Still Waters

by John Moss

  Morgan’s eyes adjusted to the chiaroscuro lattice of shadows and light that surrounded him. Tracing in his imagination where the man must have spent all those hours, he lowered his weight to the floor and found it difficult to breathe.

  A hand-forged nail lying on top of an exposed joist caught his eye. He picked it up and toyed with it, imagining other hands holding it, other eyes examining the flanged head where it had been drawn and snipped from redhot iron two centuries earlier. Morgan had read about nails. He knew the different shapes of pioneer nails, each peculiar to one region or another, declaring its vintage as clearly as if it were labelled. He didn’t own antiques, but he loved reading about Canadiana, especially early Ontario furniture with its original paint. He watched the Antiques Road Show, both the British and American versions, on late-night reruns.

  As he replaced the nail, exactly where he found it, he noticed deliberate marks etched into a wallboard. He brushed the dust away with the side of his hand, blew across what seemed to be letters.

  The inscription was brief and enigmatic, like the flourish of a signature that concealed yet expressed identity. The first letter was a capital M, like a skull with the top carved away. The next was a B, crudely done with the eyes of the letter gouged out. Then there were a linked pair of letters, what seemed like a gaping mouth with a slash to one side, followed by the crooked jaw of a G. Leaning to the side, he spied in the shadow of an upright beam other marks scratched into the wood. When his eyes adjusted, the marks became very distinct: M period. Q period.

  Griffin knew her name!

  Morgan could taste bile in his throat. How many hours and years did he hide here, watching? Morgan spat into the dust.

  “Mary Bingham Carter-Griffin,” Miranda explained when he described what he had found after rejoining her. “His mother. He named the semiology institute after her.”

  “He knew your name!”

  “So you said. Names aren’t that big a mystery in a village. It would be easy to find out from the mill hands. Everyone knows who everyone is — you don’t know them, necessarily, but you know who they are.”

  “That’s why I like cities. You know who you know. And who you don’t know, you don’t know. It’s simple. That wanking creep knew it was you he was watching.”

  “Why does that make it worse? Morgan, there are people in the city, you see them for years, they have your coffee and muffin ready when you get off the subway because you’re a regular and you tip them at Christmas. They sell you a paper, a haircut, shoes. They nod to you in the hall, you pat their dog. They work in your office at unknown labours. On the street corner you give them a dollar once a week and miss them when they’re gone, maybe in rehab or dead, you don’t know. You know these people. You don’t know anything about them. We all live in villages. The difference is that in a village like this you know everyone’s name. You can be just as lonely.”

  Miranda wasn’t sure why she had added the bit about loneliness. She wasn’t certain why being known made her more vulnerable, but it did, at least now, looking back.

  “He wasn’t just looking,” said Morgan, turning her perspective around. “He was watching. There’s a difference. He was watching your life.”

  “Or I was putting it out on display.”

  “For goodness’ sake, Miranda. You said yourself he may have been there for years.”

  “We used to gather crayfish in jam jars. I wonder if he saw us. Sometimes we didn’t come by the mill. You could cut across Mr. Naismith’s pasture from the village if the bull wasn’t out. He couldn’t always know we were here. Celia and me, we’d come out when we were only nine or ten, even younger, and we’d catch crayfish in the shallows.”

  “What did you do with them?”

  “We talked about taking them home to eat, but we let them go. I can work out how old we were by the sequence of gatherings. When we were really small, it was bits of driftwood and pebbles. Then we graduated to crayfish for a couple of summers. Then it was gathering flowers. We’d pick great bunches, and naturally they’d die. We’d pluck water hyacinths and lay them out in the mud like drowned things, and lilies with long, snaky stems. Then we got old enough and we’d come and just admire the flowers, wade out and smell them, and swim by the dam and lie in the sun. We wore bathing suits then. We were modest until we hit puberty. Celia was fully mature at twelve. I think we sunbathed naked after that, except we kept our panties on. I’m not sure why. It seems reckless now to strip down like that, even here, but we kept our underwear on, for periods I suppose, not propriety, and we read romances aloud, graduating year by year from the most romantic drivel with pastel covers to almost Jane Austen. By the time I was reading Jane Austen, Celia was married or close enough to it. Donny was all the romance she could handle, and I preferred Austen in solitude.”

