by Terry Griggs
“I didn’t even know her,” he said.
Mercifully, when Ned was asleep, he neither snored, nor philosophized, nor interrogated. At night Grif kept himself awake as long as he could to appreciate all the uninterpreted sounds on offer—waves lapping the shore, wind in the trees, bats squeaking. Gazing up at a sky thick with stars, he thought about something Ned had told him: that mariners once possessed the power of seeing the stars during the day, an ability gradually lost with the discovery and use of navigational instruments. Grif didn’t know whether to believe this or not, but he wanted to. Ned had also told him that human beings are made of the same material as the stars, and this he didn’t believe at all.
Lessons in astronomy had come his way too, and he could pick out the constellations—Pegasus, Perseus, Cygnus—most of which had tragic stories attached. The night sky was god-infested with Olympian memorials. How oppressive this was. The stars were more beautiful, he had decided, as abstract splatter, their designs loose and unresolved. Once you saw the patterns the constellations formed, you always saw them, ancient and changeless (although Ned claimed they did change over time); they rode ceaselessly overhead, dragging their sad stories with them, no matter how rent their forms.
Clouds. He preferred clouds, which were too rapidly changeable for the mythmakers to do anything with. Try to stop one with an imprisoning story and the sky would clear instantly.
But there was one constellation that he had grown fond of, and he sought it out this night: a giant who strode across the heavens in a drunken, rangy swagger, his being like glinting shards of broken bar glass tossed up into the sky, his open self a wild lament burning into the darkness. O’Brien he was called, or at least that’s what he thought Ned had called him. He had a red star embedded in his right shoulder and a blue star in his left leg. Around his waist he wore a belt of pearls, and from this a mirror-bright dagger depended. O’Brien had two dogs following him, and was himself standing on Lepus, the hare—which did not seem like inconsistent behaviour for a rogue Irish star man who must, with blather and charm, have elbowed his way among the Greeks. When sleep finally claimed him, Grif drifted off secure in the knowledge that although the giant continuously pursued those girls, the Pleiades (Colleen, Sheila, Emer …), the chase was endless. He’d never catch them—nor would he know what to do if he did.
The morning after Ned so irritatingly questioned him, invoking his wife, Grif woke pulling and scratching at his chest. In sleep he had been clawing at himself, trying to remove a holy medal, hot as a brand, that was sinking into him as if his flesh was as soft as butter. With dream cognition he recognized this medal as one that had been given to him at birth, his first possession, long since lost. The medal was about the size of a child’s thumbprint and on it was embossed the figure of the Virgin Mary, tiny and ghostly.
He sat up suddenly, jerked out of sleep, and looked toward the fire, suspecting that a flaming spark had landed on him; but the pit was cold, filled with nothing but grey ash and charred chunks of wood. He rubbed at the spot, stinging and itchy, and unbuttoned the top of his union suit. A red, angry lesion had risen in the centre of his chest like a bull’s eye. I’m a marked man, he thought. And aloud, “Hey Ned, does that infallible cricket of yours bite?”
Ned was out of earshot, up to his knees in the lake and standing perfectly still, concentrating, poised as a heron, ready to catch their breakfast with his bare hands.
A spider, then. Lycosidae gulosa, which is Latin for “sneaky bastard.” A smother of spiders. Grif shuddered to think what could have passed over him in the night. He reached for his jacket and the journal, thinking he might just go arachnid hunting, stub out a few sons of that furtive night-walking family for the offence of trespass. Then again, maybe it was hard not to trespass when you have eight legs.
