“We are a bony nuisance or novelty,” Corey says. Fire licks the dried wood and roasting deer, raw meat browning.
As I lean down and cut, heat blazes the back of my neck, unmistakable sense of presence. Corey cuts stems and doesn’t raise his head, so I carry on. Stories pass the barriers of knowing. I could be making it up. Down the next hill, our buckets covered with old t-shirts to keep the leaves and moss out.
“Let’s stop for lunch,” I say to the back of his head.
“We’ve just started,” he looks at me, frustrated.
“Do you feel like someone is watching you?” He looks at me blankly; no, he doesn’t. “Why? Do you?”
“Yeah, when we were picking I thought someone was staring at me. Felt like get out, you know?”
“Yeah, well, there’s plenty of good picking. The ghost isn’t going to hurt you.”
Dene
Na’kwoel had two sons, A’ke’toes and Chichanit, both of whom wielded great influence among their fellow tribesmen, with A’ke’toes in line to become hereditary chief. He was a fierce, jealous man whose demons forced his two wives, Chalh’tas and Atete, to live in isolated seclusion, fighting off accusations of unfaithfulness. Tormented and lonely, Chalh’tas was quick to anger and fought often with her husband. Atete was more submissive, overwhelmed by the demands of her husband and Chalh’tas. A’ke’toes was believed to have the forces of evil at his command, to be possessed by malicious spirits that could prove fatal to himself and those close to him. He was feared by the Carrier and was protected by the love of Na’kwoel.
One such secluded place where the family stayed was Long Island, at the outlet of Stuart Lake, five miles from the village of Tsauche, where their tribesmen lived on the same lake. A violent fight started between A’ke’toes and Chalh’tas, in which she accused him of the recent death of her two children. It started like many of their fights, angry words hurled like stones, raining down wounds, but this day it escalated to a raging storm of blows and Chalh’tas became determined to kill her husband. She fell on him and cried out to Atete to help her.
“If you do not help me I will kill you myself!” she screamed at Atete, who fell on A’ke’toes with more fear than rage. They beat him to death and dismembered his remains, Chalh’tas triumphant; Atete swallowed her shame. They carried his bones to the mouth of a stream emptying on the opposite side of the lake, and buried them in the sand.
Mile 13
Cook heard about Mile 13 from the loggers at the boarding house breakfast table years ago, men twisted over eggs and porridge, knotted and rough. No one had been there in awhile, green chain blade was slimy with moss but there were plenty of trees to be taken, that’s for sure. Wouldn’t recommend going alone, son, they said.
“I’d just moved from the mainland. Didn’t know anyone,” Cook said. We are in the cooking shack, chopping vegetables for venison stew. I help him out, rest from the bush. And it’s warm in the shack, out of the rain.
“They told me ‘it’s a two-man job, and with you, maybe three.’” They laughed at him, chortling around the table. He decided then to go, report back to the geezers that Mile 13 was his. He had been shadowing for a week now, bucked a few trees on his own and it was time to stake his territory. No one would stop him at Mile 13.
“I was skinny then, not like now,” he pats his soft stomach. He grew up in the Interior, the lakes and rivers and open space of the Carrier. Lithe, he slipped through the rainforest and wasn’t stopped by the thick salal. Only homesick in the evenings, he told me, he would’ve written to his aunt but he didn’t know how. He learned the basics in school, the loops and curves of his name but he quit in grade eight, didn’t learn how to write his insides.
Packed lunch in his burlap sack, the truck let him off at Mile 13 to raised eyebrows and silence. Sack slung across his shoulder, he carried his chainsaw and axe up the embankment and into the soft moss. Quiet closed in, moist embrace. He stopped every once in awhile to rest, chainsaw weighing his right side. I can see him, picking his way through, sharp eyes measuring huge trees that crowded out the sun. Moss dripping from branches, sound of wings, tchock, tchock, tchock of a raven. Breath rising and falling with the hills. Last night, I dreamed the hills were swelling waves, rising higher and higher until I was crawling, hand to knee, like a child.
