Dan is racing along gravel roads, across a farmer’s field. Running all the way to Greely, three, four hundred kilometres. Passing their mother’s house, with their father’s old red International truck decomposing beside the garage. He waves at her at work in the garden, a blaze of astonishment on her face as her eldest son streaks by.
“So this is better than squash? You must have had — what? — a second wind in those long tournaments you played in last winter?” Nine miles, at seven minutes a mile, in this cold — isn’t that what Dan claimed as a personal best?
“This is way, way better. And it’s more — pure, I guess.”
“Pure?”
“Yeah, because I’m not playing against anybody. I’m not going for a trophy or trying to move up the ladder. There’s no league, no opponent.”
“The high is higher then.”
“Way higher. And the most amazing thing is that I feel huge, like a giant.”
Henry’s five-foot-ten, raw-boned brother, striding across the landscape, the miles unreeling behind him.
“Huge,” Dan repeats, his eyelids drooping again.
Henry slaps his hands on his thighs. “Well, I’ve gotta go to work now, Dan. I can hear Ed calling me.”
“I’m going to run a lot farther than I ever have,” Dan says. “After this,” he waves vaguely at his legs under the blankets, as if that’s where the virus resides, “I’ll be ready.”
“Ready?” Henry frowns. He’s standing now; it’s almost seven-thirty.
“To run.” Dan burps softly. “I’ve lost a couple of pounds, I think.”
Dan’s face does look thinner, Henry can see that now. “So, this,” Henry says skeptically, “is a good thing?”
“A healing crisis.”
A healing crisis. Christ. “And where will you run? I mean, in races, or just …”
“I’ll run the whole way — twenty-six miles.” Dan pronounces the number reverently.
“Ah.” Now he’s going to reinvent himself as Marathon Man. Only, doesn’t he end up dead? No, it’s the other guy who dies. Olivier. Sir Laurence.
“Well, I know you don’t get it, Hank. Your favourite speed is a whaddycallit — a stroll,” Dan says sleepily. “But you’ll see. I’ll be a new man.”
As Henry turns to leave his brother to his empty stomach and his head full of future glories, he asks, “Need anything else before I go?”
“I’m fine,” he says. “Couldn’t be better.” Dan pulls the blankets up higher and pushes away the extra pillow.
Henry supposes he should be grateful Dan isn’t aiming to run an ultra-marathon.
“I’ve had the pills,” Dan adds. “They’ll start to work soon.”
“Oh Dan,” Henry says under his breath, thinking of the red pills, now somewhere in the bowels of the city sewer system. “Okay. I’m outta here.” He sees the two DVDS lying on the foot of the bed and reluctantly picks them up.
One of Dan’s hands lies on top of the duvet. It’s not a very big hand, the fingers blocky, the nails a little long. He’s always a bit surprised that his brother is three or four inches shorter than he is, and smaller all around, because Dan seems to take up so much more space.
OUTSIDE, THE DAY IS BEGINNING. Dan’s neighbour is rasping frost off his windshield, exhaust stuttering from his car’s tailpipe. Henry balances on top of the snow bank bordering the street. The light wind is bracing after the stale bedroom, the sickroom smells. He fills and empties his lungs and his breath escapes from his lips in a white swirl. There’s a fading scar of new moon on the western horizon and a band of high cirrus running in tatters from west to east. It’s the kind of sky that signals a change in weather, and even if it means more snow, even if it means a big storm, Henry wants it, he wants a change — from the relentless cold, the locked in, unshifting arctic air.
Three
THE NEXT DAY, Henry is sitting in the same fussy pinky-beige armchair he folds himself into every time Mrs. Bogdanov decrees he must come in, after he’s finished his work, to have a cup of tea. Her eyebrow arches as she indicates the neighbour’s house to the south. “… Lila’s husband, he was, you know, a conductor,” the old woman is saying, “but he was not famous. New York — he often travelled as far as New York, where he conducted a small orchestra occasionally, and not just to” — she puffs out her lips dismissively — “Winnipeg or Regina.” She makes an upsweeping gesture with both hands, as if he, Henry, were her orchestra. Maria Bogdanov has been talking steadily for a quarter hour, her accent faintly, intermittently Russian.
