Immortal North Two, page 25
“Well, hell,” he laughed softly. The artist had signed it, “Gordie.” Some child whose vision of the world was less constrained by life’s patterns and expectations and social norms had made a picture that awakened something in his audience. It sounded like laughter. It wasn’t laughter.
Maybe he wasn’t a character in a dream of the sleeping king, like he’d told his boy who then accused him of plagiarism, “You stole that!” Maybe he was being drawn up on a page of a colouring book held in the hands of an imaginative child. So, a child’s creation, not a king’s. He smiled considering the make-believe.
He was touched by all the drawings but he liked this one best and took it and pinned it with a nail into the wooden wall and my God laughter felt like a drug. He couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed. To be fair, he had actually laughed hysterically while trapped in a shallow tree-well during his mushroom trip, but couldn’t recall that now and this quiet laughter was of a different kind. It felt like something good and vital and potent got released into his body, spiked his bloodstream, then delivered its sweet biochemical payload into his heart. Like he could see becoming an addict to it. He’d kinda forgotten about laughter, and that seemed very strange to him.
Here he was in his woodland sanctuary just trying to cultivate a little mental peace-and-quiet with simple and honest living, and his treed walls had been broached by some dive-bomber who attacked dropping mortar rounds of children’s letters and a teacher’s book and a cop’s wife’s muffins and young artists’ drawings—all of them munitions which ought to take their place alongside chemical gases and cluster bombs and other ignoble weaponry forbidden by the rules of honourable warfare. In his battening and hardening in order to weather life’s madness and storms had come the interruption of human love. Their affectionate shelling found the chinks in his chainmail.
This peculiar soldier of misfortune, with his ice dips and sauna bakes and drug trips and chin-ups, sidestepping crevasses in a world scattered with landmines, a man humbly secluding himself from further spiritual fracture and ruin, ought to be left alone. Turns out under that new body armour, he was naked under there. Ethan felt raw.
Lastly in the box was a legal-sized envelope. The town’s district office and its address centred on the page. So there was a legal portion after all. The envelope wasn’t sealed. He slid out its contents. Three pages paperclipped and fronted with a yellow sticky note. He read it over. He read it again.
Early dawn glowing up its purple world. A hint of sunrise burning like a stray ember from the stove’s bed of slumbering coals. He was up earlier than normal and had been reading the morning sky’s story that told nothing more than that low star’s slow rise. Same story as yesterday. Little else required.
All the letters on the table behind him. The papers of the deed, its sticky note explaining how he was now the owner of the same hundred and sixty acres that once belonged to his family. Or, he would be the owner. All he had to do was head to town and sign to take possession and make it official. Of course at first he couldn’t believe it. But then he wasn’t surprised at all. Try to shake it as he had, he was glued to the past. Why would his family’s land be any different? He’d step forward and the past would step its shadow. Other times he placed a boot and found that the past had already preceded him.
He sat separately from those papers but nonetheless, they had all drifted up and slid through some mail slot in the back of his head.
He set the kettle to warm then sat back down by the window looking at the austere beauty of snow-covered woods in a crushed-grape dawn. That merlot just starting to be thinned with chardonnay sunlight. White porcelain mug warming his hands. Everything quiet as oils on canvas. Here he was in the tidy cabin, warm and well slept, a devout in a congregation of one in his temple of solitude, and while worshipping the holy vintage of a Northern morning he felt—
—Enough! Enough. Fuck off with your romanticism. How many layers deep is your bullshit? Keep this up and you’ll live out your days all alone.
The lighting. Look at the lighting. It’s like wine.
You don’t drink wine.
Look at the needles, even in the winter they’re still green.
They’re fucking needles. They’re needles. Green. Who cares? Stop playing make-believe. Are you looking forward to sitting by the fire alone tonight? Then tomorrow? The one after that? Does that sound like poetry? Stop pretending. Stop calling loneliness solitude, and romanticizing your lies. You’re just an ageing man living alone in the woods. You’re getting so sophisticated the way you lie to yourself, I almost believed it.
