by Terry Griggs
Ned patted his vest pocket lightly, reached in with two fingers and pulled out a harmonica, a small, thirteen-cent, nickel-plated Hohner, which he put to his lips. Those chickens he had been advised not to count—they appeared. He pulled them out of their tiny roosts, the harmonica’s ten slots, birds beaked and feathered and rounded with pure sound to peck and scratch on the dock before them. Then, as instantly as they had appeared, the shape of the musical creatures changed, metamorphosed into a form less comic, more graceful, and, compact as sparrows, they lifted into flight and vanished.
Appreciation was as hearty as two happy sots could produce, and Ned inclined his chin in a modest bow. He told Grif that he was the occasional organist in a settlement on the north shore, by which he meant mouth organ, the only instrument the congregation could afford. There was no church, either, and the services were held in the schoolhouse—Methodist in the morning and Anglican in the evening, but everyone in the community attended both.
“Let your Sabbatarians fight it out in the city,” he said, “some people just want to get along and have a good time.”
Ned then played a few of his sacred tunes, lively and raucous, more suited to a saloon or a sporting house, it was clear, Grif was thinking.
“Son, the Lord can hardly find the place on the map.”
An appealing approach to sacrilege, but what struck Grif even more was the appeal of this music. He couldn’t see how it was accomplished, how Ned, simply by blowing on a sliver of wood and metal buried in his hand, by sucking the weightless substance out of it, could produce such antic or sad or languorous melodies. He looked to be drawing music out of his very flesh and bones.
Listening, letting it pour into him, Grif felt roused, lightened. Jean, too, leapt up, hurried back into the shed, and returned with a bashed-up two-string fiddle and a homemade bow, which he began to saw away on, extemporizing with a few yips and howls.
Grif gazed at his empty hands, wanting to add something of his own devising. If he could just widen it, hold it open, make room for more pleasure to flow in. He was untalented, untutored, but he could clap along at least, could build a bracing, echoing cairn of sound with his bare hands.
Ned, eyeing Grif, paused for a beat and said to him, “Why don’t you show us which one of those shoes of yours is a better dancer? I’d put my money on that hobnail one on the left.”
“Dance? I can’t.”
“I’ve never played this thing before,” said Jean. “Come on, lad. The fish won’t laugh. Not so loud as you’ll hear them, anyway.”
So Grif rose to his feet and, what the hell, partner to himself, started to stomp around on the dock, trying to chase down what the other two were recklessly tossing out. He clumped and shuffled, awkwardly at first, a foolish grin on his face. Then he began to lose himself in concentration, the grin dissolving into intent-ness. The feel of the air swirling around him, pouring through his widespread fingers, the groaning sounds the wood made under the punishment of his heels, the dock’s vibrations, Jean’s boat bumping up against it, the disturbance he was creating in the water—how the proximate world was being pulled into his orbit.
He had attended a dance in Ingersoll once. Coaxed into dancing with a friend’s kindly and patient sister, he had clumsily rattled through a two-step like a squirrel caught in a cage. The rules of that damn measure were understood and adhered to by all except him, and here was his chance to smash those rules to pieces. He let his shoes, with their differing dispositions, argue it out. His heels hit the planks of the dock like mattocks as he danced, truly danced, an anarchic northern flamenco. His shoes filled with fire; beads of sweat flew off his forehead. Peculiar noises were struck out of the wood like cries. His performance (he thought) was sheer artistry. Certainly it was ephemeral, never to be replicated, evaporating the very moment of its expression, an escapee’s choreography that vanished straight into his soles like a high-noon shadow the second it was laid down.
The music ceased when he began to spin, and the two older men watched, impressed, as Grif followed himself around and around, faster and faster. They half expected him to bore a hole through the dock, or fly off twirling like a spout across the lake. Instead, he fell flat on his face, and a sharply pointed splinter of wood, about three inches long, shot up his left nostril and pierced clean through the skin, decorating him like some exotic South Seas native carried in the high winds and dropped suddenly out of the sky.
