“Sweetheart,” Mama said, “you’re used to certain things. You’re used to a warm house, and running water, electricity. You take things like that for granted. You don’t have any idea what it would be like, living in a house made out of ice.”
Grandfather laughed. “Kathleen wouldn’t be living in an igloo,” he said.
“Well, then, where would she be living?” Daddy asked. “In that tent you were so excited about?”
“Don’t knock the tent, Nicholas. It’s held up better than this house. No, Kathleen would be staying in the Nain Hotel.” Grandfather became expansive, conjuring up visions of luxury: an outpost of civilization, such as one might read about, in which the guests wore formal attire for dinner, stopping to pick up their mail in a lobby lavish with potted ferns and velvet-covered furniture. In the Nain Hotel, he suggested, one might recline in a tub among scented bath salts, while beyond its walls the tundra extended until the rock gave way to ice, and walruses inched along on their bellies like enormous garden slugs. “A friend of mine owns the place,” he said. “Curtis Hastings, from the Concord branch of the family? You probably know Angela,” he said to Mama.
She nodded her head, even though I felt certain she didn’t know Angela Hastings from a hole in the wall. Grandfather had her pegged: as socially inept as she was, Mama was a climber. Think of how proud she was of the fact that Daddy’s family came over on the Mayflower. Why else did she make me go to that ridiculous ballroom-dancing class, except that there—if anywhere—I could meet the right sort of little ladies and gentlemen?
By the time I went upstairs to bed that night, I’d extracted a promise from our parents that, at least, they would “think about it.” And I knew, from past experience, what that promise meant: it heralded capitulation. I could hardly sleep. One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock—I counted the hours as they struck on the grandfather clock; I listened as a voice swam into the wall behind my head.
“I can tell you about the wind, Kathleen, when it is from the north,” the voice said. It was Rogni.
Traitor, I thought. Go away.
“It is heartless,” Rogni’s voice said, “it makes me tremble. It is her breath. She is breathing on a small green stone, shaping it into something else, polishing it on the hem of her housedress. And she is very patient. She knows that it is just a matter of time before crick crack cree, the walls fall down. She is hateful, Kathleen. Keep your wits about you.”
“But I’ll be with Grandfather,” I whispered. “As long as I’m with Grandfather, I’ll be safe.”
LABRADOR
Listen, we are going to begin. When I am at the end of the story you will know more than you do now, for she was young and inhospitable to the facts about her life—do you think what you have been hearing are facts? If you do, you are wrong, just as you are wrong to think that there is a place called Labrador. So what if you can set the blue globe of the world spinning with your hand, if you can stop it with a simple pressure of your finger, obliterating a town called Nain, a portion of seacoast? Do you really know that there is such a place as Labrador? Have you ever been there? Have you ever seen the harbor water turn red; the sun filling the dent between two black mountain peaks with liquid? Have you ever ridden in a trap boat back with Zoar, watching the phosphorescent disks of tiny sea creatures revolving in your wake, while across the sky the northern lights erect their blue-and-green fences? Have you ever tasted seal meat?
Once upon a time, a young girl traveled to a place called Labrador in the company of her paternal grandfather. She was not yet fifteen years old, tall and ungainly in the manner of certain large birds when landbound, strutting across wide beaches—if she’d possessed the potential for flight, she might have been considered beautiful. Her eyes were wide-set and intelligent; even with her perpetual slouch, it was impossible to overlook her gravity, that quality without which flight would be meaningless. The old man loved her. He did not think, until he met her, that his blood had managed to find its way into anything worthy of being called kin. He was a romantic old man and, consequently, single-minded. He was, in fact, a kind of demon—a low order of that form, to be sure, but a demon nonetheless. These are the ones which we have all encountered, masquerading as toys, pinching our fingers in their metal joints, rolling their eyes, unbidden, from the recesses of our closets. They are the ones we will not let out of our sight, contributing to our parents’ belief that we love them above all our other possessions.
