The Cave Painter & The Woodcutter

by Don Hannah

  “Simon’s not going to die, is he?”

  “Yes, Ry, he’s going to die.”

  “Shouldn’t he be in the hospital?”

  “They can’t make him better, and he loves us and came home to us.”

  “Can he hear us?”

  “He knows we’re here.”

  But did you? At that point, was that as big a lie as “He’ll be in Heaven soon and watching over us”? Those last days, you were a skeleton on the bed, nothing but bones held together by skin that was falling apart. The only sound a death rattle. When you stopped talking, stopped making Ryan laugh, he got scared. He was still mad at you for Cal, for leaving, but we three were there together in our house. And there was a week, before things took a turn for the worse, when we were very happy.

  Steph and Mom both came, you rallied, rallied so magnificently that all of us thought, “Oh, well, maybe, maybe there will be some sort of miracle.”

  Then you went blind, and everything after that was hell.

  The looming figure fades. There is, for the first time, the sense that she might be in a room in a house.

  In Jericho, neolithic Jericho, nine thousand years ago, or more, they took the skulls of their dead and modelled faces on them with plaster. They used cowrie shells for eyes. I started doing those drawings after you died. One day my dealer phoned from the gallery and said, “I just sold one of your Jericho drawings to a writer who’d really like to meet you.”

  And there he was. Pete.

  With his dark hair, and his dark eyes, and the little mole on the edge of his lip. And a book about archaeology and the creation of gods.

  “This is it, Simon, the love of my life. He’s been to Jericho, worked on a dig there when he was young. He’s researching a piece called ‘The Parking Lot on Top of the Lascaux Cave.’ He fell in love with my work, then he fell in love with me. He loves Peggy Lee as much as we do! And—bonus!—he’s handsome!”

  I know that you and Pete would’ve liked each other. And Pete tried very hard with Ryan, he did. Teaching him to drive, helping him with homework and all those late-night conversations, the questions about religion, about who wrote the books of Moses, about the flood and Noah and Gilgamesh, about neolithic Israel and—

  How could Ryan turn on us all? How could he marry into a family that is so damn, so—

  I mean, all of that “we don’t hate the sinner, we hate the sin” business! Sin! Jesus. How could our son believe in sin?

  At Ryan’s wedding, there were so many things I wanted to say.

  “Simon loved you so much. Elaine’s family should know a bit about him.”

  “I want this to be Elaine’s day,” Ryan said, and so I wasn’t allowed to say anything.

  And on Elaine’s Day, which is ostentatious and liquor-free, for everyone except my sister, Steph decides to make amends for all the childhood years when she had ratted me out or teased me. Steph decides that I am being wronged and that she will take a stand on my behalf.

  We’d almost made it through the damn thing. The bride and groom had already left, I thought we were home free. But then Steph overhears Ryan’s new sister-in-law talking about government subsidies for the arts. “At times like these, we should only support what’s reallyreally useful.”

  “So you don’t think the arts are useful?” says Steph.

  “I imagine that certain things are quite enjoyable for some people, but how much of it is actually necessary?” And then, “After all, we can’t get government support for all the work we do at Right to Life.”

  And Pete says, “I think we should get your mother back to the hotel.”

  And Steph says, “You want to know what I think contributes little that’s ‘reallyreally useful’?”

  And I think, “Oh Jesus no.”

  And Miss Prissy Pants goes, “And what would that be?”

  “People who sanctimoniously impose their beliefs on others.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, people who oppose women’s health issues, who preach abstinence, who talk endlessly about the sanctity of heterosexual marriage as if Jesus Christ had come back from the dead solely to support it, and then think nothing of spending twenty-five hundred dollars on a white wedding dress so that we can all pretend that a young woman who we all know to be three months’ pregnant is still a virgin!”

  Thanks, Steph.

  Thanks for that.

  She’s poking around again. She will find a few unetched copper plates.

