The man was laughing. “Bugger,” he said. “My buddy lost his boot in a sinkhole of mud. Smelled like hot springs. He’s got a wet foot and I told him to keep his boots on. Who needs that stink?”
Then there was silence again, punctuated by laughter.
“A clean shot, my buddy thought … But it must have missed the bone, went sailing out into the air. Could that buck run. Holy fuck, I never saw anything like that, a real buck Olympics. Right over the fence.”
Silence as the person on the other end talked.
“ … the white flag down. A smart bugger. ‘Where’d he go?’ my buddy says. ‘Too much beer for breakfast,’ I says. Then we see him bounding across the field, making a flying leap into the willows around a slough. ‘We got him,’ I says, but to be safe we came from two different direction.”
More silence.
“I says, ‘Don’t you shoot me by accident.’ Watch where you aim.”
A story was being told on the other end, she could tell, because the man on the phone cradled the phone on his shoulder as he scratched his neck with pleasure. He was grinning.
“How’re you going to get them out of the bush?” he asked. “Better not run into the law. No law shit up there. Maybe we’ll head up next weekend.”
The back and forth of conversation continued.
“Hey, raise a cold one for me, buddy. I could use a bit of your luck.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We slid off the road. Had to move over for a big truckload of Indians. The buck on the roof should give us traction but my buddy’s tires are pieces of shit. City road shit.”
More silence, then he was back to telling the story of the kill.
“Yeah. I told my buddy, ‘Don’t just aim and fire. I’m coming in from the other side. We’ll get him. All it takes is patience.’ And there he was, hiding his head in the willows. Smart bugger. But we flushed him out and his head’s going to look real good on my wall.”
The man in the boots sitting at her table was following along even though he, too, couldn’t hear the other half of the conversation. He was grinning, and even pointed his finger at the man on the phone and narrowed one eye as though he was aiming a gun when he was describing for the third time how they surrounded the buck hiding in the willows.
“Then we got him, clean. He was all worn out and fell on the spot. A clean shot. Didn’t even bleed that much.”
Then suddenly, the conversation was over and the man on the phone looked at her and said, “Barb?”
She was shocked. How did he know her name?
He held the phone out to her and she hesitated, then moved into the kitchen, aware of the man sitting at the kitchen table, his eyes level with her breasts.
SHE TOOK THE PHONE, trying to avoid touching the man’s hand. The phone was warm against her ear, making her feel a bit queasy.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Barb. You’ve got some excitement there, don’t you?”
“Norman! Where are you? Are these guys friends of yours?”
“No. No, Barb. Just the fellowship of hunters.”
“Are you coming home?”
“No, Barb. I’m calling from a gas station. We walked half the night and spent the other half sitting in the doorway, waiting for someone to show up. When we got back to the truck last night, all the tires were flat. Someone slashed them, way out here, in the middle of nowhere. It’s the strangest thing. And we had three deer—two does and a buck. Over our limit, I know, but what a day it was, until the truck. We had to hide one in the forest, under some brush. Maybe we’ll get back … ”
She cut this off, this story that had nothing to do with her situation right now, at that very moment.
“The garage doesn’t answer here. And Harold wouldn’t come. He wouldn’t help.”
“Harold’s a jerk.”
“That may be true, but I have a kitchen full of strangers with guns.”
Too late she realized that they were listening to her end of the conversation. Norman seemed to know this before she did because his voice was suddenly warning, low, as though coaxing a bear to back off and let them go. That had happened once, when they were walking through the poplar forest near the community pasture. A bear came out of nowhere and he put himself in front of her and Maya, talked slowly, carefully to the bear. The bear snuffled from side to side, sending whiffs of its oily fur to her, so that it seemed to be even closer. Then it moved over to a tree, stretched to its full length and clawed the bark. She had wanted to run, but Norman continued talking gently, slowly, as though trying to hypnotise the bear to turn away.
“Listen carefully, Barb. Smile and give them some food. They’re cranky with the hunting, the high of the kill, then the frustration of sliding off the road. Things can happen at a time like that. So smile and give them some coffee.”
“You want me to play happy hostess?” she almost spit this at him as quietly as she could.
“Careful, Barb. Don’t let them see your fear. Or your resentment.”
“A little late for that.”
“You can do this. You can smile as you’re talking to me. You can send them the message that I’m welcoming them into my home. That I’m there even though I’m not.”
She was silent now, considering, her eyes surveying the kitchen, the lump in her throat rising when she saw that they had taken in everything that she’d said. The tall one was looking down, avoiding her eyes, but the short one was sitting at her table with his boots on, legs splayed so that she could see dark bloody stains on the thighs of his jeans. He was watching her, almost sneering. His hand was resting palm up on the table, the illusion of ease. But she could feel something in him coiled tight, ready to spring. She looked away and concentrated again on Norman’s voice coaxing her, cajoling, intimate in her ear.
“Smile. Pretend I’m telling you about the first doe I shot. Give them something to eat. Listen to me. Don’t talk, just listen.”
