Immortal North Two, page 23
On the table, the arm of the handheld mirror was sticking out from under a pile of books. He hadn’t put it away since the day long ago when he had bandaged his eye. Though he’d stopped dressing the wounds he hadn’t even checked the scars. He slid it out from under the stack. Brought it up and turned it. His healed, half-closed eye. Good. Where once you had to squint to shoot, now you’re always ready. He turned his head in examination. The scarred skin of his temple and eyelid.
The ritual of his mornings had him up before sunrise, first getting the fire going. To delay an inevitable trip to town, he had reduced his coffee from two cups to one, replacing it with tea. He steeped dried leaves from last summer’s foraging, wild mint and raspberry, dandelion that while neither native nor sown did sprout like a weed around the cabin, brewed birch-bark twigs and hemlock needles from winter trees for winter teas. He’d exercise and shave and wash himself. Then it was black coffee in a white porcelain mug warm in his hands that he drank slowly by the window and the stove’s fire was warm and its sounds comforting and the brew smelled like sacred and the sun outside lit the window and did nothing more than slowly rise, and illuminate, and warm, and be perfect. He’d read great books, by his account, some of the best ever written. Stories that weren’t stories at all, of love and loss and death and joy and suffering, history and culture; the redemption found through reading of the human experience.
You are not alone. He’d lose himself in it. He found new ideas in old pages and read not to finish a book but to see beauty, understand a concept, better understand the world. He had always been a slow reader and now he was a slower reader and he considered that progress.
He read early Greek thinkers, when philosophy—though extremely flawed in its justifications for slavery and disregard for human equality and women’s rights and other moral structure-fires of its day—was concerned with how to live virtuously. Not the obscurity and pedantry that much of philosophy in later centuries would become. He read and found insight in the Koran and the Bible, when they weren’t proclaiming various incredibly heinous acts. He saw a pathway for a partial release of mental afflictions through the teachings of Buddha, when those texts weren’t proclaiming highly dubious metaphysics. History books were always bookmarked. Though he had to read a lot of poetry to find a stanza of resonance, there were lines written with enough steel they could be used as girders for bridges. If the vaulted night skies are where lying tsars store their jewels, then the pages of literature were the keeping place of much other wealth. Ethan was rich. Turns out he did have books of self-help. Turns out he mostly read from that genre.
He believed in mornings and he was devout and he hadn’t called it worship but with such ritualized adoration, what other name?
After breakfast he would shoot his Daily Arrows—that’s what he and his boy had called it so he kept on calling it that. He hoped that by deliberately speaking words from former times he could coax them from out of the jaws of the past, if not defang that very beast. He was continually trying to lay down his defensive arms. Boy. Boy, he would say. Boyboyboy. He would try to take it back. Realizing he had little control as to whether the evening would bring a darkness far blacker than the pigmentless night, he tried to release his preoccupation with his fears, telling himself that it couldn’t be anything different than what it was going to be. Things came before, things have to play out. Hate the man who shot your boy as much as you hate yourself for dressing him as a bear and hate the bear that eats the fawns and hate the grass that feeds the fawns and hate the sun that grows the grass and hate the snow that buries the garden and hate everything along with it. Just hate it all. Or accept that things came before and so have to play out. There’s no getting outside of it. Are you so arrogant to believe you stand outside of cause and effect?
His left-hand’s finger with the missing tip did not affect his archery, but altering his form to accommodate his right eye was not so easy. The cognitive tracks bringing his knuckle to his old anchor point, low on his jaw, were deeply rutted. He’d draw the bow but find himself retaking his old form and have to draw down and start again. A slow process of sculpting new muscle memory. It took time. He gave it that. Sometimes he practised while kneeling, sometimes he’d strap on the climbing spurs and from up in a tree loose arrows to the bag target. He’d get his heart rate up from push-ups then let fly a dozen fletched darts for the red paint. Eventually he had to draw a second bullseye on the face of the target, and then a third, because he’d sliced a couple vanes and one time split a shaft. You are Robin Hood. He’d once said that to the boy. He smiled at that now.