Grif reached up to touch his nose, which still throbbed, although it had finally stopped bleeding. Once the splinter had been plucked out, he had spent the rest of the day with various objects stuffed up his “nose-thirl,” as Ned called it—handkerchiefs, cobwebs rolled into soft gauzy balls, even a cork. Jean offered to sew up the gash with one of the violin strings, a medical procedure he’d seen performed on a horse, but Grif declined the doctoring, saying the fiddle needed the string far more than he. It was no more than he deserved anyway for his prideful hoofing. The way he saw it, his blood was so embarrassed to be found in his body, as in some collapsing structure, that it wanted out, and had crowded through that small portal of a wound in a panic to escape him.
As evening had drifted toward them out of the forest on the bluff above, so had clouds of mosquitoes—and what a sound they made, like someone honing an axe to drive a wedge into their party. Hands that earlier had made such sprightly music and had birthed stories right out of the air now turned on their owners, swatting and slapping. Grif started hitting himself so savagely his partners wondered if there wasn’t something else he was after, some other thing cleaving to his skin that required punishment. They were afraid he might do himself more damage than he had already done.
“I’d say it was time to go,” Ned announced, jumping up.
“It is getting late. I have to attend to the light,” said Jean, holding out a hand to Grif, then hesitating. “Wait, there’s one more thing before you leave.”
Leave? Apparently some understanding had arrived more surreptitiously than the droning insects. But of course he had to leave—flight was what kept him alive. Gently, with the light-fingered touch he had once used to make the sign of the cross, he felt his jacket pocket for the journal, still bound in its protective canvas wrapping. It was a square of ice cut out of the frozen past, a small black window that admitted a limited but thrilling view of a lost and haunted country. His view, his book. He was packed and ready.
Again Jean had ducked into the shed, and this time he returned with a woman’s change purse, which he held out to Grif.
“It’s not much,” he said. “Corpses are poor employers. Might help along the way, just the same.”
The purse was made of a gunmetal mesh that poured into his hand, and the design of its clasp was that of a mermaid stretched out and feeding a lobster with a spoon. It had a pleasing weight, like a sack of plums, and surely was of some value in itself, for it was a striking object.
He smiled and slipped his hand into Jean’s, and now wondered, as he lay stretched out in the bottom of Ned’s boat, why his hand didn’t glow. He was suffused with warmth, radiant, a human lantern ignited by the light-keeper. Perhaps it was only a shirker’s surge of relief he was enjoying. Or the unexpected decanting of an ideal into his physical being, and the sense that he had achieved something impossible—a true freedom, however brief it might be.
Ned advised him to settle in, to sleep if he wanted, and not to worry about travelling at night, for he knew every rock and shoal in these waters.
“I’ll be, and that’s one of them right there,” he said, as the boat made a sudden grating noise. He slid an oar into the lake, gave a push, and they continued, gliding over the smooth black water.
Grif wasn’t worried. He didn’t care. Wasn’t that the secret of being a floating man—jettisoning all care? He thought of a story Jean had told him, about sailors in treacherous seas throwing statues, their resident saints, overboard when all supplication and prayer had failed to calm the waters. This spiritually brazen act mus
t have been intended as a warning to the powers above of a more acute danger: that the divine will lose their hold on the earthly if they do not better serve.
Grif slid down and stretched out, making himself comfortable. He didn’t even glance back to watch Lonely Island, its lighthouse and keeper, recede from view. Open and receptive as a flower, he stared up at the immense sky, the stars beginning to appear. The chill of the lake penetrated his back. He lay shallow-rooted, a dreaming keel, at one with Ned’s claptrap skiff as it headed further and further north.
CHAPTER TEN
the Irish constellation
It was an education travelling with Ned Hawke, but Grif wasn’t sure what degree he’d graduate with if he survived the trip: Master of the Minimal? Doctor of Wonders? Ned was as full of information as the lake was water, most of it about as trustworthy. For the first time in his life Grif wished that he weren’t so ignorant of what existed beyond the edges of practicality, so that he could contest some of what Ned told him. His teacher seemed at times to be like those ancient sailors who returned from their explorations with stories of fantastic peoples and distant lands rich with marvels. Yet Ned claimed that science was his subject, not fancy—except when he was teasing Grif, who was entertainingly credulous.
