by Matt Rader
Then they were moving away from him, sensitive to a whole set of forces he could not feel but that would lead them home.
There was no way he could beat the birds to his father’s house below the horse chestnuts. His father was meant to remove the ring from the first bird who returned and insert it into a special clock he’d purchased that would tell him, along with the known distance, the fastest speed the bird had reached on the flight home. Accuracy was a matter of seconds. He had little faith in his father—the pigeons were not important to his father and he understood this—but he was devoted and he completed the ritual as often as the weather permitted, racing the two hours back to town, to check the clock and make the calculations despite the obvious errors.
Sometimes a bird returned late and injured.
Sometimes a bird did not return at all.
Once he found a bird torn to smithereens, a holocaust of feathers and bones on the road half a mile from home, one leg still wearing the metal band. He removed the rubber ring and when he got home he put it in the clock and tried to do the calculations, to see how fast the bird had flown in the minutes before its death.
Then one morning—the first morning he knew he wanted to kill something—he found them all dead in the dovecote. A massacre of blood and feathers that seemed to somehow still possess the frenzy of the act, as if the remains of the birds were still in the process of settling their debts with gravity, still captured in the vortex of their destruction.
Along the blue spine of the mountains, the sun had hammered a thin leaf of gold. A colossal bank of clouds, writhed and flexed and slid across the sky.
There was no sign of the beast that had done the killing. Its entry and departure were inscrutable.
The boy was afraid.
He wanted to kill it.
To kill the killer.
That afternoon he went to his grandfather’s cabin on the lake and asked him how to use a trap, one with metal claws that could snap an animal’s leg in half.
“You want to trap it, not set it free.”
He looked blankly at the old man.
Then they began to name animals.
This is how he hears the word wejack.
“They call it wejack in the lake country.”
The boy is looking at the steel trap his grandfather has open on the workbench. He feels the charged space between the teeth, hot, smouldering, unbearable. The old man is looking at the trap too, gone somewhere else through the portal of the object.
“There are no wejack.”
19
AND AFTER, when the fire was out?
I see nothing. Just a long period of nothing. Not blackness or dimness. Not even pain. Just nothing. It’s an epiphany really.
An obliteration of all senses then a gradual, flickering return to an intermediate state, sharp and dull at once, silent with sudden eruptions of noise: hospital linens, a woman’s face peering down at me, another woman’s face, the unravelling of the dressing, the blazing rawness of my flesh.
Heat gets into the body and stays long after the flames. Anyone who has burned themselves knows this. The burn goes on and on. The new dressings smothered the flames to ember and the fire fed on my body.
Slowly the damage was being mummified in my skin.
My throat had been stripped by smoke. When I could drink and eat for myself I was always thirsty. I was three months without speaking. And even after I knew I could speak, I said nothing. I had nothing to say.
What was there to say?
All my language to make it beautiful and what is beauty except a kind of pain and what is pain but the vanguard of the ineffable.
I never recovered.
20
HE UNPLUGGED HIS PHONE and closed his blinds. He talked to only those he felt obliged to talk to and then only in the simplest, most direct sentences. He answered all their questions, but truthfully he had little to say about what he’d witnessed. Dante came most days and made him food and stayed for a long time sitting on the back porch as if waiting for something to happen.
No.
He was not waiting.
He was forestalling.
Dante said nothing of his own state of mind.
They had been bonded by circumstances and there was nothing to do but wait to see how the bond loosened. He wanted Dante to take up his story. To be his guide and spokesman. Even if that story was only told in the silence between them.
And his name was?
Saul. He was thirty-five years old.
WHEN HE SLEPT HE awoke in a panic, sweating, disoriented. Then after a time he’d grow drowsy and sleep was a heavy force dragging his whole body towards the earth. His forehead, eyelids, all his limbs. He understood everything at a remove that made his lived experience into a narration that bored him and caused him a banal despair that he didn’t know how to escape. When he did finally succumb to sleep his body would begin to twitch or go stiff and suddenly he’d be blazing with fear and his eyes would open wide without seeing anything.
