She will see that the mountain has changed her too. Her skin, always pale, will seem thin as the frost that coats the cedar flume in the morning. Her hair, once long and chestnut, will hang like the lichen from the trees, streaked with grey. And her eyes that stare back at her from the shaving mirror her husband never uses, her eyes will be the colour of the mountain’s damp earth.
Dinner will be burned that night. Her husband will give her the translucent, copper-coloured cone when she comes by with the tea. As she cleans up in the kitchen, while the Chinamen drink sake and her husband returns to their cabin, Marty the one-eyed foreman will bring a bottle into the kitchen and say: “Finest rum I ever tasted.”
“I’d hate to waste it,” she will say.
And he will laugh, and his breath will stink like a distillery.
“It’s full every morning,” he will say. “A drunkard’s dream.”
They will drink all of the bottle.
“They aren’t really Chinamen,” Marty will say as they drink and rain pounds the roof. “They’re Japs. Good thing they don’t speak English, cause if they heard us calling them Chinamen they’d get bitter. And I ain’t half Chinese neither. My Pa was British, my Ma Japanese.”
“How did they meet?” she will say.
“My father had enough money and a hankering for Orientals,” he will say.
She will laugh. He will not.
“Why don’t the rest of them realize the day keeps repeating?” she will say.
He will offer her another mug full.
“Who cares,” he will say. “More rum for us.”
While thunder gathers around them, she will talk. Growing up in San Francisco will seem even more wonderful through the murky lens of the rum. She will tell him about her five sisters, and the father who raised them after his wife died giving birth to the last of them. She will even cry a bit when she tells him about her mother, the one memory of the foggy day watching the boats sail in.
As the storm reaches its crest, he will say: “Just about done, I think.”
“I hate the lightning,” she will say, and she will reach out and take hold of his hand which will be knobby and root-like and totally unlike her husband’s. “Especially the last one.”
The lightning will flash through the walls of the cabin and when it recedes it will draw everything else with it and the day will begin again.
She will rise to the great crack. No bruise will mar her face. No hangover will cloud her mind. Her husband will hit her. She will bring breakfast up the mountain. Ravens will clack their beaks. Instead of returning down the mountain after breakfast, she will find Marty and they will sneak to the kitchen cabin at the main camp, and they will open the bottle of rum they finished the day before. He will tell her more about life in the slums of Tokyo, and she will tell him about the fish market in San Francisco.
They will do this for several days.
On the twelfth day, after the crack, after the blow from her husband, and after breakfast, she and Marty will lie beneath one of the great trees the loggers haven’t yet felled. The rum bottle will lie half-full at their feet. They will be talking about why this day keeps repeating:
“Do you think it’s that big tree?” she will say. “I’ve never seen one like it.”
“Me neither,” he will say.
“What if you don’t cut it down?” she will say.
He will shrug.
“Each day starts for you in bed,” he will say. “But for me it’s there, beside the tree, as the damn thing falls over. There’s the lightning, then there I am, standing and watching as my boys topple the big tree.”
“So it is the tree,” she will say.
He will pull out a pouch from his pocket and a long strange pipe of the kind she’s only heard about.
“Who cares?” he will say. “This ain’t such a bad day to be stuck in.”
He will pack a slick bit of tar into the bowl, he will light a match, and he will inhale. He will pass the pipe to Fanny.
“I shouldn’t,” she will say, but then she will take the pipe and she will smoke it and she will lie down on the damp ground beside Marty until the rain starts and they walk down the hill for dinner.
From the thirteenth to the twenty-third day, Fanny will smoke opium with Marty and will remember very little. Her husband will talk to her in this time when he finds her. He will scold her. He will hit her. He will bring her the present of the copper, translucent cone that comes from no tree she’s ever seen. She will know that she should talk to her husband, that she should tell him that the days keep repeating, and that she wants the man in the daguerreotype, the man she married, to become unmade by the mountain, but she will also hold the cone he gives her, the beautiful cone that shows the mountain hasn’t finished with her husband, and she will wonder if it is enough. The opium will make it easier to not answer that question; it won’t hurt so long as she keeps smoking.
Like every day, the twenty-fourth will start with the great crack, her husband’s fist, and a flume that doesn’t flow. After breakfast, she will find Marty and they will smoke opium beneath the same old tree under which they first smoked. They will also drink the rum and smoke some of the hemp that never runs out. She will pass out.
When she wakes up, Marty will be on top of her. His trousers will be around his ankles. She will feel him thrusting into her and the opium will make her not want to scream but she will scream. He will put his root-like fingers over her mouth and clamp her mouth shut until he finishes hot and sticky down the sides of her legs. He will roll over onto his back and sigh.
“I’m married,” she will say once his fingers release her mouth and the opium lets her speak.
“Tomorrow,” he will say. “It won’t have happened.”