  She took a deep breath and glanced up at Morgan, who seemed to be listening, seemed to be waiting. Miranda felt under pressure, as if something were expected of her and she wasn’t sure what it was. “Perhaps he was our necessary witness,” she went on. “Scrunched up in his tower. Dreaming of his dead mother. We had him trapped there, Morgan. We kept him locked away day after day. Rapunzel, a bald-headed wanker. In all our innocence we had the power.”

  “Not if you didn’t know he was there until later.”

  “But maybe we did. I can’t remember. Sometimes there were pigeons, sometimes maybe there weren’t any pigeons.”

  “Pigeons?”

  “You know how kids play, as if there’s an unseen audience applauding, or being horrified. Kids play to ghosts, before they grow up and lose them.”

  “They just lose them?”

  “You were a kid, too, you know. We lose our familiars when we get big enough to know they can’t possibly exist. That’s what makes them go away. We stop unbelief.”

  While she talked she wondered how she had avoided immediately connecting the green sports car in Rosedale with the car parked by the mill. No one in Waldron drove a Jaguar. She would have known. Would she have known it was him in the tower?

  “No one would want to stay innocent forever,” she said. “But after the Fall, amnesia settles in. We forget what Eden was like.”

  “No,” said Morgan. “We forget the Fall, not the Garden.” He paused. “Pre-lapsarian nostalgia,” he said, just to see if the words worked, out loud. Then he added, “When we start talking like televangelists, at least one of us is being evasive …”

  “Maybe that’s what I want.”

  “We came here to deal with things, Miranda. You brought me here.”

  “It’s still beautiful, isn’t it? An interlude from the world.”

  “A strange sanctuary.”

  “Strange sanctuary,” she repeated, listening to the sounds echo deep in her mind.

  “He was probably up there wanking all day.”

  “Is that anatomically possible?”

  “Only if he was really bad at it.”

  “I imagine it was creepier than that,” said Miranda. “I mean, you wouldn’t come back day after day through the long hot summer to ejaculate in the shadows.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Not for sex. It’s about needing to watch to prove you exist. Like taking photographs of Niagara Falls to confirm you’re there. Making connections.”

  “The connection, of course, is illusion. Even for non-voyeurs. An orgasm is the most solitary act in all of creation.”

  “Speak for yourself, Morgan. He must have loathed us, you know, in direct proportion to how much he despised himself. We’re lucky the bodily fluids being spilled weren’t blood. Not ‘we.’ The summer I was eighteen, Celia was getting legitimately laid. I was on my own.”

  The car, she wondered, had Celia and she gossiped about the Jaguar? It was always there. It had seemed as if it had always been there. If they had known who had owned it, they had known he was older, an outsider, and rich. From another world. They were trespassing technically. It was his property. Perhaps they wouldn’t have
given it much thought.

  “We cooked some of them once — the crayfish. Celia said her friend Russell Livingstone used to roast them on a stick when they didn’t catch any trout, and the shiners weren’t worth bothering with. Russell was like Celia’s brother, but he moved away. It was like he died.”

  “Did you eat them?”

  “No. I don’t think so. We let them go. But don’t you see? We didn’t release them out of kindness. We were cruel. We just didn’t know what else to do with them.”

  “You weren’t cruel. You were just kids.”

  “Innocent?”

  “Innocent. In Toronto we used to hunt along the ravines with slingshots and BB guns.”

  “Did you ever kill anything?”

  “Not even close. I had a friend who cut the tail off a road-kill raccoon and we took it to school as a trophy, but everyone knew it was road kill and that we’d get rabies or leprosy. The teacher made us throw it out in the big garbage bin and then wash our hands in boiling water and go home and change.”

