by Claudia Dey
‘The only thing she said when she got back into the car that night in Kapuskasing was, “Fuck. My shoes.”’
Then Finbar pulls me close, the two of us adrift together. ‘It is amazing how alive someone can be in the mind.’ It is an instruction. And then, both of us looking straight ahead, ‘It is about the bold statements … ’ The prologue to his autobiography.
He makes a ripping sound. Tulip leaves the room.
The next morning, I dig a grave beside the Queen’s and I bury Finbar. His face has mended itself through the night. He and the Queen will, in the same violent storm, be pulled into the lake, part of the bluffs’ slow collapse. In time, their bones will drift over to Toronto Island and be caught and held by the reeds.
He left one thing for me: a small stack of newspaper clippings. From a distance, they look like your collection of birth announcements. He must have laid them out before dying. His body beside me in the morning. The only body I have been close to that is not breathing. He is holding my hand. He told me that his hand was always steady when he drew maps, but only then. This is how it feels entwined in mine, like it is drawing a map.
A black-and-white photograph of a tree and police crowded beneath it. I make out the faces of the Mime and the Turban, yellow tape across them. Unidentified Man Found Hanging from Oldest Tree in the Rosedale Ravine. June 10, 1981. The night I spent on the island. The night I walked the wire for the first time. The second clipping, Man Found Dead in Ravine Identified as Portraitist Sheb Ledoux. June 12, 1981. The day Mr. and Mrs. Next Door looked at me with their ruined, clutching faces from amidst the totems of our life, scattered on the lawn like the aftermath of a hurricane. The article details your birthplace, the name of your adoptive mother, the mysterious disappearance of your own mother, your successes as a painter and your time in and out of institutions. It mentions Monique Ledoux, actress and former dancer, your wife of nearly ten years, and your daughters, Immaculata and Eugenia Ledoux. There is a photograph of you. One I have never seen. Mink must have taken it before we were born. You are planting the apple tree in our backyard.
For Finbar, this was a birth announcement and a death announcement together. It was the first time he had seen a photograph of his son.
If you focus your eyes on one staid object, angle yourself back slightly, jump from a speeding train and land on your feet, you have the sensation of running forty miles an hour. This is how I feel shaking over Finbar’s oiled oak table. Grief has its own velocity.
I hope a symphony filled your head.
From here, the city is cells dividing under a microscope. The view from your left eye, floating. The Gardiner Expressway is coiled – a concrete comet, cars hurtling across it, their headlights skidding and stretched white like long exposures. Night is thorough. The moon nearly full, a boulder in a yolk, it shines behind trees, making their branches antlers. Some stars, pricks of silver. The streets are stacked and crooked. Manholes: a cursive of smoke. Leaves, yellow dashes against the pavement. The strut and shuffle of the train across the bridge. Under it, a fold of horns and brakes. Potholes. Chicken and produce trucks drive over them, feathers and skins falling. The raccoons come out. Scurrying, their backs triangles, they walk the edges of fences and rooftops. Pregnant with six at a time. One fox in a park. She barks five syllables and listens for a response. Across a pond that is green and cold. On everything, the white moss of an early frost.
A woman in a knitted hat and dish gloves pulls weeds from a square of dirt with a fork. She tucks seeds into it. A dog skunks by with a bun in his jaw, the mark of lipstick on it. A mezzo-soprano sings. People gather to listen. One has a quail on his head. It lays an egg. Speckled blue. A boy slow-dances. His brother lifts weights beside him. The man gives the egg away. A wet litter of blackbirds is born under a hollow beehive. Small fires in backyards. Leaves in dank piles, burning. The smell of lemon peels and goat. A newborn grabs a fist of his mother’s hair. A tooth comes through a gum. A man pushes a shopping cart full of work gloves for sale.
A butcher stops butchering. He wipes his hands down his apron. A congregation on the sidewalk, he joins it. Faces tilted up. Women in caftans, their children a parade behind them, step out onto their porches. A lantern is hung.
Immaculata and Leopold stand on their flat roof. Leopold, his long arm a lance, points up at me. Immaculata holds a white pigeon. The pigeon is so tranquil, I cannot tell if it is alive. The dogs sprint around Immaculata and Leopold in loops, so fast that they become a solid ring. Immaculata looks at them and then Leopold and offers, ‘Forever.’
‘Forever.’
When they speak, they leave steam, their mouths furnaces. They squeeze their hands together so hard that their fingers hurt. And then Immaculata opens her arms. Unpinned, she is all fluidity. Her dress is a sail. The pigeon flies away. It is a white glove waving.
