Soil of God, I said.
Take away the sins of the world, said Erwin.
Amen, added Pieter.
We marked our piles of crap with deadfall sticks from the trees we had cut that day, branches that the local people would later collect and bundle into faggots for their woodstoves and fire-places. I wonder now if they might have come upon our dumps as they worked and expressed their offence with shock and disgust, but I didn’t think about that then. Pieter made the sign of the cross in the air — his thick workman’s hand over the mound of feces.
In nomine dictum, strontium heilige aarden in Gloria, Aaa-men. Shit, holy earth. Glorious father in the heavens. Aaa-men.
From my contrived wilderness privy, now, I could see Pieter surveying the destroyed forest. Behind him the nuclear chimney was like a decapitated minaret, the thin line of drifting smoke the only sign of its true purpose. Its grey concrete austerity had a monastic stillness; the forest, too, was still that morning, except for the creatures skittering about in search of safe haven. The light at that time of the year rarely opened up the sky but skimmed the clouds and bounced away back upwards. It was a diffusion — the edges of the rain-threatening clouds were a perplexing, pollution-build-up yellow. I made my way back to him over and under the felled forest.
A farmer had hobbled by. He was a small, bent, elderly man with lines etched on the lines in his face, the onset of cancer splotched along his nose, and rot flourishing in his few remaining teeth. He wore blue rubber clompen; smears of fodder and dung from the morning rounds covered his overalls. When he saw me heading over, he tipped his cap, h’lo.
Hi.
He glanced out at the destruction.
Whad’ya know? he said, turning back to Pieter.
It’s a job, said Pieter.
Better you than me. Stront werk, that’s what it is.
The winds had raged with such a ferocity that the earth seemed to react sympathetically to our loss. At the peak of the storm, Pieter and I had huddled in bed. Seeking warmth or unity, we made love, a lick from the neck down and down to his penis. A bumblebee slammed itself repeatedly into our bedroom window, so we let it in. It nestled into a warm corner of the frame, making a confused effort to sting the glass.
Pathetic fallacy, I had said
It’s not so bad, said Pieter.
Not you, I said.
We lived in an old manor house on the Prinsenhof. The tower spire on the old beer-hops factory attached to the house pierced the gathering sky. It was wrought for beauty more than function and would totter and fall as the winds reached their height. I wished the bee was Erwin slamming into the window, trying to come back. Even if he was only a bee, he could sting, make honey, let us know he was all right, alive.
I used to bring coffee up to Erwin in bed and wake him up by placing my cold hand on his sleep-warmed shoulder. He twitched me away as a horse does an insect, with a neural shiver. His eyes opened as the smell of coffee registered, and he smiled. His light blue eyes had the translucent quality of a sub-equatorial ocean. They gave off a buoyancy that is hard to describe.
Thank you, he said.
Is it good?
I sat next to him on his bed and marvelled at his beauty, at the pure awakening loveliness of him. We chatted in English, laughing at the way he put words together, more and more and more words in a hopeless attempt at meaning. I could easily have slid under the covers, my body curving into his, our skin rising excitedly to the touch; I did not.
Oh my god, I said to Pieter one night early on. He’s better than you in every way.
Maybe not every way, Pieter said, sliding his hand between my legs, fingers searching through the wet. As children, Pieter and Erwin had been inseparable. Their mother had even dressed them identically, despite the fact that they were born a year apart. The familiarity of their brotherliness was reassuring to me (what returns a touch might have, now he’s lost?).
Pieter and I went to bed when our eyes sunk closed at the table from reading, the wine having seeped into our dreams even, and we would huddle up close on the makeshift bed installed where an ancient toilet had once been. We were desperate to draw heat from one other in the frigid coastal humidity. We would murmur love adages in broken languages, and we would fuck. Loudly clipping each stair with his feet, Erwin would go upstairs to his room, where he occasionally had a houseguest but most nights didn’t. I would think about him making the lonely trip there to his cold, empty bed. Stupidly, I was unable to fathom the way in which his loneliness was a creation of our union.
