The Iconoclast's Journal

by Terry Griggs

  Grif accepted it, fingers fumbling as he unscrewed the top. It took both hands to bring the flask to his lips and fill his mouth. The drink didn’t unlatch his tongue, but gave him a searing, resuscitating kiss that struck deep.

  “Come,” the man said, extending a hand to him. It was an offer of assistance, of welcome, possibly even solace, and as such was a foreign language to Grif, a human hieroglyphic that he could scarcely understand. It was an honest and uncomplicated gesture, but male hands had rarely dealt him a kindness, and women’s were either grasping or withheld. He thought briefly of his mother, arms frozen at her sides, and of his wife, whose touch he had eluded. Oh God, her. He closed his eyes and saw her standing before him, so readily and whorishly summoned. She had her arms clamped across her chest, as if concealing something, a wound perhaps. A cold hissing filled his ears and he fell back against the rocky shore, certain that if he opened his eyes again the man would be gone and she would be there, eyes livid and gloating. Grif didn’t want to see it, the spectacle of this stranger—his wife’s guise—dissolving. He chose darkness instead.

  Grif’s body was moored safely enough, but his untethered mind had wandered off. Avice was to blame. Her figure stood in the light, unentreatable, blocking the way, and he had no recourse but to escape, tumbling backwards into himself, into fever dreams and a willed madness. He let the tide take him and off he went, broken and bumping up against the objects jettisoned out of his own head: a bicycle wheel, a tuba, a boater (his own), a cassock, a cabbage with a human face. He heard Amy cursing, but could not see her. And then there was that dreadful baby, his very own stillborn, except that it wouldn’t stay still. Awake in the middle of the night, Grif felt an oppressive weight massing on his chest, a tumour growing slab-heavy and crushing the breath out of him. That horrible unholy infant had found him, had crawled up from the shore, its skin grey and shredded as a rag. Needy, as babies are, it gnawed on him. With sharp pointed teeth, it ate a hole in his chest through which it disappeared with the slithering ease of a snake. Opened, at least he was able to breathe again.

  His caretaker was patient and did what he could, understanding that his guest was afflicted with brain fever. Shipwreck can take a mind far into unnavigable territory, the return not so easy. Or certain. He had seen it before, as he had seen much else. Each day he brought Grif a gift from the island—a stone, a small stick, a seed pod—and placed it on a low table beside the bed. It was a calendar of objects that had in its arrangement an appearance of primitive magic, a shaman’s device, but was gathered more for the man’s own amusement than anything else, and his love of simplicity, what cures life’s many griefs. Hell, he thought, maybe it was magic he was proferring, a low and unacknowledged source. Hold on to this, son, this abbreviated bit of the world, and I’ll pull you back in.

  Grif saw this unknown figure standing over his bed and he couldn’t interpret its meaning. He sensed that it wanted to help, that it meant no harm, and yet he had watched his wife overtake it, inhabit it, her nacreous skin crawling over its surface like a rapidly spreading disease. Sleep, she whispered, and he dared not in her presence. Eat this, and he knocked the poisonous dish out of her twisted crone’s hands. Don’t try to speak.

  She was threatening him, but how could he speak anyway? He was mute with selflessness, with absence. There was no point, there was nothing to say, there was no one there to say it. His mind had shattered like a mirror in which he was once clearly reflected, and day after day he sorted through the fragments. He shuffled and reshuffled them, laid them out in different patterns like a fortune teller, although he never came up with much of a future, or even a present. He did occasionally see that stock figure of fortune, the dark stranger, looming over his bed. For a mystery man he had the most remarkably unthrilling conversation. Sleep. Eat this. Don’t try to speak.

  Speak? All the words he knew in the world had been rammed savagely down his throat. He’d have more luck shitting them out than speaking them.

  “You’re smiling, you know. I only mention it because people do not always recognize the fact that they are perfectly sane. Or imperfectly sane would be the more usual condition, I suppose.”

  Grif thought about this. He raised his fingers to his lips, traced their veering curve, and it was so. His mouth had broken into something you could call a smile, which surely meant that he was crazy. His fingers trailed to his chin, his cheeks, and struck a thicket. While he’d been shirking, refusing to collect his wits, his body had been getting on with its job; but then, even the dead can grow hair.

