Written in Stone Read online

  She had taken to the stage as if to a sanctuary and performed in a small, unpaid, and unauthorized production of Beckett’s Happy Days at the Poor Alex Theatre. She was appeasing the burden of her mother, she told herself, a highly theatrical woman who had died in a blaze of alcoholic anger, and who sang old show tunes when she ironed, or when she did anything around the house.

  The theatre stank of scorched curtains, and during the most dramatic moment of any production the heating pipes would bang loudly and without fail. In the afternoon, when the stage manager switched on the house lights for rehearsal, the same large rat exited stage right. For six nights a week, two weeks in a row, she was buried up to her breasts inside a papier mâché sand dune that she’d constructed with the help of the director and a lighting technician, who brokered bags of marijuana to a succession of budding artistic youngsters, all of them showing up on bicycles and leaving quickly. During the performance, she stuffed cotton batten under her lips to make her look older. “I used to think,” she intoned, “I used to think I would learn to talk alone.”

  She met him at a cast party, a nearly nightly romp where the cast and delinquents from the street hovered about a table crammed with liquor, goat cheese, and whole-wheat crackers. He was a sullen older man who cast an atmosphere of sullen disapproval. She knew him to be the murky ex-lover of the stage manager, still hanging about for obscure and sullen reasons. There were rumours about him, or at least a rumour of rumours; he’d been drummed out of a university appointment due to some indelicacy with a grad student. Or something more sinister, something never spoken. He was a murderer. A mass murderer. Or he had written books. More than one. He was tolerated but not embraced. He knew the scene rather well and was decidedly unimpressed by it; these wearers of attractive clothes who made attractive comments to one another, who said scathing and clever things in their pursuit of being epically themselves. They were of the age when they turned heads, took lovers, got rid of them in restaurants, took in stray cats that they christened with ornate literary names and treated with great tenderness. None of them had exactly starved, he knew that, but they had suffered tragedies, often at the hands of older men who betrayed them and turned out to be married with kids. Soon, one by one, he understood they would vanish into advertising. He’d seen it before. Eventually, they all turned their backs on the big truth and began to cozy up to the great big lie.

  He did not approve of Beckett, either. He made this known to her. He did not approve of the death rattle of the modern world with its modern art and sickening devotion to comfort, to status, to greed. He approved of her, though. Approved of the pleasure she gave his eyes. Her hair that swung from red to brown, the heavy chest, the figure, the jeans. He approved of these matters.

  The man was at least a decade and a half older than any of them, he did not practice yoga, and, for the time being at least, boasted no beard. His face was the weather-beaten texture of the bark of the ironwood tree. (He had told her that, later: “My skin is the texture of the bark of the ironwood trees” he said proudly.) His eyes grey, the skin surrounding them lined and articulated like something from the Pleistocene Age. Also grey. A tangible inner disquiet radiated from him. If this disquiet had a smell, it was the odour of basements where things had been stored and forgotten, old fencing gear from twenty-five years before, ice skates that had rusted. He was in the habit of forgetting that he was staring at the front of her shirt, or unaware he was doing it. He found no shame in this. He told her that. He found his shame elsewhere. There was no shortage of it, he said. Linda had not heard a man make this particular admission before. She was not impressed by it. There was so much she was not impressed by when it came out of the mouths of men. So much had fallen crapulously out of that place, for so long.

  In this posture, him holding a glass of beer tilted so that the lamplight flayed into it, his face stuck substantially close to her, he first addressed her.

  “Are you any good in a canoe?” He spoke with a sort of muffled weariness that seemed to require some effort on his part to keep it to mere weariness. In fact, he was extremely nervous she would reject him on the spot.

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “Canoe. From the Portuguese canoa, into the French canot, and into the English, if we can call it that. Canoe. Are you any good in one?”

  “Are you making a joke?” She sounded appalled by this line of questioning. As if somehow it was beneath her.

  “It’s a simple question,” he said, cringing inside. She was preparing to destroy him, he knew it.

  It was a simple question. Linda was young enough to presume herself to be skilled at just about everything, thank you, even though her most recent experience in a canoe was an August afternoon a number of years ago, shortly after her mother’s funeral, when she had ventured out in her father’s antique sixteen-foot Peterborough with the bronze-coloured ribs made of maple, and immediately cracked it on the wharf at the cottage they rented. It struck her suddenly what a handful she’d been for that man. He had died in a hospital, quietly. His body stiffened oddly, like the root of an ancient tree.

  “Pretty good,” she offered. “Good enough.”

  “Great,” he said. “Let us go canoeing then, you and I, when the night sky is spread out like a something something on a table. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “Yes. I do. More than you do. Etherized. The word is etherized.” He had mixed his metaphor, and not successfully either. She would learn that he did that.

  “Good,” he said. “Good. Let us go canoeing then, you and I.”

  That’s how it happened. Rather than let a somewhat tedious burly man try to best her in a match of literary trivia, she went on a canoe trip with him.