Of course, the young girl did not know this. She had been warned, years earlier, that the world is filled with traps, but she was haughty in the way of most misfits, and skeptical, as well, that she might snag on anything so random in its intention. And so she rode along beside her grandfather, looking out through the windows of his black truck, watching the unfamiliar seep into the landscape—those gray, fishy shores, for instance, of the Bay of Fundy, where a middle-aged woman in a tartan-plaid shawl walked bent over a metal detector, slowly, slowly, as if in the act of vacuuming up all the sand. The young girl was dreaming about the future. At least, this is what she thought she was doing. She didn’t know then that what she was really dreaming about was her sister, because she thought she had left her sister behind. She thought that her sister had betrayed her, that she had wandered into the dark and sexual folds of a forest, without so much as one backward glance.
And, indeed, if the truck had not been moving so quickly, she might have seen the woman in the tartan-plaid shawl suddenly stop and get down on her hands and knees, digging in the damp sand; she might have seen that woman reach into a hole and pull out a miniature shape cast in silver—a miniature dancing woman, a treasure from Ceylon lost in the wreck of the trade ship Persiflage, over one hundred years ago.
If this had happened, our story would have ended right there—it is not as if the young girl could have ignored such an artifact’s emergence. But by the time the woman dug up the dancer, the young girl was far away, sitting by a fire. She was watching the bearded shells of mussels swing open on their hinges, revealing, inside, the pearly flesh, speckled with sand. Her grandfather ate greedily. Juice dribbled out of his mouth, dribbled through the stubble on his chin. He asked her if she believed in love at first sight, and she told him that she did; we might assume that they had this belief in common, if we were not aware of the fact that he was speaking of love between a man and a woman, whereas she was thinking of the first memory she had of her sister’s face. The moon shot up into the air like a clay pigeon and stuck there. Out came the stars, larger and brighter than she had ever seen them, so that it was possible for her to accept the existence of other lives, hitched in unimaginable ways to spinning worlds.
The seawater, as they drove up the coast, was warm and strangely clear. The old man explained that this was because it was the Time of Change: that time when the wind shifted from east to west, and the whole ocean assumed a transparency, showing off the terrible deeps in which fins flashed and toothed mouths swung open, swallowing whole schools of tiny rainbow-colored fish in a single gulp. Sailors, he told her, had been known to leap from their ships, tricked by visions of wrecked galleons, enticed by the hope of scooping up sunken jewels and gold pieces, as if such riches were at arm’s length, and not miles below on the sea floor.
As they traveled, the young girl was happy. She wrote letters home, in accordance with her mother’s instructions. She enjoyed the idea that she might be shocking her parents; she imagined them passing her letters back and forth.
One morning she woke earlier than her grandfather; the mist lifted its wet body off of the sand, uncovering the rough grass of the dunes, sharp as knives and coated with frost. She slid out of her sleeping bag and stood like a young giantess—like famous Anna Swan, the Giantess of Tatamagouche, whose wedding dress had been a special gift from Queen Victoria, a woman who took pleasure in discrepancies of scale—stretching and yawning. As she stood there, a female cormorant flew from her nest of seaweed and landed, in the upright and military posture chara
cteristic of her breed, on a rock beside the young girl. She was very proud of her plumage, running the tip of her beak down through her black chest feathers. “To look at me,” she said, “you would never take me for a grandmother. How the little ones love me! They bring me the smallest, choicest fish, wriggling in their beaks. My son is the bravest one of all. He flies far up the coast, where the only trees that grow are no bigger than your finger, where the whole ocean freezes, and the men go hunting on the ice for seals and walruses. It is a dangerous place, Mother, he tells me. There are bears there that walk on their hind legs, like humans. You would not like it there: every day the old women put on their mourning clothes and weep in their houses, until their tears melt the ice. Then it is spring and the ice cracks open. The cracks are so deep you can see all the way down to hell, where the young devils play with the bones of the dead hunters; they think they are their dolls. The flowers of the cloudberries bloom on the mountains, like small white stars, and they are the souls of the dead hunters.”