  “Not quite a hundred years’ growth.”

  Grif looked around, looked out from himself. He saw a ladderback chair, a pair of boots, overalls hanging on a hook, a pot-bellied stove, a cot at the other end of the room covered in a Bear Claw quilt, a bucket and a dipper, a pile of driftwood, a grease lamp, a teapot, an anchor, a spoon, its bowl filled with light. The whole room in fact was filled with light, for nothing was keeping it out. A door stood open wide, thin curtains were pulled aside and knotted. The bright day—and whatever else was out there—could gain admittance as he had done, easy as air drifting in.

  He tried to imagine the fashionably congested parlour in Avice’s home stripped and opened in this manner, swept clear of its knick-knacks, photographs, paintings, hunting trophies, ostrich eggs, the immense bible, the antimacassar, the heavy furniture, the Oriental carpets, the layers of lace and red velvet curtains hanging on thick wooden poles, completely shrouding the windows. It was a shrine to the Drinkwaters’ belief in industrious activity and acquisition, and no one dared trespass in it, not even the pagan sun. Poverty had its own style, which was nothing but trespass, and his boarding-house room in Owen Sound had been frugally appointed for the improvident—but here he sensed deliberation. Beside him on a small table lay a suspiciously precise arrangement of objects: a crow feather, a cigarette-sized reed, a perfectly round white pebble. . . For all its light and breathable air, he wondered if this room didn’t also have a design, as did his wife’s parlour, a webbing too subtle to perceive fully, in which he was caught.

  Grif turned his attention to the man who had been tending him. He was seated about four yards off at a pine table, hulling wild strawberries. A glass bowl resting on the table before him was filled with the glistening red fruit, tiny as birds’ hearts. The man’s fingers were stained pink. He worked with ease and precision, deftly plucking the calyx from each strawberry, and at a pace that suggested he was enjoying this sensuous task—the feel of the fruit, the fragrance, the vivid colour.

  “Jam,” he said, pausing a moment to look over at Grif and smile.

  He was no longer wearing his Sunday best, his undertaker’s uniform, but had on dungarees and a white, collarless shirt rolled up at the sleeves. Grif judged him to be about fifty, old enough at least to be amused by most things. His hair was closely cropped, his beard and moustache neatly trimmed, more salt than pepper on balance. He seemed plain as the table at which he was working. No mystery man after all.

  Clearly, that was Grif’s role. He was the one who had washed up on shore, nameless, half dead, his whole story still contained within him like a message in a bottle. Speak? Of course he could speak. But he was biding his time, waiting to break his silence significantly. He searched for the right thing to say, as one might scour a beach for the perfect stone—round, flat, fitting flush in the crook of the finger, a stone that would scale the surface of the lake lightly, a gravity-bound piece of the earth basting together sky and water.

  He couldn’t find it, though, that revelatory word, and so with a shrug he said only, “Griffith. My name is Griffith Smolders.”

  “Ah,” the man replied, plucking another calyx, like a tiny green star, and placing it neatly in a small pile beside the glass bowl. But then he frowned slightly, and asked, “Which one?”

  8

  LIGHT-KEEPING

  Exactly one hundred wooden steps down the
bluff to the beach, and Grif was taking each one so slowly you might think he was christening them as he went, naming them with his own sins­—faithless, faceless, feckless—words of descent. The bluff was steep, the woods thick on either side, the stairway overgrown in places with vines. He couldn’t remember having climbed up these stairs in the first place, but he must have done, as he didn’t think that Jean Haitse, so slight of frame, could have hauled him up on his own. Then again, he could fool you, the light-keeper. Jean. It was the first French word Grif had ever spoken, and he couldn’t get used to pouring it through his nose like a damn teapot, spilling it abruptly into the air. The name was spelled like a woman’s, yet spoken like a duck. As far as he could see, which admittedly wasn’t too far, it was the only French thing about the man. Grif had asked him if he was Catholic, and Jean had said no, he was a blue-domer, he worshipped under the heavens, believed only in the sky.