The smell of some kind of soup, mushroom maybe, wafts in from the kitchen. The washing machine is gargling harshly in the basement. Henry pictures an ancient wringer washer, Mrs. Bogdanov’s tall, somewhat plump figure bending over it after he leaves, unspooling her mannish white blouses, her dark brown pants, from the wet rollers. He thinks of his uneaten lunch slowly getting crisp with frost in a paper bag in his car.
“Her husband, he was in a restaurant by the sea. In the open air, you know, on the Mediterranean.” The conductor is ordering a local specialty, Henry can almost smell it, something redolent with garlic and a sweet olive oil. The cries of the gulls in the background, waves collapsing on the shore only twenty feet away.
“He was talking to one of the musicians about the concert. There had been some problems with the performance. He begins to sweat, he loosens his tie …” She places a hand against her deeply lined cheek, two thin bands of gold caught in the flesh on her ring finger. “He tries to get up, but he falls forward, face first, and his head, it smashes the plate.” The light from the window behind Henry catches a bronze fleck in the old woman’s weathered green eyes. “Perhaps he was robbed — you have to wonder — of fame to come.”
She has told this story to him before, and it’s not so unusual, in some ways. This has happened to many families, including his own — the father dies young, the mother carries on, raising her children in a different kind of family, not what she expected at all.
“Such a shame,” the old woman shakes her head, though she doesn’t look sad or regretful; she looks, if anything, vaguely superior — she would never be so careless as to die in a restaurant, in another country. “He was thirty-four, thirty-five, at the most. His wife, she never recovered, not really.” Mrs. Bogdanov describes how the man’s clothes remained in the wife’s closet for decades, hung beside hers for as long as she lived — his suits and shirts getting more out of fashion as the years passed.
Henry doesn’t know what his mother did with his father’s clothes after he died. They certainly aren’t in her small and very orderly closet, where even her plainest blouses are arranged just so. He imagines his father’s plaid shirts, worn at the elbow, his oil-stained work pants. What he can’t imagine is his mother keeping them. She has a few things, his wedding ring, a pocket knife, a 1965 silver dollar, and, most mysteriously to Henry, a brass plumb bob. There was a time — when he was nine or ten — that he studied these things furtively, sneaking into his mother’s room and looking into the box in her top drawer where she kept them. When he was quite small he was thrilled by the very name, which he thought was plum bob, and its inexplicable connection to the fruit. He’d lift the heavy brass teardrop out of its box, let it swing by its fine chain, and watch it circle over the palm of his other hand, until it stopped moving and was completely still.
Henry slurps down his tea, waiting for the moment he can walk out into the brilliant winter sunlight. He has done what she pays him for, he’s cleared the walks, though they had only a feathering of snow on them — the storm that was supposed to have arrived by now has stalled, it seems, over the Alberta border. Now he’d like to eat his lunch and get back to work, get the afternoon over with, then go home to the crow and the problem of getting the neck positioned properly so that the bird’s skeleton will seem to be about to launch itself into flight. He wonders if Rae will be home tonight, in good time, so he doesn’t have to check on Dan again. He wills Rae, who is in a court
room in Calgary, to begin collecting her papers and files, but like Maria Bogdanov, she takes her time. She sits down beside a colleague and begins an animated conversation; she waves one arm in the air, like a cowboy throwing a lasso.
His eyes wander to the narrow bookshelves, which he can see over Mrs. Bogdanov’s very upright shoulder: a few decrepit-looking volumes of The Globe Encyclopedia, their paper covers scabby and peeling, An Illustrated History of Europe. And Maynard’s Bestiary. He’s curious about the bestiary, envisioning colourful illustrated plates of dragons, centaurs, fabulous monsters; where does this need to invent mythical beasts come from? He thinks of the deer at home, their nervous beauty, their ability to fade into the trees when something startles them. He and his mother often see them at twilight, tawny shadows moving in a line along a well-used trail through the bush not far from the house.
On the way over here today, driving along the river, he saw a fox out on the river ice, trotting purposefully downstream, a small red arrow on a wide expanse of ill-defined white.