Persephone Without Maps
THESE ARE THE FIRST bright days of fall, when the light suddenly reaches the ground without interference—theatrical light, just right for the costumes I can see through the windows of Jonah’s school bus. Excited voices seem to suddenly escalate as the bus pulls to a stop. There are bobbing witches’ hats, smiling green faces, plastic scythes held high. A hand scratches the steamy glass wearing some long-nailed contraption.
Jonah starts down the steps with a big smile on his face. The gauze bandages I wrapped around him this morning, and toilet paper once we had used up all the bandages in the house, have drifted down like a spare tire around his middle. He reaches down and jacks his costume up further on his hips so his legs can reach the distance from the last step to the ground. He shakes the jack-o-lantern wand at me, the one he insisted a mummy must have in its hand. I’m impressed he has managed to hang onto it through the excitement of touring the school, class by class, parties and games. I’m delighted the makeshift mummy costume has fared as well as it has.
“My teacher gave me candy,” he says, rooting down into the depths of his shredding costume. I see that he’s unravelling, dragging yards of tattered toilet paper and gauze behind him as he walks, a little grotesque bride. He finds what he’s looking for and shows me candy in the shape of fangs.
“My goodness. Do you eat those or do they eat you?”
He pierces the fangs with his own teeth and discovers that they can stay attached that way, pushing against his lower lip with their fake dripping blood, although I don’t understand another word he says. I catch something about the costumes he’s seen today: dragons and princesses, skeletons, and he takes the fangs out to tell me about the one he liked best.
“Her eyes were in the centre of the painting, and they moved, just like a painting in a scary house.”
“What was the painting?”
“It’s famous. Moaning Lisa.”
I smiled down at him.
Every so often, a short length of toilet paper breaks off the train behind him and is swept awa
y by the wind. We hear the high hysterical laughter of older girls far behind us. I think they must be reacting to his costume, and I’m embarrassed for Jonah. I recognize the pitch of their voices, quivering and wild, keening to respond to all that is masculine and quick to deride all that isn’t masculine enough. The sound of feet rushes up behind us, then Jonah suddenly stops in his tracks, pulled back by a girl’s foot set down hard on his unravelling bandages. More laughter, and I’m about the turn on them when I recognize one of the voices as Norah’s.
I turn and step forward to kiss her on the cheek, but she shies away.
“Hi, Mom,” she says.
The other girl lifts her foot from Jonah’s bandages and he rebounds fully upright as though on an elastic band. He grins up at her foolishly. The girl laughs down at him. She is lithe, breathing lightly and fast, with waist-length shiny dark brown hair, and eyes that are just a little tilted, ending in sharp points. She’s already made the transition to sleek dark clothes that make her appear as nervy and fast as a greyhound. She doesn’t look at me until Norah says her name.
“Mariko and I were just going home to work on our Northwest Passage project.”
The girl looks at me then, as if appraising whether or not I will give her trouble. “Together? I thought you were half done.”
“New idea, Mom.” Norah says. “Wait till you see the pictures.”
“It’ll be dark soon. This isn’t really a good time to do homework. I need you to answer the door and hand out candy while I take Jonah around the block. Your Dad won’t be home till late.”
“I’m a crazy mummy,” Jonah tells Mariko, waving his hands in circles around his head. The girl smiles out of the corner of her mouth, then runs the sharp point of her pink tongue along her upper lip. “I’ve got fangs,” he tells her, lifting the candy teeth, holding them close to her face.
She says, “Ooooh. I’m scared.”
“We’re going out tonight,” Norah tells me. “We’re going to wear old clothes and be hobos.” She says this with a hint of bravado.
Hobos, always the last costume of childhood, hastily thrown together at the last minute. So I know in my sinking heart that the innocent costumes have come to an end—the bunnies, fairies and butterflies I sewed by hand on the long afternoons when Jonah was a baby. I would have preferred her to open the door to little trick-or-treaters instead of wandering the night with blackened face, living by her wits from danger to danger.
“Then I need you to do door duty early. Come home with us now. Okay?”
The question at the end is new for me too, and I’m relieved when Norah and Mariko do that shuffling inarticulate dance of farewell that adolescents do when they accept the inevitable.
Once Mariko is out of earshot, Norah sounds more like the eager child she’s always been. And she looks lighter on her feet, pixieish with her small pointed ears so receptive they poke out of her dark fine hair. She’s talking excitedly.
“She told us there was a ghost downtown. There were burn marks on the walls and windows were cracked. Things were flying around.”
“What are you talking about, Norah?”
“The ghost.”
“Were you watching a movie?”
“No. It happened, it really happened, and the police have pictures. They came in the middle of the night and things were still flying around. It was in the newspaper.”
“What newspaper?”
“ The National Enquirer. Last year.”
“Oh, well. That’s not the most reputable source, Norah.”
“But the police have pictures! And Mariko brought a Ouija board to school and we asked if the ghost was real and it said yes. And we asked it if … ”
“Did your teacher know you were playing with a Ouija board?”