He understood none of it. He did not deserve this despair. It wasn’t his right. It wasn’t his. It was too close to pity.
He hated himself for it.
Then he went to see her. Drove up and down her street. Parked finally half a block away. Turned off the engine.
He listened to the metal contracting as it cooled.
It was ticking along with the crickets.
The light had changed now, a few weeks deeper in summer. It was pale and hot but it was no longer working up to something. Consolidated light. Fierce at the centre but growing smaller every day.
She lived now in a small house in a neighbourhood of small houses by the river. The front was treeless and the grass sun-bleached to death, the colour of straw. Below the windows, the brown-eyed Susans slumped in the August drought, their burnished-yellow rays melting around their eyes, each stem pitching away from the others with the season’s woozy disenchantment.
Ah fuck.
Beyond the rooftop the melancholy willow.
THE BLINDS WERE DRAWN in the window. He saw his shadow-reflection swim up into the glass as he passed. He registered it as a thing, an event unconnected to him, like a passing jet or wasp or the sun. He opened the screen door and peered into the dim hallway.
“Beth?” he said, but he was already moving through the house. Some part of him was rushing to keep up, to close the distance on himself.
A TELEVISION IS ON in the living room with no sound, the room full of plants. He knew she was living here. She was alive in this place.
Lavender. He smelled lavender.
“BETH?” HE SAYS AGAIN, entering the empty kitchen. Out the window he can see her yellow dress swaying from a line running between the house and a small garage at the back of the property. The windows of the garage are black with reflection and somewhere beyond that he knows she is working, growing her small jungle of plants, her wilderness.
There’s a book by Tolstoy closed on the kitchen table, the spine wrinkled and pages yellowed. Hadji Murat. He picks it up and opens it and breathes in the pages but he does not read a word. There is The Autobiography of Mark Twain on a small shelf behind the table. Saul does not remember these books from their years together but he knows, nevertheless, that they’ve been Beth’s a long time. He knows her life has been going all along, just beyond him.
Then she is coming through the sliding door, looking at him from within her impossible yellow dress, her presence sharpened by history, immediately more than herself, a chain of memories and experiences and psychology that snaps the past into the immediate, into the continuous present.
She is not afraid and he doesn’t think of the light or the dress or the colour of her skin, which has cooled somehow in the August heat.
It is not his house and even though he’s come looking for her here, had been certain he would find her, he has the sensation that it is a grand coincidence, a matter of happenstance that this evening that isn’t theirs because it isn’t anyone’s
could find them moving across sun-damaged linoleum towards each other, thoughtless, gripped, horrified by their own needs. His own needs. He’s so dumb. She’s right there.
When they touch he feels himself slam back into himself.
How many times has this happened?
I’m looking into the darkness underneath the old farmhouse.
I’m peering into the face of the cracked foundation.
Out of the face comes the slender hand of a woman. She’s reaching for me. Her fingers are splayed as though reaching in all directions. Her nails are painted red.
I touch my fingers to her fingers. Everything about her comes rushing up to me. Everything is different now. I’m speaking something into the dark.
“Hold on.”
She’s seven and she rides her bike along a dirt road in the sun. She’s nine and she’s listening to the mourning doves along the telephone wires. She thirteen and smells her own skin at night. She wants someone to talk to about her body. She’s in love with her body, which hurts. She’s thirteen and it’s dark. She’s fourteen and it’s dark. She’s fifteen and it’s dark. She’s sixteen. She’s seventeen. She’s eighteen.
She’s thirteen years old.
“I couldn’t understand,” he says.
He’s crushing her to him. He feels her small belly against his. Puts his lips to her neck, behind her ear. His hands in her hair. He pulls her head back, exposes her throat, thumbs her jaw.
