Immortal North Two, page 3
They were talking and Norman had a whiskey. She told him how her father taught at the local school and how her extended family were mostly farmers, cattle and wheat, south of town. He talked about the woods, their trade as trappers. “I have other plans too.”
Most of her time was spent caring for her two younger sisters. “When I can I take a book from my father’s library. Do you like to read?”
He said, oh I just can’t barely keep my fingers from turning the pages.
She knew he was fibbin’ ’cause he was grinnin’ and that made it not a lie.
“Well sitting with a book and a cup of tea is just about heaven to me. I may sound like an old soul, but I assure you I’m older.”
After he asked her to dance he should have taken her hand or put one of his on the small of her back, that would have been gentlemanly. But it was his first dance of his life and only his first whiskey of the night and so that minor gaff of courtship could be forgiven. It wasn’t a slow dance, she turned and he kinda shimmied and bobbed. He was about to ask her to the following song but nearing the end someone had walked up to the new couple and rather uncordially asked, by not asking, to cut in. This person no doubt had their eye caught by this standout and wanted their own turn to dance with such beauty. The rival stood there beside them awkwardly and before the last notes of the song carried off into night, said with a blank face, “I’ma cut in now.” Statement. No inflection at the end. Ruth McDonald was delivering a fact.
At the bottom of Ruth’s rather high-cut purple dress were thick thighs built to pull out heifers stuck in the mud. From the dress’s cut-off shoulders were arms that won last fall’s stooking contest for stacking twenty-four sheaves of wheat into four piles. Time: one minute, twenty-eight seconds, no gloves. Even the men wore gloves.
Granddad had one eyebrow cocked taking in this extraordinary purple suitress. He’d probably not describe her as conventionally alluring, but still, not without affecting a certain amount of intrigue. In the way you might not want to mount up on some lively bull, but you might still be kinda curious about the ride. He was smiling amused when he looked over at his dance partner. His smile faded. Girl Gran’s thin eyebrows had gotten low and angled and mean.
“I’ma cut in, Paula now.” Statement.
Gran’s eyes were just slits, like a she-cougar at her moose-kill who just now saw a sow bear had sauntered up out of the woods. Bear strong and unyielding. Cougar leaner and wiry and though outgunned, not without her own ferocity. Oddsmakers would do well to take into account the shock-absorbing qualities from the width of Gran’s garment. “Ruth you’ll do no such thing and you better just walk on back and get yourself some punch before I serve you some.”
The son they will one-day have, Charles, will have a violent streak, but Norman did not. He had been in one fight. Another young man started the altercation and Norman ended it. He didn’t like the feeling of it and didn’t like how the other guy looked afterwards. He’d relocated to a relatively distant location the other man’s nose and the gore of it and what seemed the dehumanizing aspect of it wasn’t what he wanted to be part of. Didn’t accord with his view of the world. After that fight he said he’d do his best to make it his last. He didn’t enjoy watching violence either—but, well, who wouldn’t be just a little tickled at this arena of flattery being contested in his honour, even if that arena was about to get bloody.
“Paula I’d like to see you try,” said Ruth. “But maybe first you oughta ask your fat brother if his pecker ever got straight again after he tried to get fresh with me after the tractor pull.” Ruth had one of her mother’s earrings in her hand and was taking off the other. The closest dancers didn’t break from their embrace on this rare night for romance, the gentlemen just led their ladies and danced away, couples turning as if revolving on an axis of their own private world.
Gran squared to Ruth and Ruth looked happy about that and eager for it.
But then Granddad touched Gran for their very first time. He put one hand over her ear farthest from him, as if to ensure the words he was about to speak stayed only with her. He brought his mouth close and whispered through her dark curls and over her mother’s pearls.
Gran looked up at him. Didn’t smile. Looked at Ruth. Did squint. Looked back to Granddad. Walked away.
