by Dave Godfrey
It has been, so far, an unusual voyage but not bizarre.
Relying upon childhood memories of a far more southerly portion of Manitoba, I had blind-guided Nye, a fellow trumpet player and sojourner in Iowa, a veteran of African campaigns, on a long, long trip up beyond the 55th parallel, beyond Snow Lake, beyond the cessation of roads, to the inlet of Little Herbe Lake, to a perfect, marshy river mouth, untrampled by even one other hunter, and as fat with ducks as is a Christmas cake with sweet rinds. It was almost too good a spot, the kind one should visit once and then leave, letting its memory remain to alter and modify your impression of later places both mediocre and uncommon.
So we did only visit it once. It was no regular trip up Little Herbe, and we had progressed as much by intuition as by map-knowledge. We came back down below the 55th (and thus south of the early season), to wait for our one afternoon of regular-season hunting. Off a rock ledge, in deep, clean water we did get some pike; and we thought we might get some Canadas. At nightfall we could hear them, high, high overhead.
Down off the road from Flin Flon to the Pas, we found a suitably ugly lake, with a harsh, muddy, cat-tail shore, and spent the morning getting our gear through the two hundred yards of shore mud and crossing the lake. Shooting opened at noon; we had a good afternoon, and set off back across the lake.
I’m not sure why the boat was so loaded. Whether we were afraid of theft or had developed a possible plan of spending the night on the far shore and then driving night and day back to Iowa. But loaded it was. I was scanning the shore with Nye’s monocular, looking for a break in the shore mud, when I realized that the waves we had been moving through had slowly been attacking us, gently but progressively spilling over the bow, sloshing into the bottom of the boat beneath its mask of gear. I moved back as soon as I could get my legs untangled, but it was too late. We had made our mistake.
I must have scrambled, because the monocular never showed up, but I don’t remember being frightened. Nye responded to some pre-imagined plan and freed the motor before we swamped. I stated that we were in trouble, but I was only thinking of wet-clothes trouble, not of the aglaecean, hungry water-monsters with which in childhood old trappers frightened me. No mile-long pike troubled me.
I watched our bobbing gear spread out and move ridiculously towards shore, and that expressed our destination. Never leave the boat. We would hang on, and kick behind its stern — our camouflaged, water-heavy, turtle board. But first we had to rock as much water out as possible, and it was on the recoil from one of these foundationless heaves, pushing against the elements that melt away, that I hit the Leacock bottom of that muddy, ugly lake. It oozed beneath me, an ooze of treacle and slushy cement. Which did frighten me. I thought of sinking-sand. And I laughed, rather loudly. Once I had my footing.
Nye turned full-face to me. And I saw, laughing, thinking really only of Lake Wissanotti, that Nye was truly frightened. The aglaecean were taking teeth-sharp bites at him. I remembered then, back in Iowa, his wife bending across to warn me that Nye’s response to penicillin was lost in the war, that for him pneumonia could have no sure cure. And he had his hip boots on still, ready for the shore mud, not for this quick calamity. Or say that the German mine was finally tripped beneath his ambulance still rambling across the Sahara, and, wounded and thirst-wracked, he could see the whole muddy lake as no other than a tongue-split mirage.
“Hey, hey,” I said. “Bottom. It’s the old muddy bottom. Get out the bread-balls and we can bob for suckers.”
A mile from shore, we were only neck-deep from bottom. And he laughed too, letting go. Welcoming the mud.
We became surface-floaters again. Collected some of our decoys and protective clothing. Spread by the waves, and soggy, it had lost some of its absurdity; still we let much of it go. We turned down the chance to practice an enforced economy; we dried the gear in the sun and by a fire and slept dry.
Nye knew his Thoreau better than I. “Minks and muskrats,” he mumbled. “We go from the desperate city into the desperate country and console ourselves with the bravery of minks and muskrats.”
In the early morning, long before sunrise, there was a single shot.
“Poachers,” said Nye, mocking my Englishness.
“Somebody who really lives here,” said I. “Probably that old Indian who bummed the smokes. Potting a fat hen for Sunday dinner.” Said I from my arcticdown, mocking something else, something to do with my own sense of most questionable survival. Was it not my true ancestor who had fired the single shot?
It is one of the strangenesses of youth that you can treat a specific chance of death with no more care than you’d give to your old Dinky Toy, that one-inch, green-camouflaged, British Army troop lorry.
Out in Chinguacousy
He left Shad lumbering around outside in the top field while he went into the kitchen to greet his cousin Albert.
The hearth was bricked-in and the room smelled of oil heat.
“Not much going or I’d go out with you,” Albert said. “Might try back near the tracks though.”
Albert had the Star spread out on the kitchen table and was exploring the latest adventures of Colonel Canyon.
He felt there was something he should say to Albert this day, but it was winter and there were no crops to comment upon, and his cousin just sat there reading, with his hair rank over his forehead and the blue metal breakfast plate pushed to one side and the blue metal coffee mug glued to the centre of the plate by drying, hardening egg.
“That used to be some house,” he said when he came out and had walked with Shad past the silo and into the far fields.