There is a photograph I took of Erwin and Pieter. They are singing together in the yellow light of a dozen candles, the woodstove open for still more light. Pieter and Erwin are leaning into one another, both wearing rust-coloured sweaters knit by old girlfriends, canvas caps — the light turning these to haloes around their heads. If I suspend my disbelief, time stops there. They look, even on close inspection, like Siamese twins. I said this once to Erwin as we stood about in the forest one day, waiting for Pieter to fell more trees so that we could de-branch them. Erwin was smoking and swatting at me playfully with his wool scarf, wrapping the scarf around my legs and trying to trip me.
You are like Siamese twins, you and Pieter.
What’s so good about the Siamese?
You know, Siamese twins are joined in body.
Ha, he said, yes. We could be joined at your hip.
I knew how to examine a branch on a felled tree and expertly remove it. Sometimes this involved slicing twice or more, sometimes from below, the chainsaw blade cutting along the curve here and then there; the tree would almost sigh as it was relieved from the tension in which that branch held it, and then it would shift into a calmer position. We cleared each forest as if we were in a ballet, dancing around each other, making short work of each tree until the field lay littered with branches, and the crane or the skidder could pull our immaculate logs into an ever-growing pyramid.
Three hundred cubic metres per day. It’s amazing, I said.
Each day a little more, said Erwin.
No. There must be a threshold. If you go too fast, the pattern will be disrupted and it will lack beauty.
So?
It isn’t worth it, then, I said.
What’s beautiful about a felled forest?
Something. Something unspeakable.
In this hurricane-hurled forest, Pieter and I trimmed branches, some huge and twisted, while we waited for the crane. There was no sense trying to cut the roots away without some mechanical help — far too dangerous. We checked the length of the tree before we sliced through the leader to make sure the trunk was free and straight. And still the cutting bands got caught regularly in the torque-prone stems. We carried wedges and a sledgehammer around with us in order to pry the tree open if it pinched the saw’s blade. The stinging nettle hid an assortment of unpre-dictable miseries, too, including old fencing that nicked the saw’s razor edge. We had to stop every couple of trees, take out the files, and sharpen our tools. Meanwhile, Pieter’s skin had swollen from the nettle rash. Also, my saw kept cutting out. First it surged, then it coughed and stalled. I opened it up, cleaned the spark plug with an Opinel knife, cut out the exhaust debris. It was a day from hell, as Pieter had predicted.
As I worked, I stood on the trunk of the tree I was cleaning, shifting my weight as the tree rolled or shifted its. A wild ride and chancy. The height and unpredictability of each tree intensified my concentration. I had learned early on to jump at the slightest worrisome movement. I assessed each tree by its particularities — the way the bark turned up its spine, the direction of its fall, what lay on it and in what manner. I could climb along a tree hanging upwards of two metres in the air and work with precision and without fear. There was a thrill to it. Finally, the crane arrived on the back of a flatbed truck. The operator, a hulking giant named Paul, emerged from the cab.
’Dag, said Paul.
’Lo.
As soon as he perceived my gender, Paul b
egan to leer at me. He smiled at me from the glassed-in booth of the crane. Whenever he spotted me and he thought I might be looking, a horny glaze came over his eyes, and he put his hands down between his legs to the gearshift. He sat up high in the red crane, watching me as much as possible while he was working. Later, I would come to thank him.
Paul positioned his crane so that the jaws held the tree stem. Pieter stood as far back as he could without losing his balance and sliced through the tree as close to the roots as possible without catching dirt in the chainsaw blade. As often as not, the root ball crashed back to earth right in the spot where it had emerged. The craters were filled. I noticed suddenly that Pieter had lost weight; his pants were loose on him. Thinness gave him the appearance of having grown taller. He had changed even as he regretted the possibility of moving on, changed physically. Soft down had sprouted on his chest, his manner had more room for humour, his lovemaking had become more exploratory. He was approximating Erwin’s presence; we both were.