Weighing the book in his hand, it occurred to him that he hadn’t held it for some time, although he was ever aware of its weight, like an extra hand riding in his pocket. He supposed he could actually use it for something more dignified than squashing bugs. The journal was only half full, and what a waste, how incomplete. There wasn’t any reason not to write in it himself. Throw enough mud and some of it will stick, as his father was overly fond of saying; and although he meant aspersion rather than knowledge, Grif felt that in this case knowledge applied—and had been applied, liberally. Ned had thrown it at him by the bucketful, and it had stuck, some of it. Observing, learning, knowing, might even be another bolt-hole, another way out. It wouldn’t hurt to record some of what Ned had told him, what had truly begun to interest him, and perhaps to add to that an account of his days. He could pick up where the original writer—so methodical in his account of ecclesiastical destruction—had left off. In doing so, he would bridge a hiatus of centuries, grafting his own experience, his green growth, onto that old, twisted stock. The liberating dissent and mayhem would nourish him like black, tilled earth. That he might deface an object of considerable historic value did not trouble him overmuch. Like the roving creature that had nipped him during the night, trespass was a sin of freedom he had become comfortable with, if not entirely reconciled to.
Ned plunged his hands into the lake and an arc of silvery water flashed up.
Grif felt a thrill of rising excitement possess him, as if he were a hunter about to skin an animal still faintly warm with life. He slipped the cord off the package and began to divest the journal of its canvas wrapping.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
unnatural history
Grif entered the journal on the sly, like so many dust motes drifting invisibly into a room, materializing quietly, unobserved, particle by particle, on a shelf, under a bed. He entered like a roach scuttling into a dark corner. Like a moth disguised as a leaf sailing in on a breath of air. Why he had to creep and flit and sift into his own book, a procryptic man, he couldn’t say, except that it seemed a sensible and shrewd thing to do. The sat-urniid moth, he wrote, has antennae that resemble feathers, and large eye-spots on its wings to alarm predators. What pleased him most about scientific observation, now that he had succumbed to its allure, was how exact it was, and how evasive. Only a very keen reader might discern in his description of a wood nymph or a painted lady the camouflage of the naturalist himself, the one peering warily back through an insect’s eye.
For weeks he and Ned followed a meandering path struck through the water. The quiet was at times unnerving, the channel’s surface black as a bible’s binding. They passed limestone islands smooth as bone, towering virgin stands of pine, white quartzite cliffs, luminous in the sunlight. They passed a lumber mill that broke the silence thunderously, and filled the air with smoke and the lake with log booms that made navigation dodgy. They skirted fishing camps where huge piles of trout were stacked like cordwood, and in one, herons and grebes strung up, hanging from a tree. They waved to a man who was sitting on the end of a dock eating doughnuts, about twenty looped on the end of a broom handle. Another man rode right by them mounted on a swimming moose. He tipped his hat in passing, and said, “Howdeedo.” Pleasure craft, yachts sleek and polished, also slid anonymously by; and in one a young man, stocky and resolute as a bull, stood on the bow and stared down at them with interest. (A guest on board, and not of the moneyed class himself, he was trying to negotiate his own way through the labyrinthine channels of influence and privilege. It was the young Mackenzie King.)
Grif kept his eye turned from the human element when it presented itself, for he had become absorbed in his task of observing and recording, collecting small but potentially essential pieces of information. He’d decided that these were all clues to some mystery of which he might be a part, all forming some pattern that was sunk deeper and was less predictable than anyone before him had possibly discerned. The more closely he observed the natural world, the more fantastic and unreal it appeared. A damselfly wriggled out of its own skin like a girl out of a ball gown. Springtails flew through the air like animated specks of dirt. Fireflies addressed one another in a cod
e of flashing lights. Sphinx moths carried their own deaths on their backs, portable packages laid by the Braconid wasp that, when opened, devoured the recipient.
Ned was satisfied to see him anchored, moored with a written line to that daybook he had unexpectedly produced and begun beavering away in. His grimoire, as Ned thought of it, his book of spells and black magic. The thing looked old enough to play the part, although Ned didn’t say so. Now that Grif did not run away every time Ned opened his mouth to speak, he no longer opened it quite so often. The writing exercise had a grounding effect at any rate, and the young man’s nervous habits that were at times pronounced—of smoothing an unruly eyebrow, scratching an elusive itch, running a finger tentatively along his nose, tracing its outline as if surprised to find it still lodged on his face—these had been diverted into the book. There he was free to search and probe, and to reassure himself of his own existence.
