by Matt Rader
There is a gap between Johnson’s mind and his body so he does not know he is suffering. It has always been there even before the war when he was a pit miner and he worked until his body sat down in the wet dark and the fire boss had to call for the ridge rider to haul him up in a cart because Johnson could not stand. As a child in Battersea he learned to eat until the bowl was empty no matter what his stomach said. This day in the forest, he leans over, the sun lashing his back through the trees, and braces himself against his thighs.
“Check the gun,” Devitt says to Johnson, nodding at the body in the dust.
Johnson nods back, catching big gulps of air. He goes to the dead man and kneels beside him.
“I ordered him to stop,” Campbell says. “He kept coming.”
Devitt is only part-listening. He watches the flies lift off the body as Johnson examines the rifle. The whole right arm moves when he lifts the gun and pries it from the dead man’s fingers. He opens the magazine. There are no bullets. He looks at Devitt and shakes his head.
“Load it,” Devitt says.
Johnson unloads the bullets from his own rifle and then loads the dead man’s gun.
“It’s Goodwin?” Campbell says.
Devitt nods.
The flies settle back on the body.
Albert “Ginger” Goodwin, c. 1911
4 X 8. BLACK AND WHITE. Photocopy. Outside the Penrith boarding house, Cumberland, British Columbia. (The house is still standing.) In his pit clothes: stiff dungarees, shop coat, vest, a bandana around his neck. Hair combed and parted at the side. The bandana is red, we can guess, from the written records in the Cumberland Archives and the two or three books written about him. In the paintings it is always red. The hair we know is red. We see the porch only a step behind him and the weatherboard (now replaced with vinyl siding). Sun stage right cuts the photo in half. Half of the house in shade. Half bleached in light. Behind him an open door. Someone wants to take his picture. He has friends. He squints slightly and looks left past the camera. He sees something we do not see. Pensive. Slightly bemused. A shadow falls across part of his closed mouth. He holds his hands together absently. He is both comfortable and uncomfortable. He has just come out of the house and he is in the weather now. A mule driver still, as in Treeton and Glace Bay and Crow’s Nest. And now a sometimes-miner on his way to No. 5. He is twenty-four years old. You can see it in his mouth. In his eyes he is already much older. No better picture of him survives.
DOWN TRAIL, DEVITT FINDS a lean-to of alder poles thatched with cedar boughs at the side of a creek. A bear skin curing in the blue water. A firepit with a blackened pot for cooking and washing. A stick the length of an arm for tending fire. A small supply of wood, bucked and chopped, stacked beneath the shelter. No axe. Fishing rod and flies. Bedroll on a pallet of leaves and dirt.
He sees this all from the edge of the camp. Like all good animals, he pauses before entering the clearing.
Carefully, without going any further, Devitt reads the dirt floor.
More than one set of footprints, he thinks. Three sets. Maybe more.
Now he moves closer to the firepit, trying to decipher what he sees. He sees the spectre of the dead man tending the fire. Fetching water from the creek. There are flames then and they light up the spectre’s face. But the face is already dead and the eyes stare at nothing. Devitt stands in the middle of the camp and looks into the bush across the creek. Turns his head, then his shoulders. Keeps turning. Feels himself go out into the jungle, searching. There are edges all around him he cannot move across with his eyes or with his hearing. Too much of this world is hidden and dark to his mind. The ferns have been here for millennia and all around them is the impenetrable mystery of things formed long ago whose origins and character are unknowable even as they appear, bodily, before us. There is something out there. He feels that. Eyes.
And then, snap—the perching birds pop back into existence. Their strange algorithmic chirping flutters in the trees.
He is alone in his body again. Right where he stands.
In the lean-to he finds a small leather satchel. There is a knife and a compass inside. Bills and coins. Maybe one hundred dollars. There are copies of the Red Flag and the Western Clarion. And there is a pen and a notebook. The notebook is full of indecipherable writing. He leaves almost everything as it is. The notebook he tucks inside his belt.
