“Are you saying I deserved Sam?”
“In a way. Don’t forget, you got two years of great sex. I’ve only had great sex about six times in the last three years.”
“Yeah, but your husband doesn’t lie to you. At least not in a major way.”
“Yes, but we’re not talking about me. You had an incredible adventure. Unfortunately adventures aren’t always positive. Some of them turn out very badly. Look at all those people who die climbing Mount Everest, or some such mountain.”
“You’re not cheering me up Sarah.”
“Oh, just get on with your life. I’ve seen your art work lately and it’s amazing. You’ve been through the fire and it’s made you a better woman and artist. You’re on a positive path. Maybe publishing the journals is the negative path.”
China soon realized the journals would never be published in time to stop Sam. Probably no publisher would want to have anything to do with the ravings of a lust-demented grandmother. She debated whether or not she should call Carrie but decided not to. She had sent her a letter months ago and never received a reply. Why make life worse for Lily by dragging her soon-to-be husband through the mud? She probably wouldn’t listen anyway. Maybe a lovely young aboriginal wife who could give Sam babies would be his ticket to heaven. She decided it was best to keep Sam and Grimshaw Island in her past where they belonged. Let them take care of each other.
~ ~
Two weeks later China’s lawyer called with the news of Sam’s death. Sam, who almost never fished, had taken Bear’s boat. The weather hadn’t been particularly bad, but neither had it been perfectly calm. The wrecked boat was found on the rocks near Seal Beach, although Sam’s body had not been recovered.
“There’s something else China,” said her lawyer. “The local police suspect that he may have been murdered.”
“Murdered! By whom?”
“Well, it seems that Sam was courting a local princess. Her father decided to check him out and discovered that Sam had embezzled funds from his former employer.”
“Oh, my God, it’s never ending. How come he was never disbarred?”
“Well, the firm wanted to avoid embarrassment, so they just warned Sam that he’d better stay on the straight and narrow or they’d come after him.”
“That’s still no reason to kill him.”
“It gets worse. Sam was impatient for the wedding night and he was caught deflowering the lovely princess. Her uncle and brother beat up Sam pretty bad but he was still alive when they dumped him at his house. His mother, Anita, said he went out at noon the following day and she called the police when he didn’t return by midnight.”
“I’m sure Sam wasn’t murdered because he would have been beaten to death - probably with a foot sideways.”
“Pardon me?”
“Oh nothing. It’s a Grimshaw thing. If they intend to kill someone, they do it. No. Sam was just being taught a lesson. How long do they continue searching for the body?”
“They’ve stopped already. The weather’s really bad. China, the police might call with a few questions.”
“I’ve got nothing to hide. I haven’t heard from Sam since the divorce.”
“All right. If I hear anything else, I’ll let you know.”
China hung up and waited for the tears that didn’t come. She felt sorry for Anita and May and vowed to send them both a sympathy card, which was all she could do. She didn’t feel very sorry for Lily who was young and beautiful and better off without Sam. Poor Sam. His last two years had not been good ones. The shame of the aborted Thunder Ceremony, the divorce, and then his future plans had all gone up in a cloud of lie-filled ashes. He would not have been able to stay on the island. How much humiliation could a person bear, even it was self-inflicted? Sam must have just gone out into the storm and prayed for the sea and the winds of fate to swallow him up. And they had. Sam had disappeared without a trace.
China moped around her apartment unable to comprehend that Sam was dead. The man who had filled her mind and body and soul for almost three years no longer existed and she couldn’t fit that strange fact into her mind. Even after she’d divorced Sam and carried on with her life she still thought of him too frequently, still at times burned for the feel of him.
March 3/99
Sam is dead, presumed drowned. I don’t feel much of anything except disbelief. How ridiculous of the living to believe that death is final! Death and divorce are just stupid pieces of paper that have nothing to do with final. I can’t cry. I just feel angry for the waste of it all. We could have both been transformed, him by the truth, and I by gratitude and relief.
China went to her studio and carved late into the night. She ritually sculpted an eight inch version of Sam #1, laid it in a cedar coffin, and nailed a bronze plaque on the cover engraved with the words: Sam Eagle “Death by Lying.” She thought that by putting Sam in a coffin she’d finally get rid of him, but it didn’t work. She walked around, a vessel unwilling, filled to the brim with memories that wouldn’t release her. She had an idea that if she read every word in her journals from the beginning of Sam, then maybe she could cry, maybe she would be freed forever of the demon lover that haunted her dreams.
You creep into my thoughts
that ought, by now,
have scorned you,
yet you wield a ghostly power
that makes me yield to your embrace,
Like a wraith you glide
into my dreams
and laugh at my closed face.
The next day China went to her safety deposit box and retrieved the three journals with the brocaded covers, green, blue and red. She read every word of her demented passion for Sam, every discovered lie and some she discovered for the first time. She relived her anger and frustration, walked through the words grimly, determined to trample every lie forever so it no longer had the power to reach up out of the muck and grab her with regret.