Then a fish jumped up, all at once, from out of the water beyond the breakers, and the old bird’s eyes grew sharp and alert. “You must pardon me, my dear,” she said. “The little ones are off amusing themselves, forgetting that their poor grandmother is hungry.” As the girl watched, the cormorant took flight, her curved wings shining in the first light of the sun.
Why, that is where I am going, the girl thought, and she imagined falling in love with one of those hunters—the strongest and the most handsome—so that in time her life would be given the perfect, lucent shape of bereavement. How the people she had known back home would envy her white, sorrowful face! How they would speculate, among themselves, about the hidden sources of her sorrow!
The farther north they traveled, the more involved the young girl became in anticipating her destiny. If her anticipation made her shiver, she was able, at least, to warm her hands and face every night over the huge fires of driftwood the old man built. On one such night, after they had pitched their tent on a promontory called Cow Head, a furious wind flew down at them, blowing through the grommet holes of the tent fly, transforming itself into the high-pitched wailing of a ghost cow, into whose forehead they’d driven their pegs. The old man was in a melancholy humor, filling and refilling his cup with whiskey, reminding the young girl, as a smooth pole smoked and burst into flames, that it was a ship’s spar—that they took their comfort from the misfortunes of others.
But she remained oblivious to this information: in a sled, with the hunter’s hard arm around her shoulders, she rode behind a pack of dogs through a field of radiant snow, while above her head the stars circulated in their whorls of light. When the hunter turned to kiss her, she discovered that there was another star, wildly spinning at the base of her spine.
Is it possible to infect the air with one’s private dreams of erotic intention? Certainly they are very powerful; perhaps it is for this reason we are warned against them by those among us who have chosen God’s love, which is chaste and immutable, as their fate. For whatever reason, it was on that night that the old man told the story of the first time he met the woman named Bella: how she had picked him up, like a sack of potatoes, to carry him from the bar where she found him, and dumped him on the floor of her shack. As he described it, she had removed all his clothing and smeared his body with red hematite. This is the substance with which archaeologists find the bodies of the dead smeared in late-archaic burials. It is compounded of pigment and bear grease—it makes the body appear to shine within the grave.
With the perfect seriousness of the confirmed narcissist, the young girl’s grandfather began to enumerate parts of his anatomy: the nipples, the navel, the thighs, the penis. Although the young girl did not realize it, such narcissism is a distinguishing characteristic of the lesser demons. Instead she realized, suddenly, that his hands were dappled with those spots her mother was so afraid of getting—liver spots, they are called—and she thought, Why, he’s just a very old man. I am sitting here at the edge of the world with a very old man who might die at any moment, leaving me with a truck I don’t know how to drive, and a skinny, pathetic corpse to bury in a place apparently without dirt. Indeed, she was very tired, and it occurred to her that maybe he was already dead. Certainly he was obsessed by his narrative, like a ghost.
Meanwhile, far to the north, the town of Nain was assembling itself for their arrival. In the garden kept by the reverend’s wife, outside their tidy rectory, cabbages wrapped themselves in layers of tough leaves, protecting their yellow, foliate hearts from the first snow. Large snowflakes gleamed and then melted on the furry backs of a pack of dogs, snarling over a pile of viscera behind Root’s Fried Chicken Shack, crunching the thin bones of pitsulaks—those sea pigeons which Root breaded and sold as chicken—between their jaws, swallowing the slippery gobbets of feather and bone that would, eventually, kill them. As the snow began to accumulate, four brothers strapped rifles over their shoulders and drove on their snowmobiles, down the town’s only road, past the rectory, where the reverend’s wife pulled her curtains closed; past the place behind Root’s shack where, only moments earlier, the dogs had been fighting, leaving the snow dented with paw prints and streaks of blood. They drove across the bridge that led to the gasoline storage tanks, accelerating now, climbing the first of a series of hills that would take them to the interior—hill after hill stretching endlessly northward, into regions where glacial erratics perched at the top of sharp peaks like eyeless heads presiding over the migration of caribou and the quick unknotting of ravens’ bodies into flight. At any moment the snow might thicken into the shape of a carnivore; then, over the sound of their engines, the brothers might hear the rustling sound of panic, the dull fall of a body that signals its transition into meat.
