummingbird perfume — to drive men wild and cause them to remain faithful.

  I sat up in bed and whispered my baby’s name. My quilt slipped to the floor and a moment later Angel was gone. On my dresser that looked sepulchral in the dreamy light, the water jug and the vase had turned into two severed heads — Rainy, her hair matted with blood, and Frenchy with her eyes rolled upward. And then, as quietly as they had come, they vanished into a wall drenched with moisture, and the air filled with the mist of their leaving. The heads became a jug and a vase again, and I was left with no one.

  I lay for the longest time, then got out of bed, wrapped myself in a blanket, and hobbled to the window. I always slept with the window open but now, again, it had been closed. I rubbed a spot in the dampness — even my windows were weeping — and for a moment the clouds parted, and the silver face of the moon swam out, casting a pallid glow off my dripping walls.

  When I heard the radio come on, I didn’t turn around, but stood staring out at the darkness. “Women in Paradise are so beautiful that a man will be able to see the very marrow of their bones through the flesh on their legs,” I heard a voice say, words that conjured up Rainy, so thin her bones looked like they would cut right through her baby doll pyjamas, to break free of her skin. Rainy with her no-colour eyes, because she’d cried all the colour out of them the day she was born. “The women in Paradise have neither buttocks nor anus created as these parts were for the elimination of faeces — and there’s nothing of that nature in Paradise.” I thought of Frenchy, with her one missing finger (“nine fingers gets me a discount at the manicurist’s”) and the birthmark on her cheek, white and heart-shaped, like a beauty mark in reverse.

  I went back to bed, turned off the radio, and fell asleep as it began to get light. I dreamed of a dark blue sea with babies rolling in the waves, being tossed ashore, weightless, into my arms that could neither hold them, nor let them go.

  It was the rattling of a peacock’s tail that woke me. I felt an old uneasiness coming over me, settling on my chest and then pressing deeper. Vernal had carried the two willow coffins upstairs for me; I climbed out of bed and arranged them along the adjoining bare walls, then put my new clothes away. I dressed and, after opening the window again to let the room air, went downstairs.

  We drank our coffee, fierce and black, then Vernal found a half-smoked joint in his pocket, lit it, and took a toke. He opened the fridge, and brought out the fillet of sole he had thawed for our lunch. Vernal had learned how to make a piece of fish go further by poaching it in a can of Campbell’s alphabet soup, a dish that had made him famous in legal circles when a group of friends, including a judge, petitioned that he be tried for crimes against humanity.

  “Add in some spices, get this dish up on its feet,” he said. I wanted to add and running out the door; short of lowering one’s naked foot into the bottom of a slimy pond I found it hard to imagine a more depressing experience.

  I sipped my coffee, making little canyons in the sugar bowl with a spoon.

  “I worry about you sometimes,” Vernal said. I often caught him these days looking at me sideways as if he suddenly realized he knew nothing about me at all. I wanted to say to him what I knew to be true: we are all unknowable, aren’t we? But now — his eyes touched, for a moment, with an old kindness — he confessed he had been worrying about going back to work, too, about leaving me alone at the farm. He’d been racking his brain, he said, trying to think who he could ask to come and stay with me, so I wouldn’t have to fend for myself.

  I said I liked the idea of spending time alone, after thirteen years of not having had a moment to myself. He finished the joint and looked at me again, closely. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’ve got an ulterior motive.”

  I said, “How do you know what I think.”

  He said, “How do you know what I know?”

  I took my coffee to the sink and poured it down the drain, then went back upstairs feeling that vague uneasiness coming over me again, as if I’d caught a fragment of a shadow lurking just beyond the edges of my sight.

  My room was now filled with a musty, humus-like scent intermingled with Bounce. I heard Kurt Cobain singing “Jesus Don’t Want Me For a Sunbeam” even though I had left the radio off. There were flies everywhere. The window I had opened wide had been shut, and a wind had infiltrated my room like a malevolent spirit, upsetting the vase. I picked Angel’s photograph out of the spilled water, and dried it off on my sleeve.

  Aged Orange sat upright on my bed like a cartoon cat, his head rotating as he watched a fly circumnavigate the room. I drew the curtains and opened the window to get rid of the cloying smell that reminded me of Frenchy when she came back to the range after they failed to kill her the first two times, from the firing squad, then the gallows. The morning of your “date” you were given a change of clothing, a clean orange jumpsuit. Even though our keepers insisted it had been “freshly laundered”, it was bound to retain traces of the last girl who’d worn it to her execution. The smell of Bounce hung around for as long as a week afterwards.

  My copy of Beloved lay on the floor beside my bed. I only had one chapter, that last chapter, left to read and I had been savouring it: every time I had picked up the book I’d put it down again, as if I could postpone the bitter-sweet pang of disappointment that came with endings of any kind. I used the book to squash a fly the size of a blackberry that had landed on Angel’s photograph, then went back downstairs for a fly swatter or an aerosol can of Raid.