This is what they all see: a woman walking a wire that is fastened to nothing but the night air. I light my second REDBIRD match. My face flickers. It is free the way a nomad’s face is free. The match burns out, a twig in my fingertips. One hundred and sixty feet above the city, I am walking Finbar’s wire. The one he strung between willows, across the Falls, across Florence. The one that fumbled his Queen. She crushed her heels when she fell. I tell Finbar she tried to land.
A wire memorizes the underside of a foot. How a knife knows a grip. Finbar’s wire is broad as the spine of a dinosaur; I walk it vertebra to vertebra. I saw a dinosaur once in the glass case of a museum: a bright green bird with two sets of wings. I tell Mink the bird is her first ancestor. The bird is her beginnings. My heart beats loudly as doors closing behind me. I am not afraid. Every step is a slow and careful assembly. Eyes are remembered and returned to their faces. Portraits are filled in.
Your right eye, the colour of algae, your cheekbones in hard slabs, the sprint of your mouth, your uneven beard. Behind you, a storm. The particles in the air: fingerprint dust. And then, a vast, blue quiet. The lake on the moon. You take off your winter suit. Hang it from a branch nearby. And you swim through water thick as plumage. When you surface, your face is so still, I can make a cast of it.
My hair, your hair, your eyes, my eyes, my face, your face.
Ahead of me, a gold line – the sun prying the horizon open and then in punctures. I am above the lake now, a smooth, wet planet. The city is asleep to the north. ‘Find me,’ I say and, for a second, the world is empty. ‘Find me.’ A stamp in the open water, the morning sky behind it an explosion, blackening its shape. You said there was a sandbar in the middle of the ocean. Mustangs galloped across it. You said no one had found it yet, but you wanted me to know it existed. I walk. A man on the roof of his boat. He holds up his hand. There is something in it that catches the light. Around him the waves are hard and grey. The two of us, moving toward each other, making bridges out of space.
Notes and Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges the financial support of the Ontario Arts Council’s Chalmers Arts Fellowship and Writer’s Reserve Program, the City of Toronto through Toronto Arts Council and the Canada Council.
For temporary residence on islands, thank you to Martin and Gabrielle Alioth, and James Baird of Pouch Cove, Newfoundland; the Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts, Toronto Island; the National Theatre School, Montreal, Quebec; and especially Ken Gass and the Factory Theatre.
In researching this book, Shane Peacock’s The Great Farini: The High-Wire Life of William Hunt proved most useful, as did Carole M. Lidgold’s The History of the Guild Inn and Joanna Kidd’s Nature on the Toronto Islands: An Explorer’s Guide. Thank you also to Sam Sperry, Albert Fulton of the Island Archives, and Jimmy Jones who is the Island archives.
The Guild Inn was still operating in 1981, and there are very few houseboats built from cedar. Immaculata’s medieval recipe is abbreviated from Dr. William Kitchiner’s The Cook’s Oracle as cited by Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of the Senses. Immaculata’s speech to lightning is from S. K. Heninger, Jr.’s A Handbook
of Meteorology as cited by Annie Dillard in her poem ‘A View of Certain Wonderful Effects’ in Mornings Like This. Samuel and Eugenia’s conversation in 3-D glasses begins with a quote from Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk. On page 160 of the same book, you will find the instructions for jumping from a moving train. Grateful acknowledgement to the following artists: Chris Cran’s ‘A Good Boy and a Million Miles of Deep Blue Space’; Veda Hille’s ‘cowper’s folly’; Peter von Tiesenhausen who copyrighted his land as his art; Susan Coolen’s Le Spectacle de la Nature: A Collector’s Compendium, and ‘Alien Orbs’ from her series Celestial Travellers; Max Picard’s The World of Silence, translated by Stanley Godman; Donna Orchard’s Psycho Killer; Paterson Ewen, edited by Matthew Teitelbaum; aerialist Noah Kenneally; and, for sublime friendship, Heidi Sopinka and Jason Logan.
For belief, thank you to Anne McDermid with Jane Warren, Vanessa Matthews and Martha Magor. To Michael Redhill, Martha Sharpe and Michael Helm, thank you for close reading and esoterica.
Thank you to Alana Wilcox for brilliance. And to Christina Palassio, Evan Munday, Stan Bevington, Rick/Simon and everyone at Coach House Books for making beautiful objects in an elusive address.
Thank you always to the Kerr family, my beloved parents and sister, Sarah. For arriving partway through, thank you to Dove Dey-Kerr.
This book is for Don Kerr, who amazes me.
Claudia Dey’s plays are Beaver, The Gwendolyn Poems and Trout Stanley. She writes the ‘Group Therapy’ column for the Globe and Mail. Stunt is her first novel.
Typeset in Centaur
Printed and bound at the Coach House on bpNichol Lane,
March 2008
Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox
Cover art and design by Jason Logan
Hand lettering by Jason Logan
Author photo by Don Kerr
Coach House Books
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