Grif’s instruction began late one afternoon, early into their journey, when they were setting up camp on a small island in a mazy stretch of Lake Huron’s North Channel. Dotted with reefs, shoals and islands that boats had to weave and waggle through, this part of the channel had come to be known as the Turkey Trail. Ned was constructing a steeple of kindling for their campfire and asked Grif if he wouldn’t mind fetching a branch of cedar. Arbor vitae, the tree of life. A handful of cedar was better for a man than a bag of oranges. It could cure snow blindness, scurvy, nasal congestion and possibly what ailed his young companion. Grif was happy to comply, and wandered up the beach and into a small stand of trees, where he snapped a branch off a sapling, easy as breaking a child’s arm. He was glad of it, too, for a couple of horseflies, thugs of the fly tribe, attacked him on the way back and he was able to do battle, using the branch as a switch to drive them off.
Ned regarded the branch—and him—with curiosity. A pileated woodpecker concealed in a bush nearby began shrieking loudly, derisive as any schoolyard bully.
“White pine,” Ned observed. “You will get to know it by its carcass, heading south. The Americans make mail-order catalogues out of it.”
The old man’s look was almost vocal: how was Grif ever going to find his way if he couldn’t tell the difference between one thing and the next, between where he had been and where he was going?
“This won’t do?” Grif waved the branch.
“Not at all. Why don’t you sit down on that rock there and I’ll tell you about what’s under your very arse.”
“Huh?”
“Lichen, two plants. Living symbiotically. Like man and wife.”
“What, this?” Grif pointed to a greenish leprous scale on the rock. “It’s not alive.”
“It’s alive all right, and has been for years, likely for centuries. The manna that fed the Israelites in the desert was a species of lichen. The stuff blows off the rocks in the lowlands there and people do eat it. Miraculous matter indeed.”
Grif protested, as well he might, because Ned had begun to pull him through a grain-high, hair-wide passage into the world of particularity.
Tree, plant, bird, rock. What more did a man need in the way of definition? Vast and plain, categories as large as continents, these words sufficed. You could navigate through a whole life, incurious and detail-blind, without requiring microscopically subtle distinctions and directions. Ignorance had its uses; it kept things whole, and easily comprehensible. But not for Ned, who believed that all animals, especially the arrogant two-legged ones, needed to stay alert. To attend. What if Grif ended up marrying the same woman twice without even realizing it? Ned knew what he knew (Grif talked in his sleep) and had decided that this was not the time to be beggarly with the world’s infinitesimal wealth.
It took Grif a while to catch on. As they travelled through a labyrinth of islands—some nothing more than a hump of smooth rock with a scattering of vegetation on top, like a giant’s bald pate emerging—and dipped into dark-water bays, and as they camped and fished and swam (Grif with the help of an inflated moose’s stomach), he found his attention constantly diverted by Ned to the oddest and most insignificant of things. To the veined wing of a mayfly, or the wriggling bluish legs and orange claw tips of a crayfish, or the papery bark of the birch, encoded as a roll of music for a player piano. He listened, and occasionally grunted to prove he was listening, but then would purposely forget what he had been told, would shake it off as though ridding himself of a smattering of dirt and grit. Not that Ned’s “facts” weren’t interesting, even captivating, for he touched magically on this and that with the slight wand of himself. Grif just didn’t care that every bloodsucking bug he might encounter—and did—had been distinguished with a Latin name. Higher classification didn’t improve their manners in the least. Take Chrysops callidas, the deer fly. Black-banded wings, iridescent green eyes, half an inch in length, quick in attack, tenacious, transporting you away in small burning chunks—Grif might learn everything there was to know about the deer fly, yet it still ate him alive. It knew him more intimately than he would ever know it, unless he happened to swallow one. So much for knowledge and the deflecting power of words.