  “In boiling water?”

  “Near enough. The teacher was really scared of dead things.”

  “I can see Molly Bray as a girl catching crayfish,” said Miranda, changing the subject. “She’s wading in the shallows. You can see her. Scrunch up your eyes and stare into the sun.”

  Morgan thought perhaps he could, by shielding his eyes from the light.

  They sat close together beside the dam, both with their knees drawn up, gazing out over the pond, feeling the soft autumn breeze on their faces.

  Morgan envisioned a grown-up Eleanor Drummond, realizing she had never been a child. She was dressed in city clothes, her tailored skirt hiked up and tucked into a black leather belt, her Jimmy Choo boots set neatly on shore. She was wading with slow, deliberate movements through water up to her calves, with a small net in her hand, staring intently through the fractured glare, able to see down among the rocks where her own reflection rippled the sun.

  At first it seemed she was just across from them, with the sun at her back, then she was in the shallows by the house where the old woman lived. Every few minutes she would reach down and fastidiously turn over a rock, careful when she straightened not to let water drizzle along her arm into the sleeve of her blouse. She had a crystal bowl in one hand. He couldn’t see her pluck crayfish from the bottom. The net was gone, maybe there had been no net, but the crystal bowl was slowly filling with crayfish.

  She turned and looked at him, directly away from the sun, so that her face was haloed in light, and yet it wasn’t in shadow but softly radiant and he could see her features clearly. Her expression was serene. She bore the look of composure he had seen on the lovely dead face of the figure in the morgue, but she caught his eye and smiled. She gazed into her bowl with satisfaction, then back to the water, peering intently into the shallow depths for her quarry.

  The old woman sat on the porch of the farmhouse off to the side, rocking in a painted chair near the railingless edge, watching Eleanor Drummond gradually fill up her bowl with small scrambling creatures.

  Miranda saw Molly Bray splashing in the shallows across from them, spraying sunlight into the air. There were no sounds. It was a silent vision, but vivid in every detail. Molly was thirteen, old enough to have abandoned crayfish hunts, still wanting to play, refusing to submit to the maturity her body was taunting her with this summer for the first time, like a promise and threat rolled into one unnerving sensation that wouldn’t recede except when she played fiercely, as she was now, at childish games.

  She was between her grandmother’s house and the mill. She was swinging an old metal grain bucket, scooping up water and swinging it around so that the stream-lets of water leaking out the bottom bent through the air in fine splattering rainbows. She would suddenly stop and look down, drive her hand through the surface, and come up with a crayfish caught between pincers of her thumb and forefinger. Then she would wave it around to her grandmother back on the porch, toward the old wooden mill like a talisman, warding off evil so trivial that it was funny.

  Miranda felt what the girl felt. She was her emanation, not her likeness or double, but connected as if they were joined in another dimension, two minds not yet born into the world that would drive them apart. Miranda looked through Molly’s eyes and thought she could see eyes staring back between the boards by the flume. The mill was rumbling against the silence. The slow, laborious groaning and keening of wooden shafts turning and wooden gears grinding on iron and wood filled her head as she gamboled forward through the shallow water, defiant. Let him watch. Her clothes were soaking, her T-shirt and shorts clinging to her supple young body as she stepped up onto the roadway above the dam, squarely in front of the peephole, shaking like a puppy, spraying the air with fine rainbows of mist, turning toward the old house and strutting haughtily home.

  “My God, Morgan! He used to watch her!”

  They withdrew from their separate reveries, which had converged more than they knew on images of water and innocence: the defiant innocence of a wilful young girl and the illusory innocence of a worldly woman on a break from too much reality.

  “What is it we were after, going to Detzler’s Landing?” she asked, sliding away so she could address Morgan face to face. “Why did we go there?”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said. “I wanted to get a feeling for who Eleanor Drummond was. You wanted to find Molly Bray. We went to detect. That’s what we do. And now we’re here. In Waterloo County.”

  “Detzler’s Landing isn’t that far away.”