  I gave them a drawing. When they got married. Pete and I gave them money, of course, and Grammy’s silver, but I wanted to give them something from me. One of the Jericho drawings—cowrie-shell eyes.

  Something else for Elaine to stick in that box marked “Not In My House.”

  A small sample of what she does have in her house.

  The laminated poster in the guest room. It’s a picture of the top of a table, and on the table, a piece of yellowing parchment with curled edges, as if it were a Ye Oldie type note that God has left in his kitchen. It reads, “Dear Son, I have a job for you. All you will need are these. Love Dad.”

  And sitting on the parchment are a big ugly mallet and three crucifixion nails.

  It’s hanging on the wall at the foot of the guest bed so it’s the last thing you see at night, and the first in the morning.

  “All you will need are these. Love Dad.”

  Pete and I just stared at it, stunned, the both of us. I go, “How is this possible? I mean, it’s sadistic and stupid and cute all at the same time.”

  Pete says, “I couldn’t feel more like an unwanted Jew if I was staying at the Taliban Inn.”

  She puts the plates on the table.

  I once showed Elaine a book of photos of the paintings from Lascaux. I was trying to make her understand why what was happening to that cave had me upset. The images meant nothing to her. The great bulls, the swimming deer. She was sitting at the table, leafing through the book, one beautiful image after another passing meaninglessly before her eyes. Then she closed it, kind of shrugged apologetically, “I really don’t understand modern art.”

  She is looking about. She sees a can of Silvo and goes to pick it up. Stops.

  Not all that long after the war, seventeen hundred people are tromping through the cave every day. But, fairly soon, it becomes obvious that this parade of carbon dioxide is probably what’s creating the mould that’s creeping over the animals on the walls, so, after a couple of decades, access is restricted.

  But the town of Lascaux suddenly can’t live without that new tourist money. So they build a duplicate cave next door, a plastic replica, and then they pave over the top of the real cave so the tourists will have some place to park their damn cars.

  And the real Lascaux, with its hot asphalt roof, what do they do with the poor, sick cave? Seal it off from the rest of the world, install air conditioning, and so the cave itself stops breathing, Lascaux stops being a living thing. It’s not a cave anymore, it’s more like a climate-controlled building where you can’t open the windows. It’s like the hospital where Steph went for knee surgery, this sick building that recirculates its own dead air. Poor Steph is suddenly sick with some strange illness. “We have no idea what happened to your sister, she seemed fine last night.” And then she’s sicker, and then…

  DIANNE is alone in the darkness.

  And then she’s dead. Suddenly she’s dead.

  She didn’t even take the surgery all that seriously. But then, it wasn’t the surgery that was the problem: it was the hospital itself, the fucking building. The week before, we were in her garden, she was hobbling around with a crutch, “It’ll be good to get back to normal,” she said. And then she was dead.

  And I just keep thinking about the time we made guitars out of cardboard boxes, Steph and me, and called ourselves the Beatlemaniacs, and practi
sed lip-synching, “I Want To Hold Your Hand” and “Do You Want To Know A Secret,” and we both wanted to be John but I won ’cause I was bossier. And while I cry, Pete holds me. He’s so tender, and so great to Mom through it all, poor Mom, who was just starting to enter her bewilderment.

  Ryan and Elaine sent me this sympathy card. “Jesus embraces you in your sorrow,” it says, “Blessed reunions in Heaven tomorrow.”

  “Here’s comfort,” I said, holding it out to Pete.

  “A card?” he says. “His only aunt dies and he sends you a card? He better be a helluva lot more thoughtful to your mother.”

  She goes to the table and begins to clean the copper plates.

