No Quarter

by John Jantunen

  When he said, Well, go on, then, she drove the blade into the ground again.

  He watched her dig, standing at the edge of the circle of dirt, stroking his beard, until she’d cleared away the top layer of soil. Then, foraging in his pocket for his tobacco pouch, he returned to the shack and sat in the crude birch bark chair within the shade of its eave, smoking his pipe and watching the girl labour under the noon’s oppressive heat.

  By the time she’d dug a hole six feet deep and almost as long, the sun had descended amongst the trees. Her hands were blistered and her arms ached as if they meant to spring loose from her shoulders at any moment. She was tired beyond measure and it took every ounce of her being to pull herself up and out of the grave. She lay at its side and such was her exhaustion that it felt like she was drifting out of her body. She was levitating towards the treetops, her suffering all but a bad dream, until the overwhelming stench of the girl’s body brought her hurtling back to earth.

  Rising to her feet, she looked to the shack. The White Devil had fallen asleep in the chair, or so it seemed. She watched him for any sign that it was a ruse. She saw a fly circling him and then land on his nose. He didn’t so much as twitch and she turned once again to the girl. Her docile form, spackled with shovelfuls of dirt, reminded her of something else The Crows had told her, and she took up the shovel in both hands, holding it like a fishing spear and bringing the sharp tip of its blade down onto the girl’s chest. The blade penetrated her paled flesh as easily as it would have mud and a stifled crack told her that her aim had been true.

  Falling to her knees, she reached into the wound, finding as she had hoped the broken shaft of a rib bone. She yanked it out and with a quick glance at The White Devil, to make sure he was still asleep, she pressed its tip into the earth, pushing down upon its end until it was even with the ground. She covered it with a handful of dirt and planted a pebble to mark its place. She then bent to the girl, begging her forgiveness for stealing that, the most sacred part of her, and whispering into her ear of how she would use it to visit upon The White Devil a thousand torments: the only words of comfort she could think to offer the girl before rolling her into the grave.

  11

  Recounting this to Crystal, those five years later on the dock, she muttered, “That’s horrible. How—I mean, how could he have written such a thing?”

  “You never read it?” Deacon asked.

  “I’ve never read any of George’s books. Dad wouldn’t let them in the house. Now I can see why.”

  “But weren’t you curious? Later, I mean.”

  “I guess I kind of forgot about them. I never was much of a reader.”

  “But he’s your grandfather.”

  Crystal shook her head as if, like Deacon, she was trying to reconcile the man she knew with the person who could have written that.

  “He’s a twisted fuck, that’s what he is,” she said after a moment. “Why, I mean, why would he write that about your mom?”

  “Pa must have told him a few stories.”

  “About her being kidnapped by some psycho?”

  “She was never kidnapped, far as I know.”

  “What then?”

  “About her life before they met. She didn’t talk much about it but sometimes, when I was in bed, I’d hear them arguing.”

  “About what?”

  “Who she was with before him, mostly. One time I heard her yelling that if my pa was any kind of real man he’d carve that motherfucker’s heart out and bring it to her on a stick.”

  “She said that?”

  Deacon nodded.

  “He ever tie her to a tree?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ve seen the marks on her back enough times to know he used to whip her something fierce.”

  “Jesus.”

  They sat there on the dock, both of them staring out at the lake, listening to the gentle lap of the water against the dock. A loon cried out in the distance and Deacon fumbled another smoke from his pack.

  “So’d you finish it?” Crystal asked while he was lighting it.

  “What?”

  “The book.”

  “Of course.”

  “I never could have, reading something like that about my mom.”

  “I had to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Same reason anyone finishes a book.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “To find out what happens next.”

  “So?”

  “Huh?”

  “What happened next?”

  “I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you.”

  “Go ahead, I don’t mind.”

  “Sorry. You’ll have to read it for yourself.”

  She frowned again, and while he was occupied with the thought that she never looked prettier than when she was frowning at him, she snatched the cigarette from his mouth. She drew heavy on it and held the smoke in until it seemed her chest might burst.

  “So is that it?” she asked, finally exhaling.

  “What?”

  “The end of your story.”

  “Hardly.”

  “Well, go on, then.”

  12

  He finished the book two hours later, tears wet on his cheeks from when he’d finally got to the part where Asger and Niimi met, at the end of the last chapter. It happened just like it had on the cover, and the way George described the waterfall immediately reminded Deacon of the place his father had taken him and Abel every year, camping out there for a week to mark the beginning of summer.

  Their mother only joined them on the last night, bringing marshmallows and hot dogs to roast over the fire, treats that seemed like a king’s feast since for the previous six days their father had only let them eat whatever they’d killed or caught. And after they’d eaten their fill, their father would take out his fiddle and Deacon and Abel would dance with their mother around the fire, Rose never happier than she was then, laughing and carrying on like a woman possessed, the sound of her joy echoing off the granite forming a horseshoe around the falls so that it seemed that the world itself was laughing right along with her.

