What It Takes to Be Human

by Marilyn Bowering

  “Yes, sir. If by that you mean it is never too late for the truth.” Georgina’s son’s book—The Storehouse of Thought and Expression—had now fallen open to the frontispiece—a photograph of Rodin’s sculpture of human figures struggling in the hand of God. I point to it. “The lesson for me, Dr. Frank, is one of faith in ultimate justice.”

  “I see.” He rocked forward and backwards on the balls of his feet. “Do you see yourself as having been dealt an injustice? It’s everyone’s fault but yours? Is that what’s behind all this? Dressed-up self-pity?” He waved an ink-stained hand over the manuscript pages. “Haven’t we been through this before?”

  I gathered the papers together in a neat pile. I took a deep breath. “Do you remember Karl, Dr. Frank?”

  “Karl? What kind of a question is that? He’s one of my patients.”

  “In the East Wing, sir.”

  “I know where he is. Yes, in the East Wing, Sandy, which is not the end of the world.”

  I let that pass. Dr. Frank looked away. He was thinner than ever. I’d seen officials carrying briefcases arrive and depart, and with each one it appeared to me that he diminished. Once a car carrying a general drew up and parked near the fountain. The general entered the building without a word to anyone; he glanced neither to left or right; but the driver got out, smoked a cigarette and watched Kosho’s fish swim in circles.

  “Well, Karl is to me a man trapped by accident. He never meant to stay in this country. He was kept here, away from his family, by the war. He’s a stranger in a strange land where his actions are easily misinterpreted. He’s a foreigner. That means he doesn’t understand the customs. All he did was to let birds loose from their cages. That may be eccentric, but it’s hardly criminal.”

  Dr. Frank’s eyes were cold. “You’re talking nonsense.”

  “What is he here for, then? Please tell me.”

  “You know I can’t discuss other inmates. But you were there when he attacked Attendant Cooper. You saw his capabilities. Whatever else you are, Sandy, you’re not stupid.”

  I held his gaze. I let the silence lengthen. I tried to let everything I knew about Pete Cooper show in my eyes. If I’d had the letter ready, with me, I’d have handed it over. I think it would have made a difference.

  “Consider this then, sir,” I said when I could see he was getting restless. “Mistakes can happen. I believe they occurred in Karl’s case and I know from my careful reading of Alan Macaulay’s files that they happened in his. If you admit the principle—that mistakes are possible—doesn’t that argue for a fresh look at the evidence?”

  He leaned forward and placed his hands on the table, so that his face was close to mine. His breath smelled of coffee and there was a whiff of smoke on his clothing. “I don’t want to go through this with you again, Sandy. Now you tell me exactly what this has to do with you.” He said it as an ultimatum, and I responded as such.

  “I shouldn’t be here. There’s been a misunderstanding. I’m innocent of all the charges against me.”

  —

  I feel, inside me, as I help Kosho select rabbits to kill, some rodent-sized knowledge skitter into a corner of my mind. When I try to look at it, it’s not there. When I turn my attention from it, by thinking about the Luftwaffe attacking Moscow, and the Japanese occupation of Indochina, it peeps out, but I can’t catch its eye. The recollection of the conversation with Dr. Frank and mention of Karl has stirred it from its sleep. I am imagining my room as it was when I entered and discovered blood-spattered Pete Cooper, and Karl lying on the floor behind the bed.

  I get no further, though, as we have now to get on with the killing and dressing. Kosho catches one cony by the hind feet and lets the head drop, then he gives a quick twist to dislocate the neck. I check to make sure it’s dead and then hang the carcass by the right hind leg on a nail inserted between the tendons and the bone. We proceed in this fashion until all are done.

  Ron Signet comes in to supervise the next stage. This afternoon, Dr. Frank accompanies him. Ron unlocks the cupboard and hands over the knives. He trusts me now. We remove the heads and front feet and let the carcasses bleed into a trough. I gather the parts into a sack and take them outside, saving one rabbit’s foot for Bob, who has asked me to. This goes, wrapped in a torn corner of sacking, into my apron pocket. Back inside, Kosho begins at one end of the row and I start at the other. We slice off the tail and sever the left hind foot at the first joint, cut the fur around the right hind leg at the hock, slit the fur on the inside of the leg to the root of the tail, and pull the pelt down both hind legs to the tail. We then cut the fat away from the skin before pulling the pelt down over the carcass and off, being careful to remove all the fat from the hide so it will dry evenly.

