Lands and Forests

by Andrew Forbes

  ***

  In his note, he left me a canoe. So Jane and I strapped it to the roof of a car and drove up the Bruce Peninsula.

  There had been nothing all that noteworthy about the canoe. We were not accomplished canoeists, he and I. We were just two boys, and then two young men, who liked putting ourselves in desperate situations and then fighting our way out of them. That we had done just that on two or three occasions in the canoe was, I think, why he left it to me, and nothing else. I’d have gladly taken his guitar, but that went to someone else.

  Still, we thought it was nice of him to pass along a canoe, felt that way even after my half-assed job tying the thing to the roof of Jane’s car resulted in it being caught in the stiff wind, sent airborne and then cartwheeling end over end into a ditch somewhere in Bruce County.

  We stopped and backed up to look at it, but it was done. Cracked and crushed and useless, the fibreglass splintered and frayed. So we left the damn thing there, and instead of continuing up the peninsula to camp, we turned around and got a motel room in Owen Sound. That’s the kind of thing we used to do.

  Jane was originally from Oakville and could not be made to forget it. She was Canadian in the way the queen is Canadian: she’d seen only some of it, but felt comfortable ruling it all. I had married Jane in a typical early-twenties fit of confusion and yearning, made her beauty emblematic of the photo-worthy life I wanted to live, to have recorded. I wanted to be envied. I wanted her flawless legs to be the thing people most remembered about me. Her money didn’t hurt, of course. I wanted to be comfortable. She loved buying me bottles of good stuff. All I could really give her in return were my looks, and I could see a time when that would no longer cut it. I worried about my hair thinning.

  We got along well for a few years at first, but eventually our interactions came to be underlaid with caustic fear. Fear that we’d lashed ourselves to the mast of a doomed clipper, as well as an anger that suggested we blamed each other for the gaping hole in the hull. It made it damned hard to relax, though we found temporary solutions. Mostly they were pharmaceutical.

  “This is terrible,” Jane said in the motel. “Everything is terrible.”

  “Am I terrible?” I said.

  “Of course you are.”

  We bought a big bottle of vodka and then we didn’t get out of bed for two days. That’s how we would remember Owen Sound. We’d say, Yes, we’ve been to Owen Sound. Very lovely.

  Later, I wondered what those two days might have been like had we not destroyed my dead brother’s canoe.

  We’d been kayaking before the somersaulting canoe experience. Someone had told Jane that kayaks were great, so we got a pair, and we tried them, and they were great. Then someone else told her we should take them to Western Quebec, not far from Ottawa. A chain of lakes there, she was told. You could go from one to the next to the next, and it was beautiful, and at night you could stay in these lovely lakeside inns. So off we went to Western Quebec.

  The first lake was beautiful. It was a greyish, windy morning in early July, but the trees and the quiet and the green water astonished me. Jane paddled next to me. Her kayak was bright yellow, mine was red. Slow down and stop, they suggested. We ought to have followed that advice. Instead we tore ahead in our red life jackets. Everything we needed was rolled up, zippered, pouched, strapped down. Our weed was double-bagged, as were all our pills. I had a bottle of gin between my thighs.

  God, it was beautiful.

  “Call Toronto,” Jane said. “Tell them we’re moving. Tell them we’ll never be back. When they ask where we’ve gone, tell them the name of this lake, whatever it is.”

  “Maybe the next one will be even more beautiful,” I said.

  “What would it cost?” Jane said.

  “What would what cost?”

  “A lake.”

  The lakes all had names, but we didn’t know them, didn’t care to learn. We stopped between two of them that first night and an Anglo couple put us up in their little bed and breakfast.

  “I hope we meet nothing but Anglos,” Jane said. She was wearing only underwear and a sports bra and was splayed out atop the checkered bedspread, waiting for her pills to kick in.

  “It might be nice to talk to some real Québécois people,” I said.

