The Last Woman

by John Bemrose

  One time, after a particularly stressful call, she went outside and made her way toward the water. She was in a state – her face hot, her breathing constricted. She reached the deck almost without noticing, and stood for some minutes before the evening began to make an impression on her. The shadowed water held a green limpidity and the air was scented with pine. It was as if the place itself had enfolded her in its balm, and she began to weep – knowing she had given herself, her whole family, over to consequences that could not be foreseen, and that many things, already, were unrecoverable.

  Over the weeks, she and Billy had drawn closer, in the way that two people, who were once close, find a version of themselves in each other that is both familiar and open to new possibility. She could not imagine their living together in any conventional, ongoing sense; though his absence, if it went on too long, would begin to hurt.

  The sun is terribly hot. She asks him to stop, and as they drift for a while, she takes out a kerchief and drapes it from the back of her hat. Then they set off again. Ahead of her, under the skin of his back, his muscles churn as if looking for a way out.

  The change, when it comes, comes silently and with little warning. At one moment they are in forest, paddling down a deep defile, in the welcome shade of trees. Then they ease round a bend into the next lake, and at once there is more light behind the trees. Then the trees themselves peter out and a dazzling expansiveness radiates from the hills. It seems to her – her paddle arrested in mid-stroke – that something in her rushes to meet this new reality, exploding into a vacuum. The bush that has all along accompanied them, the bush of shadow and unimaginable depth, has simply stopped, and in its place is another world, sunstruck, stark, pullulating with heat. On either hand, thousands of stumps – stumps and rejected logs and piles of debris and slabs of exposed rock – cover the ruined slopes.

  They have both stopped paddling. There has been an assault here, an act of such violence it seems to evoke some other order of reality. The sun seems more ferocious; it bites at her face, her arms. It bakes the yellow hills where little dust devils rise up, twirl, and vanish – the only movement visible.

  Conscious of Billy, what this must be for him, she keeps still. He has placed his paddle across the thwarts and is leaning on it while he peers up at the devastation. They are drifting: past a great boulder like a turtle petrified before it can escape into the safety of the lake, past a rotting log. He is rocking a little now, forward and back, in some gesture of self-comfort, though what comfort he might find here she cannot imagine. She feels it was a mistake to have come.

  She has an urge to move: to go back, or at least to go on, to let action absorb what contemplation cannot. But she waits, for him. She is exhausted, soaked with sweat, and it seems, as they sit – several minutes have gone by – that they cannot move. The negative power of the place holds them, and they can only wait for worse: as if some new idea, some creature, some image must rise to instruct them. He has stopped rocking now and is gazing into the water.

  They go on. The first shock has passed, and now a horrified fascination sets in. She must see exactly what this thing is, this presence that has gripped the hills. A few miles back, in the untouched bush of their last portage, she had felt wrapped in a green fecundity, invited into its depths. But here, she is radically repelled, her very spirit repelled. Yet she cannot stop looking – up the slopes of dusty yellow earth covered with stumps whose raw, open surfaces shine with sap. At the top of a hill, a clutch of tall spruce persist, their crowns bristling against the blue. Why were those few trees left? Some token gesture of conservation? The surviving trees seem absurd to her – a quixotic flourish over a field of death.

  Oddly, she feels she knows this place. She has a sense of bleakness at once familiar and obscure. She knows this place: in some way it belongs to her.

  That night, they camp on an island where a few low, contorted pines twist up among several large flat rocks – a little Bonsai garden untouched by the loggers. The mood that wraps them deadens conversation. They talk only briefly, of practical things: what to have for supper, where to find firewood. They sit on opposite sides of their fire, prodding at it or shifting a pot, their small nest of light burning in the darkness that has hidden the devastation on the mainland – although the silhouette of a hill, teethed with stumps, humps against the faint glow of the western sky.

  “How long will it take to grow back,” she says, wanting to connect with him: the only comfort that seems possible now.

  Across the fire, Billy shakes his head vaguely. He doesn’t know. Or: it doesn’t matter. Or: it’s an ignorant question. She resents his dismissiveness, his continuing refusal to talk. Wrapping a rag around the handle of a pot, she pours out boiling water for tea and punctures a can of evaporated milk, holding it out to him.

  “Billy? Do you want milk?”

  “I said no.”

  She refrains from saying, No you didn’t. She will give him a pass, for today. For the rest of the trip, if necessary. But something in her withdraws, and as they sit drinking their tea in silence, she understands how little she knows this man. She knows something essential. She has a certain feel for him. But there are rooms behind rooms, some of which he may scarcely know of himself.

  They sleep outside – no need for the tent on such a clear, bug-free night – spreading their mats and sleeping bags on a patch of open ground. He is soon snoring softly while she lies on her back looking up at the stars: that forest no one will ever destroy.