  Vernal said the sun must have enticed the flies from the cracks. He rummaged through the cupboard under the sink until he found what he said I needed — a device that let you suck up insects from a comfortable distance without having to risk making contact.

  I didn’t comment, but “from a comfortable distance without having to risk making contact” struck me as how we had spent much of our married life. When I was on the Row he had written to say he had finally taken my advice and started seeing a psychiatrist. He quit after the first session, claiming he didn’t need to pay $150 an hour to be reminded he had trouble getting close to people.

  I went back upstairs carrying the cordless insect vacuum, but by the time I reached my room the flies had disappeared.

  Aged Orange had become even more agitated in my absence. I tuned in to Radio Orca, and sat next to him on the bed. I stroked him until he calmed down to the sounds of humpback whales singing in the depths, and waited. Waited for a sign that life after death wasn’t just something invented by those left behind trying to be hopeful.

  After a while I got up and went into the bathroom. Here my mirror had been taken down and put back again, the reflecting side facing the wall. My toothbrush lay beside the sink, and my hairbrush, webbed with black hair that wasn’t my own. My box of tampons had been opened and left on the edge of the bathtub so that when I picked it up the contents spilled onto the floor. I left it there (I didn’t turn the mirror around, either), rinsed my toothbrush, and went back downstairs. Rainy had still not got it through her head that I didn’t like sharing my toothbrush — with any
one.

  One morning Vernal announced he was going to drive up to the Yaka Wind village of Old Mystic to ask Grace Moon to come and keep me company when he went back to work in Vancouver which, he said, he couldn’t put off doing forever. “She’d be closer to the ferry and to the airport, if her baby decides to come earlier than expected,” he said. When he put it that way, it was hard for me to object. He asked me to come for the ride.

  The road to the north wound under tall, keening poplars shedding their last gold leaves. Vernal drove more slowly than usual, as if competing with the proliferation of roadside shrines for sobriety. White crosses festooned with yellow ribbons, photographs of kids in their rented grad gowns, scraps of poetry duct-taped to telephone poles, and messages from friends: Have a Good One, You Go Girl, See Ya Around Bud. A few had bunches of dead carnations in glass jars green with dried algae, but mostly what we passed was an abundance of artificial flowers, in faded pinks and blues, which gave the memorials a kind of Value Village aura that made them even more sad.

  “I acted for one of these kids, a couple of years ago,” Vernal said. “He used to drive up to Old Mystic to do his drinking. He ran over a young girl, I forget her name, Charleen-something. His father bought him a faster car when he got acquitted, presumably so he could get out of town quicker next time. When he drove off a cliff a year after the accident, there were some people who thought he had it coming.”

  The Bend straightened out and the crosses died out, too. For a stretch there was little evidence of human life or its inevitable end, only solitude crowded with loneliness. It started raining as we climbed Garbage Dump Hill — what the locals called it, Vernal said. When we got to the top I saw the sign — “Mystic Landfill: Keep Our Dump Clean” — nailed to a tree at the start of a dirt track leading into the forest.

  “The original dump was on the sea side of the road,” Vernal said, pointing to the edge of a cliff that fell seven hundred feet to a rocky shore. “That’s where the first settlers — I don’t mean the natives — used to bring their trash. Pretty practical lot, when you think about it. They figured if you tossed your tins and bottles over the cliff the tide would take them away. That was back when “environment” was the hard word on a spelling test.”

  We drove on, descending to where the Bend followed the coastline north, then veered inland. The vegetation thinned the further from the sea we drove until we reached a clear-cut on Vernal’s side, and on mine a sheer rock face with netting to keep debris from falling on the road. “Whoaaaa,” Vernal said, swerving so that the cliff came close enough for me to kiss. I covered my head with my arms.

  “Buck. Two point. Nearly a dead buck,” Vernal said. I told him I’d watch the road for him if he would watch his driving, and at that moment the sun burst, like a fireball almost blinding me, from behind a muzzy cloud.

  Vernal slowed, put the hearse in neutral, let his window down, and pointed to the top of the rock cliff where a white and blue plaster statue of the Virgin gazed down on us, her hands folded in prayer.

  “Native Honour Site,” Vernal said. He said you could read the name of everyone who had died in an accident since the road had gone through. “The Yaka Wind people don’t go in for that individual shrine business. If you get killed on the road they don’t want to commemorate the spot. He paused, squinting into the sun. “Rain always slacks off around this place,” he said.

  I watched a gang of crows slice through the air, then land up ahead, not far from where a man stood, as if he had been waiting for us to come along. I hadn’t seen him at first because he blended so well with the terrain.

  Vernal put the hearse in gear and inched forward. I saw the hook sticking out of the man’s sleeve.

  “What’s he doing here?” Vernal said. He didn’t sound pleased.

  He braked, then accelerated again, as if he had felt the subtle change in heat that had passed through my body.

  “We can’t just leave him,” I said.

  Vernal pumped the brakes until we came to a stop a little way up the road from where Hooker stood, and leaned on the horn. I looked over my shoulder, watching Hooker walking towards us with his distinctive, rolling gait. The crows scattered, then regrouped further ahead. I opened the door and Hooker leaned in, said “back in a minute,” then disappeared into the bush.