  2

  THE GRAND RIVER

  I was at a large dinner party and wore a very fine gown and was taken to dinner by Mr. Somebody. I forget his name. I talked politics and told them there was no government existing save the confederated government of the Iroquois.

  PAULINE JOHNSON, 1894

  SHE DIDN’T KNOW THIS AT the time, but there on either side of her on the soft brown shoulders of the Grand River stood the finest and the most dense tracts of Carolinian forest remaining in the country. Nor did she know the difference between an eastern box turtle and a painted red ear. If she knew turtles at all it was in the collective sense as harmless ugly creatures not much good on their backs, and given to long and rather morose lives.

  As they feathered their way through the slow brown water, she saw the turtles perched at steep angles on every log. They looked rather comical to her, like elderly matrons at the opera, or what she presumed elderly opera-going matrons looked like — Linda had denounced opera as a ten-year-old, after a furious fight with her mother, and had never looked back. Show tunes were different. She loved show tunes. Her mother had loved them too. Show tunes had kept them from killing each other. It’s May, it’s May, a libelous display … She thought the man up front might be paddling them to Camelot. She had no interest in going there.

  The domed creatures craned their necks forward and slipped into the river with a distinct plink; one by one they dropped in, like birds releasing themselves from a high branch.

  “Their blood freezes,” said Paul. “In winter, their blood freezes solid. Actually becomes ice. Amazing isn’t it?”

  Linda felt no reverence toward the turtle, eastern box or otherwise, nor for the blood of the turtle, frozen or not, but for diplomatic reasons she conceded to him that it was amazing. It was, really, when she thought about it. She was disturbed by other things, in particular her shoulders now ached painfully and a muscle in her neck had begun to pulsate. She considered that maybe she wasn’t ideally suited to paddle a canoe. Her bare shoulders showed the proud Richardson “breeding,” as her father had put it, contemptuously. He would be referring to the band of ex-criminals and hard-drinking future criminals who had poled a barge up the Ottawa
River to approximately Pembroke, where they quickly drank themselves to death or died of hatchet wounds. Her lineage.

  She was ready to accept that her shoulders were not the sort of shoulders designed to paddle canoes down sluggish brown rivers. They served better as a platform to uphold and reveal her neck; an extraordinary neck in her opinion, and in the opinion of others. A neck Modigliani would have painted were he not preoccupied painting the necks of those young women who were pregnant by him and seemed to always throw themselves off tenement rooftops. “Your neck, Linda dear, has been stretched out too far by your mother’s straining to see into the higher echelons of higher society. Bless her sodden soul.” Her father’s voice came to her, remote and ironic as ever. She missed him.

  After several miles, Linda put her paddle into the water for purely cosmetic reasons alone. The man occupying the stern did not seem to mind or notice. He was in his element, she thought; outdoors, on water, in a small craft, in the company of — her. He appeared to be fully enraptured in his role as the River Man; his one duty in life was to squire the fair lady through the lurking mysteries of the new world, to inform her and protect her. From the stern, he boomed his stentorian enthusiasms in her direction. He seemed entirely filled with them. Linda had begun already to suspect that the man’s skin was meant not so much to contain his flesh as to collect and hold random enthusiasms, capturing them the way a sail captures wind. Did she know the Algonqui language possessed nine conjugations and that each of those had both a positive and dubitative form? No, in fact Linda didn’t know that. It seemed the man was on a first-name basis with every county, district, and acre of the province, every tree that grew in it, every bush and thistle. Did she know the Vikings believed the world was held together by the ash tree? That according to De Quincey the trembling aspen trembles because Christ was crucified on a cross made of it? Did she know that? The way that trees communicated with each other through the centuries? The stories they told one another? “I don’t know anything,” she laughed. She was forced to admit she’d never divined water with a forked branch from the witch hazel. It suddenly seemed there was so much she didn’t know. So much she had not divined. “I really don’t know anything,” she said again, with some alarm.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “No one does. Not me. Especially me.”

  They slid with a musical slapping of water down the storied brown river, him pointing the paddle to indicate to her the landmarks of his wonderment. On either shore showed the rich jungle foliage, the vines and the knotted ropes that hung from stout willow branches, the farmed pastures and farmed interiors that crept to the ragged shoreline of willows and twisted cedars. It was from those branches that she spied the boys and girls of the Six Nations swinging themselves with alarming agility into the sun and out again. Children on ropes, their loose easy bodies swung over the river and swung back like superior little Tarzans, crying out from the belly as they released themselves to the sky, cannonballing into the river, crashing like osprey, sending frothing white spumes up from the surface. Their heads reappeared moments later, little dark dots, as the divers kicked their way to the green shore to do it again.

  “Kids’ve been swinging on those ropes since the Battle of Stoney Creek,” Paul said. He seemed greatly proud of this. “And before.”

