by Dave Godfrey
“Pretty ugly booty,” I said.
“A pretty ugly country,” Horace smiled.
But just sitting in the boat, it warmed us on the return trip down the lake. And warmed me as I saw one of the ugly haunches, clad in a voyage-stretched, old, blue, duffel bag, slide out of Air Canada’s mechanical luggage sorter at the Toronto International Airport, and hang there for a reluctant moment, prevented by its weight and inertia from sliding down the revolving steel cone amidst the shiny luggage of other passengers. And the ugliness warmed me as I thought of Horace, secretively nodding to me as he slung the unskinned portions up into the Beaver: “He’s not saying much, your brother; but he really enjoyed that. He really enjoyed it all. You’ll have to come up here more often.”
The Hard-Headed Collector
They came through the mountains themselves unscathed, although Piet Catogas nearly tumbled into the gorges beneath Yellowhead Pass when his horse skittered out from under him. The last horse. When they entered North Battleford they were all seven afoot, but they were well entertained in front of the tent of the bread baker, who kept them amused with juggling tricks and poured them many cups of hot tea in blue galvanized cups filled to the brim then with swirling milk.
The bread baker’s final trick was to keep seven round oranges up in the air at once, and when the rotund man had heard enough of their clapping he gave one orange to each man. His own children clustered around and his wife walked back into the tent, so the men were careful to divide, but Pier Dela Ombre, throwing his filthy black hair out of his eyes so that the firelight could blaze back out of his pupils, asked for a second orange from Piet Catogas, the leader, and began to explain to the children why the earth did not fall into the sun. He sang to them.
Katrina, the wife of the bread maker, came out of the tent and said to her husband, “Why not offer Mr. Dela Ombre two loaves of wheat bread every morning so that he will be encouraged to stay here?”
The bread maker stated the offer to Piet, but Piet refused. “We are on our way to a strange land and there is not one man that I can afford to lose. We have the return journey on our minds too.”
Pier Dela Ombre’s orange sun rotated around and around the orange earth held stationary by little Katrina, the bread baker’s only daughter. The mother smiled.
At midnight, when all the men except Ole Siuk and Scrop Calla were seated around the fire drinking the white lightning which the Scottish whisky maker distilled in North Battleford, Katrina came out of the tent with the bread baker.
“We will give you your own tent,” she said directly to Pier Dela Ombre. “And a complete set of the European Encyclopedia, and after twenty years’ service a golden shovel. Which will no doubt help to make you feel glorious as you clear away the blizzards from your door or clean out the many ashes from your stove. Around here we have very little anthracite.”
Pier Dela Ombre smiled and said that he needed no time to consider their kindness. “We do not even know how far we now need to travel,” he said to the woman, “but we must be there by May and then there is the long journey back before we can really set down to work, and for each stage I will have to learn the new strophe that the good Calla writes. In fact, if he were not out now stealing the settlement’s horses, he would probably be putting one together, telling of our dangerous passage through the mountains. I cannot stay.”
They both laughed at his humour of the horses and determined even more to persuade him to stay.
“Little Katrina will be disappointed you were unable to explain to her the proportions of the sun and the earth,” the woman said. “At times in the summer I have heard her say that they almost seem equal. It does get very hot here in the summer, but we arrange many boat picnics on the Saskatchewan, and of course there is nothing like sawdust to keep the winter’s ice safely stored.”
They kept after him, gently, until the bread maker fell asleep.
Ole and Scrop came back very early in the morning, before the sun, but little Katrina had risen and was adding yeast to the sugar water for the day’s baking.
“If you let him stay long enough to explain the proportions of the earth and the sun,” she said to Piet, “I will not awaken my father and tell him that the man with the sunken eyes has taken possession of Elder Clough’s grey horse and silver bridle. And six other poorer horses.”
Piet nodded to Pier Dela Ombre. He laid the golden orange of the sun on the ashes of last night’s fire and took Katrina by the hand.