“It is pretty big.” Shad had a careful and polite manner of expressing himself, which some people mistook for deference but which was really his way of reaching out. I’ve worked myself out of something pretty hard, it said, something which you don’t have to know about but for which you are perhaps partly responsible. Although I won’t mention that responsibility. It’s your word. I’ve paid my dues. I won’t go back. I’m no Bobby Washington; I won’t do anything careless. But I’ll always be careful talking to you. It said all that.
The front part of the house out in Chinguacousy was unpainted: hasn’t seen a paintbrush since the Boer war, as his father used to say. There were no curtains on the side windows, the shades were torn, and you could look straight inside, to mustiness, the falling plaster, trash, rain-stained mattresses. The boards were the colour of long-unpolished silver. Albert lived in the back section, which was low and made of brick. He had burned the ivy off one fall afternoon and the brick was pocked and crumbling, as though it were made of sandstone and not the good clay of the region. There was a C cracked almost into an O on the kitchen window.
“It’s a pretty big house, if you consider both parts,” Shad chose to say. “Has he lived there a long time?”
“Born there. Bred there. Schooled there. He and his father. My great-uncle and his grandfather. And their father before them.”
“You’re lucky to know all that,” Shad said. “About your family. It must be a lot of work to keep a place like that up.”
“Depends on what you’re interested in,” he said. Tritavis. An honourable man knows the great-grandfather of his grandfather.
They went through a grain field that had been partly ploughed under for winter wheat and partly just left to rot. There was a thick aisle of weeds ten feet out along the right fence.
“He’s going to have a field full of tares next year,” Shad said.
“Vetches we call them,” he said. “In case you’re ever out with farmers. Watch that one now.”
The rabbit came out almost at their feet and slipped over to the seeded furrows. He lifted and let it run until it was beyond damage range; hit it; caused its running to cease.
Shad still had the .22 cradled in his arm.
“Better make sure you’re on my side when the riots
start,” he said to Shad. He felt embarrassed with the small, brown body of fur when they reached it and he quickly stuffed it into the bird-fold at the back of his jacket. He put in a new shell. The lightest of bird shot.
“We’ll clean it at the car,” he said.
They went over one of Albert’s fences: old cedar rails, straightened from their former snaking flow, with a single strand of barbed wire running along the top rail.
“I guess you have to shoot them in the back,” Shad said.
“Back? Ass is the word. Sometimes they run towards you. Not often. Or circle. Or cut in one direction. Mostly it’s just straight away from your danger.”
“You want to do it at this fence?”
“Coming back; if you’re still certain. People are usually careful going out.”
“It seems funny, but I don’t think there’s another way. But I’d rather do it myself.”
“It’ll look a lot less suspicious if I do it.”
They hunted.
At the same fence, coming back, with four rabbits weighing down his jacket, he prepared himself to break the rules, the hard, the long-learned, the defensive and inbred rules. But it was still awkward and not easy. He sent Shad over first and passed him one gun. Then he pushed the safety off on the Beretta and flung one leg up on a rail and then the other leg, balancing, and tipped the barrel over the single strand of barbed wire, while Shad stood there passively, almost ready to laugh; and then awkwardly, when the barrel swung downwards, holding the gun as far from the earth as he could, calculating the pattern, he jerked the trigger, putting on all the grip he could with his right hand and using his left as a restraining block to keep the barrel aimed true, although the recoil was strong with no shoulder to absorb it and the gun fought to break out of his hands. Then he looked at Shad, who was laughing now.
“That’ll teach you to stay out of my watermelons, boy,” Shad said.
“My line,” he said. “My line.” And laughed out some of his own uneasiness. “Are you okay?”
Shad kicked his foot at any imaginary football “Sure. Should have taken a few extra bennies; but it’s not as bad as cleats. I was thinking of that night Bobby Washington shot the marine. I was expecting something worse.”
“I was too.” But he could not laugh.
He pushed the button on the shotgun and smoke wisped out as it snapped open. He tossed the spent shell on the earth. And he thought of Bobby Washington coming back into that midwest bar after the marine had laughed at him and called him a nigger-girl who didn’t know enough to wear a skirt, and had offered to fight him right there or out in the alley or on the sidewalk. And Bobby walked out and the marine laughed and joked about what a real woman could do for Martin Luther, and strutted a little, until Bobby walked back in with a pistol in his hand and didn’t even call out to the marine but just shot him six times and the marine never even got a chance to turn around and see what was killing him but all six shots entered his body within a small arc circumscribed from the point where a line joining his kidneys would intersect his spinal cord.
The ground was not totally firm beneath him and he thought of those immense dislocations of his youth, when a voyage of five or six miles would make him vomit as the world beyond the bus seemed to fade away into nothingness on all sides. He thought of McNamara sitting on a swivel chair in the Pentagon and answering the questions of the American clergy. “You know, there are two ways to kill a man. You can kill his body, or you can kill his soul. I’d rather kill a few thousand bodies than kill fourteen million souls in Vietnam.” He took aim at McNamara, but he kept swiveling away from him and presenting his back and all of a sudden he himself was the marine and Bobby had come through the door and he knew he would never get to finish his beer and then he was just a monkey in the hand of Buddha, a wild monkey with an Italian shotgun in his hands and a feeling of bitterness that the shotgun wasn’t engraved in gold.