  “You and the French,” she said. She looked at her phone, which had been tucked into a waterproof pouch between her legs all day. “Everything is lame. Awful and lame. Facebook is worst of all.”

  “I keep up with my mother on Facebook,” I said.

  “I hate your mother,” she said.

  “I think everybody knows that, Janey.”

  The television in our room didn’t work, and the owners neglected to mention that the tap water would smell the way it did. We sucked on the bottle of gin and slept deeply.

  In the morning, after a large breakfast, we resumed our trip. That day’s lake was emerald and amber, truly one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen. Hills rose on all sides, heavily treed and interrupted only here and there by the clean lines of tasteful homes. There was absolutely no wind, so we glided like ball bearings across a flawless surface. Painted turtles sunned themselves on logs. When we got near, they plopped into the water with the suddenness of stones.

  The middle of the lake was not terrifically deep. As we floated there, I could see right down through the green water to the dark and weedy bottom.

  “There,” Jane said. She was pointing off toward the farthest shore, to the west, to a blot of white amid all the green. It was a little waterfall, crashing over the grey solidity of rocks.

  Her beauty was so cruel. It stung me, needing it so badly.

  “Imagine the fur traders coming to this,” I said. “They’d have portaged it. Right there. I bet you anything that’s the portage route.” There was a little trail next to the water which disappeared into the woods, it was true, but I was just talking. I didn’t know anything.

  “There were no fur traders here,” Jane said.

  “Like hell! Look at it. Imagine all the foxes and raccoons and beavers. I bet somebody told King Louis about it personally. This is coureur des bois territory, Janey!” I was a little drunk on the desire to be smarter than she was.

  “Coureur des bois?”

  “Look it up.”

  “One semester in Montreal doesn’t make you an expert on francophone culture. Neither does fucking a couple of them.”

  There had been four. Five.

  We paddled toward the waterfall. It was the end of a short river, an outlet where the next lake up the chain came spilling into this one. Maybe thirty feet wide and ten or twelve feet tall, the waterfall churned down over and between solid hunks of granite. Before the point where it began falling, the water was a deep, cool green; after, it was foamy and white. As we paddled nearer, we felt the coolness and the push of the current produced by the fall. There was a mineral taste at the back of our throats, an airiness we felt in our eyes. A mist settled on the skin of our faces and forearms.

  The elemental violence of the thing was not unsexual. Something about the churn and force of it all made me want to disrobe and let it pummel me flat. I wanted to be on the wrong end of catastrophe just so I could hear that rushing water sound filling my ears. I wanted to be pulled apart in a riot of green and white bubbles. Sometimes you consider trading it all in for a moment of exhilaration, and you know in your heart of hearts it’d be worth it. But you hold off because there are people who love you and they’d be upset, or because there’s a movie you haven’t seen yet.

  Jane must have been thinking the same sensual thoughts. She pointed her paddle at the shore and some rocks and trees there, and I got her meaning. We pulled up and hobbled out of our crafts, tied them to a pair of cedar trees. The waterfall roared next to us. We were on somebody’s land, some cottager or wealthy retiree, but that meant nothing to us. Me and Jane, we don’t tend to respect property rights unless it’s our own property in question. We’re like most people that way.
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  All of a sudden, Jane was standing there on a boulder wearing only a bathing suit. It was black and sleek and it made her look like a gorgeous seal, slippery and firm. I doffed my shirt and stood only in my shorts. I was, for a few years, a person who could take his shirt off anywhere.

  We leapt into the water together, hand in hand. It was a dishonest gesture; we were taking no plunge. We’d taken it years before, and all it got us was wet.

  The water was cool. We whooped and hollered. The current kept pushing us out to the middle of the lake, but we swam into it and found purchase on rocks on either side of the falls. There we could stick our fingers into little crags and cracks and then let go and have the water push our bodies backwards, like flags in a stiff breeze. The noise made it impossible to hear one another, so a silence was enforced. It was like a form of therapy. It was blissful.

