Starting Out In the Afternoon

by Jill Frayne

  What attracted him to me? That’s harder to know. The answer he’s given over the years—that I gave him room—sounds like faint praise. When we met, I’d been laid up for a year mending crushed bones. Maybe I had a sheen of vulnerability at the time that was appealing in a headstrong person.

  WE GOT GOING right away. We declared our attraction. We went away together over New Year’s to the property Leon had bought in the late sixties when he first came to Canada, a bush lot at the top of Algonquin Park he somehow held on to when back-to-the-land ran out of steam. We retell this date, our first date, over and over. By now we have identical recollections; what we remember and what’s gone from memory is the same for both of us.

  We drove up in winter dusk, the afternoon waning fast that time of year. Already there was heaps of snow north of the city. We talked all the way, me next to him on the seat of his truck, so glamorous that old Chevy, a wool poncho drawn over the seat, the truck bed in back rigged with a frame he’d built and covered in a canvas tarp. I had my hand, in my mitt, on his leg. We weren’t lovers yet and the prospect was zinging around the cab like lights.

  The alternator on the truck broke about fifty kilometres south of the property. We waited in a little town on a frozen lake while the garage sent to the next town for parts. We went for a walk beyond the sidewalks. I lost my boot breaking trail in the deep snow, and Leon, behind me, grabbed my arm before I set my foot down. It felt strange to have someone catch my balance, someone close enough and paying attention. We walked in and out of the light from the street lamps in town, Leon telling me about coming to Canada, evading the draft to Vietnam.

  We got on our way again late and arrived in pitch dark, the road full of snow, no house lights anywhere. We parked where the snowplough had stopped partway up a hill, heaped our groceries and bedding on toboggans, and trudged on, the exertion and freezing air a shock after the trancelike warmth of the cab. The moon had not risen, but the snow lit a faint tunnel we could follow through the bowed trees. When we stopped for breath, the silence swallowed us. Hundreds of acres of frozen trees fanned around us.

  There was a dark house finally, a hulk in the trees. No one had stayed there for years. Leon undid the padlock and we went inside, the air no different than outdoors. He put a fire in the stove and lit the hurricane lamps. The room jumped up: a wood stove in the centre, a rough counter along one wall, a box couch on the other, some open-backed stairs leading up. When the fire in the stove caught, Leon went back down the hill for another load. I stood in my coat and mitts making soup on a camp stove, shadows flaring on the walls. I’d married him already.

  IT’S STRANGE to think of him from here. That duplex wedged downtown where we all met, where I met Leon, years ago. The pale winter house where we first stayed together. I lie in the dark in my tent on this far coast and it seems the present has nothing to do with me. None of this dense coastal history has anything to do with me. I’m in exile here. I see I’ve undertaken some self-banishment or self-dramatization on this trip, out here on the final ledge of ground before the continent falls off. So strange to think of him, to be inside a thing for years and then walk off and look at it from this far rim.

  WE HAD A GOOD BEGINNING. Beginnings are thrilling, gorged with vitality, rigged that way on purpose, I suppose, a vestige from the early days of the species when mating had to be strong to keep him facing tigers, to keep her chewing hides and nursing babies.

  Our first year together we slept at Leon’s place, or at mine, or apart. He liked dark, soundproof crawl spaces to sleep in, and when I first knew him he’d fashioned a thickly draped ten-by-twelve cave in the basement of the house he shared with four other people out by High Park. His room was moonless, dawnless, pitch-black.

  I lived communally as well, with half my therapy group and an occasional passer-through who stayed in the basement. For nights she spent with me, Bree had a bubble-gum pink room on the main floor. I slept at the top of the house in a white room under a slanting roof. One wall had a door cut in it with a tiny porch that overlooked our Portuguese neighbours’ riotous back gardens.

  We were happy. We stayed in bed in the mornings telling each other everything. We stayed in bed for about two years. We were talking, we weren’t making love. Sex worked okay, but from the start it was a zone well out from centre. We were not devouring each other, we were not appropriating every cranny of each other. I wanted to. Like everyone, I wanted love to be effulgent, immoderate. The sideline place sex occupied from too early made me sad. I took it as a secret failing. I found I couldn’t bring it up with Leon, and then it grew invisible; but that small lassitude between us grew pernicious. Like a spot on a lung, it made a hole in us.