She read her love for the beauty of Grimshaw, relived the long, solitary walks on the beach when sea fog crept into her bones and mingled with the tears on her face, remembered the sometime sunshine turning the sea to waving diamonds. The smell of Grimshaw came back to her, the damp, seaweedy, cedar smell that cleared her head and cooled her lungs.
Tears filled her eyes and gushed like rain-swelled rivers down her face when she realized that of the countless walks on several beaches, Sam’s big warm hand enclosing hers had only accompanied her once. He had not loved the island the way she did. She walked with the ocean and the sand and screaming eagles and dancing sandpipers, but for Sam, Grimshaw Island was a place to not pay income tax and to keep China prisoner.
She finished reading the journals and placed them on the bookshelf next to Sam’s coffin. She continued with her life feeling strangely disconnected and waited for the passage of time to bring her peace.
~ ~
Epitaph
Months after Sam’s death, China still mourned occasionally for the love that had been so powerful, so doomed. She understood so much more, now that it was too late. Perhaps, it was always too late for Sam. At first she didn’t understand why, after reading all her intimate secrets, he didn’t use them to love her better. Now she knew that her fierceness, her pride, and her demanding honesty had overwhelmed him. He didn’t even try to change because he knew he couldn’t. He just waited miserably for her to finally get fed up and leave.
In her life with Sam, she was understanding, full of fun and crystal clear in what she needed. In her daily loving she forgave his transgressions. There was no forgiveness in her journals. Just an angry litany of his lies and her oft repeated ultimatum that she would leave if he didn’t shape up.
Did he lie more to see what he could get away with? Did he then check in the diary to see if she had discovered him? Did he crow with secret glee when he had fooled her once again? Did he go that far in his manipulation, or not? Was he suddenly happy when he read a passionate account of how much she loved him? He didn’t read much of that in
the later journals. He must have seen the loving China in his arms meld with the angry woman in the journals. He had waited helplessly, with great cowardice, for her to realize that no amount of scribbling, or loving, would change him.
He didn’t have the energy or belief to become the man that was promised at his birth. He had manufactured the image, which had drained him of all his resources, but it was false. He searched out strong women to give him life. Women were biologically attracted to his big, strong body, and erotic charm, believing that his physical strength would protect them, but then his kind of love inevitably disappointed them when they found out how weak he was.
She now believed that he lied every which way. He lied, carelessly, weakly, unconsciously, and sometimes, maybe often, he lied with real, manipulative intent. He was evil incarnate clothed in handsome and charm. A lying devil, and the devil had possessed her. He was the demon lover who still entered her fantasies and made her shake with desire.
China knew from past experience that the only way to get rid of one lover was to find another, but she seriously doubted she’d ever fall in love again. She didn’t even want to entertain the idea of losing herself again. China hoped she’d find an easier way of exorcizing Sam from her mind and body forever.
June 17/99
The only way I knew how to love a man was to put aside my will. I believe that’s what many women do. The DNA of surrender is programmed into our hearts and bodies. Except that my total surrender never lasted very long - usually about three years. The time it took to fall out of love with them, and back in love with myself. It was a very gradual process, but every now and then my men would sense that I was not the biddable creature they thought I was. I ensnared them with my gentle, loving ways and occasionally they’d catch a glimpse of my intellect and formidable will. When this happened they thwarted me or put me down. If I had shown them who I really was right from the beginning, we would never have lasted a year.
With a few men, I showed my true self, independent, smart and willful, but only because I didn’t want them. Yet with the three I chose, I slipped into a pattern even I didn’t recognize. I now believe these relationships were karmic and I repeated the memory of who I was in a past life in order to live with them. How they must have been shocked when the new China surfaced.
It was different with Sam because my will surfaced very quickly, in the journals, fueled by his endless lies. He thought he’d found a woman who lied as much as he did, the huge difference being that I was lying only to myself and because he read it, felt that I was lying to him. How ironic that a man who lied so much about everything would marry a lie detector. What a macabre dance we led each other, locked in an erotic embrace of lies and discovery, our only neutral ground, a mattress.
China closed her journal and looked thoughtfully at Sam’s lovely cedar coffin for a long time. Then she called a friend of hers who welded iron and steel into beautiful candelabra and shelves and told him what she wanted. She waited a few days, did some carving, made plane reservations and ferry reservations, and went to pick up her special order.
China walked onto the ferry to Grimshaw Island wearing a black wig and large sunglasses. She asked the taxi driver to take her to Seal Beach, where Bear’s wrecked boat had been found. The driver was still the inevitable Eddie, who never spoke unless spoken to first, and China didn’t speak except to tell Eddie her destination and ask him to pick her up two hours later. He looked at her curiously, then shrugged and nodded and drove away.