  Deacon knew that the waterfall was indeed where his parents had met, his father had told him that much.

  “The first time I saw her,” he’d told Deacon when he was six, pointing to the top of the ridge, some thirty feet high, over which a thin veil of water fell, “was right up there.”

  But whenever he’d pressed him further, he’d say, “That’s more your mother’s story than mine. You’ll have to ask her.”

  But whenever he asked her, which he’d invariably do when he and Abel were lying between their parents on the soft bed of grass at the pool’s edge—all of them sweaty and tired—she’d make snoring sounds, pretending to be asleep.

  Deacon would nudge her, saying, “I know you’re not asleep,” and she’d answer, “Well, how am I supposed to sleep with someone poking me in the ribs?”

  “You said you’d tell us.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “How you and Pa met.”

  “When did I say that?”

  “Last year,” Abel would pipe in.

  “I did?”

  “And the year before that and the year before that too.”

  “You going to tell us or what?”

  Their mother would peer up at the night sky, as if when the time came for her to share the story it would be written in the constellations along with all the rest, the two brothers holding their breath waiting on their mother to speak. After a moment a shudder would run through her. She’d blink and shake her head and say, “Maybe next year.”

  They’d protest plenty hearing that and she’d silence them by kissing each on his cheek. She’d then roll over onto her side, making snoring sounds again and this time no amount of elbowing would be enough
to rouse her.

  So when Deacon finally came to the part at the end of the book where Asger and Niimi met, he knew his father must have told George the story and Deacon cried tears of joy, imagining that it must have happened just like he’d written.

  He read on to the end and when he got to the last page he turned back to the first, intending to start reading it all over again. But his legs were cramped from sitting cross-legged on the ground and he stood to shake out their stiff before getting back to it. That’s when he saw George standing at the back door of the house. He was leaning against its frame and watching him with the same bemused smile he’d once used to greet his mother while his father was inside fetching the rifles. Seeing him like that, Deacon had a sudden impulse to run to him, to hug him tight, to bury his head in his chest, to never let go, such was the gratitude he felt towards the old man, for bringing his parents back to life, if only for a few hours.

  He was struck suddenly shy though and lowered his head, summoning his nerve. When he looked up again George was gone and in his place Adele was at the door, calling to tell him that dinner was served. He was just stepping inside when he realized he was still carrying the book. He thought he ought to put it back on the shelf, like Adele had told him to. But he still wasn’t ready to part with it just yet and ducked up the stairs to his room and hid it under his pillow.

  The three of them ate in silence: Deacon sneaking glances at George between bites of mashed potatoes layered with hamburger hash and creamed corn, trying to think of what he might say to tell him what his book had meant, his words failing him; Adele looking to Deacon as if knowing what was on his mind and wanting to help him along but her words failing too; George, all the while, oblivious to the triangle he was caught up in, lost as he was in the simple pleasure of eating a well-cooked meal.

  After he was done, Deacon excused himself and hurried up to his room. He fetched The Stray from under his pillow and read it all through the evening. When he’d come to the end, he cried again, though it wasn’t joy he was overcome with this time but that familiar feeling of helplessness, knowing that no amount of words on a page could ever really bring his parents back to life and feeling evermore the loss of his brother, who wasn’t in the story at all.

  He buried his head under his pillow and lay there as the room grew dark.

  * * *

  In the morning, he awoke feeling the same despair that had trailed him out of his nightmares every other morning he’d awoken in this stranger’s bed.

  After a while, an errant hair tickled against his nose. He reached to brush it away and his elbow knocked against the book laying in the bed beside him. Its cover was folded in half from rolling onto it while he slept. Alarm swept through him and he grabbed it up, bending the cover back and smoothing the crease. But there was nothing he could do to make it right.

  You ought to put it back on the shelf before someone sees what you’ve done, he told himself and that was enough to get him out of bed.

  He dressed in the first pair of shorts he found in his dresser and added to that a plain blue T-shirt. When he came into the backyard, The Stray clutched to his breast, Adele was kneeling at her vegetable garden, pulling weeds. She didn’t look up and a moment later he was opening the barn’s door with the key he’d fished from under the rock on the windowsill.

  He slipped the book back into its place on the shelf and pressed the elephant’s weight against it to hide the crimp to its cover then stood there for a moment, telling himself he ought to go help Mrs. Cleary in the garden. Instead, he ran his finger along the spines of the other books until he’d come to A Bad Man’s Son. There was an armchair in the corner, its green leather seat worn smooth so that Deacon knew it had been well used. It was the only space not cluttered with books. Beside it there was a small table with stacks of paperbacks clustered around a reading lamp. He turned on the light, sat in the chair, and began to read.

  * * *

  The next two months went by in a blur.

