Guide to Animal Behaviour

by Douglas Glover

  We knelt in the centre of the village, surrounded by corpses, for two days and nights, singing our death songs to no avail. Then we set fire to the place and started off together on foot, heading west, away from New France, toward the Anderhoroneron Land of the Dead.

  Last Years: Something of Me will Remain

  The epoch of martyrs and apostles was passing. My own great works were behind me. Many of the best people I called friend were in the grave. My hemorrhoids were chronic and most of my teeth had broken off as a consequence of gravel in the native corn-meal.

  Nickbis and I wandered among the Far Indians for a year (I saw my first beaver that winter near Fond du Lac, a small juvenile afflicted with mange, which was immediately clubbed to death by a local hunter and sold for a cup of inferior brandy), then made our desolate return to Boucherville.

  The village had swelled to a dozen log hovels, all sinking into the spring mud at a great rate. A horde of infants, barely toddlers, the hope and future of Canada, raced shrieking up and down the street, tormenting the hogs and fighting with them for scraps of food. Raw-cheeked housewives screamed at each other over their laundry tubs.

  There was a letter from the bishop waiting for me at my pig-barn manse.

  Once more, His Grace complained (in that pious tone he affected), I had proved lazy and inattentive to my priestly duties. I had failed to begin construction of a church, had performed no marriages, baptisms, burials or sick-bed visitations, and had neglected to post my annual letters to the King’s minister and the papal curia. I was to remove immediately to Sorel, a problem parish downriver, where I would surely learn the necessary lessons of discipline and humility.

  At Sorel, I built an Indian house and sweat lodge at the edge of the village, a hermitage where I passed my days in solitude, ignoring my parishioners who I felt certain would find something to complain about no matter what I did. The bishop heard of it and had me moved again.

  This happened more times than I care to remember. The years were trammelled with uprootings, forced marches and fresh failures.

  It was in Sorel that I began work on a definitive French-Anderhoroneron dictionary and an illustrated treatise on native customs, with my memoirs to follow. These documents, along with my notes and sketches, were lost when a bâteau loaded with my belongings foundered off the Beauport shore during a subsequent transfer.

  At Ile d’Orléans, Nickbis caught a head cold and went off in a day, without a whimper.

  At Lévis, I drank myself into stupors between weddings and confessions, until my health broke from too much adulterated trade brandy. Since then, I have lived on a diet of water and sagamite, a sort of Indian porridge.

  (They say that God tempers the souls of artists with suffering that their works might speak to the ages. I think it more likely He means to muffle them.)

  A month ago, Bishop Laval recalled me from domestic exile to paint yet another saintly corpse, Mother Marie de l’Incarnation of the Ursulines this time, my last full-scale portrait in oils while in Canada.

  The mourners had just lowered the old trout into her grave and were about to nail down the coffin lid when everyone noticed a radiance emanating from within which could only have been of divine origin. Eager to record this miracle for posterity and against the Sulpicians, the bishop ordered the body exhumed and sent his man Houssart to fetch me and my paint box. (They had to consult their records to discover what distant pulpit they had last assigned to me.)

  But Mother Marie had died suddenly of a gastric blockage, and I could see well enough that the illusion of radiance resulted more from putrefaction of the gut than saintliness of spirit. Nevertheless, I put onions up my nose and stretched the job out as long as possible, since His Grace rarely allowed me to visit the capital.

  Working from memory, I painted Sitole naked, with her hands upraised, in the centre of the Anderhoroneron village, with the sun shining down and a garland of lilies and marigolds in her hair. I placed Adelbert at her knee and myself next to them in my Indian clothes, my face painted half-red, half-black, the sign of the Whirlwind from which the Anderhoroneron say we are descended.

  I signed it H. Pommier-Plenty of Fish.

  Then I painted Mother Marie over top of Sitole in the grand manner, just the way Frère Luc would have done, with a halo like a China plate behind her wimple, a great wen on her chin, a pious squint, a bit of needlepoint in her hand and that mysterious radiance which was nothing more than Sitole and the Anderhoroneron sun gleaming through.

