The Mercy Journals

by Claudia Casper

  I lifted my head from the ground and my hand found the knife’s handle. I sniffed. The mist smelled like grass before it’s cut, or a trout still dripping from the river.

  I don’t want to give her another chance to pierce my skin.

  The pain is just beginning to recede from my mind and adhere to the actual wounds. The cells on the edges are knitting together and soon they’ll get itchy.

  This is how I woke this morning, which is to say marginally better than yesterday.

  I’m foggy about Griffin and Leo. They built a windbreak around the tent, leaving only the entrance exposed. Griffin cleaned my wounds and Leo tacked my scalp back on. They left yesterday. I think. One to paddle, one to fish. They wanted to supplement our food supplies.

  I have enough wood to keep a fire burning for several days, boiled water to drink and to clean my wounds, and a small bag of salt.

  My scalp is re-grafting though the tissue has shrunk and left a gap about a centimetre wide where new scar tissue is growing. The hair on the injured part of my scalp, the whole top, is coming out in tufts, and part of my upper lip is gone. Under my right eye, wounds, either from teeth or claws, I can’t remember, are deep. I’ll be a striking piece of work when this is done. Ruby will get a thrill, if I am ever lucky enough to see her again.

  It was like getting hit with a bag of sand. The impact threw me forward onto the ground. Wildly I reached back—I had no idea at what—and got a handful of fur. She got me at the hairline, ripped my scalp back, got a new grip on my skull, dug her claws into my shoulder. My pack protected my neck.

  Griffin heard something and turned back, came around the trees, and saw us. He yelled for Leo. The cougar looked up, unafraid. Leo dropped his pack and started to look for a big stick or rock. The cougar twisted her jaw, ripping deeper. I groaned. Griffin started talking to me. He took his pack off and held it in front of him and walked toward us, hoping to get her to back off.

  Her breath smelled like dried spit and oil. I didn’t move because I didn’t want her teeth or claws to go deeper. Griffin kept talking to me, keeping her attention. She growled in a low rumble. He said her tail swished back and forth on the ground like she wanted to play. He thought it was only a question of size that made him less afraid, because he was almost twice as big.

  She got a better grip on my head and dragged me a couple of feet sideways toward a steep downward slope. Griffin yelled, Leave him! and moved to cut her off. She shook her head and I yelled out in pain and reached back desperately, trying to find her eyes, her throat.

  Griffin yelled for Leo again and unclipped a frying pan from his backpack. I’m going to hit her with a frying pan, Uncle Allen. When I do, fight back as hard as you can. We can take her together. She’s not that big.

  He lunged forward, and she pulled me further toward the slope. He whacked her with the pan on the head, though not solidly. I felt the vibration of the blow through her teeth into my skull. She snarled, increased the pressure of her jaw. He hit her again, a solid blow, and she let go, backed up, low to the ground, ready to spring at him. I got to my feet, blinded by blood. Leo came out of the forest with a big branch in one hand and a rock in the other. She glanced at Leo, turned tail, and disappeared.

  Holy shit! Leo said, memorably.

  If Leo and Griffin don’t come back, if my wounds get infected, if the cougar returns, I want there to be more than a few bones and some rusty tent poles to tell what happened to me. I am keeping a record for as long as I can.

  It’s more than that. During the month I prepared for this journey I missed writing. It had become a habit, like a daily conversation, a practice. It made me feel witnessed the way, I imagine, that someone who believes in God feels witnessed. You, my future reader, have become my witness, my companion. I may not be a writer, but I have become someone who writes.

  I’ve also started reading my other journal. There’s nothing else to do. I’ve thrown another log on the fire, and I’m shivering in my sleeping bag. I can only write and read in short spurts before my head starts to hurt.

  The cougar was beautiful. Griffin told me. I never saw her but I remember the weight and smell of her. Somewhere in the struggle I noticed that her teats were hard as fingernails and damp with milk. I’m weak but oddly energized. I feel chosen. I am giddy when not asleep.

  I’m almost out of water. Tomorrow I’ll have to get more. Griffin and Leo have been gone two days.