  He passed it off. Leon said he was tired of being led around by his cock, glad to be with somebody where the first thing wasn’t sex.

  That sounded okay. Mature. When you’re newly in love you don’t say “Oh, baloney” the way you will later on. Everything your lover says sounds plausible. Now I don’t think so. Now I’d say sex is the bond-fast, the belly of mating. If it’s incidental, there’s a way the two of you will never find each other. Leon’s meagre lust offended me in some way I passed over, incorporated. I could not bring myself to challenge it. Someone more confident would have, but I was not sexually brave. I did not go after him, look for ways to inspire him. I let it ride. For us, sex was the trap door under the carpet.

  I suppose we always pick deftly. It may be that Leon and I did not want the prostrations of love. What we were up to together—psychologically, emotionally—may have stormed enough walls; and in the way couples do, we colluded that sex would be our holdout.

  AFTER A YEAR we made a plan to spend the winter in the cabin we’d gone to on our first date. I’d finished social work school and wanted to take my time before I looked for work. Leon had savings. Bree was in grade six and living with her dad. She’d visit at March break. We made a couple of day trips to the property around Christmas to prepare. We asked the neighbours’ help and hauled in a better wood stove, dragging it on a sled behind a pair of Clydesdales, their breath blasting the freezing air. We found some big preserving jars under the house that I scoured and filled with beans and rice. We scrubbed the floors and countertops, sanded the splinters off, mouse-proofed an old green chest upstairs, and beat the must out of the blankets. On the first of January, in the dead of winter, we moved in. Leon told me he thought he was moving there for good. He brought all his tools and books. He thought he was finally home.

  For me it was winter camping, the house a brace of heated walls against the cold. It stretched out as far as I could see, as far as I could imagine: boundless cold, endless frail trees frozen in the snow. In bed at night I’d hear the ice in their limbs groan and crack, and everything about it was a luxury to me.

  Leon cut our firewood with a swede saw, sawing and splitting outside the door for hours, thickening his arms and chest by the day. We fetched water from the creek in pails, smacking the ice open with the butt of an axe. I made meals in a soup kettle that we added to over the week, a never-ending stew. We took sponge baths in an enamel pan, limb by limb, stripped down by the stove. Once a week we’d take our laundry to town, an occasion to start the truck, dazzle ourselves in streets and stores, be around people.

  Bree came. We bundled her and babied her, read stories and made sketches of the cats. In a knoll near the house we all built snow forts, taking the whole day. Leon’s was a jutting wedge like a ship. Mine was a resolute wall that took more and more reinforcing till it looked like a ramp. Bree’s was a starship, many-roomed, with a secret key to the ammunition. We were at it all day and then pelted each other with snowballs from behind our walls.

  A game Bree loved involved tossing drowsy houseflies out the second-storey window. The cold would knock them to sleep mid-drop, and Bree would dash outside to retrieve them inert on the snow and carry them back inside to revive.

  Her policy was to ignore Leon, but she couldn’t keep it up. She liked staying
with us, liked the huge outdoors and falling stars.

  It was a fierce time, the most vivid Leon and I ever had—our marrying time. We still talk about it. Part of the intensity was how physical it was, every detail of the day requiring some effort, some exertion. I have perfect recall of that tall, over-warm, square house, pale in winter light, bursting with Leon and me. I smell birch smoke and wet wool, sudsy dishwater, soup. We were on top of each other and we stormed all the time, but the direction in those days was always deeper in. Over those three months we laid down our tracks. We had all the fights that would eventually drive us off each other, and we fixed them in all the ways that would knit us, keep us liking each other.