  But Ryan has always been kind to Mom. No matter where he was with me or Steph, he has always, always been wonderful to his grandmother. He was so helpful after she moved up here to be nearer to us. The bad winter—the winter he was seventeen and Pete and I could do nothing right, nothing—when he moved into Mom’s apartment, he was polite as could be—didn’t play that crappy Christian rock full tilt at her place. And she adored him, her only grandchild. Elaine, she wasn’t so wild over. “It’s a phase,” she said, “all this Jesus business, he’ll grow out of it.” But when he didn’t, she was bigger than we were. When she went to visit the newlyweds, it’s off with them to church. Then, reading Bible stories to her great-granddaughters. And when the girls were older, she loved being part of their home school, helping Elaine teach them letters and numbers. She doted on them until she started to get confused, calling them Dianne and Stephanie instead of Martha and Maggie. Started calling Ryan “Ross” as if he were no longer her grandson, but the brother who had died while she was still back in New Brunswick. She moved out of chronological time.

  And she was leaving the burners on, and forgetting that she didn’t live in New Brunswick anymore. She got lost on her own street. Then it’s all downhill; she’s incontinent and forgetting to get dressed and eating with her fingers and saying, “Can you tell me what my name is? I can’t seem to remember. I know I have a name, don’t I?”

  “It’s just you and me now,” I tell Pete. “Nearly everybody else appears to be either crazy or dead.”

  And he says, “Don’t you long for the good old days when it was God who was dead?”

  “It’s so unfair,” I say. “I’m starting to feel like Job. I don’t see how things could get much worse.”

  Which was a stupid thing to say ’cause things can always get worse; they can always get lots worse.

  Especially when people start sending you the words of Christ written in red.

  She has picked up some of the torn, crumpled Bible pages to polish the plates.

  When we all first saw Martha—tiny, hours old—Steph said it first: “She looks like Dad,” and we were so delighted, like it was some kind of miraculous trick. As if our genes were trumping Elaine’s, somehow, and this baby was mostly from our side.

  But then, before her first birthday, things become complicated because somehow she also seems to look like Elaine’s mother. Everyone on their side says so. How can that be? I’ve seen pictures—the woman looked like a moose. Is it because we all need this baby to connect the living and the dead?

  And after Steph died and little Maggie was born, there was my sister, magically brought back. And I suppose this is how reincarnation first got started, “Oh look, she’s come back to us from the dead. I’d know those eyes of hers anywhere.”

  Now that it’s happened, I can’t imagine not being a grandmother. I’m determined to make this work. I’m not thrilled that Ryan’s bought into Elaine’s idea of religion, but who am I to judge? I say to Pete, “I have to work within all of that. When I go visit, it won’t kill me to go to church every now and then.”

  “Okay,” he says. “We’ll do it.” He calls Maggie and Martha his M&Ms, “How are my sweet little M&Ms?”

  The first time we went, the minister greets us from the pulpit, which I could have done without, but the welcome was genuine. It’s clear that everyone there adores Ryan. “You must be so proud of your son,” people say to me over and over. I’m told how he works tirelessly on committees, how he organizes things for kids, he’s in charge of fundraising for a new roof, he’s straightened out the books, he’s just a godsend.

  He belongs there. Like Dad at the Lions Club. He’s so content. He and Elaine seem so content.

  He has a wonderful singing voice. I’m standing beside him, we’re all singing “What a Friend We Have In Jesus,” and I hadn’t heard him sing since his voice broke. He and Simon used to sing. “Baby Beluga” and “Que Sera, Sera” and “Fever” and “Stormy Weather.” Instead of “gloom and misery” they used to sing “booze and grizzlies everywhere, stormy weather.”

  And so things seemed to be going along okay. I mean, Steph was dead and Mom was losing her mind, but Pete and I were great, and we had found a way to work things out with Ryan and his family. I’d found a way to be a grandmother.

  I started working on drawings for a new series of prints when I first saw pictures of the skull from Teshik-Tash. A child, a Neanderthal, nine or so years old. Boy or girl, we can’t be certain, except I think of him as a boy, the little Neanderthal boy. There’s something so compelling: seventy thousand years ago, a child lived for nine years. Here is the evidence.

  I’d always been interested in them because they weren’t us, Neanderthals, they weren’t quite human. Did they have a language, worship gods? Why did they disappear? Was it climate? Was it us? Genocide, cannibalism? Or did we simply breed with them until they were no more?