Her nipples hard behind cotton.
She slaps him across the face but he doesn’t stop.
“I couldn’t understand,” he says again.
“No one understands,” she tells him as he slides one hand down her thigh and up again.
I’m screaming.
Did he scream?
He did not scream.
I hear the sirens calling, see the lights doing their red and blue aurora on the lilacs and acacias. I see the woman lifted from the dungeon through the floorboards of the house, emaciated and filthy and wildly present. She has no sense of time. She is raised from the house like Lazarus.
Lady Lazarus.
She may have been pregnant, I hear her say as she is swept away by paramedics and police, wrapped in grey blankets. Her voice goes on and on in my head. I hear her speaking twenty years in the future in a new and gentle darkness.
“I love you,” she says, but not to me.
I am terrified.
The sky is a grey blanket.
My arm is on fire.
Breath.
Breath.
How old was she?
Eighteen. Five years he kept her there.
“No one understands,” Beth says as he draws Saul’s wet fingers from her mouth and lifts her dress, reaches into her. But Beth understands. He’s a fool.
I’m a fool.
The pigeons lift off and swirl inside the dovecote.
Her eyes roll back and she is gone.
The television flickering in the next room.
The evening pouring in everywhere.
BEARING THE BODY
FOR WEEKS JOE BROUGHT only bananas and milk to the small cabin by the sea where his father was dying. And then when Anders stopped eating ten days into March, Joe set out a hunting bedroll on the wooden floor next to his father’s bed and didn’t leave except to replenish the kitty of wood for the stove or to smoke in the March drizzle or twice a day to run along the beach road while the nurses washed his father and prepared his medicines.
In the morning of the second Friday of the fast, Anders told Joe his plan and Joe agreed. That afternoon, he helped the nurses carry their equipment out to their blue Ford Tempo parked in the gravel by the road. The March light was quiet on the wet asphalt and on the lapping sea. Across the strait, a sailboat leaned with the wind. White smoke waved out the cabin chimney. When Joe and the nurses had loaded the gear into the car they stood a moment as if there was something yet to say.
Quietly, with shame and determination to speak in the face of that shame, Joe asked that they not come the following day. Neither woman could look at him. Not the younger one whose wrists were poised as though she were playing piano. Not the taller one with the thinning hair who stood close enough just then to touch him. Joe thanked them and turned his back and didn’t watch them leave.
On that Friday, after Joe heard the nurses’ car pivot in the gravel and ease off down the beach road towards town, with the late daylight just beginning to ricochet off the sea, Joe went inside and opened the door to the stove and put his face into the raw heat. Then he filled the kettle and set it, wet and hissing, on the black stove. Joe and Anders didn’t speak. They’d been speaking less and less over the weeks, and it felt good and right to Joe that he could be, finally, at forty-two, comfortable without speaking in his father’s presence.
It felt good that he knew what to do with himself in his father’s home and he didn’t feel awkward or incompetent. He knew to stoke the fire and adjust the baffles. To make coffee three times a day—in the morning, in the late afternoon and after the evening meal—so the house would smell as it always had and one less thing would be gone from his father’s life. He knew too to feed himself the modest meals of eggs and bread his father had always favoured and to help his father to the table at mealtimes so Anders could watch his son eat. He brought his father water in bed and in the last days, when they were alone, he held the mug and tipped it to Anders’ lips.
He read to his father each night from the book of Chekhov’s stories he’d been teaching that term before he’d taken a leave to be there in the cabin with Anders as he died. He knew his father liked stories. He knew to rise when his father wished to rise, wished to simply stand in the room like a man who still had legs, to look out the window of the bedroom at the moon rising in the east, and without speaking Joe knew when to put his hand out to help his father and when not to. When Anders needed to piss, he put his arm around Joe’s shoulders and wordlessly they hobbled to the door of the house so Anders could pee on the early crocuses beneath the eaves.