Norah grows suddenly quiet.
“She didn’t know, did she?”
“No.”
“Where were you?”
“In the washroom. At lunch time. We were allowed to stay in to help with the parties in the little kids’ classes.”
“Some help,” I say. “Listen to me, Ouija boards are dangerous. They’re part of a whole underworld of dark thoughts. You can get lost in that and never come back. And you’ll scare younger kids half to death. Do you understand me?”
With some surprise, I realize these words are my mother’s, delivered to me in the same tone of voice when I was exactly Norah’s age. She’s defensive now, carefully choosing her next words.
“She only let her friends play with it. We wouldn’t let the little kids see.”
This is the first I’ve heard of this particular friendship. Her name, Mariko, although unusual, sounds vaguely familiar. I remember something unsettling is associated with the name, but I’ve forgotten what it is.
“Do her parents let her take things like Ouija boards to school?”
“Her Dad died. And maybe it’s not such a big deal to her mother. She has more important things to worry about,” Norah says, very worldly. She’s picked up the tone of my voice. She’s not going to offer anything more. So I stop talking as we approach our driveway. I’ve grown wary too, and it’s a shock that all this change arrived so suddenly on a walk home from the bus stop.
The front lawn has a new dead spot that seems to be growing night by night. My neighbours’ lawns, too, have these round lunar patches of disturbed earth. It looks as though someone has been digging with a small shovel, flipping over grass, exposing the roots. Sometimes the crows are still here, hopping from place to place, turning over the sod even as we reach our property line but today they’ve retreated to the treetops where they caw and taunt each other. I turn saucer-sized clumps back into place and step on them with my shoe.
“These grubs are getting worse.”
“Grubs?” Norah asks, scooting over and flipping the grass I’ve just pressed into place. “What do they look like?”
She’s digging with her slender fingers into the cold dirt.
“They bury themselves deep in the ground. Fat white things curled like shrimp. They eat away the roots of the grass. And the crows come down and eat them in turn. Winter should kill them off.”
“Wicked,” Norah says, another change. A year ago she would have recoiled from anything slimy and ravenous.
Norah hangs around and helps me carve the pumpkin. I’m conscious of the sweet musky smell as we lift the lid, but she dives right in with her two hands. Norah scoops out the seeds like frog spawn, slippery and cool where they cling, wet, to the walls. But the flesh hums with an underground energy when we dig down into the pulp.
“Yuck. It’s like the inside of a cold body,” she says, obviously not too revolted. I see her slipping one seed into her mouth, chewing, then spitting out the hull.
I know just what she means. Norah was born by Caesarian section and I can’t rake my fingernails through the slimy pulp of a jack-o-lantern without remembering what it was like to be scooped out like that, to be empty and sutured up in a tight line of pain. This year, she does most of the scraping. I get out an art book and we carve the jack-o-lantern to look like Edvard Munch’s The Scream—a horrified stretched mouth and eyes that are long, panic-stricken holes letting out the light.
“Cool, Mom. This is our best pumpkin yet.”
As I’m cleaning up I ask her, “Did you finish mapping the explorers’ routes?”
“I’m not doing that anymore. What’s the point? All those stupid men looking for something they’ll never find. Has anyone ever made it through the Northwest Passage?”
“No, I don’t think so. That was a dead end. And will be at least until global warming makes it a possibility. Maybe in your lifetime. Maps of the future could change more than they have since they said dragons past this point.”
“Did they really say that?”
“Yes, so you can see why most people would say they were incredibly brave—to head out like that without knowing where they were going.”
“But that was the problem. They wanted the new
world to be like the old one. Franklin’s men went crazy dragging their silverware behind them in a lifeboat. Who needs silverware in the Arctic?”
“Maybe when you’re in such an alien place, and it’s so hopeless, you need the familiar more than the practical,” I say, amazed that we’re even having a conversation this sophisticated. She’s still too young to feel pity, yet she’s old enough to ridicule the misfortune of adults, thinking that they are somehow marked for it.
“Mariko told me that the Franklin expedition was poisoned by lead in the tin cans for their food. The officers had the best food, so they went crazy first. The last ones alive had to eat each other. There were knife marks on their leg bones, from silverware.” And she laughs in a new way, a suppressed snuffle of cynicism.
She fishes a book out of her bag. I see the title quickly, Frozen in Time, but I jump when she flashes the first photo of a corpse before my eyes.
“My God, Norah, you could have warned me.” It’s a photo of a young man tied down in a narrow coffin, a kerchief wrapped tight under his chin, yet the lips are curled back in a snarl, the eyes are half open, the irises icy disks of milky blue with no pupils. His big toes are tied together, the hands tied by strips of cloth knotted around his body at knees and hips. Even though he looks as though he could spring dangerously to life, his hands are heartbreaking in their slenderness.
“This is John Torrington.” She flips through the book. “And this is John Hartnell,” but I’ve turned away after one glimpse of that eyeless socket.
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