“It may have been going on for awhile but there was the sound of breathing.” Sizzle of frying venison, air thick with herbs and oil, we both stir steadily. “It was heavy, like an animal dying right beside me. Reminded me of a horse my uncle shot that had been hit by a truck. And it tried so hard to keep breathing. Sounded like that. And the smell of shit was so strong, almost made me sick.” He kept stirring, I added onions. “Felt like someone was watching me, you know? When your neck gets all hot, you look around and no one is there. Frick. Thought that maybe one of the men had followed to scare me, but there was no way that breathing was from a man.”
“What did you do?” I asked. Cook wiped his hands on his smudged apron, lit a smoke, bits of white and black hair in his eyes.
“Thought I would scare it off, take a swing with my axe, make some noise. I yelled really loud, aaaaaaaaahhhhhhh, maybe it was a bear. Started up my chainsaw and I bucked a tree, chunks were flying. Kind of like, this is my territory, leave me alone.”
Shaking, sweating, too afraid to look anywhere but straight ahead to the next hill, he told me the smell got worse. Thing was breathing like its lungs were full, a slow drowning. Cook grabbed his gear, moved on. There was money in the woods, he wasn’t going back until he saw the size of the trees. And he didn’t want the men to know he was afraid.
At the top of the next hill, there was a clearing with a trail of mushrooms in a dip of valley below. By a shredding trunk was a pyramid of mussel shells, perfectly shaped, stacked in precise diagonals. Pile came to just past his knees when he got up close.
“Who could eat all that?” He looked at me, his eyes narrowed. “Frick. This was no place for a picnic, believe me.” Breathing became a high-pitched scream like a warning, off to his right.
“It was beside me, close enough that there was a dark shadow in the bush. Screaming right at me, I could feel its eyes.” Rasping gasps curdled breath. He knew then the horror behind the silence of the men and he hated them, he told me, angrily hacking up the venison for the second pot of stew.
“I couldn’t go back, it kept walking beside me. It didn’t get any closer but it didn’t go. Frick. I made it to the green chain, notched a few more trees, show it that it was my territory now, it had better go.” Cook swept his arm in front of him, clearing an invisible path.
Mosquito Lake
Toby got lost past Mosquito Lake last night. Said all night he was so thirsty, he was more thirsty than afraid. And here there is so much water. I’d be so hungry I’d see fish frying in the bush, smell the smoke if I let myself. Or remember things like when my best friend left in grade nine I wrote a poem about her by the side of a choppy lake. Maybe I’d remember that. I think maybe I would remember lying down in the sand in some hot place, feeling the completeness of my body, stretched, supple. What does it matter when it’s dark and there’s no one to listen. Keeping your flashlight on till it burns out. You’re in some war movie you watched when you were a kid and safe on the couch. Keeping your wits about you as though someone would steal them. Laugh while they’re taking them.
Mile 13
Horror of the sound passed like the shock of pain after a blow. Cook stopped wondering what it was. He could still hear the heavy thump of footsteps beside him, keeping pace. Dense like a moving mountain, whatever it was, pungent smell warning him to stay on edge.
We are taking a break, sharing a smoke by Skidegate Lake, grey and motionless, sprouting stalky reeds like spears.
Outline of the green chain in the bush reminded him of an extinct animal. “Some kind of long, lean raptor with a gouged crown down its back,” he said, his face drawn, his compact body sprawled on a log. “There were piles of
logs waiting to be cut, so I turned on the generator, found the switch for the blade and it was a little wobbly, but it worked.” Eyes watched him but he ignored it. Maybe it would run at the screech of the blade, sound of money rolling in.
“Then a huge beast comes into the clearing, dark matted hair. Tiny black eyes, teeth bared, a wide squashed nose. Smell so strong I could hardly breathe.” Cook stood up on the log, his short thick arms flung straight up beside his head, trying to convey its size, but I can’t picture it. “We stood and looked at each other. It was breathing like it was dying but I couldn’t see the wound.”
*
After lunch, we continue to the green chain. Corey hasn’t seen it in years and he wants to show me the scene of the crime. Back of my neck is still tingling, burn of eyes, but I try to put it out of my mind. It’s just a story. Logger was killed so long ago there can’t be anything left of him here. Further in we go, the more nervous I get. It’s always like this, like wading into the ocean past your head until you’re walking underwater. Further and further away from the van and the road, where the clear light hits and you can see the next bend, comforting curve. I stand at the next hill and check my compass. Due north it points and Corey is already heading down to the next mushroom patch. His internal radar is alert, he doesn’t need the safety of checking and re-checking.