FOR THREE DAYS, THE body rots where it fell. Flies begin to dismantle it, piece by invisible piece, and carry it off into the world. The gases rise in the stomach and in the flesh of the hands and face. Even the fleas have abandoned it for something warmer.
Campbell has gone for the Inspector.
Johnson covers the rotting body with the bear skin from the creek so he will not have to look at it. He and Devitt take turns waiting with it through the day and the night. There are animals to think of. Other men. They talk little and are never comfortable. They take turns berrying at the lakeshore and lapping water from the creek. Johnson sleeps in the lean-to. Devitt sleeps on his own pallet of leaves. At night it grows cold and in the morning everything is damp where the heat of the earth meets cooling air. On the last night they make a fire in Goodwin’s pit. For a while their hands warm and then the flickering shadows at the fire’s edge become too much and Devitt puts it out.
Devitt wants to ask Johnson if he is afraid. But he cannot. He doesn’t have words for this kind of talk.
“They’ll want us dead for this,” he says.
He speaks out of darkness into darkness.
“Yessir,” the darkness says. “Some of them been watching us.”
There are other men in the jungle. Dodgers. Wanted men. Hidden. Men dissolving back into the coal town across the lake, shaved, dressed in suits and given new names. The future is out there and it is coming with funeral parades and general strikes, amnesties, expeditions, the Spanish flu.
The darkness is breathing.
“I know it,” Devitt says.
The darkness is quiet then.
ON THE THIRD DAY, in the early morning calm, Campbell and five men start back towards the body by boat. The stutter of the motor travels across the dark and glassy lake and maybe on forever through the mountains, across the waves, and on into the ear of a young woman buying vegetables in the port of Vladivostok who does not know what she hears. On board is the inspector from Nanaimo, a doctor named Levin, an undertaker, and two miners from Cumberland who have agreed to help bring the body down from the mountain. To the east rise the wooded foothills and to the south, the hazy, blue cap of Mount Arrowsmith. Northwest are the grey exposed bluffs at Boston Bay and above them the white tooth of glacier, sharp and clear and menacing. Out on the middle of the lake where the morning sun touches the water at his back and makes of it a mirror for the empty sky, Campbell sees Alone Mountain among the dark shapes rising towards Queneesh.
Queneesh.
YOU HEARD THIS AS a child.
Long ago, there were dozens of war canoes on the beach and canoes for fishing and travelling the rivers and great cedar houses lined the harbour where the herons hunt and the harbour seals and the seabirds. Exquisite totems stood as high as the trees and named the known and unknown world so men and animals would not become lost on the earth or in the dimensions beyond. Eagles waited nightly in the shore trees for fishermen to gut their catch and spread it on the rocks like a banquet feast and always their catch was plentiful and the banquet bloody. The eagles, with their white heads and dark, solemn bodies, were deacons observing the ceremony of harvest from the sea. Nights were quiet except the lapping of the waves and the call of owls as they prepared to move across the fields of the valley.
One night a man named Quoi Qwa Lak had a dream. In the dream the sea rose all round the village and covered the last totem and did not stop until everyone was drowned. When he woke, he warned the chief and his people. Quoi Qwa Lak was known for his dreams and for their stunning and horrible accuracy. The chief, who was an astute man, did not hesitate. He
ordered new canoes fashioned and all the stores of berries and fish and animal fat loaded in them. Then all the men took a long and supernatural rope that had been given to the people of Comox many years before (you were never told by whom or what) to the top of the glacier and staked it there and tied each of the canoes to the rope.
Then the rains came.
They did not stop.
THE WATER ROSE AND began to climb the walls of the big house. The chief ordered everyone into the canoes. Each canoe carried a man and as many women and children as it could fit and still float. The elders stood in the middles of the canoes and quietly watched the world disappear. Soon the last totem was indeed submerged in the saltwater. The children did not know what was happening. They wept and laughed in their confusion. The women hurled insults at the men who they blamed for offending the sea. Some men hung their heads so no one would see their tears. Some wished they could drown now in the overwhelming tide and not wait for the dry burn of thirst to do its work. And the chief, who did not say anything, wondered how long they could wait for someone to die.