  Grif stalled about midway. The anonymous steps fell in a cascade before him. He wasn’t actually naming the stairs but staring at his feet, getting better acquainted with his newest pair of shoes, two odd ones he had chosen out of the light-keeper’s store of salvaged goods. Jean had built a shed by the dock where he kept whatever items washed up on the beach, if he had no immediate use for them. And what use would he have for a woman’s corset, or the picture of a solemn and unknown married couple in a gilt frame, or a pillowcase embroidered with the insignia of a ship silt-mired and rotting on the bottom of the lake? Entering that dim shed was like stepping into someone’s plundered dream, and Grif had not wanted to touch any of it. There was something obscene about this continuance of people’s possessions beyond them—and yet he needed shoes. Jean had warned him about walking barefoot. Rattlesnakes the main reason, which made Grif wonder if he had somehow drifted clear of his own safe country, and then he stopped himself, his wondering ceased. He didn’t care where he was—better not to know.

  The shoes were a stiff, water-cured leather, and not a bad fit, considering that one was a size bigger than the other. He had been fortunate to find a left and a right, although each was so different he thought his confused feet might just walk off in separate directions, to the east and west of him. The only identity this pair shared lay in being drowned men’s shoes, and it seemed to Grif that neither had entirely shucked its former owner. The left and larger one was moulded into an impression, all toe bumps and corn knobs, that defined a man’s foot clear as a death mask. It was a mud-brown brogue, worn at the heel, broken at the cuff, laceless (he’d secured it with string), its ripped tongue lolling like a tired old dog’s. Surely a foot phrenologist, if such existed, would have a heyday with it—criminal tendencies, lewd predilections—and wasn’t the state of a man’s shoes supposed to be revealing of character? (What did it mean that he couldn’t seem to keep them on his feet? That he had no character of his own?) The other shoe, the right one, was sleek and black, smooth as an otter, sunlight winking off its toecap after he’d given it a polish with his sleeve. Its owner might have been a clerk or a lawyer, someone proper and dutiful and decent (its lace had been double-knotted), while the other fellow with the unkempt and shoddy footwear was clearly lazy and suspect, an untrustworthy oaf, a blinkard. Or maybe it was the other way around: one was simple and honest, while the other was sly and scheming. The greater question, though, the only one he needed to consider, was: which shoe fit him best?

  Which one? Jean had startled him in asking. Which Griffith Smoulders was he? Jean had seen the name very recently on a supply run to Collingwood, noticed it inscribed in the register of the hotel he had stayed at. He said that the signature had caught his eye because it was written in a hand that was ornate and flashy, drawing attention so insistently to itself he had to pause and look at it. Given the arrogance and advertisement of the signature, he had assumed it to be that of a salesman or politician. He remembered thinking how ironic that was, since the name “Griffith” means “man of great faith.” As you must know, he added.

  He didn’t know. Besides, his name was clipped to Grif—man of little faith.

  “But that could not have been you,” Jean had continued, “for you came up from Owen Sound.”

  “I did,” said Grif, attempting to look perturbed. “It’s . . . odd, such a coincidence. And to think there is someone else in this province, and nearby, with my name.”

  He knew who it was, too. Fenwick Nashe. All the details of the terrible mishap, invented or otherwise, would have been in the papers by now—the foundering of the Echo and no survivors. Fenwick was the only person alive, outside of Jean, who knew he’d been on board. Since Grif no longer had any use for his name, and couldn’t defend it, the villain had obviously stolen it, had taken it like a wife, or a grave robber, a resurrection man. What a convenient banner (if already soiled) under which to conduct his unknown and illicit business. Any troubling introspective questions Grif might ask himself were no longer quite so personal, now that he was sharing his name. The central question—Who was he?—had taken on a more universal application. With Fenwick’s theft, Grif’s self was split, twinned—an other set loose in the world, a Griffith Smolders over which he had no control.

  He took the steps at a brisker pace. Duplicitous, equivocal, double-crosser. The empty water buckets, one in each hand, clanked against his legs. The rifle slung over his shoulder tapped him on the back like a loose wing. Grif raised his chin as if preparing for a blow, but received only a puff of wind coming off the lake, off its shimmering, slightly ruffled surface. Lake Urine, his father called it, fouling it, but unintentionally—which made Grif smile. His father’s only joke and he didn’t even get it.