  On the afternoon of the third day, they reach Silver Lake. She has carried a hope that the bush in that area remains intact, for all along they have passed places where the clear-cutting has temporarily relented. But no: the devastation returns. Behind a thin screen of trees the empty, barren hills rise once more. They scrape ashore under a high bank. He starts up the slope immediately, while, knowing how important this moment is for him, she stays behind to unload the canoe. Struggling up the eroded trail with a couple of packs, she reaches the flat, open space at the top and sees the cabin. She has heard so much from him about “the cabin on Silver,” about the life his family lived here, that she must stand for some time, simply taking the place in. It seems so small, so utterly forlorn, with its holed, sagging roof. She can just make out Billy in the little grove that survives near the cabin, holding up a chain from which some rusty-looking object swings. Dropping the packs, she approaches the door. Inside, in the shadowy depths pierced by sun from the broken roof, she discovers a small, overturned table, a section of fallen stovepipe, a half-destroyed mattress. There is a smell of rot, of animal excrement.

  They pitch their tent on the edge of the bluff. Billy claims to be pleased with the view – a few trees, then the lake, then a few more trees on the opposite shore, with more of the scraped yellow hills beyond. His remark seems bitter – a blade turned against them both.

  The next day, he sets to work repairing the cabin. She joins in, but wonders if they can ever do enough to make it habitable again. Using a small trenching tool, she scrapes away at the rotting floorboards, carrying out little piles of leaves, dirt, and shit, while he braces the roof and climbs onto to it to repair the hole. There is a pathos about their efforts, she thinks, as if they are trying, against all reason, to hold back a flood of ruin. Out of loyalty to him, she hides her sense of hopelessness, but it is a relief, finally, when he goes off to fish and she has some time to herself. Sitting under a kind of awning he has rigged up with a tarp, she tries to read her novel, but the words seem weak and irrelevant, unable to compete with the vast space around her, the brutal assault of sun and heat on the devastated hills.

  That evening they eat the pickerel in silence. Forks scrape on their metal plates. The little fire crackles to itself, with a kind of dry merriness, as if it knew something humans did not.

  “We’ve hardly made a dent,” she says. “Do you still imagine you can stay for a month this winter? You said yourself the animals are gone.”

  “We just a
te one, didn’t we?”

  “Well, one fish.”

  “I didn’t say they were gone,” he says. “I said I couldn’t see any tracks. They’ll come back. There’s still lots of bushes around. The moose will sniff them out sooner or later.”

  They are silent for a while.

  “Tell me what’s been on your mind,” she says, pleading. “I understand that it’s hard for you here –”

  He shrugs and blows out through his lips.

  For no reason she can grasp, they are estranged. They sleep side by side without touching. In the day, they are civil, even cheerful in a brittle way. She laments what they have lost – so good together only a short time ago. She wonders what can be recovered, what they have in them for each other. Has she always felt most intensely for him when they are at a distance? When she is with someone else? Has she made him up?

  Out of sight of the camp, she sobs. She comes back determined to get on with her life, and when she finds him sitting on the ground, picking at a tangle of fishing line, his total absorption in the task, his apparent contentment, enrages her.

  “We’ll soon be out of food!” she announces, exulting. It means they will have to go back.

  “I’ll catch some fish.”

  “I’d really prefer not to eat fish for the next three days. I think we should start for home.” He has fixed again on his reel: the stoicism of a man waiting out a storm. “Anyway, you haven’t caught a fish for three days. I hardly think you’re going to now.”

  “Whenever you like,” he says.

  The decision to go generates a brief satisfaction. But the bleakness of her melancholy, her sense of estrangement, does not shift. Things are still wrong between them. Will leaving change anything?

  Later they sit again at their fire. A few high, stately cumulus have drifted in, pink against the darkening blue. “Look, clouds,” she says, momentarily forgetting herself. “Maybe we’ll finally get some rain.”

  He jabs at the fire with a stick, then tosses it in.

  “All those years ago,” he says. “Why didn’t you tell me about the baby?”

  “Oh God,” she says. Her body feels insubstantial, as though it might blow away. He is looking at her, at last, though not in the way she wants: his eyes burning. “I couldn’t have told you then, it would have hurt too much. It wouldn’t have done any good. Billy, I could not have had a baby.”

  Desperate to be close to him, she scrambles around the fire. At once he stands up, and when she tries to embrace him, he moves away. Her heart is beating crazily, and she has a sense of them being tumbled about in some pocket of chaos, as if a wave had caught them. “Billy,” she pleads.

  “I was only nineteen. I was already enrolled in art school –”

  “You do whatever you like, I guess.”

  “That isn’t fair! It wasn’t like that! You didn’t have to go through it –”

  “There would have been – someone else now!” It tears from him with a half-choked cry. Speaking rapidly, touching him on the arm, she tries to make him see how it was for her: the fights with her parents, the agonies of doubt, the impossibility. But his gaze remains locked in the region of the fire: there is something adamant in him, set against her. Breaking away, he begins to pace up and down the campsite, turning, coming back to the fire, going off again. Finally he stops. “Richard came to the Island…”

  She is astonished.