Ethan sipped the coffee.
What you’re doing here isn’t any good. This is not a life. It’s not. It’s nothing.
Ethan blew over the coffee.
You’re not special and the world doesn’t care about you. Your future is to wither and die. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. Get that in your head.
It’s there.
You lost it all. Now what? The only thing keeping you going is a full return to your own self-righteousness. Almost there. So crown yourself a lonely king over some pile of dirt whose mound you’ll further raise with your own dead body. Dirt. That’s you. You do know that, right?
Keep telling me that.
I will.
Good.
He sipped from the mug. Aren’t you tasting this? Aren’t you smelling it. He inhaled clearly through his nose in the pine cabin with trace aromas of fire and bread and hot coffee. He looked to the stack of great books beside him. The gilt names of their authors glowing before the sun lit them.
You really don’t feel it? This isn’t enough? He asked that in all seriousness.
Bread and coffee and books and sunlight. That’s enough for you? Hey? Just stop. Who are you kidding? Stop peddling your shit.
Normally he wouldn’t have said anything but it’d been many days now cooped up with this perpetual dialectic of an isolated consciousness. The embattled self. Cabin fever. He said: If I’m in sales then so are you. What are you selling? What’s better? He didn’t wait for himself to answer. You’re going to try to sell some bleeding-heart romance. I know you too. I see you.
You’re dying inside and you don’t even recognize it. You’re the worm at the bottom of the tequila bottle, I’m trying to show you a way out.
You don’t drink tequila. Now who’s talking out of their ass? Do you even know how patronizing you sound? I’m alright. Actually. This all feels pretty good. I can bear a little lonely. Lonely isn’t so bad and nothing’s perfect. Where’s better? Town? You’ll say town. What do you think is waiting out there? Hey? How does that end? Loss. And how many people in the company of others are still lonely? How many people don’t even really like the few friends they have? How many trapped in relationships of convenience? People just afraid of leaving rather than some strong bond holding them together. Half of marriages end in divorce—how many that keep it together are still chronically unhappy, people dying inside. Trapped. People drowning in routine and so very tired of the annoying habits of the person next to them and they’re choking back a part of them that wants to scream out at the dinner table so instead they just reach for their wine. Add in the infidelities and the cruelties and the lies and now you’ve sunken much lower than lonely. You’re the one dressing it up. I’m saying right here, look, the needles are green. You’re saying you know where they grow greener. I’m good. Maybe it’s you that needs some honesty. Hey? Maybe it’s you who should look in the mirror.
I’m alright.
Listen to yourself. You think you know but you don’t. Maybe you just love the concept of love. You’re idealizing something you’re now too far removed from to remember all the ugly bits. You’ll idolize a holy saint until five minutes together you’re ready to throttle him for how he whistles through his nose eating his soup. That’s what’s waiting for you.
Is your world all books now that you don’t even know when you’re thinking and when you’re repeating? Don’t fool yourself. Look at your hands, they’re already withering. You’re on short time. You’re sitting there alone and withering.
That’s only a problem for one of us.
Look.
He lowered the mug and humoured himself and turned over his hands.
Look.
I’m looking.
Those cracks. You’re getting old.
I’m proud of that leathery skin.
Just stop. You’re killing me. Stop dressing everything up. I can’t take it. It’s just old skin getting older is all it is.
Cracks like Granddad’s hands were cracked. You fault him too?
You’re living a lie, bud. You’re alone and you’re getting old.
That’s only a dirty word for one of us, bud.
Look at the corners of your eyes.
He reached for the hand mirror, his face dimmed in the early light but not so much he couldn’t see crow’s feet, cracks and lines.
Look.
You look. You’re scrutinizing for imperfections when you could be scrutinizing for beauty. I see lines like Gran’s eyes. You saying in her old age she wasn’t beautiful? You’re calling Gran ugly?
