The Cast Stone
Page 27
Ben reached across the table and picked up the red-and-white book from in front of Benji. “This isn’t so bad, I like the comparison between Christianity and Stalinism and Hitler, but it doesn’t really get us anywhere. Attacking Christianity doesn’t increase our understanding of where we are.” He put it back down; “When you finish it maybe you would like something written without the confusion of philosophy. I can’t remember who it was, someone once said that rationality was the flatulence around reason.” And with that he went over to his little library of three bookshelves against the back wall where he kept only those treasures that were too important to abandon when he left academia. He searched for a few seconds before he found what he was looking for, returned and set the thin volume at Benji’s elbow.
Late in the evening, after Rosie went home and after the supper dishes were done, when Elsie and Benji were alone momentarily, when the warmth of the log walls absorbed her words, Elsie asked, “So what was that book your dad gave you this afternoon?”
“Oh that. You know, I was sure he was going to give me something by Nietzsche.” Benji went and got the book and brought it to her. “He said to read it after I finished Bertrand Russell, so I’m kinda skimming along to get it done.”
Elsie examined the cover, “Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. I think I would like to read this.” She turned it over to read the back jacket.
Monica cried. It was more than that her eyes watered from being burned; she lay in her bed, covers over her head and her face buried deeply into a pillow and cried. She was by herself; Abe left hours ago. He assured her, promised her that her sight would come back. “It’s just severe welder’s flash, hurts like hell for a few days, but you’ll be all right. Just stay in the dark and I will be back now and then to check on you.”
She hugged the pillow her face was buried into; squeezed hard, pulled it to her breast and let her tears pour. The worst part about being blind wasn’t the pain, it wasn’t even the fear; the fear that someone or something unseen was going to attack and you were defenceless in a world of white light. No, the worst part about being blind was this strange form of loneliness, unable to see people, forced to live inside of your head, alone.
She wondered if she might be crying for Betsy — probably not; Betsy was a traitor, a fake, a liar — if she was crying at all for Betsy, it was for the loss of a friend and that friend was lost before Betsy went into that house.
Perhaps she was crying for Ben, for the life companion, the husband that he had never become. She wasn’t sure. She was filled with sorrow and despair that seemed to gurgle up from the deepest part of her soul as though she was mourning. She wondered if she was crying for a home, for a family, for Benji; all of those things that she had denied herself, given up for the resistance.
She sat up, sniffed loudly; wiped the wet away from her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse. Her eyes burned, but not with the same intensity as before. She strained to see something through the white glare, anything; and was rewarded with the dim silhouette image of Abe standing silently in the doorway.
“¿Señora,Quieres algo para desayunar?”
Kay smiled back at the young, nicely tanned waiter. “Yo no hablo español,” she did the best she could.
“Oh, Señora, I asked if you wanted breakfast with your coffee,” without any hint of an accent.
“I’ll wait, my husband will be down in a few minutes.”
An easy wind came in from the Atlantic and brushed Kay’s bare shoulders. Maybe she should have brought a shawl; yes a shawl would go nicely here at the sidewalk café. She could have sat inside, but it seemed that she had been inside all winter and when you are on vacation, well . . . you put up with a little chill in the morning. Here in Miramar, Argentina, it was summer, or rather late summer, early autumn. It wasn’t cold, frozen Toronto where Kay and Stan Jolly kept their home, and it was definitely a lot warmer than mid-March on the Saskatchewan prairie and Kay’s family’s farm.