“If the sun were made that small,” Pier said, “let us say about a thousand to one, then the earth would still be so large that in a whole day we could not walk around its edge.”
He held her hand more tightly and began walking with her away from the tent and the fire, in the gentle circle of one who is uncaringly lost.
The six men were glad to have the extra horse and the mountains behind them, with the summer not completely gone.
“He’ll be in real trouble when they discover the loss,” Scrop Calla said to Piet when they next stopped.
“The mother will get him out of it,” Piet replied. “If the little girl can’t. God, they start them young here. I can’t believe there’s anywhere they start them so young. Even among the Sasarians.”
Why had he decided to present the works to the United States?
“Well, a lot of people wanted it . . . but I couldn’t do what I did in any other country. What I did I accomplished here in the United States. It belongs here.”
Did he have any comment about President Johnson? “I told him I’ve adopted him. I love him.”
They went eastward safely for five days across the lush prairie grass until they heard gunfire in the distance ahead and what they thought might be a tornado, a dust storm. Coming over the rise they saw a Nanarian Indian from one of the reserves who shouted at them as he drove his almost collapsing wagon at a dangerous pace towards the west. His wife and children sat on mounds of hay in the back, firing whence they had come. The men rode on, although they knew there was a fire ahead which would block their way.
“We can return later,” Piet said, “and cross over the ashes. Or look for the river again.”
“I’m sure I can find it if you let me lead,” said Torah Black.
He rode back whence they had come — the mountains were invisible — and the others followed, although Piet had said nothing.
The wagon was overturned less than a mile to the west. Besides the wife and the four children there was a milkwhite goat among the hay. “This will save us all,” Black said and slit its throat. He held it by the hind legs as it kicked its way to death and circumscribed a large circle around the wagon, the men, the four children, and the woman.
“We had better ride on,” Piet said.
After a time the firing started again, and once or twice the five men could distinguish the sound of Torah Black’s shotgun. Scrop Calla could see the gold engraving on its stock glittering in the sun.
“What does a gunsmith know about old superstitions,” Piet said as they rode back eastward over the powdery black ashes. Looky McLaww nodded sagely.
Mr. Hirshhorn lives with his fourth wife, Olga, in Greenwich. He is the father of six children, two of them adopted, and is a grandfather several times over. He is board chairman of the Callahan Mining Company, and the principal stockholder in Prairie Oil Royalties, a Canadian concern.
He has been trying to follow doctor’s orders to take it easy, but finds it a trial. When he appears at Parke-Bemet, the auctioneer knows that he has to keep a sharp eye for the little man with the expressive face who signals vigorously with his program. If there is any doubt, Mr. Hirshhorn lets the auctioneer know what he is up to. He calls out his bids in a loud clear voice.
“He’s a tiger,” an old, close friend said.
Beyond the death of Torah Black they had no more difficulties until they reached Winnipeg. It was difficult
to find a place that would take all of them, for the Leagues were busy, but eventually they found a large old house on the river in Ste. Vital. All of the girls spoke French so that Andre was kept busy as a translator; but after all, what is there to say?
“We have made it over the hard part,” Piet said. “We have still eight months to go. Let us hope that the winter will be easy. Tonight you may enjoy yourselves; there is no more need of the horses in any case.”
The first girl did not satisfy Looky because the pleasure of her body simply filled his head with memories of the wife he had left on Queen Charlotte Island.
“That damn Hunky won’t want more than a snack,” he said and walked into Ole Siuk’s room and threw him out of bed. “J’ai une qualité inestimable,” he said to the girl and she shone with delight.
“He is afraid for his wife,” Piet said to Ole Siuk. “There are many other carvers and poets on the island. She is a loving model; puts her heart into it.”
“Mineur, how’s about a free and equal exchange of riches,” Looky later said to Andre. But when Andre tried his new girl he found her cold and exhausted. She swung a condom full of black beetles over his head and threatened him with death.