  Dr. Frank watches the operation with interest and asks questions as we work. After all the coats have been removed I prepare the carcasses. I carve around the anal opening and follow on down the abdomen to the neck. The rest is removing entrails, stomach and lungs, washing the cavity, then hanging the meat to cool.

  I wash my hands and look over my work. Someone else will come in to remove the meat to the cooler. The flesh we can’t use ourselves will be sold. Kosho is already stretching the hides before they can harden, making sure that all the legs are on the same side. He smoothes out all the folds and wrinkles and ensures that no parts touch and stick to each other.

  “Boys, that’s a day’s work well done,” Dr. Frank says. He claps us both on the back and grins. The quality of the meat and skins we produce has attracted notice in the outside world. There’s a write-up in the newspaper. Dr. Frank shows it to us and pins the clipping to the wall. “Mentally Ill Inmates Assist with War Work,” it says. We finish clearing up and Kosho returns the cleaned knives to Ron Signet. He and Dr. Frank stand by the door for a moment, chatting. When Ron goes to put the knives in the lock-up I see my chance, reach into my shirt pocket to pull out the letter. “Dr. Frank?” I say. He turns towards me, but Ron Signet is back already.

  “It’s nothing, sir. I was just wondering when our next truth session is?”

  “Good, glad to see you keen to get on with it. I’ll let you know.”

  “What’s that you have there?” Ron asks me as soon as Dr. Frank has left. I can’t see any point in pretending, since all Ron has to do is ask me to show my hands. I say, “Ron, I’m taking a risk, but you know and I know that Pete Cooper must be stopped before something terrible happens.” I hold out the letter and put my fingers to my lips for “shush” so there is no mistaking my meaning. He blinks what I read as agreement, and takes it.

  It’s only later, after lights out, that I recollect my prior feeling of unease. I had been revisiting, in my mind, the scene of Karl’s beating. It comes to me then: Although Ron Signet clearly understood what Pete Cooper had done, he didn’t report it. How, when Dr. Frank reads my letter, will he explain his behaviour? How will he justify his lies about Karl?

  —

  In daylight, when my thoughts are brighter, I decide that I can trust Ron Signet. He’s a decent man with a family. He’s always shown me kindness. He may have been waiting for the right opportunity, himself, to raise the subject of Pete Cooper. It can’t be easy to blow the whistle on a colleague, so perhaps I’ve done him a service.

  I decide to continue with my writing while I wait to see what happens. Since the weather is good, there is an early evening baseball game in the airing court to which both Bob and Winchell have gone. This week, brackets were fastened to the tops of the airing court fence posts and four extra strands of barbed wire were stretched on them. Most of the work was done by the patients in the afternoons. I saw Bob standing at the foot of a ladder, but he was forbidden to climb it.

  Tom likes to spend the evenings at crafts, although he hasn’t progressed far with his rug-making. He pulls out the loops almost as soon as he’s finished drawing them through the backing. I’ve sketched a new pattern of a ship for him to follow. He seems to like it, and I ordered him to complete th
e funnel and to report to me with it later tonight.

  All in all, I have perfect peace and quiet.

  The Storehouse of Thought and Expression suggests that when one is troubled—as I admit I am these days—and having difficulty with a set writing task, one should write whatever comes to mind, first imagining that one is in a different place.

  I get to work on Karl’s paper with Karl’s pen and ink at Karl’s table and I imagine myself in the New World where Alan Macaulay lands.

  Part III: More Events of My Sad Life

  When I arrived at the docks at Montreal I was taken straight to the train with a group of men who had signed up at the same time as me in Scotland. We travelled for several days with little information as to where we were going. West, certainly, but how far west and to do exactly what type of labouring?