  I blacked the background and put in a narrow cruciform window such as the sisters had in their cells, a sacred heart and a Bible on a lectern with little beaver tails for bookmarks.

  It was a third-rate portrait (I didn’t bother to sign it) much admired in the colony, though the bishop noticed the beaver tails, which he chose to regard as a satirical interpolation and evidence of my spiritual incorrigibility.

  It was on account of the beaver tails that His Grace finally lost patience and ordered me back to France.

  One evening, while I was still engaged on the Mother Marie, I paid a call on Mistress Arlette Boisvert and we wept an hour together for our youth (she with eight children and a ne’er-do-well shipwright she called Bo-Bo for a husband).

  She had a boy, she said, who took much after me and could draw like an angel. She had apprenticed him to a stone mason, so he could learn to make his living carving religious images.

  I found the boy the following day in the stone-yard next to Our Lady. He had my eyes and the long arm and leg bones that give me my awkward, grasshopper look. I asked to see his work, and he showed me a gargoyle he was cutting for the transept roof. Then I asked to see the work he loved.

  He gazed at me thoughtfully for a moment, then swept the marble dust from a sheaf of drawings.

  There were eight Mary Magdalenes in crayon, five or six Annunciations, a Holy Family, an Adam and Eve in a garden stocked with moose and beaver and a copy of my Martyre, which he said he had seen while working inside the Hôtel-Dieu basement with his master.

  All the female subjects were from the same model, a girl just past puberty, half-Indian, by the look of her cheekbones and hair, with breasts like brown hen’s eggs and large pale nipples.

  He himself had posed for the Adam.

  THE OBITUARY WRITER

  We drifted along in this empire of death like accursed phantoms.

  — de Ségur

  1

  Aiden is in St. Joseph’s, dying of head injuries. Annie has gone Catholic on me. She has quit school and taken a job at a home for retarded children in West Saint John. She works the graveyard shift so she can spend the day with Aiden. Mornings, she visits the hospital chapel for mass. I hardly ever see her.

  Of all the brothers and sisters (there are a dozen O’Reillys, counting the parents), Aiden and Annie were closest in age and sympathy, though all they ever did in public was bicker and complain about one another. Aiden was the family clown, a bespectacled, jug-eared, loudmouthed ranter, given to taunting the younger children and starting fights — though he once sang in the cathedral choir and spent a year trying to teach himself the guitar. Annie is boyish and prim. She dawdles over her makeup, ties her red hair back and gets average grades in her university courses. But like many people who spend their lives reining themselves in, she has a soft spot in her heart for eccentrics and outsiders. One always knew that if anything happened to Aiden, it would be hardest on Annie. It is also natural that she should flail about, trying to locate beyond herself an agent responsible for this terrible tragedy. I say “beyond herself’ on purpose, because, of course, Annie O’Reilly blames herself for everything first. Then me.

  Mornings, in the chapel, she and God are sorting all this out. But I have little hope that He will see fit to represent my side of things.

  We live in a brick apartment house owned by a police sergeant who is dying of cancer. He ha
s told me about the operation he underwent, but not that he’s still dying. Maybe he doesn’t know. I know because the other day, returning from the scene of a fatal car crash on the MacKay Highway, I passed Sgt. Pye directing traffic. Father Daniel, Annie’s priest-uncle, happened to be driving with me. He said, “That one’s not long for this world. He’s full of cancer, just full of it. I’ve seen enough to know.” I was filled with envy then for Father Dan, for his knowledge of the mysteries of not-life, for his familiarity with the endless, dark ocean on which we float.

  That’s the sort of wisdom I sought when I first went hunting for a newspaper job. Mostly, though, I type obituaries and make lists of striking names to use in my short stories. Mornings, I rise early and type my dreams on a table beside our bed. Annie sometimes stops by on her way between the retarded home and the hospital. She’ll lean on the door-jamb, smoking a cigarette and watching me type my dreams. My habits mystify her. The minutiae of my psyche seem frivolous next to her crippled children and dying brother. She lives in a world of mythological horror. I read my dreams like tea leaves, observing the signs, the motions of the universe as they ruffle the limpid pool of the unconscious. I want to know who I am before I sink back into the inanimate. I tell her this.