  I looked up through the branches to see what time of day it was and glimpsed black clouds racing by. High up in the canopy, treetops are getting whipped around, yet down here there’s no wind.

  I chuck some wood on the embers. Smoke darts a tongue out from under the wood, licking its sides, squirming up into the flame wriggles into existence, vanishes, wriggles, vanishes. Raindrops begin to hit the fire, making it hiss. If there was a storm yesterday, I was too out of it to notice. I hope Griffin and Leo are on land, waiting for the storm to pass. I hope that’s the explanation.

  I’ll say one thing: reading is an act that should definitely take place between two minds. Reading your own writing is onanistic (a word I learned in Sunday school) and embarrassing. It has none of the pleasure that normally comes with reading.

  The fight scene with the mob over Leo’s vehicle infraction, meeting Ruby, the goldfish—they’re accurate but I left so much out. The part is made to stand for the whole, and then the part becomes the whole.

  The memories I left out are already different from the ones I included; they’ve transformed and morphed. My journal has become a barricade, a closed border: the memories on the inside are uniform and almost foreign to me, the ones on the outside are smoky and intimate; the ones on the inside are like the army, and the ones on the outside are like guerilla fighters.

  I am apprehensive about reading to the end. Things are bad enough without stirring up that pot. I might not.

  I am going for water. Griffin said the creek isn’t far. I don’t want to bust my stitches or bleed again so I’m only taking two empties.

  I’m wearing three sweaters under my coat. I wrapped a T-shirt around my head, eased a knit hat over that, and tied the hat on with a scarf under my chin. I’m wearing two pairs of pants with a third wrapped around my neck. I’m carrying the knife open. I will advance while slowly turning 360 degrees. I would have painted a face on the back of my hat—cougars prefer to attack from the rear—but lack the means. I’ll be scanning for changes in sound, smell, air pressure.

  My face felt her. She was watching. I felt her presence the way you know when a woman is looking at you. My stitches burned. I had to walk out into the river to a place deep enough to fill the bottles. I was completely exposed. I drained a bottle, refilled it, filled the other.

  The birds weren’t silent, but they didn’t sound relaxed either. She was there, but I didn’t think she was hunting me. She was just watching. It bothers me that she can see me but I never see her. I’m sure she’s killed something else. That’s why I’m getting a rest.

  Four days. If they don’t return soon, I’ll have to go on alone. I’m about a quarter the way up Vancouver Island, maybe more. I’ll head for the cabin rather than going back and hope to find them there.

  It’s still very windy. In these waters hypothermia sets in in half an hour. That boy Griffin is something special. My brother is the usual lunatic.

  I heard a scream. A wildcat did howl.

  I check and recheck the knife, mentally rehearsing.

  I finished reading my old journal. I’ve found a kind of peace. My strategy must’ve worked, though truthfully, I don’t know how.

  I will find Ruby if I return. There is one sure place to look. February 21, at Molly’s grave.

  I heard the scream again. I leapt up, knife in hand, thinking the cougar might be attacking Griffin and Leo as they were walking up from the beach. She screamed again and I realized the sound was coming from behind me, away from the sea. And then I heard another scream, not hers, same distance. A series of yowls
finished with another scream. She must be mating. She must be at the end of weaning.

  A small part of me travels in her now: a scrap of my right upper lip, some scalp, my blood.

  I was taking out the stitches—pack propped up against a tree, rectangle of mirror on top—and had taken out three or four when I heard a twig snap and a small thump. I put the scissors down and picked up the knife and turned, back against the tree. The thump could have been the sound of a heavy cat jumping out of a tree, hitting the forest floor.

  The river should be behind us, Griffin called to Leo. I called out to them. They arrived in camp within a minute. Hey bro. Less like hamburger, more like tripe, Leo said as he strode across the clearing.

  They’d been blown way out into the strait by the wind and had paddled through the night trying to get back. Exhausted, they had gone ashore at the first land they reached, assuming they were on Vancouver Island. When they woke, they realized they were on a smaller island. Wind and exhaustion prevented them from leaving. They stayed on the island another night, eating the fish they’d caught. It had taken two full days in the chop to find the upright paddle that marked our landing point.

  Griffin got me to sit down, took the scissors, and started to carefully snip and pull.