She liked it here. She could relax. The tension of home, the constant tension, the tension that was always there, so always there that it became normal and you didn’t notice it, wasn’t here. They left it behind, left the constant wariness; they stepped off the plane in the sunshine and it was no longer heavy on their minds, on their bodies, on their spirits. Here she was just a tourist, just a retired schoolteacher from Canada tourist, having a normal morning cup of coffee, at a normal outdoor restaurant, and Stan . . . well today he too would be the tourist. He would join a group of kayakers and explore the coast, a normal tourist thing to do, and Kay would maybe go down to the beach, more probably wander the streets looking into shops, not shopping, listen to people speaking Spanish just for the sound, have lunch somewhere, a nice sandwich, and later in the afternoon maybe a yerbe mate. She had become quite fond of the local drink, an infusion served in a gourd and drunk through a silver straw, and the known fact that it reduced cholesterol simply added to the pleasure. And it seemed to Kay that it helped with her arthritis, maybe she was imagining it, it might be the sunshine, or more probably it had to do with not living under constant stress; anyway the ache wasn’t as intense as usual. It wasn’t enough that she could go kayaking with her husband today, or mountain climbing with him last week, but it made life much more enjoyable.
A chair scraped and she looked up. “You finished posting?”
“It’s done.” Stan put the computer bag on the sidewalk beside the chair before sitting. “You have my absolute undivided attention until noon.” He looked around for the waiter.
Kay touched his elbow across the table. “What was the result?”
He looked back toward her: “Inconclusive.”
“Come on Stan, was it or wasn’t it?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“Well, what did you post?” she corrected herself, “what did That Jack post?”
“Only that the bolt from heaven was dropped on a house in Saskatoon. I didn’t say anything about the barrel of yellowcake.”
“Why not?” Kay’s tone changed, Stan could be frustrating at times.
“Because we don’t know for sure.”
She stared at him for a long second, he was serious. She leaned forward, lowered her voice a little, “We know they dropped it on the house, we know there was a barrel of yellowcake uranium in the basement. Now, maybe no one has done any testing, but it seems only logical to me that Saskatoon is completely contaminated.”
“Okay, then let’s examine what we know for sure. When the bolt hit the house it was pure plasma. Tungsten melts at 3,422 degrees celcius, and uranium melts at 3,027 degrees, so we can assume that all of the uranium was vapourized.”
Kay sat back. Stan had done his homework. She thought of something she had read not that long ago. “Remember Suzuki’s Sacred Balance?”
Stan was looking for the waiter again, “Uh-huh.”
“Remember that bit about Shapley I think his name was?
“No.” Stan looked back at her.
“Well he said that if we calculate the amount of argon in a single breath, I can’t remember how many atoms there are, but something like trillions and trillions and he calculated — and I do remember this — each breath we take has about four hundred thousand atoms that Gandhi once had in his lungs. And each breath we take has atoms that Jesus once had and atoms from Hitler and Stalin.”
Stan thought about it for a moment. “It’s worse than that. Even if the uranium was vapourized on impact, it would only be vapour until it cooled down again.”
“Okay, so I’ve read Doris Lessing and I get it.” Benji held the lead dog, Duchess, while Ben harnessed one of the full-grown puppies. “Don’t belong to any organization, how simple.”
“Right. If you belong to them, then they own you.”
Benji thought for a moment about that play of words. “Yeah.” He nodded his head, happy outdoors in the sunshine of early March, with a bit of warm wind coming from the southwest.
“It’s also
kinda like that dog you’re holding there.” Ben finished harnessing, attached a tug line, and stopped. “For most of the winter I’ve been telling her that haw means I want her to turn left and gee means I want her to turn right. She doesn’t question it. She’s been told it so many times consistently that it’s become her truth. She probably believes me because I am the alpha male here. I am the one that brings the food. And her puppies.” Ben waved a gloved hand at the other five dogs harnessed to the toboggan, “They believe that this is normal, perhaps even natural and necessary, look at them, they’re anxious, they want to do this. It’s like they’re saying, come on already, let’s go. I’ve only been running them a few months and already this is their absolute truth, they belong to this team.” A dog jumped over its teammate. Ben gently put it back on its side of the gangline. “People get that way too, get to believing something is natural and necessary because that’s all they ever experienced.”
Benji joked, “So should I turn her loose?”
“Naw, she’s too domesticated, wouldn’t survive on her own yet. In time she could learn to go back to being wild and free, run with a pack because the pack was her family and not because the pack was a yellow dog pack or capitalist pack or conservative pack or a resistance pack.” Ben stood on the back of the toboggan. “Okay, let her go.”