  A Bad Man’s Son led him to The Passage, and that to My Brother’s Keeper, The Pines, Marble Mountain, The Sons of Adam, The Road Ahead, Into the After, A Precious Few, Land’s End, until finally The Unnamed lead him right back to The Stray. Most, as his father had warned, were chock full of violence and sex, often of a most deviant variety, interspersed with moments of such stark terror that they’d make him clamp the book shut. Sometimes it’d be days before he’d summoned the nerve to return to it. But as he read on he also found an equal share of love and joy, and it wasn’t long before he began to divine that there was something more at play within them than a mere catalogue of the horrors man could inflict upon his fellow man. He couldn’t put into words exactly what that was: a mystery of some sort that always seemed to be fleeing forever beyond his grasp.

  The first ten were written in chronological order, A Bad Man’s Son set in the 1860s and Land’s End in some dark and dismal future where dates had little or no meaning. Only the middle three were set in what might be considered George’s present—the 1960s and 70s—and all of these ended with a cataclysm, never fully revealed, that brought about the end of civilization. The following three took place in the world that George imagined was to follow—“a burnt-out district of mythic savagery over which the course of empire runs in reverse,” in the words of one reviewer blurbed on the back of Land’s End. The eleventh, the only hardback among them, seemed to take as its aim the unification of all that came before. As such, The Unnamed was the longest of all his books, by a factor of three, and it took Deacon better than a week to get through its 694 pages. It was divided into seven sections, the middle five introduced by titles bearing the dates 1600 through 2000, the first and last introduced by a blank page as if the past and the future they imagined were beyond the bounds of time itself.

  The story revolved around two Omushkego, which Deacon was to learn was the name of a tribe of Cree who lived on the shores of James Bay in Northern Ontario. One of them was a girl and the other a boy and both were born on the same spring day at the exact moment Old Chiishaayiyu, the village’s Story Keeper, saw the first wave of kihchiniska returning from their migration to the south. Their parents took this to be a sign that good things were in store for the two, but, as Deacon would shortly learn, they couldn’t have been more wrong. Such suffering as they’d endure made his own seem trifling by comparison, and all thoughts of his grief seemed to fade away as he followed the many trials and tribulations of the protagonists, who, as the book’s title had indicated, were known simply as the boy and the girl, in the first two sections and the man and the woman in the latter five.

  The other odd thing about the book was that as one century passed into the next, the two lead characters aged but a decade. As such, they were ten when they spotted the white sails of a wapiskiwiyas ship cresting the waters of Wiinipekw and seventy when wapiskiwiyas civilization fell, restoring the Omushkego to their former prominence within the natural order. Or so it had seemed, for in the last chapter a black fume of smoke—what they called pikithew—appeared on the southern horizon, warning of a new threat yet to come. Deacon could only assume that this was the Sons of Adam, the doomsday cult introduced in the book of the same name and then forever hovering on the periphery of the books that came after, stalking the scattered remnants of humankind in their eternal quest to burn the world back to Eden.

  As to the man and the woman’s ultimate fate, George did not say, but given what they’d lived through thus far, Deacon was left with a lingering hope that, regardless of what happened after George had written The End, they’d make out just fine.

  After he’d finished with it the first time, he’d set the book back in its place and plucked out The Stray. Peering down at his parents on the cover, the despair that had overcome him when last he’d read it threatened to once again swallow him into its fold. Thinking of what he’d just read, he told himself he’d be okay too. He read it through in a single sitting and this ti
me did not cry at all. When he was done he put it back on the shelf. It was an act that had seemed meaningless at the time but, in the years to come, would take on an almost mystical significance: his own past becoming, in that moment, just another one of George’s Fictions that he could put back on the shelf along with all the others.

  At the time though, he didn’t get even an inkling of that, and he ran his fingers along the spines of the others until he came again to The Bad Man’s Son. He stood staring at it for a moment, shaking his head and muttering to himself, “Maybe it’s best if you give your eyes a little rest.”

  Wending his way back through the stacks he came to the door, squinting against the light and catching sight of a swallow pecking at the grains of seed in the bird feeder hanging from the cherry tree. He could hear other birds too: the playful chatter of chickadees and cardinals warbling to their kind and the ruckus of black birds overlaid with the soothing chirrup of frogs from the creek running along the bottom of the ravine. A dragonfly flit by his face. He watched it hover over the lawn and though he’d seen dozens, maybe hundreds, doing the same, he was struck with a sudden awe at its grace and its beauty. Such a feeling of peace as he’d never known settled over him, lasting, as such feelings do, only the briefest of moments before a frantic fluttering of wings turned him back to the cherry tree.

  A blue jay was descending towards it, its wings raised like an avenging angel. It landed on the bird feeder’s perch with such force that it sent the seed scattering in all directions. The way it sat there ruffling its feathers and squawking its glee, as if it were king of the world and wanted everyone to know it too, made him all of a sudden understand why George had such a hate-on for them.

  I wonder if that pellet gun’s still up by the window where he liked to shoot, he asked himself.

  Only one way to find out, he answered and hurried off into the barn.