Looky took Scrop Calla’s girl also, a plumper one than the first three, but when he came to Piet’s room he found him gone.
The old woman, the girl provider, still lay in the bed and offered herself to Looky, but she was dark-haired and hidden-eyed like Looky’s wife and he could not take her.
“There’s the matter of the bill,” she said, “but that’s not important. I have the horses. If you had slept with me those bay-tàrds would have beaten you to death with horseshoes on the end of pikes and we would have put you out in the stable to freeze until spring, but as it is you will save us the cost of putting an ad in the Free Press for some able body to haul our ashes all winter.”
“At least McLaww won’t have to go about with a gold shovel in his hands,” Piet Catogas said to Scrop Calla as the four men trudged on bear-paw snowshoes through the wine-dark snows north of Fort Frances, as the sun fell.
But, with the end of World War I, he guessed wrong on the market and found his fortune had shrunk to $4,000. Mr. Hirshhorn says he has always learned by his mistakes. At any rate, he was back on top in a few years and intuitively got out of the market with $4 million just before it broke in 1929.
When he was a child, Mr. Hirshhorn was attracted to the pictures on the Prudential Life Insurance Company’s calendars.
Mr. Hirshhorn was attracted to the possibilities of Canada, bought 470 square miles of land and, by 1950, was mining uranium. His biggest coup occurred in 1952. On the advice of Franc Joubin, a geologist who had little audience elsewhere, Mr. Hirshhorn secretly put together 56,000 square miles of claims in Ontario’s Algoma Basin and struck a uranium bonanza in Blind River.
When the four men were only twelve miles from Chapleau, they came across a group of Hémonites at prayers. These had built a great square wall of snowblocks out onto the lake, no more than a foot high, and at intervals, dressed in brown worsted cowls, stood women, men, and the older children, praying into the sky.
“This is a chance for Calla to use his four iamb line,” said Ole Siuk, who had taken over the post of religious cynic since they had lost McLaww.
Piet could see no altar, but in the centre of the square was a tall ancient man standing above a slender circular hole cut deep into the ice down to the dark water below.
“In the summer you can see clear down thirty-two feet,” the old man said.
Near him were three boys tending nine blanketed cattle. On a high easel, facing in the direction in which all prayed, was an old lithograph of an Essex County dairy farm, coated in plastic to protect it against the weather but torn in one corner so that the gold of cut hay was stuck to a piece of flapping plastic and glittered in the frosted sunlight.
“No one will do it,” the old man said.
“I’m out of grass, acid, and mushrooms,” said Scrop Calla, “but I know what you want and I will attempt it.”
He stripped himself naked and lowered himself into the water three times so that not only his heavy beard and hair were covered with a silver of ice, but his whole body. It shone.
He held his arms outward in the direction of them all and said loudly and with no sound of rhythm: “I know, I know, I know.”
Upon the horizon appeared, as though on the edge of a highly polished silver punch bowl, a simple inverted image of all: the penitents, the wall of snowblocks, the old priest, Scrop Calla, the strangers, and the forests and the snow-covered meadows behind them. With the exception that, in the inverted image, the cows were unblanketed and moved about freely: their udders thick with milk, their coats sleek as threshed grain.
“You’re a genius and a half,” the old priest said. “You’ll have to settle here. In the summer you can see down thirty-two feet and the fishing licence’s only two bucks — to natives that is.”
“During the war,” said Piet to Ole Siuk as they came near French River, “Calla once deserted and tried to find the enemy, but a handful of men went unknowingly after him and became so enthused with their fear that they broke through the lines of the Sasarians and covered themselves with loot and glory.”
At night when they stopped now, Ole Siuk read in Calla’s leather-bound notebooks and occasionally was seen stamping his left foot heavily and repeatedly on the hard earth of the world.