I would die without you, Pieter said to me.
No.
I would drink.
You drink now.
I moved further and further away from the racket of the crane. What must it have sounded like, I wondered, these huge trees ripping up the earth, trees crashing into other trees, splin-tering with thunderous cracks. Did the small forest creatures under the roots look up, their roofs removed, their vulnerability exposed, and notice death looming with each new crash? The reactor chimney smoke swirled into a mini-twister, thrown this way and that in a smoke dance. I sat down amongst the fallen trees and ate a sandwich that I had stuck in my jacket pocket. It was a squished pair of bread slices with a thick smear of fresh butter, two speculaas cookies in between.
I could no longer see Pieter or the crane. When the buzz of Pieter’s saw cut out for any length of time, I counted off the minutes it took for him to roll and smoke a cigarette. If the silence lengthened, I became alarmed, and a bilious anxiety rose in my stomach. He had become everything to me; we were inseparable. Perplexing death images dissipated only when I stood close to Pieter; when we were in bed together I felt complete. The night after the accident, Pieter and I crawled like maimed animals under the duvet. I had sorted his clothing in the upstairs laundry, held the blood-soaked cloth up to my face. I had no idea what I was doing. I had read once that Madame Curie held her husband’s brains in a handkerchief for days, not able to bear the loss of his mind. I put one little bloodied wood chip into my mouth (the metallic taste of Erwin melting on my tongue), and then I shoved Pieter’s sullied clothes away from me into the washing machine. I watched them agitate clean. I should have built a shrine around them, I thought later, as Pieter whimpered in bed next to me. I was not asleep; I was heartlessly alert when Pieter held me close and made love to me. It was Erwin’s face and his body that came to mind.
Does it bother you that I loved him?
I am not a jealous person by nature.
I felt this comment as a heavy burden. It weighed on me. Not as guilt but as something more tangible, as if I were somehow responsible for propping it all up, holding us on the earth. Everything had an enormous heaviness. My legs moving from tree to tree were magnetized and grounded; I could not fall. The Doem laboratories had repatriated loads of vitrified nuclear waste in barrels deep in the ground; they’d dug a series of a hundred tunnels seventy-six metres beneath me, deep under the Tertiary clay that itself created a non-porous shield against any possible leakage. The little fishes bumping into the wire mesh. Erwin’s hand on my throat. Even laughter carried weight. I felt the world had a boundlessness that I could not escape. And this depressed me.
Even sorrow is fleeting, Pieter said.
That’s not my experience.
The crane operator was the closest when I fell. He clambered out of his machine, as quickly as his giant body allowed, to help me. I had screamed. Pieter was further away and took longer to arrive. Paul’s hands were enormous, like grizzly paws. They lifted me as if I were a bundle of dried sticks. I had been listening to the sweet whine of Pieter’s saw off to my left and back. I had looked up into the sky before giving the tree my full attention. There was a single bird grappling with the air currents. It spun midair and regained flight balance, seeming to enjoy the inevitability of its own weakness. I looked carefully along my tree, and I sliced it through. The tree became an instant catapult, grabbing me by the midsection. It hurled me in seeming slow motion in an arc some ten metres through the air before I dropped at full force into another log, spine first. I expected to die and braced myself for this inevitability. I held the spinning blade of the chainsaw as far away from my body as possible, reasoning that if I dropped the tool it might cut me in half. The space around my eyes in that instant of airborne thrust was shattered into a million quartz-like shards. In the strange expansion of time before I landed (the awful shock of pain; the catapulting tree flinging about trying to find its central calm), I sought to explore these gem-like splinters, their texture, their variegated edges, and imagine a way they might fit together to explain to me what I had become, and then wonder whether, if given the time, I could look through this clear stone of my creation to determine what had become of us.
photo: Miriam Berkeley
KATHRYN KUITENBROUWER is the author of the bestselling novel All the Broken Things and the novels Perfecting and The Nettle Spinner. She is also the author of the short story collection Way Up. Her writing has won a Danuta Gleed Award, the Sidney Prize (USA), and has been nominated for the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the ReLit Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta Magazine, The Walrus, and Storyville. She has taught and mentored students through The New York Times Knowledge Network, The University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, and the University of Guelph MFA in Creative Writing. Kathryn has recently completed a residency at Yaddo and a fellowship at the Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts.