He laid the gun on the cold-hardened earth and slapped reality back into his face.
“Got six, eh?” Albert said when they came back to the house.
“Five. And one Shad. I did the real city boy thing at the fence. Shot him in the foot passing over the guns.”
Shad held out the boot as though he were some sort of travelling salesman or they were all actors in an early comedy film.
“A little birdshot’s good for the soul,” Albert said.
He took them inside and Shad unlaced his boot. The foot was bruised and sweaty, but the boot had absorbed most of the damage. Some of the shot had gone well through the tough leather, some taking blue wool from Shad’s sock with it so that odd threads curled up like hairs, and pellets were visible as darker bodies within the flesh.
They phoned the doctor and left Shad alone in the kitchen.
“Hear you’re thinking of moving into the country,” Albert said.
“Charlie tell you? I’m always thinking of it. I hear you’ve put a price on this place.”
“Considering it. Want to see around?” They moved out of the brick portion of the house into the old, frame, two-storied section and walked through the musty rooms. Old mattresses lay on the floor; a cracked wash-stand; cardboard boxes and pile of newspapers. The walls were stained. The wallpaper’s floral pattern had been bleached out by time; the torn shades kept out little sunlight. The fireplace was full of settled ashes.
“Used to be a hotel didn’t it? A stopping place?”
“Oh, maybe. A hundred years ago. Who knows? I wish I had that whole hundred acres instead of just this here fifty. Got offered two an acre for it. Two thousand. Enough to pay off the mortgage, I guess.”
He knew there had never been a dollar borrowed on the land in all the time since the original grant. He looked at his cousin.
“Your American friend didn’t like the army, eh?” Albert scraped at his cheekbone with his right thumbnail.
“He never joined.”
“A lot of them like that in Toronto now, I guess.”
“Some.”
“A little cowardly to my way of thinking.”
“There’s lots of ways to be cowardly.” He looked out through the dust on the window. “There’s never been a mortgage on this place, has there?” he said. “In more than your lifetime and mine put together.”
“Just a way of speaking,” Albert said.
“You’re quite a way from things here.”
“Seven miles from the Rambler plant. Eight miles from the 401.”
Modern loci. From the dusty front windows were still visible the masonry walls of the river’s mill, the ancient stone heart of the locality. Tritavus.
“Lots of industry coming up,” he said. “You might get General Dynamics or Dow to build here.”
“Can’t tell. If you can’t beat them hold out for top dollar on what you got to sell them, I say.”
“That’s one way of looking at it, I guess.”
“I guess.”
When the doctor came up from town he gave Shad a local anesthetic, and right there in the kitchen removed all the birdshot.
“Better keep your weight off it for two or three weeks,” he said when he was done. “Then you’ll be as good as ever.”
“It’s not going to work,” Shad said on the drive back towards the city. “I could laugh last time, when they read off the Attorney-General’s list and I said no, I never belonged to any of them, they’re all dead, nobody belongs to any of them. And they said sure we know that and that’s why we don’t change them because when we did they just changed their names anyhow; now we keep the list the same and they don’t change their names and we all know where we’re at. They said all that and I laughed with them. But this time I’ll throttle anybody who jokes about it or if they keep me waiting for five hours at a time. And if I go in, I’ll kill somebody within three weeks. As soon as they start running me through their stamping machine. I
’m not raw metal now; I’m a grown man. I’ve fought my wars. And if I stay out and hide out, some day my father’ll die and I’ll go back and they’ll jail me for five years and I’ll go mad and kill somebody. I dream of Bobby Washington some nights now, shooting that marine right off the stool, without giving him any warning at all, and I wake up in a worse sweat than after a game. I should have used the rifle myself.”
He drove quickly and let Shad talk and fought the sense of failure that came as he considered that he had been unable to succeed even at the simple task of maiming a friend who desired physical maiming.
When they got on the high part of 401 the city was a sea of light right down to the harbour. Then darkness. Then the islands. Then the greater darkness beyond the islands.
On the River
“What is it? Really.”
“There’s nothing. It’s nothing. Or you know what it is. The country’s lovely. You’d better watch for the sign.”
“Christ, you know I’m watching for the sign. But I need it like these crops need rain, not at all. Some of the most miserable moments of my youth were spent here. Summers. Even after ten years you don’t forget roads.”
“It’s more like a trail.”
“I’m going as slow as I can. You can’t really expect gravel to stay long on top of straight granite.”
“I’m sorry. I know you’re taking it easy.”
“It’s the odds isn’t it. The fifty-fifty.”
“No.”
They parked the car by the barn. He knocked on the door of the house but nobody answered. He went out into the thin wedge of soil that made the vegetable garden and dug some worms. He felt the poverty of the land in the thinness of the mossy soil. The meadow was gone to weeds and he had to remember where the path had been. Age had worn it into the ground though, and once he could feel its pattern, he could not stray no matter how thick the weeds were. They were both damp almost to their knees by the time they reached the dock.