  “Unreal,” said Vernal, shaking his head, and shutting off the engine, when the minute had stretched into five. A quarter of an hour later Hooker reappeared from the trees with a green garbage bag.

  “If you’ve got body parts in there, I don’t want to know,” Vernal said, as I moved over so Hooker could slip in beside me. His hair, smelling of wood smoke, brushed my face.

  “Roadkill, that’s all.” Hooker nudged me: a furry paw poked out of the bag he’d placed on the seat between his legs, and I looked away. “Most people won’t even bother picking it up anymore. Game warden catches you, you pay that new roadkill tax.”

  Vernal shook his head. “Who thinks up these things?” He glanced at the garbage bag, then asked Hooker what happened to the pickup he’d been driving the last time we’d seen him in the Port of Mystic.

  “Tide got her. We were clam digging and my sister she hit a soft spot. I told her, ‘Keep your eyes peeled for soft spots’, but she never listens.”

  Hooker didn’t sound too perturbed by his loss. He nudged me again, smiling so quickly that when it was over I wasn’t sure I’d seen it at all.

  We hadn’t driven more than a quarter of a mile before the rain began hammering the hearse again. For a while no one spoke, then Hooker said he’d caught a ride to the Honour Site earlier in the day to visit two of his cousins, Brad and Sugar, who’d died on their way home from an AA Meeting. “They were too smart, those two. Everybody knew they were going somewhere.”

  Vernal asked Hooker if life had quieted down in the village since the film crew had left. Hooker shook his head and said it didn’t even feel like home anymore; he wondered why he bothered hanging around. Vernal explained, for my benefit, that the band council had been paid a lot of money to let a Hollywood producer use the village as a location. They were making a movie about Vikings, but had come in August so had to import tons of Styrofoam to look like snow and transform the village into a Viking settlement. The Styrofoam had broken up in a storm and now the beaches were covered with snowballs that weren’t going to melt.

  “They covered the poles in front of our longhouse with dragon masks and shit. They even fucked up our church,” Hooker said.

  One night he and a few of his friends had been partying, and the film crew had come to shut them down. Complained they were making too much noise; the crew was trying to shoot a Viking ship full of Viking berserkers stoked with mead landing on the beach. “We weren’t supposed to complainabout that,” Hooker said. “We couldn’t even pass out, not until they raped and killed everyone and went to bed.”

  Hooker reached across me and took my left arm in his hand. He grinned at my frog bracelet, turned it around to examine it. “Nice carving,” he said, “nice and deep.”

  The frog was his naha’s, his mother’s crest, he said, the crest of a secret society that in the old days belonged only to women. “She told me — you put a frog on your head. If it stays on top it means you’ll have a long life. If it jumps off right away, it means . . . ” he looked at me as if trying to decide whether it was safe to continue.

  I took my bracelet off — I don’t know why I did this — and put it on my head. Hooker laughed when it fell off and rolled away from me on the floor.

  “ . . . it means someone else is going to die,” he continued. And then he said most white people thought they were crazy to believe in things like that.

  I looked up at him and met his eyes. He looked back down at my bracelet. He said he had been making jewellery himself for the past few years, but that you gained too much weight sitting still. He had recently started to work in wood, bigger pieces where you had to move around more.

  Vernal, as if sensing t
he mutual attraction, asked where Hooker wanted to be let out. “My naha’s place’ll do. She’s off island until next week some time, but Gracie’ll be there. I’ve been looking for my dog since yesterday. I figure he might have stopped in to visit Gracie and them for a bit.”

  Vernal said we had come to pay Grace a visit, too. “How’s she making out?”

  Hooker drew the flat of his hand across his throat. “You know how she gets,” he said.

  The further north we drove, the harder the rain fell. By the time we reached the village it was bouncing off the road and going back up.

  Vernal pulled in at the first house we came to, one with antlers hanging above the entrance, and strips of salmon drying on a clothesline. We followed Hooker into a mudroom where a hollowed out log — the start of a canoe — took up most of the space. On a table made of rough planks balanced on top of a stack of old Reader’s Digest magazines lay a mask Hooker said he had been working on — a welcoming gift for Gracie’s baby. “Wood keeps splitting on me,” Hooker said. I saw where the moon’s face had been severed by a crack in the grain.

  I heard laughter or crying — I couldn’t tell which — coming from inside the house, on the other side of a yellow cedar door carved with Raven stealing the light from the sky. Vernal said we should go, he didn’t want to intrude, but at that moment Gracie pushed open the door and stood, naked — except for her three gold bracelets — and hugely pregnant, in front of us. She seemed unaware of her nakedness and made no attempt to cover herself. Her cheeks were flushed, and she hadn’t brushed her hair, which made her look as if she’d just come back from running against the wind, or having lazy afternoon sex. Vernal began to apologize, said we were in the area, hadn’t meant to intrude, but Grace seemed to be in her own world, one it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to intrude upon.