“This is it. Our new territory. We have to come at least once a week, these buttons need to grow some more, waste to pick them now.” He glances over his shoulder at me with a look of are you listening? He sees me staring at the next hill, bright pink ribbon tied to the end of a mossy branch. I have tied well and carefully and it is easy to see from here. I point to it, say, there’s a ribbon I tied and we’re going north, I just checked.
Corey says nothing, leaves his buckets where the mushrooms are and hikes up the hill, grabs the branch, checks it and keeps going straight down the next hollow, up the next mossy hill. Checking the ribbons on the branches to be sure that we have come full circle in the maze, that we are being led out the way we came in.
Vietnam
Vietnam is oppressive wet heat, apocalyptic murk hangs in the air, ground particles, detritus from the war that everyone breathes in, though no one ever talks about it. Relentless roar of sputtery motorcycles swerving and swaying on pocked streets, skimming by pedestrians, guided by road warriors, expressionless eyes, faces covered with cloth masks that look surgical from a distance but when I buy my own, they are pink and blue, patterned with flowers, ribbons. Long black ponytails and high heels mark out the women. Men wear cheap flip-flops and sag a bit more in their seats. Terror slows my steps so that it takes me half an hour to cross an intersection.
“Act like you’re a pylon,” Winnie says, “and they will go around you.” Winnie is my friend and my boss, giving me the benefit of her time and experience, showing me where to shop, what restaurants are good, how much you can expect to pay for clothes and food.
“Which cabs are the good ones?”
“The white ones with the green writing. Drivers speak some English usually and they won’t rip you off.” She has lived in Saigon for five years already and is adept, matter of fact. I rent a room in the centre of the city in a narrow cinder-block building, blue tile with white skinny balconies, Lego’d amongst yellow, pink, green blocks, pushing up against the pavement, the confines of narrow alleys, looking for space to grow.
Within a week I am working and I have a xe om, motorcycle driver, Mr. Quang, who picks me up at my door for work. He must be in his fifties and so slight that I have to be careful not to crowd him off his seat. A makeshift café with plastic stools sets up every morning in the alley, along with the fruit lady and a couple that make sandwiches. The young husband has a cowlick, he is always smoothing it across his gleaming forehead. Coffee is thick and sweet, the bread crunchy with feathery insides, tang of pickle and salt of hot fried egg. Young men in dark blue pants and crisp white shirts smoke, laugh, ice tinkling on their teeth, constantly checking their cellphones. Sleek SUVs squeeze by, picking up expat executives, holding up the constant hum of motorcycles for a moment but then they veer around like ants encountering obstacles. Drivers stand and chat with the men drinking coffee and mothers half drag their uniformed children to school. Harry Potter backpacks, smiling Winnie the Pooh. At work, I am interviewing young Vietnamese for jobs with our clients, checking for English, confidence, good eye contact. Applicants, mainly young women, are eager and want to work for foreign, prestigious companies. Is the boss a foreigner? If not, they are not interested: No chance to improve English.
One lunch break, I find a new restaurant, a two-storey outdoor café with a pond on the main floor, flash of fins in murky water. From bins of food I pick out fried pork chops, rice and green beans, find a table on the top deck, wreathed with hanging lanterns, fringe of elegant trees. Leaves flicker in the breeze. Burn holes in the red tablecloths, glasses of iced beer click, laughter. It was difficult to walk here, crumbling sidewalks crowded with parked motorcycles, vendors selling t-shirts, coconuts, handbags from China. A charming waiter teaches me numbers, writing them out on my stained paper placemat.
“One is mo!” He declares in his laughing way. His hair is styled to stand straight up with the use of gel, which does not flag in the heat.