  Leon’s habit of acuity made him a keen observer of me. He knew me the way no one ever had. He held the mirror steady and I had to be accountable, not to him—he wasn’t like that—but to my own enthrallment. I wanted his esteem. I wanted my own. It’s the power lovers always have over each other. In his company my colourful opinions had to start standing up for themselves, pass muster. I’d shoot off some long-held view and find myself taken seriously. I loved his querying and I hated it. I resisted him and then quit resisting and began to learn from him. I stopped second-guessing. I stopped flouncing off to end an argument. I started to fight fair.

  WE WENT HOME in March. We knew we would. The next summer we looked for a place of our own, some compromise between city communes and the woods. We found a schoolhouse in a ghost farm village fifty miles from Toronto. It was an hour and a half from the job I had taken but as near as we could afford. The property was an acre trimmed in old spruce trees. It had a brick schoolhouse set back from the road and a huge steel garage. Leon put a big Quebec stove in the garage and set up his woodworking shop, and I made the drive to my counselling job in Scarborough.

  The house was a hundred years old, roomed off at some point after its schoolhouse days. It had a bell tower on the roof, six tall round-top windows facing east and west, and a huge beehive in the back wall. An old fellow came into the yard one time and asked about the hive. He told me it had been in the wall when he used to come here as a boy attending school. Every spring a few stray bees would stagger into the house and I’d trap them in a glass and carry them outside.

  The yard had an old perennial garden with heavy beds of peonies and phlox, pure yellow day lilies flopped over the pump, and a clump of huge mauve iris gone silver with age. Rusty hollyhocks grew along the wall. A line of dusty Norwegian spruce separated us from the neighbours and lay thick bands of shade across the yard by mid-afternoon.

  I kept the flowers going and planted herbs. My mother gave me dogwood and forsythia bushes the first spring, and Leon put in a post fence to circle a vegetable garden. The wire he used was so thick and taut it could have kept in wild horses.

  It was a funny house indoors, all grey corners and wavy linoleum. We bought it without going inside, if you can imagine, peering in the windows on tiptoe. We never took to the inside of the house. I don’t think we ever really moved in; we were happier pitched in the yard. A friend came after we’d been there for years and noticed the pictures still ranged along the floor, no nails put in.

  For one thing, the partitioning was never right. The rooms were inexplicable, and there was a full-length false ceiling that lobbed off the windows halfway up. In a spare room by the stairs I hung red drapes and a clothes rod and laid my best possession, a handwoven rug. I couldn’t think what to do with the room after that. We had to swivel sideways in the bathroom to get between the sink and the washing machine. The living room was too long for people without furniture and had a lurid green rug we eventually stopped noticing.

  We slept upstairs in a vast attic with the original plank ceiling arcing over the floor. I started scrubbing the old paint off one time and got about an eighth of the way before I left it, a clean beige square over the bed. We made the mattress ourselves out of layers of cotton, gradually creating a boundless cotton raft that got away from us, lunged off the platform and spread like caulking foam. We never could find sheets to fit it.

  Bree’s room was a different story, outfitted with broadloom and mirrors and a real bed, a different vintage entirely from the rest of the house, and, as it turned out, unoccupied. She never moved in. She came weekends with a backpack and spread her things on the floor as if she were camping. As time went by I gradually took it over, easing a few winter jackets into the closet, sleeping in her bed on airless summer nights.

  WE WERE THERE seven years. I dreamt about it the other night. Someone else had moved in. There was a powerboat in the yard over my tulip bed. The perennials had vanished, shaded out, and the vegetable garden was a kerfuffle of weeds and tall grass, clamped by Leon’s peerless fence. Leon, a ghost of Leon, was squatted in the driveway weeding the gravel, preoccupied and patient, working his way through planks of late sunlight down toward the big maple at the road.

  THE HOUSE HAS THE PRINT of our journey in and out. In the first two years we dug the vegetable garden, renovated Bree’s room, stripped the wallpaper in the living room, knocked a wall out in the kitchen. In the last few years we didn’t change anything. Leon made himself a lair upstairs, a bunker of heavy desks, which he piled with books and computer paraphernalia. I established a region of selfdom up there as well, a den of bookshelves and piled rugs. Our sleeping came unfixed. We abandoned the vast futon, both of us drifting around the house, usually together, but not designating a bedroom. We began to stay away nights after days in the city when it seemed too far to come home.