Ruth got her dance. That sow bear for the first half was looking over and smiling proudly at the northern lioness, who had her back turned to the pair. When the song ended they broke. Ruth walked towards Gran who somehow knew she was coming without looking that way because she partly turned. But Ruth didn’t stop she just said, “You can keep ’im.” She was hobbling.
Gran was holding a drink in a paper cup brought by a new young man named Peter. Granddad approached and asked her for the drink and then not even looking at the boy he handed it back to him. He didn’t ask her to dance he just took her by the hand.
The affectionate wind rocked the glowing bulbs strung above the band. A man in black with long dark hair had red spruce tucked under his chin. His fingers on the frets. He had earlier been fiddling but was no longer fiddling. He just drew a first long stroke and turned that fiddle into a violin. The man drawing his bow and the soft wood singing. The man’s eyes were closed like they were open to somewhere else. The guitarists and pianist and singer were taking a rest and even they watched him and that instrument that sounds better as it ages, the wood becoming softer and so softening the notes, deepening the resonance, enrichening its song. A violin that before it made its way to where woods met pastures, had for a century lived on the east coast, and before that crossed an ocean leaving former homes on foreign shores. It had a before that too and it sounded like it did. A sound that can both break hearts and fill them. It’s a strange world where things can be both haunting and heartening. The dark-haired man with his eyes open somewhere else. Drawing over the strings, filling up the body with melody until that hollow brimmed and overflowed and filled the audience, moistening a corner of a pair of eyes. As if the many horse hairs that strung his bow were crying for all their lost colts.
Love was in the air and couples danced within it. Her thin hand in his. And from that clasp would come other life. Unbeknownst to them, where their palms met roots sprouted. Small vines already curling out between their fingers. The melody was a ribbon that wrapped and tied those clasped hands. Granddad felt it. She looking up at him, her other hand high to his shoulder, his on her waist, them turning like the music’s silk had wrapped them up, that ribbon moving off into the night, uncurling around their waists gently turned them. So they turned.
Some reveller still in search of his own romance tripped on the cord of the overhead lights, and for about the duration of a love song, the only illumination came from the candlelit mason jars on the tables, pin-specks of tiny stars from a high sky, and the streaks of fireflies.
Then with the lightest strumming of major chords, two guitars joined that violin. The singer from the band stayed seated and took up no microphone. She sang. Her voice flowing like warm maple syrup to entomb in its resin some sweet amber moment. Singing in a language few recognized, a melody all, maybe all, would.
She sang about love, as if there were anything else. Sang it to the dancers, as if those ears were listening.
Woods
The trapper woke at dawn curled up in a ball and partly from the cold. Nearly twenty-four hours of sleep. His dreams so very dark that even if he makes it through the day he greatly fears another night. He lies there as fragile as the dried silk from an empty cocoon. The heavy blankets kept him from freezing in a room barely warmer than the winter outside. But the weight of the wool nearly caving in this husk of a man, emptied of his core, frail with loss.
His stomach and chest are pits. The endless cavity of the darkness, of the shape left inside when someone takes a spoon and carves out those things nearly as important as your organs and you’re left all hollow. A jack-o’-lantern man lacking a smile, just a mangled eye.
He rolled to his back and his sore head took the pillow with him as it was stuck to the bloody side of his face. Like he’d been tarred and feathered, but his hasty persecutors hadn’t even bothered shaking out the feathers. He pulled at it and one cheek widened, the glue of dried blood stretching the right side of his mouth, the image of half a man whose lack of a groan told he was without a sound adequate to express the depths of his grotesque pain. The airspace above him became obscured by the hanging vapour of his breath. In that godforsaken morning he begrudged the cadaverous mist, evidence of his continued existence. He listened to a silence he’d never heard before. A new type of silence. My, it was stark. As if he’d ported his ear to some perfectly isolated void. He wanted to retreat to whatever tiny hollow inside his heart hadn’t been crumpled away, then lie down next to the bones of that former artisan who once tapped at the walls of his heart.