  The next day we left. The wind was blowing northeast up the strait, which was excellent because I was weak. My back muscles burned, my head pounded, and my wounds ached. Leo had to stop frequently and wait for us to catch up.

  Despite my discomfort, I was uncommonly happy to be back on the northern waters, moving over the strait’s dark surface. Every time I raised my paddle, icy seawater trickled onto my hands. Cold briny air filled my lungs. Jellyfish billowed and propelled below the surface.

  We remarked on how few seabirds there were. The herring run, if it even happens anymore, would have been long over, but even so, the number of birds was small. We saw a few northern gulls walking on tidal flats and once we heard the peeping of sandpipers. A mini-flock of Canada Geese, five birds strong, flew overhead and we stopped paddling to watch.

  Late in the day, as the evening mist rose on the water, we heard a sound like chainsaws starting. We slowed and peered ahead. To the starboard came a sigh, followed by a ripple. Seconds later, on the port side a huffing erupted, like a dog warming a scent with its breath, and a few metres ahead, another large sigh. The water’s surface broke.

  Sea lions, Griffin whispered and grinned.

  A large head appeared between the boats. I could see its coat was light brown. Several other heads surfaced and came round the boats, huffing. They were massive.

  I’m getting the feeling they want us to leave, Griffin whispered.

  We were gliding toward a small island of grass and rock covered with dark bodies. We began to paddle backward slowly, then angled away out to sea. Killer whales are thought to be extinct and we’d seen no seals. The sea lions were a privilege.

  Nirvana is on the northern inside curve of a small peninsula on the east of Vancouver Island called the Forgotten Peninsula. The shape is unmistakable on a map—Leo and I always called it the penis-ula. When our family bought the place, an elderly couple from the K’omoks people were still paddling out every spring for a few weeks to camp and harvest shellfish. They stopped coming when I was about ten. My mother told us that all the broken shells in the sandy dirt were called a midden and that the piles of shells probably dated back thousands of years, way before the Roman Empire and ancient Greece. Leo and I had looked for cool stuff like bones, arrowheads, and slave killers, but never found any. Even three feet down, the shells were thick as ever.

  The base of the peninsula, where it attaches to the main island, is no more than thirty metres wide and mostly blocked by a huge rock that my father believed to be a meteorite, leaving an entrance only fifty centimetres wide at high tide—just wide enough for an adult to pass without getting their feet wet. We used to park the car at the end of the dirt road and hike in all our provisions. Leo and I joked about how the mighty member was hanging on by a thread and played out disastrous scenarios of it getting an erection.

  Leo said we were close to the cabin as the crow flies, but because of the peninsula and the bluffs on the south, it was still a half day’s paddle away. Night was falling so we made camp and ate a potage of lentils, rice, salt, and a small fish that Griffin had caught trolling in the one-seater. Leo divvied it up. Griffin looked at his bowl with dissatisfaction. Leo had given himself the lion’s share. My appetite still hasn’t returned so I gave Griffin some of mine despite his protests.

  Hungry boy, Leo commented. I paddled solo today, brother. You could throw me some too.

  Griffin’s portion was a bit light.

  Oh? Was it? So sorry, my boy. He reached over and ruffled Griffin’s hair.

  Leo shovelled in the rest of his bowl, looking at Griffin.

  When we arrived at Nirvana I was weak and feverish. The wind had switched and blew hard against us, and rounding the peninsula had been difficult. No one realized how weak I was until I fell in the water getting out of the kayak and was unable to stand back up. Leo and Griffin helped me onto land, pulled the boats up, and shouldered me up the hill to the cabin. The door was unlocked and the house smelled like mint tea. The fact that I’d smelled chicken manure and wafts of other livestock while walking up registered now. A place was set at the kitchen table—knife, fork, plate, and glass on Mom’s yellow plasticized tablecloth.

  Someone’s here, Leo whispered. My heart leapt with the hope it was one of the boys, but the neat single setting suggested something else. They led me to the daybed in the sunroom. Griffin put a blanket over me and I whispered, Tell me what you find out.

  I woke to sounds from the kitchen, a serious-toned female voice and Leo’s voice, reassuring. I called out and they came.