  Jane began edging herself forward, toward the heart of the falls, moving hand over hand along the rocks. When she got right up next to them, she turned with her back to the rock and dove off toward the whitest water, the spot where the falls hit the lake. She was lost from sight, pushed down and out. I had a moment of concern, so I stuck my head under the water to see if I could spot her. She was down there, through a curtain of dark green and dancing white, a black-and-white form highlighted by the sunlight slicing down through the water. On or near the bottom she paused, and stayed down there a beat longer than I thought she would, then shot toward the surface, emerging with her mouth in a big O, her eyes wide.

  “Waaah!” she cried. “Oh wow, oh wow! It’s so beautiful!”

  She looked happy and unburdened. It was a rare thing for her.

  After we’d swum another few minutes—leaping like dolphins into and out of the spray, arcing our bodies to point down toward the bottom, surfacing like corks, letting the current push us around—we ambled up onto the shore and stood in the clean sun on the rocks, dripping dry. We untied our kayaks and climbed in, pushed off, and floated away.

  In the middle of the lake, Jane said to me, “Babe, I’ve lost my ring,” and she showed me her bare finger.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  “You know how my hands shrink when they’re cold. It must have been dragged away by the force of the water,” she said.

  “Holy shit,” I said again.

  “Oh, babe,” she said. “It’s just a thing. It isn’t anything more than that. A hunk of metal. It just happened. We can get another.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Or not. We’re not symbol people,” she said, though she might have said simple people.

  “Sure. No.”

  “You get hung up on the smallest things. Let’s keep paddling and then find somewhere to stay tonight, and we’ll get drunk and you can debauch yourself all over me. That’ll make you feel better.”

  “Are you happy, Janey?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Not this. I can’t. I won’t. Just paddle.”

  We were the only people in the world for each other. It crushed us to know it because love was so awful. All love in general, but ours in particular. Losing her ring was her reaction to that—to being in love with someone she hated.

  I knew then what she must have been doing at the bottom of the lake. A moment of clarity under ten feet of uproarious water. She had felt the strong water thumping into her rib cage and musculature, and decided to let her ring drift away.

  She never—and we were together three more years after that—she never said anything about all this to me directly, but her act sent a clear message to me. I was amazed she hadn’t sent it sooner.

  But there’d been love there. I see that now. I know it because if things had been different—if Jane had told to me what Rebecca had told to Pedro—I’d have felt just as affronted and repulsed as he had. We’re terrible, really. It isn’t the act of loving that’s awful, but the people who do the loving. It troubles me to know that I wouldn’t have been any better.

  Ex-father

  A LIGHT SNOW was falling. The flakes looked like packing material, tumbling so slowly and evenly they appeared as a cloud of suspended particulate that the earth and all its accessories were being lifted slowly through. It was a Sunday afternoon in April, and quiet. A rare still point in Sarah Lee’s hectic life, a few hours of slow time with her boy, Ry. They played tic-tac-toe with crayons on a big scroll of paper and then ate cookies while watching TV, the crumbs falling to their chests and on the blanket they shared.

  Then Sarah Lee’s ex-father, Reg—and she called him Reg, because she didn’t want to honour him with Dad—came limping up the front step and rang the bell.

  Sarah Lee opened the door and saw him there, the snow coating his shoulders and bare head, a battered vinyl suitcase in one hand.

  “Jesus,” she said.

  “Surprise,” he said. Then he sang, atonally, “Nobody doesn’t like Sarah Lee.”

  “Ha ha,” she said, but it hadn’t been funny to her as a kid and it wasn’t funny now. She was trying to decide if he’d shown up to prove to her that he was now harmless, or that he still presented a threat to her and to all the people in his life. He looked pretty beaten down. She let him in her door, but she did not hug him. “What do you want here? Last I knew, you were a security guard in Memphis.”

  “Knee’s in ruins,” he said, bending and holding the left one up slightly. “Came back home to get it repaired.”

  “Okay.”