He will light one of his hemp cigarettes. When he passes it to her, she will take the lit end and she will press it into his palm. Now he will scream. She will pull up her undergarments and she will run down the mountain. She will run away from the slashed areas and into the forest where huge trees still stand. As she runs, she will weep. She will mourn the sanctity of her marriage. She will curse the day she first took a sip from Marty’s mug.
She will hate the flume, the lightning, the cedar, and herself.
As she runs, she will come to a cliff. For a moment, she will hesitate at the cliff’s edge. She will hear no one following her. She will jump, and as she falls, she will think of sailboats in the fog.
When she hits the rocks, she will die.
The great crack will sound for a twenty-fifth time. She will rise. No bruise. No hangover. No death. None of Marty’s stickiness between her legs.
She will hear her husband on the steps. She will endure his punch. Ravens will clack beaks. Eventually, her husband will start the water flowing back down the flume. The roar will fill the cabin, and the roar will seep into her, fill her with resolve.
At her husband’s sawmill, Japanese Chinamen turn cedar trees into bolts, wedge-shaped logs that fit into the v-notched flume. One day her husband caught the men riding down the flume on a narrow skiff they carved from a cedar bolt. He confiscated the skiff and hid it beneath their cabin. Though he warned her never to touch the dangerous thing, she will push aside spider webs and mouldy lumber until she finds the shallow boat, which will be no wider than her hips, no deeper than her forearm and no longer than her husband is tall. She will drag the skiff up the steps by a rope handle looped through its nose and she will lift it onto the edge of the flume. She will climb up beside the skiff and for a moment she will be mesmerized by the white water that rushes past her feet. Then she will slide the skiff beneath her and let the roaring stream her husband has redirected pull her down the mountain.
Her screams will startle ravens and woodpeckers from their roosts. The skiff will knock beneath her as the flume makes corners. Water will soak through her wool shirts until she shivers but she won’t let go of the rope. Though she will be terrified as she slides down the cedar flume, a part of her will si
ng with the joy of escape.
Ahead through the trees she will see an expanse of dark blue. The flume will spit her out into Rice Lake, a holding pen where the bolts are then ferried down another flume to the city. She will swim to the surface though her sodden clothes will drag her down. That first breath after she is dunked will feel like her baptism.
A bolt will fly off the flume and will strike her in the thigh, and her leg will break in two places. She will swallow water as she tries to scream. One of the loggers rowing a boat around the lake to herd bolts will notice her struggles. He will be a pale blonde man too young for a beard. He will row over to her, drag her out of the water, and bring her to the cabin, also cedar, where these loggers live.
Most of them will be white. They will scold her for riding the flume, though they have all ridden the flume before. They will send for a doctor.
Talking to these men who aren’t Marty and aren’t her husband will be the brightest moment in the last twenty-five days. The pain in her leg will be unbearable. She will refuse the whiskey and opium they offer her.
As she lies in a cot that stinks of sweat, mud, and cedar, she will think that she has escaped it. The repetition is over. A doctor will come and everything will be all right.
The young logger will come in and tell her they’ve sent someone to fetch her husband. Later, the same logger will return to tell her that the doctor will arrive tomorrow.
“He has to come today,” she will say. She won’t believe in that word, tomorrow.
“He’ll come as fast as he’s able,” the young logger will say.
Rain will start slightly later than it does further up the mountain. A headache will set in behind her eyes, and her leg will throb with each beat of her heart, and as her blood fills the cavities the broken bones have slashed inside her flesh, her leg will swell like wet cedar.
After the first peal of thunder, the young logger will come in and say: “There’s someone here to see you.”
Despite the pain, she will sit, expecting the doctor or her husband, but the person who will walk through the door is neither. He is a young boy of seven or eight; maybe Indian or Chinamen or Japanese. She won’t be able to tell for the filth that cakes him. He will walk over to her.
“You haven’t happened before,” he will say. “Are you like us?”
“You know about this?” she will say. Her heart will pound louder than the thunder. “Does this day keep happening for you?”
He will nod his filthy head.
“Have you seen it?” he will say. “We think they cut it down.”
“The tree?” she will say. “My husband’s men felled a huge tree this morning.”
“Where?” he will say.
She will point up the mountain. “The flume runs eight miles back to the cabin, and the tree is another mile or two beyond that.”
He will sigh, a sound she will think should come from an old man many times this boy’s age.
“That’s too far,” he will say. “Most of us start by the water. It took me all day to get here.”
“You know how to make this stop? You know what to do?”
He will pick something from his ear that he will wipe on his muddy shirt.
“The old people told us the tree needs to grow again,” he will say. “They sent us out to find it.”
“My husband brings me a cone,” she will say. “A cone like none I’ve ever seen. Do you think that’s it?”
He will shrug.
The fever that has been building in her will take hold then. Her words will stop making sense. The filthy boy will sit beside her and hold her hand until she dies.
The crack. Her leg will be healed, the bruise on her cheek will be gone. Her husband will be on the stairs with his cold shirt and colder fist. The twenty-sixth day.