  The lake was the source of other jokes as well, but darker ones, and Grif himself didn’t get those. Jean had told him about a former light-keeper’s wife who had insisted on being lashed to a tree near the water’s edge during a storm. Huge waves washed right over her and she claimed to have seen the very bottom of the lake, miles of it revealed as the vast watery skirts lifted. The man stood back clutching himself, terrified that his wife was going to drown, while she roared with laughter and shouted out, amazed at what she was seeing. Did all women have a streak of wildness in them? Perhaps it was only because she was stuck on this island, married to it, which would drive anyone mad. The isolation, the ghosts. Grif had no doubt that the place was haunted. It had to be with all the bodies that were buried on it, all the unquiet deaths, some very recently, his fellow travellers. Jean had not uttered another word about that dead baby and his makeshift family, thinking possibly that Grif, in his delirium, would not remember. But his memory was a very crypt.

  When he was first up and around, he noticed that the Indians who stopped at the dock to sell blueberries or fish transacted their business with uncharacteristic haste, refusing even to step out of their boats, their faces wary and evasive.

  “Up on the bluff beyond the light tower,” Jean explained, “there’s an ancient burial ground. A sacred place.”

  Old bones, restless spirits. Yet Grif suspected it was the newcomers who were the troublemakers. His race, dead or alive, was hungry and dissatisfied and forever on the move. He could feel it here, could sense them moving through the undergrowth. At night sometimes a candle flame would flicker out suddenly, extinguished for no reason. Or a door would open with a crash, letting a chill rush into the room.

  Jean had pointed out to him two mounds behind the storage shed down below where a lighthouse keeper of a few years past and his dog lay buried. They had starved to death over the long winter.

  “Why didn’t he eat the dog?” Grif asked.

  Jean shrugged. “Would you eat your only friend?”

  Nearing the bottom of the stairs, Grif stopped again, paused with one foot momentarily suspended, which he then very slowly retracted. On the third step from the last a snake lay basking in the sun. A well-fed fellow with a blotchy appearance, dark brown markings on tan, like splashes of cocoa. Unwind him and he’d be
about two and a half feet in length. Or she, maybe it was a she; and maybe she was a water snake and not a rattler at all. Jean had told him that the two were often confused, and people killed both anyway, usually clubbing them to death with a Christian fervour.

  Grif would have been happy to give this one the benefit of the doubt, but it was taut with awareness, and raised the tip of its tail in warning, giving its rattles a menacing little shake. Gently, carefully, he set the buckets down, then reached a hand back for the rifle. According to Jean, this island was thick with them—the massasauga rattler—especially near the tower, where they drew close in the evening, biding their time, waiting for the dazzled birds that knocked themselves out hitting the light. A man could stand in the kitchen and pick the snakes off the rocks for gun practice, his aim truer if he feared and hated them. Killing rattlesnakes might somehow help fill up that empty and dangerous space within that deepened and got more dangerous in a remote place like this. It was not a hobby that Jean himself subscribed to. He had no need, being spiritually amused.

  Grif cocked the rifle and took aim. The snake had amber eyes, like doll’s eyes but very much alive, and they seemed to look directly at him and through him to whatever lay beyond. He was reminded of a cat, ears and limbs and fur smoothed away, all extremities eased flush into its compact and sculpted body. Studying it, he decided that the creature was better-looking than most humans he had ever encountered; certainly it was more perfect, almost an ideal form. He had no desire to blast it to bits, to tear open that cunningly wrought skin in which its being was so seamlessly sealed. Besides, he didn’t even know how to handle a rifle and would be more likely to shoot himself in the foot, thereby ruining another worthy pair of shoes, no matter how eccentrically matched.

  He lowered the gun and felt immediately the tension in their relationship slacken, after which the snake simply slid off the step and disappeared into the bushes. It probably went away sniggering, he thought, having sensed the tremors that his knocking knees sent through the wooden stairs.