by Terry Griggs
Grif planted the sticks in the ground by the fire, and the dangling socks smoked like censers, releasing their own complex olfactory story of his journey. He retrieved the missal from his jacket, also drying on a teetering homemade clothes horse, thinking it would give him some entertainment to see the book burn, to sizzle a few saints and preachments. To prolong the anticipation, he flipped the book open and riffled through it. He contemplated feeding the fire slowly, page by page. That’s when the writing in it snagged his eye and he realized that it wasn’t a missal at all, but a journal of some sort. What sort was beyond him, and in trying to figure that out he got enmeshed in the reading of it, as though an ancient gnarled hand had reached out of the pages and yanked him right in. The paper was buckled somewhat from his dip in the lake, and the crabbed script was on the verge of illegibility—but it was a verge to which he was nonetheless attracted.
He could figure out this much: that tubby, self-satisfied cleric from whom he had stolen it could not be its author; unless the man was even more depraved than he looked, for the journal was largely a record of mayhem and vandalism. Most entries described the desecration of churches, the destruction of statuary, holy vessels and relics:
Clare. We brake down 1,000 Pictures superstitious; I brake down 200; three of God the Father and three of Christ and the Holy Lamb, and three of the Holy Ghost like a Dove with Wings; and the twelve Apostles were carved in Wood on the top of the Roof which we gave order to take down; and twenty cherubims to be taken down; and the Sun and Moon in the East Windows, by the King’s Arms, to be taken down.
Grif read on in the shuddering, uncertain light of his campfire, baffled but fascinated. The book also contained a few poems, notes on wills, passages in Latin, a recipe for how to make a Presbyterian (“Take the herbs hypocrisy & ambition. . .”), and detailed descriptions of whippings, brandings, beheadings, hangings.
His lips twitched as he read. He could feel heat rising in his throat, his tongue burning. The journal had nothing at all to do with him, and yet he saw himself reflected in it, as if he were staring at a mirror and not merely the faded pages of an old, lifeless book. The actions it described both deeply excited and troubled him. In the end he didn’t toss it in the fire, but found himself clutching its black calf covers tightly, protectively, as if hanging on for dear life to his own hidebound soul.
“Griffith.” His name dropped out of his mouth like a newborn. It was the first time he had spoken in weeks, outside of the speech he had delivered to the pig and the monosyllabic pleasantries they had exchanged. “Oh Grif,” he said again, his soliloquy foreshortened by shame, for he had freely admitted to the crime of himself.
3
NOMINUS UMBRA
So the fugitive, the scapegrace, admits to a name but has no plan, at least nothing he can attach a name to. Having yanked his name out of its place in the world, it seems an object adrift, like a head minus a body, a floating spectre trailing ripped tentacles and filaments. Possibly his name was his plan, one that carried him further and further north while he clung determinedly to it. It was the one thing in his life that he was faithful to, although not necessarily out of choice. If he could have dreamt up a convincing alias to hide out in, he surely would have. Erasmus Richardson? Raphael Dunsmuir? Utterly respectable fellows—they would never desert their wives—but as these names were so ludicrously weighty, Grif could scarcely launch them off his tongue, couldn’t even get them past the barrier of his lips without laughing. Duncan Campbell . . . Lampman? Ha, ha. A good name, it appears, is harder to steal than a gold brick. Valentine Moote, Walter Thistle, Vespasian Nutting. Even the most ordinary and generic names he could think of sounded in his ear gimcrack and clumsily cobbled together, hardly credible and, like the jacket he wore, unconvincing concealment for an entirely dubious article.
He was not an actor—no name-haunter, or hustler—although nearly as contemptible as one. If anyone asked now, he would confess, I am Grif. Grif Smolders, and let them spit in his eye, or doctor him with a dose of cold lead. He would take what was coming. As plans go, this was a thin one, and did nothing much for his spirits, so perhaps it was useful that he did meet an actor, a villain as it turned out. Villains always have plans more robust and less mired in guilt than your garden-variety deserter.