  This is Parker. Parker Leclerc. Griffin introduced me to a tall, physically strong young woman with brown braided hair, eyes that moved quickly. She looked like she was almost certainly pregnant.

  She’s been living here for months, he said. She’s put in a garden and she’s raising chickens and goats.

  Leo came in and said, It’s bloody Goldilocks and the three bears.

  Parker looked at my wounds and left. She returned with clean linen and a hot damp towel. Griffin changed the bed and helped me undress. I slept for twenty hours. A deep twenty. I hadn’t felt so warm and safe since I was a kid. Being back in the family home was total surrender, like dying, the good version.

  The next few days I woke, ate, drank, and sank back into the warmth and the quiet. I asked Parker if she had seen any trace of my boys when she arrived. All the supplies I had laid in were gone, and the rifle and ammunition and all the water purification kits, gone also, but she said there was nothing to indicate who’d taken them.

  She asked if we’d seen many people on our journey up. A few people digging clams, I answered. A few people fishing, an occasional chimney with smoke coming out. Mostly near towns—Nanaimo, Courtenay/Comox, Campbell River. How about here? Anyone living around here?

  Not that I’ve seen, she answered.

  One day I woke to a loud clatter. I made my way to the kitchen where the noise was coming from and found Leo on his hands and knees, pulling out all the pots and pans from the cupboard under the electrical wall oven. He held up a desiccated mouse by the tail.

  Must’ve been poisoned by Mom, what, thirty years ago.

  What are you doing?

  Glad you’re feeling better.

  Yep.

  I went over to the woodstove and opened the door. The feel of the worn wooden handle in my hand was instantly familiar, like putting on an old shoe. I could picture my parents’ hands holding it as they threw in another chunk of wood and I felt the layers of their grip under mine.

  I looked up and saw, hanging on a hook, the metal rod for lifting the eyes of the woodstove. It was attached by a leather thong, and I thought about the fact that that thong, that thin piece of animal hide, had outlasted two
living, breathing, full-bodied adults, and then I thought how many of the things around me would continue to exist when I was gone, and discovered that was a good feeling.

  Are you okay? my brother asked.

  I nodded and filled the kettle.

  I’m reorganizing the cupboards.

  You’re kidding me.

  No. We’re going to be here for a while, and I thought I might as well get things organized.

  He went outside and tossed the mouse into the bush. Never say people don’t change.

  I woke to the sound of my old guitar and it flooded me with a laughing/crying feeling remembering summers of fun, fun, fun, when everything was still pretty good in my world. The old man was working on the base and Mom would feed us meals whenever we were hungry, leaving Leo and me free to play until the sun set late at night. The days were warm and sunny and harmless.

  I called out to see who was playing. Griffin came into the sunroom. He had found a supply of new strings and replaced the broken ones. I asked him to keep playing. He laughed sheepishly and strummed a few bars of a couple of songs, each time falling away apologetically. How is it I never knew he played so well? Crap uncle.

  I sat up and tried myself. The last thirty years hadn’t exactly loosened up my fingers. I played the opening chords of the first song I made up. Like bees around a flower, Like a dog around a bone, you and I hit puberty, and now we’re on the pho-o-o-ne. I put my arms around you, and planted my first kiss.

  Leo came in from the living room singing, I’ll be coming back for more girl, that’s a thrill I’m gonna miss. I remember that, he said. I thought it was sheer genius. I thought you were going to make a million. Wow.

  It’s good to be here. An eagle called out by the ocean and I heard an echo of my mother’s laugh. The memories are good and the place is beautiful and largely undamaged by the catastrophes. We lost a grove of cedar trees, a small chunk of land eroded into the sea at the north-eastern tip, and the beach is almost gone, but on the plus side, the access to the peninsula from the main island is almost gone too. We’re all glad to be here. Leo and Griffin look more or less relaxed. We all like Parker. Leo and Griffin gave her all our supplies—we had enough to last a couple of months—and put her in charge of doling out the food. Griffin’s going to fish and Parker’s excited about the possibility, with all of us here, of digging up a field and planting crops. She thinks there’s still time in the season.