Ned, however, foresaw a technical problem. This was not difficult and required no occult talents. The pencil he had offered Grif when he’d first noticed him frowning into the blank pages of his opened diary had been whittled to within an inch of its own life. He had watched the instrument disappear in Grif’s hands, and presently his fingers were bunched on the point of it, as if his whole being were balanced there. Curious how something so insignificant, a nub of wood encasing a fraction of graphite, had the power, like other small, danger-packed objects—a poison capsule, a bullet—to alter one’s destiny completely. There was going to be a death sooner or later, either in their journey or in Grif’s account of it, and as his partner did not want to stop scribbling—or could not, for he clung to the book as if it were an extension of his own skin—Ned made an agreeable suggestion. Agreeable to himself anyway, for he was beginning to feel crowded by Grif’s company, nostalgic for his own fleet and unobserved peregrinations.
The suggestion was straightforward—and not unwelcome, he thought—and involved dropping Grif off in a bay on the east side of Manitoulin Island, the most accessible spot to land the boat. Ned knew of a family named Cormany who lived on the outskirts of a small village there. He had met them on only a couple of occasions, but found them to be genial and hospitable people—a bit eccentric perhaps, but harmless; and he was certain that they would put Grif up for a day or two while he got his bearings, and might even have a writing instrument to lend him. Or he could buy what he needed in the village store. From the Cormanys’ it was a short walk, fifteen miles or so, to Little Current on the north shore, where the steamers stopped on their way to the Sault and on the return trip to the south—in other words, to whatever destination Grif’s weather vane of a conscience might lead him.
Grif glanced up from his book to nod in agreement—he’d been thinking, whimsically, about what secrets he might reveal if he could dip a pen into the ink of these waters, into their black or indigo or gold—and the next thing he knew he was nodding again, more than a bit surprised to be watching Ned sail away at a buoyant clip, hand raised in a parting salute, fingertips reaching into the air as if the open sky were a font of freedom. He had been dumped, but not without directions, which he supposed he might as well follow. He didn’t want to squander the money Jean had given him—the currency of the drowned after all, and not to be frivolously spent—and so decided that he would try to cadge a meal, maybe even something to write with, from these people and be on his way.
He slid the journal into his pocket and began to walk along the beach, which seemed to consist entirely of slate, pieces the size of dinner plates and platters that broke like crockery as he picked his way over them. It made him feel oafish: here he’d just arrived and already he was wrecking the place. He made a bee-line for a bank and clambered up. A path on the other side brought him before too long to the village Ned had mentioned.
In keeping with his newly acquired interests, Grif was paying more attention as he walked to the skimming dragonflies and the tumbling sulphurs than to the wharf and fishing boats on his left, or the grist mill and hotel up ahead. He was recalling what Ned had told him about the fritillary larva and its preferred menu—the tender leaves of violets—and did not even notice the villagers, who had ceased all activity and stood motionless, as if caught in a photograph, to watch him, a stranger who had apparently stepped right out of the lake. Even a woman hammering shingles onto her roof, a rope tied to her skirts to hold her dress down, paused in mid-swing to stare. He was unshaven, had long hair, was oddly dressed—and shod—and was as preoccupied as any phantom on a midday patrol. He brought with him an unsettling chill, a breath from the grave that rushed through them as he wandered by.
The only citizen unaware of the passing stranger was a young man, a pianist who had retired to this obscure corner of the world and to the loving care of his sister due to ill health (consumption). Enfolded in the gloom of his parlour, he was sunk up to his elbows in a Chopin nocturne (no. 6 in G Minor, op. 15, no. 3), and was as intently focused on the technicalities of this passage as Grif also happened to be on the entomological minutiae of his. As he walked by the young man’s house, Grif was startled by a brace of beautifully articulated notes that drifted out of an open window and into a net of dancing midges. Looking around, taking in a wider view for the first time, he began to wonder what sort of enchanted shore he had been abandoned on. And indeed, the people of this village were standing around stock-still, arrested and staring, as if bewitched. He could easily guess who was responsible, too: that woman tied like a witch to her roof.
