Into That Darkness

by Steven Price

  Listen to me. Thirty-six years on and my head’s still trying to understand what my hands have always known.

  His wife did not die in autumn and yet autumn was when he’d dream of her.

  He came up out of that tunnel into the grey light coiling his safety line in the webbing of one thumb and slapping it forward and his legs stiffening in the late air, hamstrings cramped, back aching. And this was the dream: his wife shyly drawing her hand across the shiny knee of his trousers. A digger in the rubble held out a bottle of water and he took it from her. And this was the dream also: the steel-dark of his wife’s black hair against his skin. The cold ropy weight of it after she had bathed, through the open door the clawfoot washtub gleaming. Something was in him and he did not understand it. It was not quite grief. He thought it was what happened to grief after a long time in a person. He thought: The boy will know it too.

  He shook his head, pulled off his gloves in disgust. You are going to pieces old man, he thought. There will be nothing left of you in an hour. Only when he opened his eyes did he realize he had spoken aloud. He looked at the digger looking at him there.

  You’re alright, she said. Sure you’re alright.

  I’m not alright, he said.

  His hands were sore and his arms streaked where the sweat had run. He leaned up against a slab and passed a hand across his eyes and then loosened the cloth at his throat. He felt nothing. They had brought the boy up out of that rubble and the woman lay dead below and he felt disgusted thinking of his part in it all.

  After a moment he bared his teeth in a carious grin and drank the water then lowered the bottle with his chin sunk to his chest then raised it and drank again. He rubbed his eyes, looked up. The sun shivered orange and watery and huge under the low western sky like some terrible omen in the late blue light.

  Where did they take him? he asked at last. His voice was hoarse.

  The digger looked up. Who?

  The boy. The boy they just brought out.

  She nodded at the street below.

  The old man studied the digger. She was a short woman with wide shoulders and big strong-looking hands and she wore stiff trousers that crinkled when she shifted her weight. He supposed they had been soaked and dried during the day. He did not know what they would have been soaked in. Gasoline perhaps. She looked very tired.

  After a moment she said, It’ll take them a while to cut her out.

  Yes. Where will he go?

  I don’t know.

  They won’t make him see her body.

  Somebody has to.

  It’s his mother. They won’t let him see her like that.

  She said nothing to that.

  That boy needs to get to a hospital, he said.

  Now she brushed a strand of hair from her face, looked at the old man. Her eyes were deep-set, dark. The hospitals are wrecked, she said. Nothing’s left. He’s got to go to a station.

  A station? Where are they?

  I don’t know. The big one’s at the Vic General.

  You mean at the hospital?

  She nodded.

  He stared at her a moment then shook his head and looked off up the street then stared at her again. Well, he said slowly. That’s where he’ll need to go then.

  There’ll be trucks along soon.

  When?

  Soon.

  When did the last truck come by?

  She blew out her cheeks.

  Have any trucks come by?

  What’s the matter with you?

  What?

  You got something you want to say just say it.

  I don’t.

  Good.

  She folded her arms grimly across her chest as if something had been settled and after a minute he got to his feet. He screwed back the cap of the water bottle and set it at his feet. He did not thank her for the water.

  He scrambled achingly down the slope, hands fumbling with his gear. His wrists were black with grime and blood and he worked his fingers thickly. He did not see the engineer nor did he see the slender girl with the bruise at her forehead and both might have been apparitions of that horror for all that he would ever learn of their fates.

  He could see a group gathered farther up the ridge and he knew there would be digging there but he did not go to them. He was sick, worn down, somehow ashamed. He had no intention of looking for the boy and yet when he reached the street he made his slow way over to where the digger had gestured. He saw a small group of survivors huddled together in the lee of an upturned Saab but he did not see the boy and he was surprised by how this made him feel.

  He finally found the boy crouched alone against a mailbox with his knees pressed to his chest. His strange squinting eyes. Someone had scrubbed his face clean and draped a blanket across his shoulders and the old man stood over him peering down from his great height. He saw again the window of that café, a dark hand pressed to the glass. The boy’s eyeglasses were bent at the nosepiece and he pushed them farther along his nose in order to see.

  Mason?

  The boy peered up at him.

  My name is Arthur. Do you remember me, son?

  The boy did not reply but only looked up at him with his burned stare and there seemed nothing at all in him that the old man could speak to. He gestured to the bent eyeglasses. Wondering what it was about this boy.

  I can fix those for you, if you’d like. Do you want me to fix them?

  The boy slid his eyeglasses under the ruff of blanket.

  Well. Okay. His voice was gruff. He glanced off down the street and then back at the boy. Is someone taking care of you, son? he asked. When the boy said nothing he did not know what to say and after a moment he said: I’ve got to go home now. I’ll come back in the morning if you’d like. To check on you. Would you like that?

  The boy squinted up at him.

  What is it? I can’t take you with me. He grimaced suddenly, hearing himself say it. He had not intended to say such a thing. You don’t want to come with me, do you? he asked.