“Mo, hai, ba! That’s one, two, three. It’s also what you say for drinking. Mot tram. Say mo jam, means one hundred.” He shows me a one-hundred dong note with the beatific face of Ho Chi Minh. I go to the outdoor café twice a week and eventually learn the numbers, which I cobble together with my street and the first thing I learn is my address—moi tam bis wee tee minh kai. I am triumphant. I can find my way home.
I go to the backpacker district, Pham Ngu Lao, to seek out company; busy blocks of hostels, restaurants, bars, internet cafés, revellers drinking beer, waves of tourists, of Vietnamese on the sidewalks, chatting in alleys. Indoor and outdoor markets crowd narrow streets, tables with raw lumps of beef, pork, squirming fish, bundles of bananas, coconuts, stern women calling children out of the street. One night I meet a woman from Vancouver, Teresa, middle-aged and chubby with a green and yellow scarf shot through with silver tied in her unruly hair, cheeks flushed from the beer and the heat. She was on her way home after two months living in Phnom Penh, volunteering at an international aid organization.
“I lived by the river and watched old people pick through the garbage every morning. The riverbank is full of hotels with old foreign men and young Cambodian girls they rent. It’s disgusting. The heat, the bugs, my place was a dump… I kept trying to talk to the girls saying don’t do it, they’re pigs. But they need the money. It’s awful. I didn’t know what else to say. There was this great restaurant. I went there all the time. The owners were so wonderful.” Putting down her glass, she looked at me with bewildered eyes. “I wondered what I was doing there. I felt so useless.”
Dene
The women hid his bows and arrows in the woods and rocks of Stuart River and fled to Fraser Lake, leaving behind a message with the Tsauche tribe that following one of their usual disputes, A’ke’toes had tried to kill them but they escaped his wrath in his canoe. When he tried to pursue them he went past the level of his skill and drowned. Believing the story, the Stuart Lake tribe searched the river for days, where they recovered his missing quiver. A few days after this they recovered his mangled remains buried in the sand. The pain and anger Na’kwoel and Chichanit felt knew no bounds and they guarded this feeling, kept the need for revenge alive through the years after the wives disappeared.
Living in exile started to wear on Atete. She missed her family and wished to return home. Feeling vindicated by being the unwilling accomplice in the murder, she decided to end her exile and tell the whole truth of the matter to her tribe, hoping to have a happy homecoming. But as she neared Stuart Lake her return was revealed to Chichanit, whose rage sent him out to the edge of the lake and he killed her with his bow point—a spear fixed to the end of a bow—before she had a chanc
e to speak. He later found out that Atete was coerced by Chalh’tas in the murder of A’ke’toes and he repented, feeling shame that she was unable to explain herself. He then decided to spare the life of guilty Chalh’tas if she became his wife in memory of his late brother. Messengers were sent back and forth and Chalh’tas agreed to the arrangement, which was quite common then. Widows often re-married their late husband’s nearest kin.
Vietnam
When I pick my way around the hawkers and travellers to our appointed meeting spot, the Sinh, or Peace Café, Kelly is waiting, reading a travel guide, his Singha beer t-shirt already sticking to his bit of belly.
“Kelly!”
He rises. “Adrienne!” Big warm bear hug, he is clean- shaven, leaner than when he is at home. He is known, familiar, like a landmark.
“How was your trip?”
“Fine. Got in last night, ended up arguing with the cab driver, he was driving around in circles, running up the meter.” We order bacon and eggs, Vietnamese coffee.
“How are you?” he asks, looking over at me quickly. DeTham Street in front of us is a crowd of taxis, buses, ladies in matching print tops and bottoms like pajamas, old bowlegged ladies with cone hats selling fruit, coconut drinks, xe oms, men and boys smoking on their motorcycles parked on the sidewalk. Children coming to our table with stacks of books in their arms; Lonely Planet guides to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. They stand silent in front of us until we say no thank you and they move on to the next table.
“I’m okay. Adjusting. It’s so hot and noisy. Work is hard.” Kelly and I were roommates for seven years in a revolving number of houses in East Vancouver. We have survived friends, lovers, boyfriends, girlfriends, pets and cleaning disputes. One night in Bangkok we shared a room in a hotel. I was living in Japan and had come to travel with him. He cuddled up to me and I froze.
The Earth Remembers Everything Page 3