Mrs. Bogdanov clears her throat, a rare, satisfied smile on her bruise-coloured lips. He has missed whatever she’s just said.
“Yes,” she nods — she seems to think she’s surprised him — “they had a garden party every year. Every year, Henry, in May. I went only the once, many years after he died. We were standing, maybe twelve of us, with glasses of wine, it might have been champagne —” she shrugs, how ludicrous, drawing Henry in, a co-conspirator. “And then Lila announced that this day was her husband’s fiftieth birthday.”
Her eyes widen in indignation, the left eye a little off true, which makes it seem as if she is looking east but also a little north. “But, you see, I cannot pretend such a thing, not even out of politeness.” She bows her head slightly, in acknowledgment of her incontrovertible honesty. “And so I said, ‘Your husband, may he rest in peace, was a dear fellow, but he has no birthday. Like my first husband, he does not get any older.’”
What reaction there was to this announcement Mrs. Bogdanov doesn’t say. Henry’s stomach growls; he calculates that he has another ten minutes, at the most, before he has to leave.
“Sometimes I wonder if already at that time Lila was, what do they call it? Senile. She was sick with that for years. I could hear her singing sometimes when she was there alone. Not with words, but a kind of warble. She could carry a tune, though she had nowhere to carry it —” she narrows her eyes at Henry.
“No one to hear it, you mean?”
Mrs. Bogdanov doesn’t smile but her face brightens. “Yes, that’s just it, Henry. Singing — to no one.” She brings her teacup to her mouth but doesn’t drink.
“In those last years, the odd time, just out of the blue she would seem to be all there, her old self. We would talk over the fence, as we used to. She often spoke of music, and of the blonde daughter, and the other, the dark one. But never of her husband. It was as if, at last — at last, Henry,” and here she reaches across the table and taps hard on the back of his hand where it rests on the arm of the chair, and he flinches at this piercing of the cushion of air that surrounds him, an envelope of space he’s believed inviolate.
“At last,” the old woman says with a small smile, “she had accepted that he was dead. Or maybe,” she adds, not unkindly, “she’d forgiven him.”
Forgiven? Henry doesn’t know what she’s talking about. He wants to rub the spot on his hand, which feels like a throbbing dent, where her finger, with its thick varnished-looking nail, hammered down.
“Every day for years, even after Lila died, she came, the dark one,” Mrs. Bogdanov says. “Oh yes, every morning she was there for a few hours. What did she do? Well, laundry. Yes, dresses hanging on the line — were they hers or her mother’s?” She shrugs, her large, knotted, arthritic hands nestled together in her lap. “Yes, for years and years that house was empty. Mother gone; father gone. The end.” She sinks back into her chair.
But it isn’t the end and Henry grits his teeth. She loses names sometimes, the thread of the story or simply whatever she intended to ask him to do — and she freezes. Henry tries not to look at her, to signal in any way that he knows that she’s lost her way. It’s excruciating, pretending that he isn’t waiting, as hungry as he is, his legs twitchy from sitting cramped up in this silly chair. He forces himself to keep his face neutral; if he seems like he doesn’t want to be here, she might throw a barbed question at him. Or worse, she’ll interrogate him about his birds. How many people do this, this bird bone art? she’ll ask. He always says that he doesn’t know, but that doesn’t stop her repeating the question days or weeks later. And art? The word annoys him. Can putting a skeleton together, following the instructions of nature itself, assembling the toe bones, for instance, in the correct order, be considered an art? He showed her a picture of one of his articulations some months ago, hoping to put an end to her questions. It was a goose, not exactly his best, but since then she’s insisted on this word, art. She says it with a kind of tender pride and a shake of her head with its cap of flyaway white hair, as if she is constantly amazed by his accomplishments.
The old woman’s on her feet now, slowly pacing the length of the bookshelf, studying the titles. He averts his eyes from the crisp crease in the back of her brown slacks when she bends awkwardly to read the spines on the lower shelves.
At last she speaks. “The Good Soldier Schweik,” she says, flourishing a pocketbook with a red cover. “Wonderful novel. Czech. Have you read it?” She doesn’t wait for a reply and hands it to him. “All young men should read literature,” she says primly. “There is good instruction in novels. Not practical, that’s true, but philosophical. Questions of religion, of what to believe. This kind of guidance may lead to action, to a change …” Her voice trails off.