  I go to the hospital. Aiden is in the head-injury ward, where old men mutter, fall out of bed or walk into the hall to be tackled and restrained by nurses. Once one of them grAbbéd Annie from behind and tried to choke her, a mad, fragile, leaf-dry, shit-stinking man.

  I stand beside her chair and say, “He’s in there. He’s in there practising for death. It’s been a shock. He never thought about it before. There’s this little man inside the bombed-out control centre with the frizzed wires and smoking lights, all dripping with goop from the fire extinguishers. He’s pressing buttons frantically, trying to get a line out, panicked, not knowing what to do.

  “Later, the little man will give up, collect his coat and lunchbox, wrap a scarf around his throat, turn out the lights and lock the door. Then Aiden will be dead. Where will the little man go? I don’t know. Home, probably. Back to the infinite split-ranch in the sky, with three pear trees in the back yard and a tire swing for the kids, and wait for his next job. What’s the little man’s name? He hasn’t got one. But he’s all there is.”

  Annie stares at me as if I were crazy; she prefers to pray. Aiden is taking it about as calmly as anyone, sleeping it off like a hangover. Life.

  Old Mrs. Lawson who lives on the floor below persists in leaving her door ajar. She treats the landing as a parlour and has decorated it with antique tables and ornately framed prints of Saint John harbour in the days of the sailing ships, the port a forest of spars and sheets. When she hears me climbing the stairs, as likely as not she will think of an excuse to ambush me and talk. Sometimes her stove won’t start — she’ll tell me she hasn’t had a hot cooked meal in a week. Sometimes she’ll gossip about Sgt. Pye who bought the building from her after her husband’s death.

  Once she told me about the tenant who used to live in the apartment Annie and I share. (She insists on calling Annie “Mrs. Cary,” though I have told her a dozen times we aren’t married. As in, “Is Mrs. Cary still keeping those late hours? Mercy me!”) It turns out that our bed was a deathbed, something I had long suspected, though for no particular reason. Frank Beamish, a retired foreman from the sugar refinery, died there in his sleep a month before we moved in. Of course, Sgt. Pye cleaned and redecorated the place, but, said Mrs. Lawson, she can’t help thinking she senses “something” above her head late at night, when the distant foghorns sound.

  I think of Aiden in his bed, and Frank Beamish and Annie in bed with me (yes, there is a symbolism attached to beds, those banal loci of love, death and dreams) and my strange dreams since we moved in. This bedroom of broken dreams.

  Mornings, when I type my dreams, my mouth is bitter and clogged with dead cell detritus. It floats in the air. Those motes you see in the sunlight in the window. Annie used to be a sack angel — that was her revolt, everyone’s really, the only thing we do to reverse the current, twisting and snapping our backs like salmon struggling upstream, against the flood of time, to spawn and die. We would beat together like fighters in a ring, like tiger-moths against the killer light, and Annie would expire, whispering, “I love you. I love you.”

  She was a technical virgin when we met, though she had had a lover in high school, an older girl she met playing badminton. When this girl left for Montréal to study nursing, she began writing Annie passionate love letters. Annie panicked, burned the letters, flushing the ashes down the toilet, drawing back from the aberrant entanglement, the suck and slop of emotion, the dark flow. She became prim. At a party, drunk and ironical and somewhat provoked by her coldness, I put my hand down the back of her pants and felt her ass. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “Why are you hurting me?” Later, I made her bleed. “I love you,” she would say, and die. “I love you.”

  After sex, she becomes formal, embarrassed, shy and neat, with every hair in place, her back straight. I sometimes laugh at her, laugh in her face. I say, “Abandonment is a commentary on primness, just as my dreams are a gloss on obituary-writing.” She makes a sour face, reties her hair and takes an extra fifteen minutes with her makeup to drive me mad. We both understand that I am titillated by her dual nature and her lesbian past. I am a lover of paradox, of outre juxtapositions and jokes — this is the way we talk about death.