Some part of his fractured self knew if he didn’t get up now he never would. It knew the stakes of this morning, that it was vying for its own existence as well that of the whole.
I know this is hard. Harder than words. But just listen. Here’s what you have to do. Do this and anything else on the day is extra. We make a list. Then we carry it out. No matter what.
He had as much enthusiasm to humour this voice with its list as he had for the continuation of his pulse.
Step one: Get up.
Step two: Go to the kitchen and drink water.
Step three: Assess your head.
He touched at his head with two fingers and felt the crust and cake of dried blood. He touched at his drooping eyelid. It stung. He winced. He poked it again. It stung again. He winced.
Step four: Make a fire.
Step five: Eat something.
That’s it. That’s all. For however long, that’s your day there. The voice thought steps three and four ought to be switched around and it did so and informed him. Then it said, Step six: Make coffee. Anything over and above that on the whole day is extra. And the hardest part, he told himself, might just be starting it. Just walk a narrow one today. You can do this. Just stay focused. Just do the steps.
Steps. The seemingly innocent were trip hazards and triggers and he now wished he’d used a different word.
Do not listen for steps coming from the loft, he told himself.
He lay there listening to the space between thoughts filled with different types of silences. The silence of no steps being made by his boy, of a room lacking family voices, of wooden cabin walls without pops from the warmth of a fire lit by a loving, joyful child. No merry kettle whistle, no creak from the hinge of the stove. Various vacancies all dense with loss.
Do not listen for him opening the stove.
He agreed, then used that empty pause that followed the agreement to listen for the squeak of the stove.
Hey. Stay focused. Don’t make of him what you did of her or you’ll never come back. You feel something meaningful but those memories and those feelings are working against you. If you hold onto them, then when you do want to move on, the past is the one not letting go. This morning matters. A lot. How you frame things. What we do here. This is very important. Now c’mon, get up.
He agreed. Only to make the voice go away. He lay there. He lay there because he knew there were only three options that awaited him. Either he was leaving the bed to enter the ruinous present after a terrible existential shelling; or handing himself over to a prison of the past that he had, after her departure, spent time in before; or walking into a future he wanted nothing to do with—like a country whose language he didn’t speak, he some ill-fated refugee who though was told he’d found asylum only discovered that the customs of that most foreign land were the sacrilegious opposite of his own sect. He looked for a fourth option and discovered one but when he searched his person he found no blade.
Hey! Focus! If you don’t at least try now while things are still fresh, the tracks will become so deep you’ll never steer out of them later and you’ll just follow those ruts off the cliff. Right now matters. You have to at least try. Take these first steps and leave it all behind.
He lay there and then he lay there. His rotten bones that loss had quickly made porous and hollow, bled of their marrow, had now turned leaden, some form of petrification from sadness and fear. He did not move.
You can’t bring them back. No holes inside you get filled with the dust of the past. You buried them. You buried him days ago. Leave them buried. That’ll be you too one day. Save your crying for the reunion. That day is not today. Get up.
He did not.
Get up. Get up ’cause life is and you are. That’s it. Soon you won’t be. There’s your touchstone. It’s always been that way. Before her before him, it was that. You know that. That’s always been Rock One, your foundation. Right? That part asked that rhetorically and didn’t wait for himself to answer he answered it himself: Yes! So go be what you are. The woods, their beauty. Trapper, pick up the trap.
He was thinking about his boy.
Fine. Go ahead and dig up those bones. Then go crawl inside yourself and sweep your arms over the soil and cover yourself up just as dead.
He was willing to agree to that.
Your call. Go ahead. Do it now. One small fraction of a multitude dying out in the same instant. That’s how much sorrow you’re worth. That part was trying anything it could here, borrowing former lines spoken in the most manic of times, as this voice was of course pleading for its own life too. Go be that sad thing feeling sorry for yourself. Just don’t tell yourself it’s romantic or loyal. That’s bullshit—it’s not. It’s the easy way out. Yeah this is bad. But it too will be over. Let’s have that day not be today. Not today. Get. Up.