Benji let go of Duchess’s collar and stood aside. The team began to run all at the same time, a fast, long-legged lope, and as Ben went by, he leaned out and gave Benji a pat on the shoulder. “Be back in about a couple hours.”
She could kill Monica, that would be easy, she knew where Monica lived, knew her habits, how she always used the elevator to get to the parking level of her apartment. It would be simple, Betsy would sit in a car near the elevator and wait — simple, easy and unsatisfactory. No, Monica deserved to die a fuck of a lot slower than that. It was simply a matter of principle. Betsy grinned at the idea, “Yeah, on principle, Now who was being principled — bitch?”
Her feet still hurt from the frostbite, and the new shoes didn’t help. The pain fed her anger, she breathed in deep, exhaled with a surge through clenched teeth. She was going to fuck Monica the way Monica had never been fucked before, take away the one thing that that the bitch cherished the most. Betsy was going to kill Ben — kill the idea, kill the principle. Then she would come back and kill Monica too — and Abe — just for the fuck of it.
The early sun reflected off the sharp edge of an axe that hung by a strap attached to the dog sleigh, a tiny flare lost in the sparkle of sun on crystallized snow. The sleigh runners made a slicing sound behind the team that ran a familiar track along the edge of Moccasin Lake. Ben stepped down on the sleigh brake, and shouted a calm “whoa” that brought the team and the sleigh to a stop. Most of the seven dogs looked back over their shoulders as though to ask, “What’s up, why’d we stop?”
Ben had no reason. The dogs had not run far and did not need a rest. The track across the lake was clear. No reason other than he wanted to, it felt right, just stop and enjoy the warmth of the sun on his face for a minute, to take off his gloves and grab a handful of snow just to feel it melt between his fingers and wipe the wet across his face, to walk up to the lead dog and scratch her behind the ear for a minute and tell her she’s “a good dog, yeah, you’re a good dog.”
There wasn’t much left of winter, the remainder of March, then most of April and the geese would come back and the lake would melt. The sun already gave a good warmth and stood higher in the southern sky; a pale blue completely cloudless sky. There to the south, just above the horizon, a black spot caught Ben’s attention. He watched it, mildly curious, a raven probably; more than likely a raven. But ravens were still mating this time of year and there should be two of them.
The black spot became slightly larger. It was clearly a bird. Ben noted the flight pattern of flap and glide. Pelicans fly like that, so do eagles, as do ravens occasionally. It wasn’t a pelican, too early, no open water. So, it was either a raven or an eagle. If it was an eagle it would be the first to migrate back, the first to return to their nesting grounds. Ben waited. Scratched the lead dog’s ears absentmindedly for no other reason than she deserved kind treatment and for the feel of fur on his hand.
The eagle flew straight towards Ben and the team. He recognized its flight long before he could make out its white head and tail. As it passed directly overhead in a long glide, wings outstretched, it banked steeply to its left, made a circle as it descended and landed on the snow-covered lake a dozen metres from the back of the sleigh.
At first Ben was wary, looking around. This was not normal behaviour for an eagle. There was nothing here to attract it. It wasn’t like a fisherman had left something out on the ice that an early eagle would be interested in, something to eat before the lake ice melted and it could fish for itself. It would be hungry though, it had come a long ways. He took a sack filled with chunks of frozen fish from the sleigh, snacks for the dogs, and tossed a few greasy pieces out towards the large bird.
It kept its distance. Ben dumped the sack. There wasn’t a lot in it, something though, a bit, an offering. “Hey, Mikisew,” he spoke softly, reverently, “Hey, Grandmother. You can see far, you can see the future, you can see the past. Thank you for coming back to us.” He gave the sack a final shake for the last fish crumbs, pulled up on the sleigh brake. The dogs leaning into their harness, eager to run again, did not need to be told when the tension came off the gangline. They burst into a quick lope. Ben looked back, turned around on the sleigh so that he was facing backward and watched the eagle hop toward the offering he had left, accepting it.