  “Recovery’s six months. Minimum.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  She looked out at the falling snow, and then at his shoes, which were worn and flapping and clearly soaked through, and she knew she was stuck with him. As awful as what he’d done to her and her mother was, she still felt obliged, as his only acknowledged child, to help. She wished she didn’t, but there was no way out from behind it.

  “Well, come in, I guess,” she said, then took his bag and set it down next to a recycling bin while he took off his shoes and unbuttoned his coat. “My boy’s just in here watching the TV.” She led him into the warm, dim room where Ry was still wrapped up in a blanket on the couch. The TV shouted.

  “What’s his name again,” Reg asked, as though he had ever remembered.

  “Ry.”

  “Ry. Hey, Ry. Hello there.”

  Ry was in first grade, and not adjusting particularly well. His reading was lagging, he didn’t talk about friends, and there were still days he came home having peed himself. He looked away from the screen and stared impassively at the broken bit of a man standing next to his mother.

  “I’m your granddad.”

  The boy looked at his mother, not knowing what to do with that information, and she offered a small nod atop a shrug. That was about the extent of the interaction between the boy and his grandfather. Ry turned his face back to the TV, and Reg went back to displaying as little interest in children as he had when Sarah Lee was a girl.

  She led Reg into the kitchen, where he sat at the little round table.

  “Get you anything?”

  “Drink’d be good.”

  “Like water? Might have some Diet Coke.”

  “I’d take a glass of water as a chaser.”

  “Right. Don’t know what I’ve got,” she said. She pulled a chair from the three around the table, moved it over toward the fridge, then stood on it and opened the cabinet overtop. Only in that moment did she realize she’d learned to keep her liquor there from Reg, when she was about five years old.

  “I don’t have much hard stuff, but I think Tal might’ve left something.”

  “That the boy’s father?”

  “Was, yeah.” She pulled down a bottle of Teacher’s. “This okay?”

  “Sure. More of a breakfast Scotch, really,” he said, “but it’ll do.”

  He unscrewed the lid and poured a generous slug of it into a juice glass she put in front of him. Later, she noted, he slipped the bottle into the pocket of his coat and she never saw it again.

  ***
r />   The temperature shot upward overnight. By morning the snow was gone and spring appeared to have a decent foothold. Sarah Lee cleaned two houses and was home by the early afternoon.

  Soon after, Reg got up off the daybed where she’d put him in the little sunroom off the back of the house. His hours were all off. He either slept dawn to noon, or went from drunk and nasty to hungover and cranky without ever going to sleep. He didn’t seem all that different from what her mother had described, except now he hobbled and likely had to go to the bathroom more often than he used to.

  They sat on the porch of her rented house, smoking cigarettes, watching a car or two roll by on the road. On a clear day she could see America from where she was sitting, but just barely.

  He looked at her through the smoke. “You still have blond hair.”

  “I know.”

  “Your mother gave it to you, you know. She went dark right after she had you.” His own hair was gone, but it had been sandy brown once.

  “I know. She told me that a hundred times, Reg.” She added, “It was pink about six months ago,” but then chastised herself, because what business was it of his? That or anything else?

  A line of pine cones stood atop the porch’s railing. Reg flicked his spent butt at them, trying to knock one down into the dwarf spirea on the other side.

  “Hey, quit that,” Sarah Lee said. “Those are Ry’s. Calls them his trees.” She stubbed her cigarette out in the lid of a Snapple bottle. “Gotta go get him and bring him home in a half-hour.”

  While Reg stayed there on her porch, smoking her cigarettes, Sarah Lee made her way over to the bus stop on the corner. You couldn’t tell by looking at her, but her left leg was a quarter of an inch shorter than her right. She always stood a bit askew, one leg in front of the other, her hips cocked. It meant popping joints, bones that rattled, and a constant painful kink in the muscles of her lower back. But like Tal’s leaving—or her ex-father’s, for that matter—it was a pain so familiar she’d forgotten it was there, forgotten why she walked the way she did. It was what she woke up to every morning. Only that.