This villain even looked the part, having only recently been chased out of Meaford for playing it to perfection in some cheesy little melodrama. To keep himself amused, he had adopted for the performance a broadly farcical French accent, and it may have been his provocatively stretched and slanted vowels that stoked the good Orangemen in the audience into an orange rage. Or it may have simply been the ambiguous spin he put on his part, complicating evil with a dash of goodness. Funny how a mere hint of moral confusion can incite in such a crowd an even deeper hatred than usual. They loathed him, a mass sentiment he always found bracing, even charming. How seriously people took him, booing and hissing, pitching the odd rotten egg, as he plotted and schemed his way through these mundane entertainments—The Road to Ruin or Wages of Sin (“Endorsed by the Clergy” and “Praised by the Press”). How little they required of their art, and what a triumph of simplicity. Jew-dark, moustache-twirling, forecloser of mortgages, despoiler of virtue, he became the locus of all dissatisfactions and resentments, a convenient scapegoat. Well, if he were a straitlaced, flush-faced citizen of Meaford, Ontario, wedded to one of those corpulent and jeering females, it would be understandable, wouldn’t it? The blame for these dreary, constricted lives had to be allocated somewhere.
At least he was universally despised, even by his fellow actors. Ah, mischief. Had he really called Margaret, the lily-white heroine, a whore (she was), albeit under his breath, possibly a little louder than he had meant to? Thank God for the power of words, that, unscripted, they could still do the work of a hurled bomb. Men, enraged, rose up from the audience and actually stormed the stage to defend Margaret’s honour, and by proxy the honour of their wives and daughters. It was so touching, which is why he’d cleared out, and hastily—the very thought of their meaty paws touching him… appalling. (And where was Frank meanwhile, the dashing hero of the play? Behind the curtain, dashing a quick pint down his throat. You had to be a hero yourself to receive the reeking lines he poured into your face.) There wasn’t much point in being the villain if one didn’t make off with the evening’s proceeds, which he promptly did before disappearing in a puff of smoke, the latter usually a corny and unconvincing effect, except that the audience, in lieu of burning the words right out of his mouth, had to settle for torching the stage. A passionate lot in Meaford.
The villain was still wearing his top hat and cape when he came whistling out from behind Knox United on Murdock Street in Owen Sound. He’d nipped behind the church to take a leak and on emerging spotted Grif, who was gazing up at the bricks and mortar of the building as if there were some intelligible reading to be had in it, an early and invisible graffiti that might tell him what to do next. A likely-looking lad, the villain thought to himself, catching Grif’s eye and flashing him a brilliant smile. A hearty meal, a wash, a decent pair of shoes (heavens, yes), and he’d be an even more likely lad. Good looks, a wonderful physique, a bit glum, but not beyond cheering up. The villain was feeling generous, public-spirited, in a mood to deepen his commitment to his fellow man. (He hoped he’d remembered to button himself up.) He smiled again at Grif, doffed his hat and gave his cape a natty little swirl. Self-parody ran so strong in him it was all he could do to keep his eyebrows from dancing off his face. He moved in on Grif, hand extended. “Fenwick Nashe,” he said.
His name fit him like the skin on his arm.
Grif took him for a banker, and that a banker should want to make his acquaintance seemed likely enough at the time. In his long post-nuptial walk, his jailbreak constitutional, Grif’s sense of what was possible in his life had unravelled and let in some light. Owen Sound itself had a kind of anything-goes atmosphere, fed by a
n unsavoury undercurrent that was not unusual to find in a port town. Corkscrew Town, he’d heard a man call it in passing, and Grif had noticed a prodigious number of taverns, as well as drunks, vagrants, reeling sailors and dock hands, loafers, gamblers, loose women. (He was a loose man, but that was different.) Easy to see how even an upright citizen might have trouble staying that way, how even a banker might have an eroded respectability. Fenwick Nashe didn’t shun the public houses in any event, and by the end of the day Grif felt he’d been introduced to most of them: the American Hotel, the Queen’s, the McWilliam House, the Clifton, the Comely. After a while the names no longer registered; they were washed down with quarts of Eaton Brothers’ Golden Ale and Triple X Stout, then pissed out anonymously against the taverns’ back walls, where a man might write something legible if he weren’t too squiffed to handle the instrument in hand.