  It happened four days ago, he tells her. “I figured he was coming to kick my head in, but he wanted to talk. Talked a lot about you. He said he’d never realized how bad things had been for you sometimes – that’s when he told me what happened. I acted like I already knew, but it cut me, Ann.” He pauses, closing his eyes for a few seconds. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had this place in me. Raw. Nobody was allowed to touch it. It was like he’d reached in there and squeezed it good.”

  For a few seconds, he allows her to hold him. Then he breaks away.

  “Where are you going? It’s almost dark.”

  Not answering, he plunges down the bank, out of sight. A moment later, she sees him – his T-shirt moving rapidly along the shore path, then turning inland to climb like a white travelling spark among the shadowy stumps and heaps of debris. Just under the summit, it winks out.

  She wraps herself in a blanket and sits down by the fire to wait. She assumes he won’t go far, but really she doesn’t know, doesn’t know when he’ll be back, doesn’t know if they’ll get past this. It is all but dark now. In the open doorway of the cabin, firelight quivers on the handle of an axe. Some time later, she crawls into the tent and curls up on her bag. She dozes, then wakes to a distant grumbling of thunder. She slips outside and calls his name, but nothing comes back. Around her, the night seems as dead and still as if every living thing, even the wind and water, has deserted it.

  She climbs inland, floundering through debris. Her flashlight beam stops at a small evergreen, pitched nearly upside down, and seeming, in the pool of her light, to have been caught out in some shameful act. The stars have disappeared.

  Back in the camp, she adds fresh wood to the fire and again sits down to wait. Poplar leaves rattle in the rising wind.

  Shivering, she retreats into the tent and, sliding into her bag, falls into a shallow sleep. She dreams she is being hunted by a vast, low-flying machine – like a steel shutter being drawn down the sky. If its searchlights find her, she will be sucked upward into its liquid, quivering mouth. She hides under a hospital bed, where a seagull has been caught in a trap. When she tries to free it, it pecks at her; she escapes down a corridor.

  And arrives on a hillside, where she stands looking out over a landscape of forests and rivers – rivers and forests, as far as she can see – livid in an ominous light that roils on them like the roiling glow of hot coals. The wind is gusting and the ground trembles underfoot. She wakes suddenly. A cold wind is blowing at the tent – the walls are billowing, a bit of metal shivers wildly. From a distance comes the slow monotone of thunder. Someone is tapping at the roof.

  It comes more swiftly now – drumming on the tent, hissing in the coals of the dying fire. Peering out, she can just glimpse something white moving, but when she leaves the tent, it has disappeared. The darkness is nearly absolute, there is only a faint, striated glow from the fire near her feet. The rain is coming more heavily now, a torrent under which she turns, crying his name.

  Then at once he is there –

  Many years later, near the end of her life, she will recall their trip to Silver. Much will have altered by then, and she will think that the world she is leaving is not so fine a place as the one she was born into. Of course, the old are notoriously disapproving, and the young must have their truth. Still, she will continue to find her own – in certain faces, in the shifting moods of Inverness, in sudden, ecstatic couplings of idea and colour. As for the events at Silver Lake, she will hold them as her passage into the second half of her life, less materially stable than what came before but more open to the subtle flux – the deep current of ceaseless change – that sustains all things. And so one October afternoon, bundled up in her chair, she will receive for a last time the memories of their journey north: the long moment of their embrace in the rain, and the moment, two days later, when they paddled around a point and found themselves once more among the trees.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank Cathleen Hoskins, Alix Bemrose, Aaron Lumley, Fred Bemrose, and Kathryn Bemrose. Also Jim Morrison, for his invaluable history lessons and social commentary; and my editor, Ellen Seligman, whose patience and skill continue to astonish me. To those many people, native and non-native, who over the years have communicated their love and knowledge of the wild places of this country – Megwich. Among authors, I am particularly indebted to Hugh Brody for his account of native hunting practices in his 1981 classic, Maps and Dreams, and to Rupert Ross for his penetrating 1992 study of cultural differences, Dancing with a Ghost. The Last Woman could not have been written without
the contributions of these people. Its inevitable shortcomings are mine alone.

  Thanks, as well, to the Canada Council for the Arts.

  Copyright © 2009 by John Bemrose

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Bemrose, John, 1947–

  The last woman / John Bemrose.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-318-8

  1. Title

  PS8553.E47L37 2009 C813′.54 C2009-901615-X

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  The Last Woman is a work of fiction. Although certain aspects of the land claim described in the novel were inspired by various actual claims around the country, the book’s characters, events, and principal settings are invented. Any resemblance to the lives and characters of any persons living or dead is coincidental.