She will pull herself up from the floor. She will bring breakfast to the men where they climb over the dead massive tree. Boris the mule will nuzzle her pocket for the apple she will forget.
“Where’d you go yesterday?” Marty will say when he comes up to her for breakfast. She will not say anything in return. “You can’t stay silent forever. It’s just you and me, pumpkin. May as well make the best of it.”
And he will pinch her bottom as he walks away to eat his oatmeal.
Her husband will come down the hill and tell her to bring breakfast to the men at the sawmill, but she’ll ignore him. She’ll climb up the length of the downed tree. The stump will be forty paces across. At its centre, she will find a hole a few inches deep that ends in fine sawdust. The wood around the hole will be blackened from an old fire. This, she will think, is where the cone must go.
“What are you doing up there?” Marty will say. He will hold a big two-person saw over one shoulder and will squint out of his good eye.
“Nothing,” she will say. “I’ve got work to do.”
She will climb down the planks the Japanese loggers drove into the tree to serve as platforms for cutting. Marty will try to grab her arm but she will shake him off.
“You come back and see Marty as soon as you’re ready for some more,” he will say.
She will look for a cone, but she won’t find one. She will have to wait until dinner when her husband gives her the cone after the tea is served, and she will know there is still something decent within her husband. With the dishes unwashed and the storm raging, she will climb up the mountain alone through the downpour with only lightning to illuminate her path.
When she arrives at the tree, she will find Boris the mule waiting for her. He will be very quiet and will follow her up the length of the downed tree. She will climb the stump again. When she takes the cone out of her shirt, the cone will glow with a soft light the same colour as the lightning. She will place the cone in the hole she found earlier that day. Though the cone will fit, something will seem to push the cone out of the hole if she doesn’t hold it there. She will climb back down to find some stones or sticks to make a brace to hold the cone in place, and that’s when she will see Marty standing beneath an ancient hemlock.
“Now I’m real curious,” he will say. “You disappear for a day and you come back with all sorts of new ideas.”
“Leave me alone,” she will say. He will laugh, and even through the rain she will be able to smell the distillery.
Boris the mule will bray louder than she’s ever heard him. Marty will jump out of the darkness but her shirt will be too soaked for him to get a hold. She will climb back up the stump. Lightning will flash and thunder roll. She will know the last flash is close.
She will place the glowing cone in the hole at the centre of the stump. In one of the flashes, she will see Marty’s face at the edge of the stump. In the next, she will see him pull up onto the lip of the stump.
The last bolt of lightning will cut through the air. It will seem like light jumps out of the cone in her hand to meet the lightning. She will try to hold onto the cone even as the lightning pours through her. Marty will be blasted back, away from the cone. She won’t be able to hold on. The cone will roll out of the hole. The light will recede, sucked back into the cone, and when it disappears the day will start again.
Day twenty-seven will start like every other. The crack. Her unblemished face. Her husband on the steps. This time, after he hits her, she will say: “That Marty made inappropriate advances to me a few days ago. I don’t want to see him again.”
“He’s the only one who can speak with the Chinamen,” her husband will say.
“I don’t care,” she will say. “I won’t feed him.”
She won’t bring breakfast up the mountain that day. She will barricade the door and lie in bed, gathering her strength. When she hears Marty yelling at her from outside, she will remain where she is, even when he slams his fists against the door.
“Don’t you dare try to end this,” he will say. “Don’t you even dare.”
After the rain comes, she will hear her husband return. He will try the door and he will say: “What’s going on
here?”
“That Marty tried to come in,” she said. “I told you, there’s something wrong with him.”
She will move the shipping chest and the wood chair out of the way and she will let her husband in. He will not smile.
“I’ll talk to him,” he will say.
“Don’t let him come to dinner,” she will say.
His eyes, as hard as the stones she wrecked herself on when she jumped off the cliff, will soften for a moment.
“All right,” he will say. “But you get down there and get cooking. This can’t happen tomorrow.”
She will go down to the kitchen with her husband. She will make the same stew she made before; the ingredients will all be there. Marty will not join them for dinner. She will hear him cursing outside. She will be very afraid of what he will do.
After the dinner, her husband will reach into his coat and will present her with the copper-coloured cone. Instead of accepting it, she will take his hand, and she will say: “Come with me up the mountain. I need to show you something.”
“I’ve got to enter my numbers,” he will say. “And you need to clean up this mess.”
She will hesitate then. She will not know if she can face this man the mountain has turned into somebody different. Thunder will shake the cabin. Cedar dust will fall into her hair. She will hope that the small part that remains of the man she married is enough.
“Please,” she will say. “Do this for me.”
All the Japanese Chinamen will be watching. He will nod and she will lead him out into the storm.
They will climb the skid road together.
“Is this about what happened this morning?” he will say.
“No,” she will say. “Yes. I don’t know. Just follow.”
They will come to the clearing where the massive trees lies on its side. Boris the mule will greet them with a loud honk.
Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing Page 25