Henry doesn’t think he needs to read a Czech novel to tell him how to live his life; he trusts his senses to help him find his way. His eyes are reliable, and even when they occasionally mislead him, the path he follows is real. The Jack pine, the birch, the deer trails, he thinks of them with relief. Going in the wrong direction, that’s no problem. You arrive somewhere else, not where you wanted to be maybe, but somewhere new.
“Yes, yes,” the old woman mutters as she escorts him to the door, her hand — again, the heavy touch — on his shoulder, and it is all he can do to keep from ducking away from it.
As he pulls on his parka, she gives him his usual fee, plus an extra twenty. She tells him to check her favourite secondhand bookstore for any Eastern European fiction in translation. He pockets the money almost grudgingly. (He has left The Good Soldier Schweik on the seat of his chair.) Whenever she’s tried his patience and he thinks about quitting, about letting her find some other guy to do her chores — to sit for too long in her overheated sitting room listening to her tales — that’s when she pays him extra. As if she’s sniffed out his restlessness.
Outside, snow is beginning to fall in large, lazy flakes. He clears the windshield with the back of his mitt. The temperature has risen several degrees, but the wind, fresh and wild, blowing in icy skeins off the river, is bitingly cold. It seems the storm that has been predicted for days now, that they say is going to blanket the entire Prairies, has begun.
Henry starts his car, digs into the paper bag beside him for the half-frozen salami sandwich, which he should have eaten as soon as he got it from the deli. He doesn’t know why he was in such a hurry to clear her walks when he’ll have to come tomorrow anyway to shift the several inches of snow that’s been forecast.
A couple of blocks from Mrs. Bogdanov’s, he peers out across the river, to where the fox moved like a flicker of cool flame, and sees nothing but ice and snow. When he was twelve, he spent weeks watching a family of foxes, all through May and into June. Every day after school he’d hike out to a spot along the nearby river, the Torch, which flows just north of their quarter section. He’d hide behind a screen of alder, near the den. As the kits grew, they invented games. One would pick up a stick or
a pine cone and the others would chase him around. Another would disappear behind the trunk of a large cottonwood and wait, pouncing when a sibling attempted to ambush him there. Then, at some point, the male of the pair disappeared. It took Henry a few days to realize he was missing, but when he tried to track him he couldn’t distinguish the male’s prints from the female’s, and anyway the signs were so subtle they were pretty much impossible for him to follow. It was nearly solstice by that time. The light as full as it would ever be, evenings long and nights short. Perhaps the male fox crossed the highway at the wrong moment, June sun in its eyes, and was struck down. Or maybe he was caught in a trap. But the female fox, the vixen, was vigilant, and a good hunter. She’d appear out of nowhere and drop a mouse or ground squirrel for the kits to eat.
It’s snowing more intensely now and Henry flicks on his wipers. If enough snow comes down, the storm will mask the hard edges of the houses and office buildings, will soften and blur everything, the streets silting in, deltas of snow at every intersection. The elms along the avenues will convulse, bending and rising, weaker limbs shorn off, broken branches buried like grey bones in the new drifts. If the storm lasts all day and night, the city of too many cars and trucks and SUVS, the endless traffic — that city will disappear. At least for the space of a few long breaths, this place will be becalmed, storm-stayed. The relentless rushing and striving will stop, with only the river still moving freely beneath the ice like a dream-life that you can’t quite articulate or fathom.
Four
BY TWO, THE TEMPERATURE has risen from minus thirty-five to minus twenty and ropes of falling snow thicken and fray outside the shop window.
Henry calls to make sure Dan isn’t dehydrated, isn’t feverish and raving, and he isn’t, he’s bored and chatty. His voice on the phone distant, as if he were in another city.
“I thought I’d do some work on a laptop I’m cleaning up for a client,” Dan’s saying through a fizz of static, “but looking at the screen made me feel like barfing. I watched some TV instead. Jesus, cartoons aren’t what they used to be — it’s all spelling and counting, and getting the kids to make the right choices, like little goddamn accountants —”
The Afterlife of Birds Page 3