Of course, the young girl was unaware of these things. She and the old man were stuck in a town to the south, waiting for that same storm which adorned, indifferently, the four brothers’ eyelashes and hair with glittering snowflakes, to let up, making passage across the Strait of Belle Isle possible. They stayed in a decrepit hotel; after the daytime succession of hours, through which the young girl had drifted, as if through the rooms of a museum filled with tedious clockwork objects, she lay, at last, on her bed. From downstairs she could hear the swilers—the men who killed seals—laughing as they danced in the purple light of the lounge, sticking their big hands up under the backs of their partners’ mohair sweaters. The sound of their laughter was water rushing into a sea cave; the smell of fish filled the hotel. So the young girl came to understand that she was being lowered, bit by bit, in the orange box of her room to the ocean floor, where her hair streamed out around her head on the pillow, and she was beyond rescue. This was wilderness, believe me, without margin, beautiful and predatory.
The plane which carried the young girl and her grandfather to the town of Nain was bright red; when it touched down, its pontoons sent up wings of frigid water. From their squat, fragile houses the townspeople came to gather around the harbor, to see what the pilot would do, since the dock had detached itself from its moorings during the night and now floated—free at last!—into the open sea.
How did such things happen? The townspeople, it must be admitted, clustering together, turning their faces this way and that as they discussed whether the passengers would be able to get off the plane, found the pilot’s predicament exciting—in the same way they had found it exciting the day the iceberg glided into the harbor, scuttling several trap boats. On that day they could not contain their laughter: the boats were so small, the iceberg so queenly and oblivious, the blue light emanating from its frozen heart so beautiful! Still, it was a lucky thing for the young girl and her grandfather that the Aleekis’ trap boat had not been among the ones destroyed. It would have taken only a single sharp knock: trap boats are delicate in their composition, assembled out of the parts of other boats; they are never named, because they are too unreliable to love.
Now the four Aleeki brothers rode on their bo
at right up to the side of the plane. They were the sons of Appa Aleeki, who had drowned when his snowmobile tumbled into a rattle—one of those places where strong tongues of current lick the icebound sea to mush. All four of the Aleeki brothers were fine to look at, but each of the younger three was flawed in a way impossible to ignore. Obiah was gun-happy, shooting at things which remained invisible to other people’s eyes; Mooli was insane, obsessed with the notion that he would one day become a rock-and-roll star; Ben, the baby, was a thief. Only Jobie, the oldest, was perfect—about this fact the residents of Nain were in agreement, although they kept to themselves the uneasiness they felt in his presence. Even the cold-blooded Bella Tooktasheena, a woman capable, it was claimed, of turning herself into a narwhal, a raven, a walrus—even Bella was a little afraid of him. Perhaps this was because she suspected that one day she might find herself, while not in her human guise, caught in the silver teeth of one of the traps with which Jobie laced the landscape. His genius for concealment was legendary, as was the wealth he had accumulated by selling his furs to flaccid and insatiable dealers from the south.
It was Jobie Aleeki who steered the boat, as his three brothers lounged on the deck like courtesans, charming but useless. And it was Jobie Aleeki who lifted the young girl off the plane: he lifted her into air so cold it made her face turn to crystal, mirroring in its facets Jobie’s dark eyes, the four bone buttons stitched to his cap—three white and one black. Do I have to tell you that she fell in love with him then and there? It was all she could do to keep herself from reaching out and touching the smooth convexity of his cheek, that skin the color of café au lait. On either side of his head she could see the line of the horizon drawing itself across the harbor’s mouth, and she thought it was the first morning of the world. She thought that, and she sighed, because the expression in his eyes remained serious, impassive.
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