  His skull is a jigsaw puzzle; it had been broken into a hundred pieces by the weight of time. He would’ve had a big nose, they all had big noses. The Neanderthal brow and weak chin.

  And both upper and lower teeth that had not yet erupted. They seem so hopeful, those teeth, invisible when the boy was living. Waiting, unaware beneath the surface. An unfulfilled promise.

  I start filling sketchbooks with drawings. Not sure where I’m going with them, I’m trying to understand the ache that he makes inside of me, the little Neanderthal boy.

  Then, surprise, surprise, Elaine called. “Would you and Peter like to come and look after the girls?” Ryan was at a church retreat and she wanted to see her father, who wasn’t well.

  Pete says he can’t do it. “My agent’s breathing down my neck.”

  “You are a martyr to deadlines.”

  “I am. I’m a martyr to martyrdom.”

  I hadn’t said anything, but I was so looking forward to the day when that damn martyr book would finally be in its editor’s hands. Jewish martyrs, Christian martyrs, Muslim martyrs. You’re so obsessed with them, and it’s all important and fascinating, God knows, but they just depressed the hell out of me. Sana’a Mehaidli, the teenage suicide bomber, driving her car full of TNT into a convoy of Israeli soldiers. Seventeen and beautiful and idealistic—“the Bride of the South”—sacrificing herself and in so doing making everything worse for absolutely everybody.

  “So you can’t come and play with the M&Ms.”

  Oh, but if only you had.

  I’m exotic to Maggie and Martha, I know that, and I’m not freakish, the way I think I used to be to their mother. They like hearing stories about their father. I’m careful in what I say. I know there are things about the way we lived when he was growing up that Ryan would not want them to know about yet.

  They love the silver necklace Simon made for me, with Ryan’s baby teeth for pearls.

  They laugh when I tell them the wrong words that their father used to sing to “Stormy Weather.” And we all go, (sings) “Booze and grizzles everywhere, stormy weather.”

  Maggie says, “Grammy, how old are you?”

  “That’s rude,” says Martha.

  “No, it’s not, really. She’s just curious,” I say. “When you were born, I was fifty-four years old. So
how old am I now?”

  They can’t believe I’m so old.

  We’ve been making marks in the dirt with sticks. I draw two lines, a little one, a foot long, another about seven feet. “The little line is how long you’ve been living,” I say, “and the big line is me.” (indicates this on the floor) “This is when I was born, this is when I went to school, this is when your father was born, this is when your great-grampy died, this is when I met Pete, and this is when Martha was born, and Maggie.”

  “How long will they be?” Maggie asks. “The lines?”

  “No one can tell,” I say.

  We paint with fingerpaints, we make collages. We laugh, and they ask so many questions.

  Martha says, “Are you in the computer?”

  “Google me.”

  But they don’t use Google, they have a Christian search engine, and, of course, there’s no reference to me on it whatsoever.

  I figure out a way to bypass the filters Ryan and Elaine have set up. We look at the slideshow on my gallery’s website.

  Martha goes, “Why do you draw teeth so much?”

  I tell her I think they’re beautiful, and they last so long. “Like bones,” I say. “Our teeth are the part of our skeletons that we can see.”

  “Euw,” she goes, shivers and giggles.

  I tell them I like fossils because I’m an old fossil myself. That we are the living fossils of our ancestors. I tell them that scientists can study old teeth and figure out what people used to eat, how they used to live.

  Maggie asks me if teeth and bones can tell scientists the skeletons’ names.

  “No,” I say, “but wouldn’t it be wonderful if they could?”

  Then I tell them that drawing old bones, using them to make marks on a page, is my way of studying them.

  Martha says, “What do you want to learn when you study them, Grammy?”

  She can be so serious.

  “I guess I’m trying to understand what it means to be human.”

  And then I tell them about the little Neanderthal boy. We look at pictures of his skull, we go through my sketchbook. There’s a small map of Teshik-Tash.