How strange it felt to Grif, being back in civilization, even this demotic version of it, after being wind-groomed and river-fed for days, tucked up under a star blanket at night, mosquitoes singing him lullabies. It didn’t take long to become a wild man, which is why Fenwick’s first move was to propel him into a barbershop, from which he emerged raw and blinking like a creature who’d just been dragged out of a bush. Groomed, fed, liquored and briefed, that’s how the day progressed, but dreamily. The plan the villain slowly unfurled was a wavery one, submerged and ungraspable.
Around midday Grif milled down a meal—boiled beef, roast potatoes, pie—taking on this heaven-sent dinner as if it were employment. Serious work when it doesn’t come every day. Then somewhere between one saloon and the next they stopped at a storefront to look at a chorus line of deer carcasses displayed in a window, and in another a bear: This week exhibited live, a sign read, next week dead.
“Empathy,” Fenwick pointed out, keeping an eye on his charge, “is a ruinous sentiment.”
At Grafton’s, a dry goods store, they met two little people named the Winners, a major and his missus, who had come from Iowa to promote the store’s camel-hair coats. Two little coats. The manager had billed them as The smallest married couple and the world’s greatest midgets. Small and great, they attracted quite a crowd; and Grif, marvelling, could not help but reflect on the diminishing effects of the marital state.
For some undisclosed reason—a bank job in the offing?—Fenwick bought him a pair of shoes at Grafton’s, and a suit of clothes to match, although Grif drunkenly insisted on wearing the Reverend Bee’s noisome jacket overtop his new trim.
Grif supposed he would get the gist eventually. His patron was not reticent. He talked freely and ranged widely in subject matter as the watering holes they wandered into got progressively smaller and rougher, until they were practically nose to nose, facing one another over a table tottery as an outstretched hand. He could feel Fenwick’s breath on his cheek, and he found it weirdly cool, smelling of nothing. But the barroom itself was too close, too warm, oppressive with the stench of men’s lives guttering out in sweat and smoke. And vomit—there was a trench in the floor for sluicing it out the door. (Good chance Grif himself might soon be contributing.) The only other decoration in the place was a bucket in one corner that served as a spittoon and the pug-ugly faces of the men standing at the bar, who turned either to send a gob flying into the bucket or to stare with undisguised hostility at them.
Fenwick took not the slightest notice. He was absorbed in the current topic of conversation: himself. He was as open as a vault, but no banker after all, for he told Grif about life on the stage, about touring the Dominion, and where you could buy the services of a nine-year-old girl for fourteen cents, and a double-breasted suit sewn by her mother for less. He had met well-known actors, artists, politicians. Julia Arthur, May Irwin, the famous Canadian writer Gilbert Parker. He had escorted Pauline Johnson, the Mohawk Princess, to Shea’s Theatre to hear the exceptional monologuist George Fuller Golden. He had dined at the Rideau Club, marched with the Knights of Labour, penned a column for Busy Man’s Magazine.
“Do you believe that money is the handmaid of virtue, Grif?’’ His address slipped easily into American informality.
He didn’t wait for an answer, not that one was forthcoming. Grif wasn’t feeling backward, or out of his depth, so much as afloat. Fenwick provided a surfeit of facts, but there was a slippery ambiguity to everything he said. Grasping the precise point of it all was like trying to hold a freshly plucked eyeball between your fingertips. Nor was he any the wiser about the man’s views. Was he for or against privilege, the safety razor, child labour, the coin-operated phonograph, zippers. . . ? Grif honestly couldn’t say, and didn’t.
“Have you tried one of these telephone devices yet?”
Hah! Grif knew all about the perfidies of that invention. It was said that the telephone transmitted false information and lies.
“Electricity is the coming thing, though, eh? I know a fellow in Quebec . . .”
Even worse! The devil’s own veins and arteries creeping through your house. Grif’s parents had been terrified of electricity, yet had embraced it readily enough, infernal light to extend the working day.