  No, the boy whispered.

  He waited but the boy said nothing more and the old man reached down and very gently, very awkwardly patted his shoulder. The boy did not stir. After a moment he straightened and turned and began to make his way up the street. The buildings felt blown-out, emptied, shells of what they had been the morning before. The red sun was nearly down and the shadows were lengthening.

  At the corner where the old pub still stood he stooped to tie his shoe and then paused with one hand on his knee and he crouched breathing like that for what seemed a long time. He was angry with himself for frightening the boy. He glanced at the sky, glanced back the way he had come. The dark streets strewn with rubble and stalled cars. Then he breathed in sharply. Someone was crouching in the shadow of the bank across the way, watching him.

  He looked at the huddled figure and said nothing and then looked at the figure again.

  Mason? he called. What are you doing? Come here son.

  He got to his feet and stood very still in the road but the boy did not approach. He watched the boy holding his eyeglasses to his face, studying him with dark eyes.

  Mason? he called again, more gently. You don’t want to walk with me?

  The boy said nothing. Mute and fierce with that blanket clutched at his shoulders.

  At last he shrugged and turned and went on. As he began to walk the boy began again also. When he would slip too far ahead the boy hurried to catch him up, then hung back until he had moved on.

  In this manner they went. The boy following. Or being led. It did not matter which.

  They went.

  Sometimes I’ll hear her speaking in the next room, or calling up at me from downstairs. I don’t know. I thought for a time it was grief. It wasn’t. It was just my outliving her.

  My grandfather used to say time has a way of worrying in. I guess he meant everything is in a state of decay. Painting isn’t any different, it’s like music in that. Its element, too, is time. You move through
a painting quickly, or slowly. The eye takes in nothing at a glance. There was an expression I struggled to capture for years. It wasn’t a large canvas. I dreamed it one night fifteen years ago and became obsessed with painting it. It was of a young woman sitting in a silver car in a parking lot, her face just lifted towards the windshield. And on her face was an expression of just-flourishing sadness, a kind of serenity. I saw it with terrible clarity. I’ve never forgotten it. I never could get it right. Always it was complicated by regret, by apology, by blame. A face is a fluid thing, it’s like the surface of the sea. It’s never still. Even in sleep. I don’t know, when you add the play of light across it it becomes near impossible to hold. Even photographs fail in that. I have a half-dozen photographs of Callie but none of them are her. I know it’s strange to say it.

  Not a day goes by I don’t think of her. I wonder sometimes what my grandfather would have made of her. I didn’t quit painting because of her. I don’t care what anyone says.

  A couple of years ago a woman came by to interview me for a book she was writing on Callie. I didn’t want to do it. But I sat with her for a time. She pulled out a small blue notebook and scribbled down curt notes when I spoke. I didn’t see how what I said could possibly be written down so quickly. I told her she could take a minute and get the rest of it if she wanted. I’d thought she’d smile at that but she didn’t. She asked me if Callie left me because she couldn’t complete her work with the pressures of being a wife. I suppose she wanted to know if I stifled her. I didn’t know what to say to that. I told her my grandfather had been a judge and his favourite kind of sentence was a question. She didn’t write that down in her little notebook.

  I used to believe if I lived severely enough I might come to some kind of understanding about all of it. I don’t know what I would have done then. I never did understand it. The heart’s a dark room to me still.

  THE LABYRINTH

  AND THE THREAD

  She could feel a wind on her sleeves, her shirt front. It was dark.

  It was dark and the darkness was very blue and then she understood that she was staring into the sky and the sun was down. Something had happened. Something had just happened.

  And then she was remembering her father’s last visit, six months before his death. She had not known that he was dying. Her children adored him, this grandfather they’d hardly known. His great soft hands and the dark pitted skin on his face and the low rasp of his voice when he laughed. He had left Canada for his native Trinidad when she was six. Had returned after her mother’s death only to vanish again into a small coffee shop he’d opened in Fernwood. His nation, his politics, his second life, these had consumed him. She carried always inside her that cold October day in the playground when she had realized he did not—did not— need her.

  He was tilting the neck of the bottle towards her glass at the table and she came in from the patio and set her hand over the rim and shook her head no. The light was already deepening out in the yard and she looked at her father’s face in the grey and thought he was still handsome. It was just the four of them there amid the clatter of dishes and the scent of dish soap and the steady running of the faucet. Her, and her father, and her two children. Her daughter sat on the counter with her coltish legs swinging loose and lifting her glass and holding it out.

  Oui monsieur, she was calling to her grandfather.

  Yeah right, the woman said.

  Eh come on Jean-Paul, the girl said in her terrible accent. Toppa me off.

  Jjjjahn-Pollluh, her son laughed.

  Now look what you’ve started, the woman said. You call him Poppa.

  Her father smiled and shook his head. I think one glass is enough, he said.

  Come on. I drink more than that at recess.