  She would learn that he was enthusiastic about first people and first ways. He was enthusiastic about anything that offered another way into the world, or another way out of it; about the craft of polishing river stones with sturgeon oil, imprinting birch bark with human teeth. Or dreaming in trees. He was one of those men who searched for a way to live, and had not found it at home, or in the crass achievements of the world. He was enthusiastic about all things that were not him; all the entities that belonged to the world he had grown up in; the fish and otter, the smell of books, old books that no one cared for. He was enthusiastic about obscure writers of forgotten books and even more obscure travelogues. British and Canadian texts, beefy orators of dead patriotism often expressed in strict rhyming couplets and soul-crushing sincerity. Pauline Johnson was one of his favourites. “The Mohawk Poetess,” he called her. Linda cringed.

  Silently they shored the canoe on the west bank and he led her brazenly by the hand through a thicket of swishing green grasses and prehistoric fern. Monarchs and sizeable blue dragonflies filled the air. They exited through a towering chamber of black oaks to the front of a house planted unexpectedly on the river side of an old wagon road, now paved. She found herself standing in front of a square white pile of a Georgian mansion from which the stucco was beginning to go.

  “She was born in this house, Pauline Johnson,” he said. She saw that the man was filled with childish and almost idiotic enthrallment. “She had a nickname for her canoe. ‘Wildcat,’ she called it. What else can a girl raised on the side of a river call her canoe? Wildcat. Perfect.”

  Paul examined her face for some acknowledgment of this perfection, but didn’t find it. “She believed that ‘the Indian and the Paleface were one race,’ that’s how she put it, and they would come together, right here beneath the oaks and the walnuts, and together they’d become the greatest people in all of history. The greatest people in all of history, that’s what she thought. She wrote that. You’re not part Native are you? I would take part native over pure laine any time.”

  “Sorry.”

  He looked at her suspiciously, “What are exactly are you?”

  “I’m in transition.”

  He did not seem sure this was the right answer.

  “Her father was very special,” he said, and stopped. It seemed he would let the story die there on the crest of all this specialness.

  Linda laughed. “Are you going to tell me?”

  “All right,” he conceded, as if she was forcing him. “The man’s name was Smoke Johnson. John Smoke Johnson. His wife’s mother was ethnic Dutch captured as a girl by the Mohawks. Smoke Johnson refused to wear gloves because he believed he breathed through his hands. He was maybe the only man on the planet who could still translate the Iroquois Book of Rites, and he had a tough job with a beautiful title. Warden of the Trees and Forest. Has a ring to it doesn’t it? Would you want to be that? Warden of the Trees and the Forest?”

  “Sure.” She sounded insolent and knew it. They were starting to fray against each other. She didn’t care.

  “What exactly are you again?” he asked. “You’re not one of those precious young people with a job in event planning or something like that? You’re not a consultant, are you?”

  “I’m just another dysfunctional paleface with a Masters degree in modern English lit. What are you, mister?”

  “It so happens that I’m the world’s greatest authority on aboriginal rock art.”

  “Is that right?”

  “East of the Rockies of course. I wouldn’t go so far as to take credit for the work of a bunch of tenured west coast academic potheads whose work for the most part is bullshit. Her father was murdered here, right here.”

  She followed his finger into the sun-scattered glade where the grasses danced and the stout black oaks towered. She couldn’t see death there, only sun and the silver-blue circles of the dragonflies that caught the sun’s rays and shone like mother-of-pearl in the air.

  “The timber companies did it. He was the world’s first tree hugger. He was good at it. They hired assassins, four extremely foul fellows who shot him twice, broke his ribs, broke his teeth, and heaved him in the swamp. That swamp right there. He dragged himself out and, somehow, he managed to get into the house. He died up there in that room. Right there.”

  She discerned the delicate lace curtains greying in the shadow of the window frame. The establishment was closed, semi-permanently it seemed, and they turned from it and walked back toward the river. On the path between the oaks and the walnuts and the ferns that waved the heat at them, they had their first spat. He ventured that a certain poem by Pa
uline Johnston was the finest poem in the English language. She laughed in his face and ventured that he was full of shit. Really. She’d spent five years studying the dense black pages of Beckett, Joyce, Wolfe, Lowry, and to listen to him go on about some uptight virginal poetess who clanked rhymes like chains was more than she could tolerate. She quoted Santayana. He surprised her by throwing Lawrence back in her face, and gave her his “death rattle of modern art” speech. He marched ahead of her down the path with the cicadas clinging to the high branches, screaming at both of them.

  “Recite it for me,” he turned suddenly on her.

  “Recite what?”

  “The Song My Bloody Paddle Sings.”

  “I’ve never read it.”

  “And you have a postgraduate degree in English literature?”

  He insisted once again the world was going down the toilet.

  She agreed, but for entirely different reasons.

  They fit themselves into the canoe and paddled five miles beneath the whispering willows without speaking a word. Turtles watched their passage with an intense and unknowable gaze. Over their heads, swallows hunted, veering in dizzy course changes, righting themselves and flitting without effort to perch next to one another on a fence near the shore.