She walked down the empty beach with her heavy duffle bag and set it down when she could no longer carry it. She looked around remembering all the lovely, lonely times she had tramped this beach. The memory of the white shoe came unbidden and for a moment she regretted that she hadn’t given the shoe to the RCMP. Perhaps the family would have been pleased to have a memory of the daughter, or sister whose body had never been recovered. Perhaps not. They had plenty of other memories of her. Why would they want the death debris memory of her struggle with her last cold Atlantic breath?
China gathered together a few dead branches, threw some kerosene on the wood and fed the fire until she had a nice blaze going. She spread open the bag to reveal Sam’s coffin, took out the branding iron, made by her friend, and heated it in the fire until it was red hot. She then pressed the iron into the lid of the coffin, burning the word LIAR forever into the wood.
She took out all her Sam journals, threw them on the fire and watched the flames devour her tormented life with Sam. She considered cremating Sam and his coffin but she didn’t want to go so far as to tamper with tradition. The Grimshaw Indians believed in reincarnation and also believed that they could only return as Grimshaw Indians. Once a Grimshaw, always a Grimshaw. The bones had to be buried on the island so their spirits would know where to return. The buried bones sent out a homing beacon so to speak. Made perfect sense to China.
She doused the fire, left the branding iron on the sand to cool, picked up her bag and walked into the trees above the water line. She found a mossy clearing, took out her small shovel and dug a hole deep enough to bury Sam. She pried the lid off the coffin and looked at her last Sam doll. She had carved a perfect likeness of his face, a perfect, miniature Sam doll, only eight inches tall, which was the height of his penis in full erection. Sam’s penis had actually had different heights, depending on his mood, and how much booze he had imbibed. It was always effective no matter the inches but China preferred eight. She picked up the small wooden stake she had carved, and the sledge hammer, and drove the wooden stake right into Sam’s lying little wooden heart. A tremor ran threw her body as she pounded. Was it Sam’s spirit, the last sigh of her love being expelled, or was it simply a tremor of great satisfaction?
She reached into her pocket, withdrew a piece of paper and read Sam’s “Epitaph.”
You creep into my thoughts
that ought by now
have scorned you,
yet you wield a ghostly power
that makes me yield
to your embrace,
Like a wraith you glide
into my dreams, and laugh
at my closed face;
I would have my subconscious
put you to rest. Here,
lies a fellow poet
who inveigled me
in deceptions
But I had eyes too wise
to see the cloak
that hid his duplicity,
He didn’t like
my bull’s-eye arrows
that punctured his skin
with little stings,
He slowly crumpled,
a deflated balloon
and my very womb
rejected him;
To love a man
with nothing but pity
soon finds
the heart’s contempt.
China placed Sam’s Epitaph in the little coffin, nailed the lid back on, and shoved it into the grave. She filled in the grave and jumped on the earth to tamp it down. She scattered old, dead branches and handfuls of moss over the fresh earth and in a couple of minutes even she couldn’t find where Sam was buried.
She still had half an hour left before Eddie’s return so she gathered some shells and a few small pieces of driftwood. Her bag soon looked as heavy when she left the beach as when she had arrived. China loved practical solutions to difficult problems. It had been a very expensive solution, but worth every penny. She walked towards Eddie’s taxi with a jaunty step and a smile on her face.
All of a sudden her steps slowed and a horrible thought slipped her smile upside down. What if Sam, the master of deceit, wasn’t really dead? His body had never been found. What if he planned his death and was lying somewhere with another woman, poor thing, and the proof of perjury now a pile of ashes waiting for high tide? China felt a strange mixture of fear and laughter. Oh well, she thought, I’ve done all I can do to stop him. The rest is up to fate.
China waved as she approached Eddie’s taxi.
China Collins had said her final goodbye to Sam Eagle.
THE END
Questions & Answers
Questions posed by a book club and answered by the author.
Q. How did the author research/ learn about the acceptance/ or not of ‘white’ art in a native community. I wondered how in a community that has such divisions would the introduction of an ‘outsiders’ art be accepted?
A. My experience/research is that they work side by side doing their own thing and admiring each others art. China wasn’t on the island long enough to be an artistic threat. Sam was considered to be much more of a threat to the status quo.
Q. Did the author receive any feedback (positive/ negative) from the native community about the book?
A. Grimshaw Island doesn’t exist, therefore neither does the native population on that island. So far I have heard only one comment from an Inuit who had nothing but praise. My publisher did very little to market Liar beyond the shores of Newfoundland.
Q. Sam and China had a very complicated relationship. Do you feel that marriage (because of all the mundane/day to day activities that it usually must address) is doomed to be complicated/confining?
A. I wouldn’t compare their marriage to anyone else’s because Sam is not “normal”. Generally speaking, I have rarely seen a truly happy marriage but they do exist and are a delight to behold.
Liar Page 23