Now it seemed to Joe that speaking had always been a terrible thing, had obscured the obvious and simple in his love for his father and he wondered what words would mean to him after his father was gone. When the kettle whistled he gripped it with a potholder and poured the water over the coffee grounds in his mug.
The window in the bedroom where Anders and Joe slept looked southeast, through the frame of a shore pine, at the blue-black slate of islands and mountains, translucent but impenetrable, dark spots that suggested something darker and wilder deep inside them. Opposite the bedroom was a pantry lined with shelves and stocked with empty jars and a black canning pot, a sleeping bag, a broom and two large jugs of water on the floor. Joe kept his things there on one shelf: his books, his briefcase, his duffel of clothes. Next to the pantry was a small bathroom with a sink and a toilet and shower but no mirror. It was barely wide enough for Joe to stretch his arms between the walls. In the main of the cabin was one room with a small galley kitchen with a table and chairs on one side and a sitting area with two leather bar chairs that balanced awkwardly on the uneven floor.
Joe stood in the kitchen with his cup of coffee in both hands and looked out the west window at the swayback wooden shed where Anders parked his truck. A trio of cedars reached up behind the shed and cast their shadows over its mossy roof. At sixty-five Anders should have had a decade or two before him in that cabin. But Joe could feel, though he didn’t know how to say it to himself, that soon it’d be as if Anders had never lived there at all and that the site of his dying would be displaced from that cabin into Joe’s own body. He didn’t want the coffee. He carried the mug in one hand to his father’s room where his father lay with his eyes closed and placed it on the windowsill next to the bed. He listened for his father’s shallow breath.
Anders had lived in the cabin only five years, had made it his home after decades in the camps and motels of western Canada, an extended period of near-homelessness that had suited someth
ing detached in Anders’ character. In the bedroom, above a small leather chair opposite his bed, hung the only photograph in the cabin. Anders had been an ironworker and the picture showed him in profile on a high beam of steel, trim and severe in black braces, a denim shirt tucked neatly into his waist. He wore a white hard hat and black boots that came up over his jeans. Beyond Anders in the photograph was wide empty blue as if the steel had risen into a clear new world and anchored a corner of it to the Earth. The Anders of the photo was perfect in his silence.
Looking at it now, Joe felt paralyzed. As if he himself had entered the photograph and stepped out into the blue oblivion, had become suspended there. Joe imagined his father getting up that morning in a near-empty motel room, bleary, hungover, a cruel pain in his shoulder, sitting on the edge of the bed in his underwear, the tatters of a dream world too much like the one he’d awoken to still on his face. Then he imagined his father getting dressed: socks, shirt, jeans, braces, tying the black laces of his boots with his thick fingers. The whole banal ritual of labour: the coffee, keys, the smoky drive, the morning shit. And then the climb into the sky and that photograph.
When Joe remembered his father he remembered him with bristles and a moustache. Thinning hair. Anders smoking and alone on the dark porch. Sawdust and car parts. Hard candies. Dirt roads. Cutblocks. Trout. His watery black coffee. His truck covered in white mill fallout. The Remington with the walnut stock. The blue Lapua boxes. The animals in the shed and the split wood. Axes. Chainsaws. Fishing poles. Aluminum boats. Outboard motors. He knew the beery smell of Anders’ breath. He felt his father’s presence in his memory. But there was no sound and what he seemed to remember most clearly were banalities of a certain kind of life that he barely believed to be his own.
And when he pressed his imagination it only atomized and grew more strange and disappointing. Where was his mother? They’d lived with Anders until Joe was eight and yet in his memory he could see her with him only once: Anders and her in the cab of his truck parked at the curb outside the house on Chinook Street where she and Joe had moved after Anders left. The street lined with tall dark maples in leaf. His parents are talking but Joe can’t hear them. The asphalt is wet again and Anders is smoking. Light comes out of the sky in long pale shafts that touch nothing.