His impression of strangeness wasn’t alleviated any as he approached the Cormanys’ residence, which was located several miles beyond the village. It was a four-square frame house, two and a half storeys high, bracketed by tall chimneys and graced with several large windows in front, each decorated with arching eyebrow cornices. This architectural detail made it seem as if the house were watching him, as the villagers had watched, although this was not what struck him as unusual. What did were the three grown men in the front yard playing leapfrog, bounding through the long grass, hurtling over one another and roaring with laughter.
He paused, and studied the scene. He shook his head, dismissing it as if it were an illusion, and was about to move on towards the town, thinking it might be wiser to forgo an acquaintance with this family, when he paused again in a stutter of indecision and the gambollers caught sight of him. All the energy the men had been pouring into their game was instantly directed at him. They laid a welcoming siege, shouting greetings and motioning him in with large arm-swooping gestures. To Grif, an uncertain, flickering figure on the road, the force of their inexplicable friendliness was irresistible, and against all caution he was drawn down the lane toward them.
One of the men was older, but each bore a striking resemblance to the others. The elder gentleman was a vintage version of the younger two, who were handsome, pale-eyed and fair, and all displayed a great many white teeth—a fleck of pink dentifrice powder evident in the older man’s gums—as they took turns clasping Grif’s hand and introducing themselves. William Cormany and his sons, Edgar and Albert. The sons brimmed with health and high spirits, and Grif was intrigued to see such delicate, beautiful skin on these young male faces. He doubted if they even shaved. Like angels, they seemed, or over-large cherubs. Beside them he felt like a plate of leftovers, a man woven together out of hair and creases and stains.
When he mentioned Ned’s name, the welcome was amplified and extended, and he was swept into the house to meet the rest of the family. The men led him down a hallway, past an unoccupied drawing room, and into a dining room where four women were seated around a thick-legged cherrywood table, the surface of which was cluttered with a welter of objects: unwashed dishes, a pile of mending, an apple skewered with a knitting needle, magazines, a pipe, orange peels, a scatter of chess pieces and a half-eaten butter tart in which a dental impression was clearly visible. The women’s hands might have been idle, but their chins weren’t, for they had been busy wagging them in an excited whispered conversation
that stopped dead the moment the men appeared. They turned very slowly and all at once, as if the act were choreographed; and Grif saw it was a planned jest, for each woman had a maple key, split at the seed base, stuck to the bridge of her nose. They looked as fetchingly peculiar as any of the insects he had lately become smitten with. They began to titter and laugh, and the Cormany men joined in, and Grif too caught on to the tail end of it, but with a faltering grasp, like that of a flying child who is last to latch on in a game of crack-the-whip.
“You must forgive us, Mr. Smolders,” said Ina Cormany, the mother of this merry crew, when he was introduced, “but we do like to have a bit of fun.”
The daughters—Victoria, Maud, Polly—shared in the limited but excellent range of features that were allowed this family, and all were lovely, especially Polly, the youngest. Grif judged her to be about sixteen, and perhaps to distinguish herself from her neatly coiffed and carefully dressed sisters, she wore her hair down, an unruly reddish-blonde blaze, and she had on a dress she’d grown out of.
He had to turn his eyes away from her (no corset)—the burning rims of his ears shame enough—which is when he spotted another member of the family, tucked up in a bucket and presently putting in service as a doorstop. It was a baby with a sooty tuft of down on its head, a poet’s sideburns and a very serious expression on its small, ugly face. This child didn’t seem to belong here among them—dark, glowering, an imp in a pail—nor was anyone paying it the slightest bit of attention. But the baby drew Grif’s eye as if it had some magnetic power to which he alone was susceptible.
“Who is this little fellow?” he finally asked.