Grif liked Ned. How could he not? The man was personable, easy to get along with, undemanding. He had a cricket for a pet. During the day it lived in his pocket, and at night he placed it on his knee so that he could speak to it. And the darn cricket answered. Truth was, Grif had gotten to the point where he would much rather hear the cricket’s monologue than Ned’s. Irrational, no doubt, and ungrateful, but he had developed an aversion to the sound of his companion’s voice, of what it carried, like pins and bits of broken glass that scraped against his inner ear. It was like listening to a wind at first melodious, then monotonous, then causing a deep ache in the head. He made excuses to get away from him. When not sailing on the lake, or drinking as much of it as his gut would hold (giving him a reason to go off and piss privately in the woods—he’d made a nuisance of himself zinging streams scattershot off the rocky beaches, wetting Ned’s pant legs), he began to spend more and more time in it, submerged, ears stuffed with muffling water. As a consequence of being driven into it, he was—incredibly—mending his relationship with the element, and mending himself into it, stepping from water to land and back again as if crafting for himself an amphibious existence.
One day he wandered off to dry himself on a baking haunch of rock. He tilted his head back, opened his mouth and stretched out his tongue, letting the breeze move in and the sun lay down a warm host of light. Despite the lessons, this transient life was not so bad. Ned was only trying to help, after all, and although he had told him a great many things, the subject of a destination had not come up. Grif wasn’t about to suggest one, either. Nowhere in particular was a safe enough place to be. If attention—or some semblance of it—was the tuition he had to pay for this errant life, then he supposed the fee wasn’t beyond his means. He glanced down and watched his wet footprints fading on the rock, as if he himself were evaporating, lifting into the air, stepping up and away, being translated directly into spirit. No man, nowhere. Touching his cheek, though, and his brow, skating his palm down the length of his arm, he felt himself to be solidly, ineradicably present.
He then noticed the blue flower of a harebell that was growing in a narrow crevice beside him, and reached out to touch it instead. Campanula rotundifolia. Grif knew that now, and knowing it didn’t make it less delicate, or less hardy for thriving in this barren spot. He placed a finger under the bell and raised its tiny blue chin to peer inside. Curse the man, he thought, it’s becoming a habit. He was expecting to see lavender stamens tipped with yellow dust, but saw instead a thing dark and twis
ted, a writhing black seed. He drew closer, eye to flower, body stretched out flat, and distinguished two insects (unnamed even by Ned) stuck together to form one crude and misshapen unit. Disgusted, he ripped the plant up by the roots and smeared its blue bower into the rock with his bare heel. Everything mocked him, even creatures so small you could scarcely see them.
That evening as they sat together by their campfire finishing supper, Ned pulled a pike’s bone out of his mouth as if out of a sheath, ran it over his upper lip, combed it through his beard and said, “You know the Wise Man who brought the gift of myrrh to the Christ child?”
“Yes-s.”
“Think what better shape we’d be in if he had brought mirth instead.”
“Christ would have been telling funny stories instead of parables?”
“Jokes, yes. And the Apostles might have put on skits instead of long faces. There’s no comedy in religion, is there?”
“None that I’ve ever encountered. Except once, when Father Fallon knocked a chalice over during the consecration. Turns out he was having his morning coffee in it.”
“Ha. A sense of humour produces a critical mind, is why. Liberates you to think your own thoughts. Can’t have that where faith is concerned.”
“Does the Pope believe in God, do you think?”
“That old monkey? I’d be very much surprised if he did. Too clever by half.”
“He’s infallible.”
“So’s my cricket.” Ned twirled the fish bone in his fingers, then, pointing it at Grif, said, “Why did you leave her?”
Grif sucked in air, rammed by the very conversation he was cruising along so comfortably in.
“Didn’t you love her?” Ned persisted.
Grif snatched up a chunk of driftwood, flat as a paddle, that lay beside him. It seemed for a second as if he were going to swipe it across Ned’s face—erase the question and the inquisitor both—but instead he drove it into the fire. A spray of sparks leapt up, a tendril of smoke.