“Superior to gas, mind you. Do you realize how many people that kind of lighting has killed off? A chap prepares to retire at night, blows out the flame, forgets to turn off the gas, goes to bed and never gets up. Asphyxiated.” Something about that word pleased Fenwick, and he took a moment to linger over it while stroking his gums with an ivory toothpick. Then he said, “You’re on the run. Tell me why.”
And, Bless me Father, he did, confession being an old habit and a hard one to shake. The villain may have worked some colourful embroidery into his autobiography—that bit about larking with Oscar Wilde in Toronto—but Grif had no need, his story was fanciful enough.
Fenwick was sympathetic, exonerating him for his marital defection with a dismissive wave of his hand. “You’re well shot of that one, my boy, she would have eaten you alive. Sounds like one of these New Women.” He shuddered. “Once the ladies have the vote, we will be done for.”
As for the ball lightning, the fiery, heel-igniting orb, he also eased Grif’s mind. Where Grif had been worried that theology and retribution might be involved—a divine messenger lobbing a sizzling knuckleball at his confused and sinning head—Fenwick offered a scientific explanation. “A high-density plasma,” he suggested, “or gas trapped in the atmosphere. You are fortunate to have witnessed such an unusual thing. And to have survived it. One does hear of it happening; there are documented reports. I recall reading about one such that occurred in the seventeenth century, in England it was. A yellow flaming ball, just as you describe, rolled into a house right through the door and killed eight people. And a cow—don’t ask me what it was doing in the house. Fresh milk, I suppose.”
Seeing as his actor friend was not shy of knowledge, it occurred to Grif that he might also be able to enlighten him about that peculiar book he had found in the cleric’s jacket, what its provenance might be, what exactly it was, why, even, it seemed to engage him the way it did. He began to say something about it, but Fenwick’s attention had been diverted elsewhere.
“Knuckle-walkers.” He nodded toward a group of men who had tumbled out onto the street to play a game of hot cockles. One man, blindfolded with a black neckerchief, stood braced while the others proceeded to ball up their fists, then took turns punching him. The object of the game being that the blindfolded man had to correctly identify the one who had hit him, and when he did so, it would then be the identified man’s turn to be blindfolded and punched, until he too came up with the name of his assailant. There were some subtleties in this game, perhaps difficult to locate—that even the wielding of a fist was done with a certain style and could leave an impression clear as an incriminating fingerprint. Also, there was punishment in full for not knowing who your friends were.
“Knuckle-walkers?” As Grif watched through the grimy window this brutal give-and-take, b
lood already streaming out of the blindfolded man’s nose, he figured it wouldn’t be too long before the game broke free of its rules and they got down to brawling in earnest.
“Primates. I wonder, does such an activity prove or disprove Mr. Darwin’s theories?” Fenwick smiled, trying to retract the iniquitous edge of it. “We are progressive men, are we not, Griffith? You agree to what I have proposed today.”
Statement or question, Grif nodded, although it was more like shaking up a jar to get a view of the contents. What had Fenwick proposed? Something about making money, piles of it. But he hadn’t meant actually making it, had he? Grif could already see his own grimacing mug printed up on one of those handbills he’d seen posted around town, men wanted for robbery, arson, trespass, murderous assault and “furious driving.” Surely he was in enough trouble already.
“Excellent.” Fenwick rose from the table and grasped his hand briefly, giving it an efficient contract-sealing shake. “Tomorrow it is, then. At the pier. I’ll be waiting.”
Grif watched him stride out, and suddenly he seemed so unlikely in his actor’s gear, he might indeed have been nothing more than a figure loosed from a melodrama, a fugitive from the script. It’s a wonder he didn’t walk right through the wall. A man propped up against the bar, a hairy lunk with few teeth and even less charm, sneered as Fenwick swished past, and sent a sloppy wad of black spittle after him, which disappeared into the folds of his cape. Someone less accustomed to critical review might have taken exception to this and sent the man’s few remaining teeth down his gullet to nibble on his equally unattractive insides, but Fenwick merely walked briskly out the door and up the street.
The game of hot cockles was in full swing.