  WHEN I COME HOME from this trip, we won’t live in the school-house any more. We’ve decided to sell it. Leon is doing a different kind of work now, learning a model for conflict resolution. He sold the cabinetmaking business and doesn’t need a shop so much. He found it lonely and wants to be around people more. The last year or two, he’s been away weeks at a time.

  Bree is finished high school and wants to travel.

  I’ll move up north to the property we have—I call it ours now, the land we stayed on in the beginning. I won’t go to the house we lived in that first winter. There’s another house, a more kept-up one with hydro and a basement. I’ll move there.

  Leon won’t come, at least not now. He’ll make a base wherever there’s work.

  I THINK ABOUT the habits of that house, the one Leon and I bought. Six years of gardens, six rounds of phlox and peonies, purple and cerise, bundled in jars. Six basil and snap pea harvests, corn one time. In winter the scrape of the steel door to Leon’s shop, Leon inside building tables in his work suit and felt hat, covered in sawdust. The smell of Bree’s room, the unused cool of it. A hundred passes with the vacuum cleaner over the algae-coloured rug, a thousand armloads of stove wood. The huge safety and comfort of my relationship with Leon.

  On this trip I need to portray our separation, to feel the absence of Leon as extremely as I can. That’s what it seems. This is the vertigo between founding myself on him and founding myself on my own, and I want to get it over with. I’m trying to be pure alone, to have completely what I have anyway, the way an inoculation gives you a dose of what you’re going to be up against, in hopes of a cure.

  Three

  CHARLOTTES, ARRIVING

  The ferry from Prince Rupert makes a lurching six-hour crossing of the Hecate Strait to the all-tides port at Skidegate. Getting off the boat in the Queen Charlotte Islands is like stepping into a greenhouse, another world. The name conferred on it by a European captain in 1787 to honour an English queen withers at once. It must go by the name the Haida gave it: Gwaii Haanas, Place of Wonder.

  To the left, winding along the shore, is Queen Charlotte City, a white town with a weaving line of frame cottages, a supermarket, a school and a baseball diamond. Along the shoreline to the right is Skidegate, a Haida settlement, one of two communities where the Haida pooled when there were too few of them left to maintain their villages throughout the archipelago. The place is a chilly riot of green, the air soaked with oxygen, the forest press
ing on the settlement, growth gobbling up the backyards. Everything is jumbo size: devil’s claw, foxglove, lavish berry bushes shoving into the road. I plod up the hill under my pack, sniffing like a colt.

  JUNE 28

  This morning in the museum by Skidegate, I met a man I talked with yesterday on the ferry, Hilary, with his daughter Mary. On the boat Hilary told me about the daughter he’s visiting, how she left a high-profile job in Toronto to move out here, bought herself a used van outfitted with two captain’s chairs bolted into shag carpeting, found a gut kayak in Calgary and drove to Queen Charlotte City. Now she lives in a house with the tide at her door. He didn’t know how she’d make a living and was coming out to see how she was doing. When I meet her this morning, she’s my age or a little younger, in rubber boots and a home-knit sweater.

  The three of us stroll around the museum, a modern construction with vaulted ceilings and tall windows looking on the sea. The objects displayed are familiar: halibut hooks, bentwood boxes, carved feast bowls, animal masks, the bold, flawless cuts of Haida art. I stare at a grey photograph of a woman carrying firewood. She’s on a dim beach, a row of sea-facing houses rising behind her. Her bare chest shows under a cedar-bark cloak. She has a stone labret embedded in her lower lip and stares through the camera at the person photographing her. At the time, half her village must have been dead.

  In the afternoon, following the shore past Skidegate, I come upon a Native cemetery on a bumpy hillside and go in. These are Christian graves, a part of Haida history that came later, incongruous and sad in a place so wild. Most of the headstones are marked by blackened columns, some in low iron enclosures with ornamental Victorian posts, some engraved. Chief Skidegate, died December 21 1892, aged about sixty.