Still above the water was the white glacier.
And then a young girl began to cry, “Queneesh, Queeneesh!”
All the people looked up at the great white mountain as it began to move and transform. The thunder was tremendous and it roared across the water, the hurricane of hurricanes, so the waves stretched the rope taught and carried the canoes across the sea as far away from each other as possible. No one party could see another. The last canoe sailed to the west of the mountain that was now under water, alone yet connected by the rope with all the others around the great watery world. The glacier was now a white whale and the girl who had called it by its name sat dryly on its back.
THE DARKNESS WATCHED THE man with the deputy’s badge raise his rifle.
Goodwin stopped and lifted his arms above his head. In his right hand he held the rifle Naylor gave them so they could hunt and feed themselves as best they could—food was scarce because of the war and it was increasingly dangerous for the conspirators. The magazine was empty.
The deputy was tall and lanky and seemed especially so looming up-trail above the short and slender fugitive.
“Don’t shoot,” Goodwin said and he took a step forward.
The future was gathering around them.
The report obliterated the jungle.
Then half a second later it was back, as all the birds lifted up and were gone.
FIRST WOMEN’S BATTALION OF DEATH
CATHERINE’S THROAT WAS SOFT and open to the orange light of the salon. Josie held the back of Catherine’s head in one hand, moving the nozzle with the other, rinsing Catherine’s hair with warm water. Catherine felt herself relax into Josie’s hand, give in, let this other, younger woman support her. She had her eyes closed. The water was loud against her skull and against the porcelain sink and Catherine allowed herself to slip away into her body where it was dark and endless and uncommonly quiet, where the hand holding her head was part of her body going on forever.
Then the water stopped.
The phone was ringing.
“He can fuck off,” Josie said.
Catherine felt the words before she heard them and they brought her out of herself and then, paradoxically, in an instant, locked her back into her body, a reminder that her body and her awareness of her body were two different places, locked her into her finitude, to the space between herself and Josie.
Then Josie laughed.
Catherine opened her eyes.
Above her on the ceiling was a map of the world. The map was upside down and the hemispheres reversed. All the proportions were unfamiliar, with Europe and Russia and Canada crammed into a fat landmass along the bottom of the image. It looked like a different place. “Sorry,” she said to Catherine. Her voice was soft and regretful, half- embarrassed, half-irreverent. She sounded fatigued and at the same time energized by her fatigue, as if swearing like that was at once a weakness and a thrill.
She let Catherine’s neck rest in the support of the sink.
The phone was still ringing.
“He’s a fucking asshole,” said a voice from a few feet away, a blonde hairdresser called Hannah who had cut Catherine’s hair once before and who had reminded Catherine of her sister, Jessica—Yashka she’d called her since they were children—with her strident voice and her lazy left eye. Both women seemed to only ever half-see Catherine and simultaneously to see something she could not, to see in a way she could not.
They were talking about Josie’s boyfriend.
Then the phone stopped.
Catherine heard Josie pump the shampoo then Josie’s fingers were working her scalp. She would have paid just for this part. She liked Josie’s soft body leaning over her. She liked the heat of that body. She liked Josie’s fingers moving her scalp back and forth. Josie smelled of butter and soap and Pinot Gris and something grimy and tired and young that seemed familiar to Catherine but that had gone out of her life several years before, back when she was Josie’s age, in her late-twenties, or perhaps even younger, before she’d taken her post at the university, before her Facebook feed had been overrun by pictures of other women’s babies, then other women’s toddlers, then school performances, then even the teenaged rock bands of her friends’ children— always the fathers posting these—before she had friends who were divorced or declaring bankruptcy or getting chemotherapy for some rare form of stomach cancer or cancer of the blood or cancer of the skin or kidneys, losing their hair, drinking kombucha, cutting out sugar and gluten, going camping in the late fall for that last moment in the autumn sunlight over the islands, arbutus trees with their peeling skin and persistent green leaves, before tenure, before the pain in her hands that made it excruciating to type, before the novel began to languish, even in her own mind, before she’d tired, finally, of being tired.