  We slept in rough berths at night; in the daytime we played cards and examined the scenery and watched other men leave the train at various godforsaken stops. The rocklands of Ontario unnerved me: I felt such an ache of loneliness in them. Mining country, men said as we travelled the empty northland, and I thought of the coal-mining friends I had left behind and wondered, not for the first time since setting sail, if I’d made a mistake in leaving home.

  The Prairies, when we reached them, were more alive, with some good agricultural land and a number of farms along the track. After Regina there were sweeps of yellow grassland and a number of alkaline lakes swarming with waterfowl. Wild antelope fled in great herds as the train approached, and I began to take an interest. My companions, much like me, had kept to themselves, but now we seemed to wake up, as if the ties that bound us to our homeland had stretched so far they had to snap, freeing us for what might lie ahead. There was no more rereading last letters or mooning over photographs amongst my travelling companions.

  We crossed the river at Medicine Hat and climbed to a new plateau with only water tanks and windmill pumps to look at it. Near the line were hummocks made by gophers: One of the company entertained himself, and us, by taking potshots at them, until I told him to stop. “Life is precious,” I told him. “Don’t take it unless you must.”

  One morning, very early, we awoke to find ourselves running up a steep incline with the Bow River alongside. Ahead were the Rockies. I will not describe that part of the journey in detail—it was too much like a dream, for much of the time I felt I was on a strange planet—suffice it to say I was entranced, it was as if I’d entered a fantasy left over from the imaginary realms of childhood. In these mountains I had glimpses of the better man I could be. A walker and climber, a guide, perhaps as had been my forbearers in Scotland. I almost left the train at Banff, but was persuaded by my fellows to continue on as I’d agreed in my contract. Honesty, they say, is the best policy and a man’s word is his bond. But he should also, I can say with hindsight, listen to his deepest instincts.

  In any case, amongst the peaks and ravines and glaciers of the mountains, my spirits lifted, and still we climbed until we were more than five thousand feet above sea level. For a moment we were like gods with the world at our feet, then we began our fall through a series of tunnels, picking up speed as we burst from between canyon walls into another mountain range in British Columbia.

  There were more mountain passes and a long run between snowsheds and at length an extended curved trestle bridge over the Columbia River. I stayed awake the night we passed through the Fraser Canyon under a full moon and marvelled at this wild ravine and the furious river below boiling through the shadows and the light cast from the train. I thought of my grandfather’s tales of wolves in Scotland and how the last had been killed a hundred and fifty years earlier, and as if I’d conjured it, a lone wolf loped out of the forest, glided over some rocks near the river and disappeared again into the trees.

  My grandfather said that an ancestor of ours at Wick had saved the city from invaders when a besieging foe was about to take the city. He’d slept out on a crag after an argument with his father. He was still sleeping when a wolf, alarmed by the advance of the hordes, had howled in terror, waking him. True or not, I had loved that story as a child. Why had it come back to me now?

  From Vancouver City we boarded a steamer and crossed a sound peppered with forested islands. From our port at Victoria on Vancouver Island we were loaded into carts and driven on a rough track northwards.

  It was dark when we arrived at the camp.

  In the morning I stepped out from under the canvas and found myself at the shore of a large lake. Quietness lapped outwards into the dawn. The lake rocked gently in a bowl of treed hills. “Hey, you!” a voice cried from the cook tent. The figure held several buckets in his hands. I ran over and took them. “Go out a little ways before you fill them,” he said.

  I took out a little rowing boat from the dock and headed into tissues of mist. When I stopped, the land had disappeared from sight. I dropped the buckets into the water and scooped them full. When I came out of the mist I was far down the lake. A doe with her fawns drank at the shoreline. I could have been lost there forever—in the long run I would have been better off—and not minded. In the Highlands they say that a trip in a boat over the water and through the mist is the path to eternal life. If I’d heard singing, I dare say I might have kept on, but as it was, the cook rang the triangle for breakfast and I paddled in that direction.

  Was I happy to be where I’d landed? Happy, yes, and more fully alive than I’d felt since before my arm was hurt. The arm I now rowed with, with no pain.