“Poverty has a bitter taste,” Mr. Hirshhorn said years later, recalling how his mother was sent to the hospital when a fire gutted their tenement on Humbolt Street, and the family was dispersed to various homes in the neighborhood. “I ate garbage.”
In French River the three men were fed and lodged in a building as tall as the smallest of the foothills they had long left behind them.
“Perhaps we have gone far enough,” said Andre. “That is a building tall enough to house Egsdrull. The tools must be rusty and I long to hear the chips shatter, even a practice stroke.”
All of the people there had a small exact circle of soot on each cheek, but they were kind to the voyagers, gave them fat for their stiff-thonged snowshoes, and did not laugh loudly at Ole Siuk’s awkward attempts at song.
“You can see God’s fish,” they said at the end of the recital. “Perhaps then you will stay and teach us to sing.”
Inside the tall building sat rows and rows of old men and women, all dressed in heavy blue robes, but seemingly divided into three groups.
Some had two circles of dark soot on their cheeks, so that only the blue robes distinguished them from the guide. These sat reading from a book that was passed slowly down the rows, meditating while they awaited their turn. Others had only one circle of soot, that on their right cheek, and were busy at work benches, hammering tiny marbles of gold into large, almost circular flakes. Their blue robes seemed cumbersome, and many seemed too old for such a task.
The third group had no marks on their cheeks, but on their foreheads was a slightly larger, more oval, circle of soot. These seemed to be neither reading nor hammering, but once, while the strangers were there, one of the old men among them went up to the forty-foot fish which dominated the entire building, a mashkinoje. Only its skeletal frame was finished; the outer covering was not yet half done. The old man laid in place on the others his own interlocking golden scale. Then fire consumed him.
“Each year,” said the guide, “we get just about done before the Sasarians come raiding. We’ve calmed the Nanarians. One year the Sasarians will be awed by God’s fish and will allow us to finish. Below God’s fish, you will see the coffins of the fifty original scale craftsmen. Each holds an ivory tooth on his breast, and on the day that the Sasarians are awed, they will all arise and the teeth will complete the fish of unity.”
When Piet and Ole left, Andre Mineur was talking in Arabic to the God’s fish’s tail. He was not
speaking of their own voyages and their many losses.
“He’s a sucker, that Mineur,” said Piet Catogas to Ole Siuk as they crossed the St. Lawrence at Three Rivers. “It won’t sell. I’ve seen men making them in Boston, twice the size, every scale machine-polished, and for half the price.”
“I think you have the right reason,” said Ole Siuk. “Hah, hah, hah.” His teeth had all fallen out because of the bad diet they had endured during the winter and he looked very old and ugly.
“It’s almost the end of April,” he said.
The President added:
“Washington is a city of powerful institutions — the seat of government for the strongest government on earth, the place where democratic ideals are translated into reality. It must also be a place of beauty and learning, and museums should reflect a people whose commitment is to the best that is within them to dream. We have the elements of a great capital of beauty and learning, no less impressive than its power.”
The two men avoided all contact with the Sasarians, although Piet was certain he could communicate with them if necessary, but when they arrived in Edmundston and stated that they were determined to reach the Bay of Chaleur even though only two of them remained, they ran into the united opposition of all the Town Fathers.
“The day of judgment is only possible as a concept because of our notions of the duration of time,” the Mayor said. “In reality there is a summary court in perpetual session and we’re going to beat your knackers down to your knees.”
They turned upon Siuk, stripped off all his clothing, tore away his finger nails with their teeth, gnawed his fingers with the fury of famished dogs, and thrust a sword through one of his hands. They drove the two men between them in a hastily formed aisle, and beat them with clubs and thorny sticks. Then they hung them by the wrists to two of the poles that supported the Town Hall. A woman was commanded to cut off Piet’s thumb, which she did; and a thumb of Siuk was also severed, a clamshell being used as an instrument, in order to increase the pain.