  “Maybe not from Waldron, but it’s a very long way from Toronto. There’s a huge leap from Molly Bray to Eleanor Drummond.”

  “But, Morgan, in Toronto she was both.”

  “From the girl to the woman, the foundling who grew up in the sticks to the sleek-city woman who tortured them both unto death, there’s an abyss …”

  “Maybe so. But I’m the bridge! I am the bridge.”

  “You?”

  “I know that girl, Morgan. She wasn’t like me, but I know her, and I knew Eleanor Drummond. In spite of myself, we connected.”

  Morgan stared into the depths of reflected water shining in her eyes and then dropped his gaze so she could think out loud

  “Look,” she said, “I can imagine Molly, from what Miss Clarke described, flaunting her adolescence if she knew he was watching. She did. She would do that.”

  “How so?” He hadn’t meant to speak up.

  “It’s a matter of power. She’s being watched, she watches. He knows she’s onto him, but he can’t stop. He’s obsessive-compulsive, excited by knowing she knows.”

  She proceeded, forgetting that Griffin peeping through from the mill hadn’t been revealed to Morgan, who at the time had been imagining the woman from the city, not the girl. He struggled for a moment and caught up, glancing at the mill tower and back at Miranda, whose features were bathed in the soft light of the late afternoon.

  “When they occasionally pass on the road, when she walks by the mill to the store and he’s out tinkering, maybe building that absurd picket fence, they’re cordial. It’s part of the game. He’s a balding man in his early fifties. She’s a country girl, barely into puberty, a socially nondescript pretty young thing. But from the shadows he sees her as purity incarnate, his own mother restored to primal innocence.”

  “There’s a lot about innocence I don’t understand.”

  “That’s probably true, Morgan.”

  “Where do you fit in?”

  “A decade before … and I was older. I mean, she wasn’t naive, but she wasn’t Lolita. That’s male fantasy, that a girl that age understands what she’s doing. It makes it exciting. But she doesn’t. She feels it, her hormones are burning her up inside, but she doesn’t understand. It’s imagination and hormones, powerlessness and power …”

  “And neither did you. You didn’t understand. You and your friend.”

  “By that summer we were seventeen
, Celia was sleeping with Donny, we weren’t kids. Not sleeping. Doing it in Donny’s car. There were lots of better places, but sex and back seats of cars were tradition.”

  “Not where I came from. We didn’t have cars.”

  “No premarital sex?”

  “Working parents and living-room floors.”

  “So he was repeating history. There was a pattern.”

  “It takes more than two.”

  “But how likely is it that we were the only ones? It could have been something he did over and over. Sometimes it ended with sex, other times rape. It’s a matter of perspective — no, judgment. There’s a fine line between. Anyone watched by a predatory voyeur is a victim but doesn’t know she’s a victim until she submits to his gaze.”

  “Miranda, you were —”

  “No, Morgan, I wasn’t.” She paused. “How did he poop? That’s a long time. Sometimes I stayed most of the day. What did he do?”

  “It wouldn’t be hard to go five, six hours, but he’d have to pee. He must have peed in a bottle.”

  “Can you do that — pee in a bottle?”

  “Yeah, I can,” he said.

  “I can’t. I tried once, but I wasn’t very good. In a tent, in a jar in a tent. I peed my initials in the snow in front of Hart House one night. You could read it, too, but it dribbled down my leg and I got really cold and had to go home.”

  “You were drunk.”

  “I was not drunk. I was making a statement.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. What is it about when you pee in the snow in the middle of a university campus?”

  “He probably had a jar,” said Morgan. “Maybe he kept them and his wine cellar is filled with jars of old urine.”

  “I wrote an entire name in the snow once.” She didn’t want to return to questions of moral responsibility. “It wasn’t my own pee, of course …”

  “Your handwriting’s legendary, Miranda.”

  “Is it? He watched me. I let him, and then we were lovers.”

  “You weren’t lovers.”

  “I was eighteen.”

  “A virgin?”