  “Glad to see you’ve made yourself useful,” the foreman said when I staggered into the cook tent with the water buckets. The others were already at breakfast. One of them muttered something and the rest of the crew laughed. This was the Irishman, Kennedy. You know how it is when you make a friend. There’s some affinity, unspoken communication that goes back and forth. It’s the same when you make an enemy—which was the case with him.

  I finish this part of the writing and return to myself. The work has gone relatively well and I still have time left. With the longer hours of daylight, the others come in late from their games and pastimes.

  The camp where Alan has arrived is a stone’s throw from the hall at Shawnigan Lake where my father held revival meetings. I know the area well. The coincidence of settings is a bonus. Not only does it mean that the hanged man and I have a link beyond our incarceration in this building, but we’ve seen the same landscape. The Storehouse advises that the insertion of an object, person or place real to the writer will make the tale more lifelike. More than that, the coincidence means that when Alan reaches his crisis, I can see what he sees. “Write what you know, or what you think you know or what you can convince others that you know,” Georgina’s son’s writing text says. But this is a paradox, since it also advises how useful it is to write in order to get away from where we are. “Dream forward and prophesy,” it says. “We cannot be satisfied until we begin dreaming ourselves out of our skins.” How marvellous that with Alan Macaulay I can do both!

  The text also advises that I recall an experience that has helped me to feel my relation to the universe beyond mankind: that is, the world of rocks, plants, animals and stars. I find I’m biting the end of Karl’s pen. How shall I continue? I’ll start with what I know for certain.

  It’s spring vacation. I’m on a plank bench in the old wooden barn of a tabernacle on my father’s lakefront property. Earlier in the day I’d climbed on ladders with the men to tack tarpaper over leaks in the roofing. Sunlight drifts through cracks between wallboards and falls on the upturned faces of the people, and on my father’s face as he leans towards them from behind the pulpit. I can hear, through the open doorways at the back, the sough of wind in the tall Douglas fir trees outside. The scents of resin and wet earth from last night’s rain, and sun on deep layers of moss, and the murmur of water at the mud and sand lake shoreline—these are more real to me than my father and his preaching. What does he say? Only what he’s said a thousand times before—Repent, the
end times are nigh. I sigh and look down at my feet in their new wingtips. Shoes I am pleased with, shoes that speak of my interest in style and not just practicality. Shoes that let the world and my father know I’ve a mind of my own. However. They are dirty and half drifted over with sawdust from the floor. I glance to the side. The skirt of the woman next to me has ridden up to show her knees imprinted with tiny sawdust rectangles. She’s only just got up from kneeling. Under her breath she keeps saying, “Praise the Lord.” I can think of many reasons to praise the creator of all being, starting with the handsome trees and finishing, perhaps, with the beauty of the tree-frog I’d regarded that morning. It was a tiny thing with toe-pads that helped it clamber and vault or sit still clasped to branch or shrubbery. It glittered, copper and green, semi-precious. Praise the Lord!

  I think ahead to after the service when I will tell my father and my mother who shares the platform with him, her feet pumping the pedals of the small organ, her fingers steady on the chords, that I have long since left Damascus Road College, that I do not believe as they do, that I will not be ruled by them; that the only calling I have is to be a university student and a pilot. I’m here to deliver this news as a courtesy. I do not belong with them—I haven’t for yonks.

  To me, at this moment, my future is self-evident and simple. I do not think of opposition to it—how could there be? Who has rights over the sovereignty of my body other than me? Only a few nights ago, before leaving for “home,” I’d slept with Maureen, the wife of my former “Science in the Bible” teacher. When we’d finished, I’d looked at the tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and kissed them. She said I’d made her happy for the first time in years. But when I returned from the bathroom, she’d had time to reconsider. She had telephoned her husband and asked him to come home; she begged his forgiveness.

  How sorry I felt for her! Sweet blond-haired Maureen who’d only just finished begging me to penetrate her, her tongue flicking the roof of my mouth, her finger deep in my ass; the lovely woman who’d adored the holiness of my body had vanished. In her place sat a haggard remnant, a mother of sorrows, a gross forgery. Even the room smelled different. The scent of her had soured. When I sat beside her, she drew the worn chenille bedspread up to her chin. I kissed her one more time, licked her tears dry and told her she was a good girl.