  Across the landing, there is a single room Sgt. Pye rents to a middle-aged black man named Earl Delamare. Earl is the colour of dust, or he is one of those black people whose skin always looks like it needs a quick buff-up with Lemon Pledge. Earl lives on welfare and a disability pension for some back injury. He’s unmarried. He has never spoken to Annie or me. The first week or two after we moved in, he would open his door a crack whenever we came or went — dusty skin, white eyeball. It gave Annie the shivers. She would shake her shoulders and skip out of sight, either down the stairs or into the apartment.

  Now that we hardly ever come and go together, I rarely see Earl. Though mornings, when she stops by for a visit, Annie sometimes remarks that he is still there, watching. When she is cranky, she’ll accuse me of being friends with Earl, or make believe we are twin brothers, or one and the same person. The truth is Earl and I don’t get along well, this in spite of the fact that we have never even spoken to each other.

  Nights, now that Annie’s away, Earl will get drunk and stand outside my door shouting obscenities, taunting me about my lost sweetheart. I do not respond — at first, because I was afraid of him; now, because I am not afraid of him — which only infuriates Earl. He rants on the landing, getting drunker. (God knows what Mrs. Lawson thinks is going on. Perhaps this is the only “something” she senses.) He creates complex plots out of whole cloth, accusing me of devilish connections, quoting Revelations, speaking other names I do not recognize. He says he’s going to call Sgt. Pye and have the police put an end to my racist cabal, before my friends and I burn him out. Lately, he’s been going on about some mysterious group called the Numero Cinq, which he thinks is holding meetings in our apartment.

  I do not tell Annie any of this. Perhaps none of it’s true.

  I tell her, “Without someone else we cannot exist.” Of course, I mean this in the contemporary sense — the Other.

  She hasn’t forgiven me for taking a newspaper job. Or, more precisely, she hasn’t forgiven me for being content, for burrowing into the warm mud of the daily press, like an ancient fish into its river bed, and waiting. She prefers my previous incarnation as a discontented junior lecturer at the university at Tucker Park, where we met — long hair and tattered jeans, waving my unfinished dissertation like a toreador’s cape, the student’s friend. Because she cannot bring herself to rebel, she adores rebellion in others — in this way all love is pathological. But I have grown tired of drawing attention to myself.

  Moreover, it
was her father who introduced me to the city editor. Of course, Annie worships her father, that gruff, taciturn patriarch. Yet their relationship is difficult, and she yearns for independence. Her father found Aiden jobs, too. The summer before Aiden worked on the Digby ferry as a deck hand to earn his university tuition. But Aiden made a show of accepting the job under duress, with an air of knowing his father had laid something on the line to get him hired, to which extent the father was now in his son’s power.

  Aiden boasted he could always go back to cutting pulp in the woods. But the last time he did this he nearly cut his foot off with a chain saw. Aiden’s body is an archaeology of his experiences: the chain weal on his cheek from a fight with a biker, the knife scars on his arm from the time he and a friend intervened to stop a gang rape on the night beach at Mispec, the thick diamonds of white skin on his knuckles where he smashed his hand through the kitchen wall after an argument with his father.

  Now Aiden is dying; he’s only nineteen and, though we live together, I don’t see Annie anymore.

  The librarian is a fey, blonde woman named Lyn Shaheen. She wears wire-rim glasses and has long, thin breasts of exceptional whiteness. For weeks I went to the library hoping only to catch a glimpse of her out of the corner of my eye. One day I screwed up enough courage to speak. I said, “I’m writing a book, a novel, you might say. I need music to go with it. In the text, I mean. I need something mad, something eerie.” She looked at me strangely, but led me to the record collection. Mussorgsky, she thought. Night on Bald Mountain. Cage, she suggested. But no, experimental music would be too rational. Lyn Shaheen. I played the records.

  In truth, I am writing a novel. It’s about a woman with epilepsy, a rare form of the disease in which the fits are triggered by the sound of music. The young woman is a concert cellist who develops seizures in her twenties following a car accident. Out of pity, her lover murders her. On subsequent visits to the library, I have told Lyn the plot of my book. We have had coffee together at the Ritz restaurant next to the bookstore on King Square. We have kissed in the street, though I was terrified one of the O’Reillys would see us and report me to Annie.