Fiction by Mark Anthony Jarman
My White Planet (2008)
19 Knives (2000)
New Orleans is Sinking (1998)
Salvage King Ya! (1997)
Dancing Nightly in the Tavern (1984)
“Knife Party” will be published in 2015 by Goose Lane Editions in Mark Anthony Jarman’s forthcoming collection.
Mistakes are part of the dues that one pays for a full life. — Sophia Loren
My wife is from Florida and is moving out of my house on the cold Canadian river, while I stay in Italy. She takes the frisky dog down to the freezing river and hits a ball into the water with a tennis racket. The moving van comes and the moving van goes. The river moves, and the faithful dog swims to retrieve the ball again and again, the dog floating in a state of grace.
Our train speeds into the side of an Italian mountain, and we have no eyesight, we knife noisily into black tunnels and then shoot out again, our new eyes viewing the patient volcano and ancient sea.
Our noisy engine halts iron wheels at seaside towns where families alight with beach towels and fashionable sunglasses and sunburns that still have hours to flare into ripeness.
We have entered the mezzogiorno, land of the midday sun, so close to Africa. The train’s exit doors have small windows, but they do not open, and the cars are furnace-hot. Tough kids from the exurbs stand near the exit doors in an alcove with no seating. They hail from the illegal neighbourhoods built up the sides of the volcano, the zona rossa. If the volcano erupts again their homes in the red zone will be wiped out. Ray-Ray and Eve are thirsty, are looking for a bar car; some trains have bars, and some do not.
The ancient train moves into light and out. In the confines of a dark tunnel, something incredibly fractious and noisy grinds against our train car and the tunnel walls that hug us. The high windows are open to roaring air, open to relieve the hellish heat, so much noise already, but this new clamour makes all the passengers flinch and panic, metal debris bouncing and crashing and wrenching our heatstroke dreams. What hammer is hitting the curved be
ll of our train?
In the darkened alcove, sketchy teenagers are moving shadows, and I see a lithe shadow leap to kick a window in the train’s exit door. In the heat the teens demand a breeze. When the train is in a tunnel, they attack the door’s sealed window, thinking no one sees them in the blackness.
One kid swings nimbly on a high chrome bar, a true acrobat who, with both feet, hits the window hard, a human battering ram, and more fragments of glass and metal frame break away in the dark to clatter and bounce along the outer skin of the rocketing train.
We burst out of the tunnel and they stop smashing the window to pose casually in mad light. In the next tunnel the kicking starts again.
Wives look to their husbands: will you do something? Each Italian husband shrugs. Polizia ride many trains, but not today. Where is the stoic conductor I like so much?
The Italian teens try to look cool in huge mirrored aviator shades, but their childlike faces are so thin and the aviator glasses so large — the effect is of Clownish Boy rather than Top Gun Pilot or Corrupt Saigon Major. I should wait, but I react primitively at times like this; I know they carry knives, but I’d like to trash them the way they trash their own train, our train, see how they like it. But I know we’ll all be elsewhere soon if we just sit and do nothing.
Don’t engage, my wife always said to me, and it’s good advice.
So why do I walk to the alcove and stand beside the cretins? My move was not well-thought-out. There are more of them in the hormonal antechamber than I realized, and sullen girls lean in the mix. I wish Eve and Ray-Ray were here beside me, I wish I was a more confident vigilante man with amazing eye-hand coordination and hidden weapons. Those in the group look to each other for guidance in child-thug matters, but no one steps forward to test my skill set, my tennis elbow. Uncertain moments hang, served to us like writs.
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