His talents returned to former levels.
Then he exceeded them.
He could make a heart shot on a moving deer at fifty yards, but he still didn’t shoot past thirty and never on a moving animal.
Every bolt on his bow was tight and he knew the twist count in his string down to a half-turn and its limbs gleamed from polishing and he stropped the broadheads’ razor blades on buckskin until they shined like flakes of the sun.
He believed that he was entitled to very little in this world and he aspired to be worthy of his lot. To have a body deserved of the air it draws, to have a heart worthy of a beat.
At the edge of the cabin’s clearing, a pine branch ten feet off the ground was rubbed barkless in two places, and that bare wood looked polished. His hands unblistered from chin-ups because they were already calloused from rope climbs without the aid of his feet. Physical strength as fundamental as spiritual fortitude: earn your perseverance in this harsh world, he told himself. It wasn’t that the world deliberately preyed on the hurting and the weak, but it certainly didn’t favour them. The world isn’t malevolent, it’s indifferent; its wounding more like shotgun spread than sniper fire. So armour up, he decided. It’s better to be a warrior in the garden than a gardener in the war and so he hardened. Push-ups, sit-ups, squats with a heavy log over his shoulders and farmer carries hauling pails of creek water that even amidst the bitter cold was still flowing with its own defiant turbulence. The creek inspired him. The tree bows flexed under heavy snow loads. The trees inspired him. He took instruction from the woods. He at once bulked up his body while exorcising his demons. He didn’t do reps to muscle failure, as being sore would’ve meant he couldn’t afterwards put that strength to practical use, but every other day he set a new highwater mark. His regime gradually shaping him, giving him old-world strength, the physique of a lumberjack, farmer or mason. A form sculpted by the woods—Rodin of a Northern man. That ponderous sculpture animated from his stony pose to wander the woods.
He kept vigil for threats in whatever shape they might take: harsh weather, peak predators, cabin fire or famine, for cold and for loss and for death. By both inflicting and receiving suffering, he knew that upheaval is always closer than it seems and every morning he splashed that truth on his face like the cold water from the basin he washed away the sleep with. Wash away the illusion of his own permanence. Wake him to the fact that though one coming morning will feel like the rest it would be his last. He tried to sow humble seeds of gratitude by appreciating the absence of specific torments, a type of negative happiness: no roof leak, no toothache.
Cords of wood were stacked and split for the rest of the winter and well into the next and he laid long strips of bark overtop the stacks to shield them from the winter snow and coming spring rain. He saw himself in the spring rain. He sat and visualized himself in it, him in the rain, projecting himself into the future so the fibres of his mind, like the tendrils of bush beans, could reach out and curl and pull him along. Medicine—his list was long.
Looking through tears that he did not disdain, he cut his nails and trimmed his hair.
The cellar with its shelves full of mason jars looked like a mediaeval apothecary, or the storehouse of a travelling freak show’s extraordinary collectibles preserved in formaldehyde—those foetuses and shrunken heads and baby pigs. Though his were full of fish, smoked walleye and pike packed in salt, other jars brined and the water flavoured with oregano and thyme leaves, garlic cloves and whole peppercorns. It had been the slowest year for deer hunting he’d ever known, but he was going out regularly, and with luck—his good, the deer’s bad—he would add pemmican and strips of smoked venison to his cellar.