  The woman’s father was looking now at his granddaughter’s hair where she had cut it short and he waved a hand towards it. It looks nice, he said. Different.

  Shut up, she smiled, then blushed.

  Kat, the woman frowned. What’s got into you? You want to go to your room?

  What? I was joking. Kids say it all the time at school.

  Listen to her. A little red wine and she loses her manners completely.

  I got manners.

  Right. Manners of speaking maybe.

  Would you like anything more to eat, Mr Clarke? Could I fetch you a coffee, Mr Clarke?

  The woman’s father laughed. Ah yes. That is very polite.

  Kat what did I tell you about sitting on the counter?

  The girl smiled at her grandfather. See? Mom’s driving us crazy.

  You’re not driving me crazy Mom.

  Thank you Mason.

  Her daughter snorted.

  The woman crossed to the sink and banged open the cupboard and began putting the dishes away. Blue serving bowls emblazoned with asian fish. She squared the glasses of blown green glass. Oh your horrible mother, she said. However do you stand it. Tell your grandfather how I beat you, how I work you like slaves. Oh you poor things.

  You don’t even know. You don’t know how hard it is, it’s not like when you were a kid. It’s a different world. You think you had problems? We got problems.

  The woman’s father folded his chin onto his hands, raised his eyebrows exaggeratedly. I would love to hear, he said. These are the boyfriend problems? The drug problems?

  She had a boyfriend. But Crispin Carter dumped—

  Shut up Mason.

  Hey? Language?

  The girl glanced across at her mother. As if I’d talk about it anyway. She’d probably just ground me or something.

  She has a name, the woman said.

  It’s Mom.

  Thank you Mason. Aren’t you awfully helpful tonight.

  Yes.

  Ah. She would ground you would she?

  Poppa, you don’t even know.

  Usually I just lock her in a closet. With bread and water.

  I used to send your mom out in the fields for the day. I think she should send you out to the fields maybe.

  We don’t have fields here Poppa.

  Neither did we, honey, the woman said.

  You could tie her to the rack, her father said. Or shave off all of her hair.

  The woman laughed. I think she already did that.

  You’re both hilarious, the girl said, all at once distracted and immensely bored. She lifted the glazed head of the cookie jar and peered in, then slid lazily off the counter and sauntered out, a cookie in either hand, another in her teeth.

  Can I have a cookie too? her son asked.

  No.

  I remember when you were that age, her father said.

  No you don’t.

  He looked at her. Well. You were perfect. You were a perfect angel.

  You said before that Mom was a little devil.

  Hey? You want to be grounded too?

  Her son shook his head. After a moment he looked up. Kat’s grounded?

  You get out of here. Go on. Go see what your sister is doing.

  Her son scrambled down from the table.

  She looked at her father. He’s going right into his sister’s room to tell her she’s grounded. You know that.

  Her father smiled. It is nothing. I had five brothers.

  And two sisters.

  Yes.

  She said nothing then. She looked towards the sitting room. In the gloom its couches were lumped and misshapen, the old fireplace cold in the shadows. Embers of darkness coalesced within. The smell of the yard came in through the open window and she could hear a dog barking beyond their fence. She wiped the countertop down with the dishcloth and shook its crumbs into the sink. Filled her tarnished kettle with water, plugged it in.

  Through the walls a thrum of music started up and the woman smiled grimly, regarded her father. The floor tiles under their socks shaking.

  He stood. I will ask her to turn it down, he said.

  You’re great with them, she said.

  I could stay longer.

&nb
sp; No. You should go.

  He nodded but did not move.

  I could take them out on the boat on Saturday.

  No.

  Anna Mercia. What do you think I am doing here?

  But she made a cutting motion with her hand and he went quiet.

  He had always loved the ocean. When she was a girl and he would telephone on her birthday or on Christmas he would ask first about the changing light on the water. In the West Indies he had owned a small boat and it was one of the first things he purchased when he returned here, to this colder ocean. He had been famous in his country as a public figure. She wondered suddenly at how things alter.

  She turned back to the sink. Standing there feeling slack and grotesque and old. She held a warm plate staring at it without interest and she set it again aclatter in the rack. She thought her father had left the kitchen but all at once she felt his hands on her shoulders and he turned her gently so that she was facing him. He took her chin in his palm.

  He said to her very softly: They love you. You are their mother.

  They need a father.

  They do not.

  She looked into his face. Everyone needs a father, Dad.

  Everyone wants a father, he said. There is a difference.

  She looked at his soft sloped shoulders and doughy face in the kitchen light and it seemed to her then that he was asking something of her she could not give. At first she did not recognize it and then she did and it was something she remembered from when Mason was very little. She felt all at once as if she were older than her father and feeling this filled her with a great sadness.

  You were a good father, she said to him.

  Even as she said this she knew it was not true and she knew that he knew it also.

  There were many things else, he said quietly. But I did always love you.

  No you didn’t, she said, and looked at him. You didn’t, Dad. That wasn’t love.