All the silences.
The part of himself trying to rally the other parts was about ready to lie down with the rest of them. In truth, for all its talk, it too was barely hanging on. It didn’t want so much to do with the world either. His sharded self was nearly wholly beat.
There came a last attempt: You’re standing in front of three doors. Behind Door One is Death—that’s easy, that door will one day open itself. Behind Door Two is a caretaker of the past, which doesn’t need a guardian, the night watchman making his rounds at the dead museum of his own memories, obsessed with old things that can’t be undone. Keep that door shut. Don’t be him. And here’s what’s behind Door Three: Not that. It doesn’t even require any dressing up, ’cause it’s just not those other doors. But in fact it is dressed up. It’s the unknown. The near and unknown future with its chance for better things—even if right now the chance feels small, even if those better things don’t yet look shiny. You can’t predict what you’ll feel like in even short times ahead.
Stillness.
Gran once said if you find yourself suffering you got lucky ’cause now you have a chance to bear it well, to put it to use and transform it.
That sounded like a call for loyalty to the past and the small trapper inside the trapper pricked his ears up. Meanwhile another part of the trapper was hating himself for using the past that way, like some grave looter digging up a body to see if it had been buried with gold teeth.
Yeah you were a family man. Took that as your identity and means of orientation: Up is this way. Down is that way. Forward is there. This rallying cry was gesturing inside the man’s skull. Well, what to say? Too bad. One by one those points of orientation disappeared. Black magic snuffing out stars in the night. What else to do? Find new orientation. Be something else. See what that’s like.
That fractured self was kinda mixing messages and trying anything here and the little trapper inside the trapper felt like he might be getting tricked. Rolling his thumb over the detonation button.
Get up in curiosity for the present or hope for the future or in honour or defiance of the past or I don’t care for what just get the hell up!
The trapper could have just been repositioning his stinging head or making a futile attempt to get away from his own plaguing voice, but he turned in bed.
Whether or not that movement was actually a sign of life, the rallying cry believed his words were getting through. Hope raised his voice. Look. We’re in a battleground for the present moment. Arm yourself. Pick up anything that looks like something. Some scrap of resolve. A tiny goal. A cup of coffee. The sun. Hunting. A book. Anything. He thought further and said, You don’t have to like the feeling of that first step—actually, expect that you won’t. And the second might not be any better, who knows maybe even all the rest to come—but you won’t know until you take them. And yeah you’d go back and do things differently, but that’s not how it works. And yeah maybe we screwed up immeasurably and we’re sorry my God we’re sorry and if we could just atone we would and maybe some things can’t be atoned for ’cause some mistakes are too large to learn from because they cut you in half. So we’re broken. And then what? Hey? And so what. You’re broken. Other people get broken too. Maybe in time to come you won’t be. For now then you just be a broken thing that still takes a step. A limp, a crawl, I don’t care, anything. Get up. In this paralytic present you go blink out a fucking novel in Morse code if that’s all your wounded body is good for. Then you thank your one working eyelid for its efforts—that’s valour—getting up is valorous, lying in the bed of your sorrow is not. So get up or don’t—and you will get up! No more talks now. Nobody is coming for you. It’s just you. The world doesn’t care about you, owes you nothing, you’re not special to it, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, so get up and adjust your eyes to the darkness.
The trapper gave a deep sigh.
New plan: Forget steps two through six. Your whole day is step one. Your whole day is one step. Get up!
The trapper sat up. His head hung towards his chest like a puppet shorn of its head-string. He felt nauseous.
Good. Feet.
He put his feet to the floor. Not the cold floor, there was an old matted bear-hide there and though he had set his feet on it every morning for years, the soft curls on his soles caught him off guard.