In a kind of semi-formal exploration of pain, he routinely plunged in ice dips, then tried to observe as calmly as he could the mental phenomena from that insufferable water, asking himself if there might be a glimmer from some diamond stud sewn into the cloak of hurt. He’d jog frozen to the misty shack and be with his body’s fireworks, transitioning from the artillery of the cold, to the armistice of the warmth, to the new onslaught of the intense heat. He’d tell himself to sit there and take it. He’d sometimes first set a cup of mint tea in the sauna and when he returned the space would be infused with its aroma and he’d then drink it to amplify and internalize the heat, ending his sweat-soaked session with eyes closed, legs crossed, and a mind open, inviting any lurking demons to make themselves known. They were only messengers coming to let him know he had something to address. When both the stove and his inferno thoughts rose the temperature of the sweat-shed to such thermometric heights it’d mush a spud, he’d attempt to remain even longer in a state of dispassionate observation—feeling the burning air through his nose, listening to the rage of his heart without trying to corral it.
Sometimes hardship, whether self-inflicted or otherwise, fortifies and growth results. But not all hardship strengthens; sometimes it just erodes the inflicted, and that degraded thing is never the same. He wasn’t entirely sure if he was getting it all right. He found that even pain and pleasure were not reliable beacons. It was hard to know when discomfort was reliably signalling stressors to avoid, or when the ache came from the strengthening brought on by a beneficial challenge.
He wasn’t sure if that earlier sweet dream of a goddess was a star trying to help him navigate a course through old lands to new love, or if she represented some seductive falsehood that would have him chasing an empty ideal. How to decipher a signal from out of cacophony?
He found there was a fluidity to his mental states and whatever it was, good or bad, he could wait and soon enough he’d notice a different feeling. Recognizing the transient nature of his mind meant whatever emotion occupied it in that moment seemed a bit less credible, more trivial, and thus the prick of sad quills less sharp, the winds of self-doubt less strong. Lonely—so what? So what? he asked himself. Lonely isn’t a death sentence. It’s just a bit sad some nights. His spirit sometimes a bit heavy in the night. But the sun brought the tinder of morning: she warmed, she lightened. And when she lifted so too rose his spirits like a rising branch melted of the night’s frost and freed of its cool burden. Then the day would begin with its own pursuits and challenges and unexpected pockets of suffering, reward, and beauty.
He was doing alright. Mostly he felt pretty good. Like maybe nine-tenths happy, and one-tenth sad. That’s not bad, all things considered. The lonely tenth was living in the loft of his mind. One past day it was her tears that had soaked the little trapper’s explosives. She cried often, but she tried to keep her sobs silent for she did not want to spread more sadness in the world. One night her quiet tears pooled on the floorboard of his mind, then drained through a missing knot in a plank and they sprinkled down and got caught in the light from the projector flickering its images in the theatre of his skull. One voice in his head thought it was raining diamonds, “Diamonds,” she whispered. She was overjoyed at their beauty and she nudged her friend next to her, and he smiled also. And so the accounts in the world of happy and sad were about as equal as before the lonely tenth cried her pretty tears. Ethan was looking out the window one afternoon and thought he saw a December rain, but he’d lost track of the days. It was the new year’s light playing in the floral patterns of the frosted window.
He was out hiking when he felt another presence stalking him. It had been lurking for a few days. One prior day near the creek it was so very close to him and with the small river’s audible flow he wouldn’t have heard its steps so he must have just sensed it. But when he turned, it was gone. Then one day it came again. Briefly. Then the next.
Contentment.
He hadn’t seen it coming, but there it was. An imperfect and inconstant contentment.
Town
The small town was a jumping off point for fishing and hunting trips. Wealthy men, and it was almost exclusively men, drove or were flown up in small chartered planes to the town and took lodging at one of the two accommodations. Some fishing charter companies were based out of town but most flew their clients farther north on floatplanes to remote camps and lodges.