Just calling a spade a spade. Loneliness isn’t solitude and pain isn’t beauty and old is old—Gran or whoever.
I don’t even know you anymore. Her lines were cut from a thousand smiles. I should be so lucky.
You smiling much now?
When did you get so bitter on me? Maybe I’m okay with being an old man. There’s grace there. An honesty. Out there fishing in the morning.
Where your old arthritic hands can’t tie the knots.
Where I wouldn’t resent them for it. And if it’s too cold that I can’t tie the line, I’ll drink coffee or make a fire or sit and watch the sunrise till my hands are ready. And if they’re still not ready I’ll just watch the birds and the clouds, and that’s okay too. If I have to tie the knots in the cabin where my hands are warm, then so be it, that’s just fine by me. And if my knees hurt walking down the gametrail I’ll go slow and I’ll find a good stick and I’ll carve the stick and make a deer-hide strap for my hand. Take things as they come and expect nothing and just be happy with any mildness to the day. He looked down at the backs of his hands and they weren’t like Granddad’s yet but part of him was. Part of me already is an old man, he thought, just waiting for my hands to catch up. Where I don’t even care if I hook anything and I only take what I can eat, so mostly let them go and I’ll only keep one I’ve foul hooked or worn out too bad for him to recover and where mostly I’m just out there anyways ’cause it’s pretty. Just ’cause it’s pretty. Like it’s pretty now in the wine light. You’re missing it. You should see it. Did I mention the wine? he teased himself. You should come with me. I got room for you. Then I’ll come back from fishing and clean up and sit and it’s still early in the tidy cabin and I’ll look out the window with the fire going and drink black coffee and maybe sweep the floor again even when it doesn’t need it and read all the way to noon and look out at the water from my cabin and the pretty grey sky above and wonder if it’ll rain today. That’s enough for me. I think it might be. I think there’s love there.
You don’t live next to a lake. What are you even talking about?
Just seeing if you’re paying attention. Yeah, you better keep your eye on me. You can have the half eye, I get the whole one. He winked it.
But an old man alone in the woods? that part asked now sounding more agreeable and genuinely curious, if not perhaps scared. Is that what we’re signing up for? Is that enough?
He thought about it.
The kettle started to whistle. An alarm for decisions that needed to be made.
Stove damper shut. Mug empty beside the chair. On the frosted porch, Act One, Scene One: shadow puppets of birds at play. A little breeze roamed, looking to wander that lonely country between the man’s ears. A squirrel come for a seed. A man gone hunting.
Doubt is an unpleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. From a book he’d long ago returned to a shelf but a line he had not. Philosophy is to teach how to live without certainty. Another passage etched on the inside of his skull. Still though, he couldn’t help being concerned with the incertitude: town or woods?
It wasn’t yet spring, so the sweet fragrance emitted by a late-winter warm stretch was either a forgivable lie or believable promise. A half-morning’s hike away was a section of woods where the taller trees, wider trunks, and broader canopies sheltered deer from storms, and there the animals tended to congregate for their winter range. He thought most clearly while hiking.
The sun lit icicles hanging from branches and in one section of the forest those crystal roots dripped wet beads into their own tiny puddles of varying depths, playing notes that ranged the scale of xylophonic bloops and plinks. Their curious sharps and flats matching his uncertain thoughts of what to do with the property deed. One hundred and sixty acres returned. Just go in and sign? Do I even want it?
He knew he had to go to town soon enough anyways regardless of the deed. It wasn’t the inevitable trip that was weighing on his mind. Trapping was a dying trade; few people bought furs anymore. So, what? Take possession of the land and rebuild the cabins and run the outfit for hunting like before? Bring this story full circle? He couldn’t imagine that that type of tourism was in any less demand than when he last quit it. Start up the lodge like Granddad? It was the most obvious choice and it made logical sense because he would need money and he had once been a guide and knew how it all worked. When he visualized what that would look like, it conjured up a feeling he imagined a person who after surviving a decade shipwrecked on a small atoll and then having returned to civilization might feel when he found the world he knew was no longer. Those kinds of feelings. The idea of raising up new cabin walls felt more like resurrecting the dead.