What she knew: Josie had broken up with her boyfriend, an unknown but gifted painter from Australia named Matthias, whom she’d been with for some years. His small 12 x 10 inch paintings were all over the salon walls, floating in large rectangular frames. The images were tiny, photo- realistic depictions of women’s clothing alive in colourless, roughly pencilled settings: a sheer smock walking a nighttime highway, an old woollen bathing suit and cap on the sidewalk of a North American city, a paisley dress expressing the wind on top of a double decker bus in the heart of London. The clothes looked like they were walking or running or standing in the energy of the world, with gravity and weather and motion acting on them. But there were no bodies, no people alive in the clothing, as if the bodies— women, Catherine thought, or even men—had been removed, erased. Yashka would have a field day with these images. She would never stop ripping them apart. Then she’d have a go at Catherine for using a cliché like “field day” and a second cliché like “ripping them apart.”
Or she’d laugh and say nothing.
Sometimes Yashka would say nothing just when she had the most to say.
There’d been a party in the salon two nights before to celebrate the hanging of these paintings and the place had been closed the following day. It still had the faint odour of beer and wine gilding the scent of product. Catherine had not caught the details of what happened between Josie and the painter, but at some point in that day the salon was closed Josie had had enough.
Catherine was waiting for something to say.
She didn’t know Josie well, but they had friends in common. They were neighbours in that loose sense of belonging to a certain part of the city.
Maybe he’ll go home to Australia, she thought, but she didn’t say it.
Looking at the map with her head tilted back, Catherine had the sense she herself was hanging upside down. South America reached up into the top of the world like a plume of smoke where the fat north was the dull fire below. Australia was a lonely cloud. As strange as it was, she’d seen it before. She recognized it. Yashka had it hanging in her office. There was so much blue ocean in the south
—it looked to Catherine like the sky.
“Take home a bottle of white and drink it in the bath,” Hannah said, her tone all solidarity and sympathetic vindictiveness, as if by adopting some of the uglier of Josie’s feelings she might alleviate those very feelings in Josie, ease some of her friend’s burden. Catherine imagined Hannah’s eyes looking off in two different directions at once. “We’ll take these fucking paintings down tonight.”
Josie lifted Catherine’s head up and wrapped a towel around her hair, patting it and squeezing it. Catherine felt the blood running back into her body.
“Do you want a cup of tea?” Josie said. She was still patting Catherine’s hair. “Or coffee? We have green tea? Lemonade?”
Josie had her hand on Catherine’s back, between her shoulders, so Catherine knew to stand up. There was late- afternoon light filling up the front part of the salon, getting hung up on the ficus and in the blue barbicide on the counters. Catherine was the only client.
“Offer her the wine,” said another young woman who was sweeping the floor. Catherine didn’t know her name.
The hair on the floor was a mixture of black and silver like Catherine’s own. Already the person from whom it had been cut was growing new hair, having left some physical part of herself behind, some part she no longer wanted. This struck Catherine as sad and disgusting in a way that had never occurred to her before. She listened to the sound of the broom against the floor and she imagined in that instant that it was the sound of the hairs moving against each other. Our hair going on even after death, “like grass in good soil.” That’s what Remarque’s beleaguered German in All Quiet on the Western Front imagines: the hair growing on his dead comrades’ corpses in the mud of Western Europe, their nails twisting into corkscrews. Catherine knew it was a myth that these cells went on without us, without our beating hearts, but it compelled her imagination as it had Remarque’s and now here was all that hair that her mind could not quite make dead being drawn across the floor. When the young woman turned away from Catherine, a tattoo of Ganesha reached its arms and elephant head out from the scooped back of her dress.