One night a group of four wealthy businessmen returning from a stay at a fly-in hunting resort were eating dinner at a table of the bar. Pepper steak; potato split down the middle and in the steaming cleft a square of melting butter, chives, an option for sour cream and bacon bits; Caesar salad, warm bread. Beers before the main course, wine during. One of them was looking at a poster pinned into the wood panelling of the bar. Stencilled letters that flowed into freehand. By now the paper was torn and had a couple stains. It displayed a primal-looking masculine cartoon standing above some massacred and hybrid beast: body of a beaver, head of a moose. The artist signing his name had turned the first letter around, making the uppercase G and lowercase e something of mirror reflections. Like beginning and end, though farthest apart, had a relationship that excluded the middle. Fuckin’ Gordie, here. That artist rebellious at his early age not even respecting basic alphabetry. Next to the fantastic Wildman and sized to his height was a crayon-drawn thermometer. Its tube halfway coloured in red and there was a dotted line delineating funds raised, funds outstanding. The businessman while still looking at the poster forked a piece of meat then dipped it in the bar’s homemade BBQ sauce. Ivan, the establishment’s owner, called it his “Small-Town-Bar-B-Cue Sauce.”
After retracting those tines his mouth had emptied of its cargo, the businessman pointed them to the poster. “Who’s the woodland killer with the T on his shirt standing over the fucked-up buck-badger?” Given the avant-garde of Gordie’s latest work, this man’s interpretation was entirely valid.
The waitress Pam gave them the broad strokes. Ivan was standing a ways off, not so far he couldn’t hear. When she finished, he came over to narrow those strokes up some, came out from around the bar with a complimentary bottle of wine and took up a chair. Ivan told them the story as he knew it, his version of it, everyone’s being subtly different given the unresolved hypotheses and telephone-gamed dynamics distorting its fidelity.
He told how the land was first acquired. How it’d later been lost. How the man with a T on that poster, who in all probability had no such T-sweater in real life, had met his real-life wife, lost her. Lost his son. The fire, and the several theories of the fire, and the fact that the police hadn’t charged anyone with arson, though there was a charge of manslaughter. He told them how the insurance company had hired a fire inspector, but since those lakes had been in an indeterminate state of slush at the time, that inspection was delayed. And then about six feet of snow fell. He said such inspections are more often than not inconclusive anyways. Told it start to finish while his audience of four cut their steak, forked their spud, mopped their plates with bread. They looked entertained, like they’d come for a meal but got dinner and a show.
The proprietor while he was telling it had gotten up, and still talking, went behind the bar and returned with a second bottle of red, one of his better, that to these guys was not such a special bottle. He knew one of the gentleman by name because everybody did, not just in town. He pretended like he didn’t. The one guy owned a company with a market cap as big as some small countries’ treasuries. Though Ivan didn’t know the three others, they were known names in financial circles. One managed a successful fund of funds. The two others were early-stage investors who although had way more investments that went to zero, they had a few that went to the moon, then beyond it. Based on their exchanging head turns and C’mons and No ways and eye rolls, safe to say all four were taken in by the story’s entertainment value and nothing else. In the same way certain movies start with a disclaimer: These events are based on a true story, they likely figured this recounted version had about as much in common with the bare facts as a carrot cake has with its featured vegetable. It’s mostly not even orange.
At the story’s conclusion all four of them were looking for the angle here, smelled a ploy at play to pull on non-locals or rich guys or something. These guys were pursued professionally. In the business of sniffing out bullshit, their spidey senses were tingling like they could tell it wasn’t just the spud being buttered.
But Ivan was not massaging the details of the story, given that real life had wilded it up enough. He was only trying to make supple the leather of their wallets by telling a captivating history while liberally pouring out wine. At the end the fund manager, smiling, said what all of them were thinking, “Come on. How much of that is actually true?”
“Ask around,” Ivan shrugged. “Most of the details are in the paper even. And not just the local paper. The boy. The fire. It’s all there. The funds have slowly been coming in drop by drop.” Saying this, he pulled the cork from the bottle and their sounds almost rhymed. Pop. Ivan had his own version of trophy hunting: catch the wealthy in good spirits and ply them with good spirits on their way home from catching trophies. Play it right and who knows how many zeroes you might see at the bottom of the bill. Ivan with four big racks in his crosshairs.