So then what. Sell it? Thank them for the land, then sell it and keep the money. No doubt, not exactly what they had in mind. But maybe I’m not who they think I am and why do I owe them anything? I could live for a long time up here with that money. Never even have to go to town again. Buy a satellite phone and call in for air-dropped supplies whenever I need a refill. The appeal of that idea meshed a couple gears in his head. One quick visit to town and sign the deed and return to live happily ever lonely after?
His plodding steps of uncertainty were interrupted by the sight of cleft hooves. Deer tracks. Those big prints stopped him in his own tracks. One of the fore prints was turned slightly inwards. He eyed their path to the big timber off in the distance.
We aren’t always privy to our particular biases nor their workings. We often don’t see our well-meaning but flawed self-preservation tendencies hindering us from growth. It was hard for him to know what he really wanted and what he didn’t. Where through the path of self-honesty lay happy country, and what was false comfort or faulty shield. He had real love for the beauty and tranquility of the woods, truly he did, and it held many simple pleasures and it was the world his family long knew. The thing is, he reflected, that family always had family. He did not. He was framing the question as Town or Woods, but it was really People or Solitude: human connection or woodland seclusion. So, what about people? What about time spent with those capable of inflating your heart? What about laughter? He asked himself that while thinking about the children’s drawings. But he knew happiness could be real without being shared, and maybe he didn’t need fixing.
All my happiest memories are people.
All my worst memories are people.
Earlier he had thought that he had a fundamental love for life that preceded the people that populated it. To simply have gotten a chance at life takes incalculable luck, the privilege to simply witness a world of such splendour. But he wondered if he was lying to himself ’cause it felt like deep down he might have once loved his wife and his boy more than life itself. That would explain why their loss felt so total. He just didn’t know the answer to that and so it seemed like honest self-exploration had its limits. Ethan had assumed he was folded like a letter, where just one untruth lay in the crease. In actuality this man’s truths were so intricately fitted together that opening one crease revealed another and the layered dimensions had him folded not so much like a letter and more like a paper crane. What are you avoiding? Trying to get at the root of his incertitude. What scares you? Is it the past that’s holding on to you or are you not letting go? Is living out your life alone in the forest a type of real love? It felt like it might be. Or are you scared of greater connection because of its ever-potential to again be ripped painfully away? He could ask all that while genuinely not knowing what he should do. Scared of letting the next person down like you did her? Like you did him? Like you let yourself down? All the folds, so many folds. Hey origami-man I’m talking to you.
He didn’t see the bird circle high above. Its wings unflapping.
The land that awaited to be returned to him had a complicated past. That was not lost on him. Should I restore it to those who lived here first? He considered this. Who were the people who lived on this particular part of land before the government claimed it, then sold it off? Was it the case that when the settlers acquired it from those who lived there before, those earlier people had taken it from some other? He didn’t know. He’d read in books and also heard Granddad’s stories of Nôhkow that the land’s ownership wasn’t ever an ownership. It was people who harmoniously shared it with one another and with other animals. But he wondered if that was some make-believe, idealized version of the past. Otherwise why had he heard tales of tribal wars over this very land if not for taking the land. Maybe it wasn’t some peaceful and singular history and sometimes it was battled for and bled over, and could be the North, with its majestic trees, was so fertile and lush from all the warring blood and bones that nourished it, like most other lands and other history—mostly unrecorded—of one group taking land from another who took it from another. He didn’t know and wondered who did know, and whether anyone could prove unequivocally their version. Accounts of history can be murky, and uncontentious narratives rare, and both parties—victor and defeated—may have biased accounts from distinct perspectives. Who then fairly adjudicates that opaque past with its scroll all tattered and bloodstained and burned and eaten by moths?
