Deep River Night

by Patrick Lane

  “I am Marie,” she said.

  Marie.

  The river and a tree brushing against the bank, the drift booms on the North Thompson River riding a fallen tree out into the main stream, the roots and trunk and branches rolling over and gone to the rapids miles downstream. He could hear them, the sound diminishing as it drifted away. The Seine, the ripples brushing against the stones just past Notre-Dame. Marie leaning over, pointing at a bouquet of flowers someone must have thrown into the river. Quelle tristesse.

  How sad, she had said.

  Marie.

  She was all around him and he wanted her gone. He went over to the chopping block where the tumbled pile of wood waited and began again.

  His heavy axe cleaved the cool evening air, the fir breaking under the iron fall of his thick, splitting blade. The green wood sucked apart, the three-foot rounds cleft in two, the chunks dropping to the dirt on either side of the chopping block. He rested the axe with its blunt head against his leg, leaned down and picked up a half round, setting it on the block. He stood there trembling, his shirt hanging wet. He stared through the salt in his eyes and found the fracture line in the wood where there were no knots to bind his blade. His axe swept up into the sky and down, the edge of blunted iron finding the mark he had chosen, the wood breaking perfectly in two. Wiping the sweat away he repeated the blows, the rounds behind him disappearing, the quarters breaking down into eighths. They piled around his legs until he could hardly move to lift a round to the block. When he was done he began stacking what he’d split, trying not to think of the whisky in the cabin, the bottle of Ballantine’s sitting on the table just inside the door. He could use a drink, just one, a couple of fingers to calm the shaking and stop the sweats.

  But no, not yet.

  The pure mindlessness of the work was what he’d needed. He’d wanted his body to go through its steady paces, no thought intruding, no memory roused in the labyrinth of his brain. When he was breaking the fir rounds it was the work of muscle, blood, and bone.

  Splitting firewood for the winter to come was work he loved no matter winter was months away. It was the same work as what he’d done off and on his whole life. Except for the war years and he shook his head to drive the thought of them away. He didn’t want to drive a forklift, truck, or Cat anymore. He didn’t want to work on the mill floor feeding an edger or working the trim saws and gang saws. He hated machines after the war. He hated what they could do.

  Yet he hadn’t always. He’d loved working in the mills along the coast and up north before the war. He’d loaded boxcars, pulled lumber off green chains, stacked rough-cut boards as they came down from the trim saws until the piles were backed up three deep and five feet high. He’d driven forklifts and hauled the stacked lumber away to drying fields beside oceans and rivers. He’d dug ditches and driven water trucks to spray the dusty roads. He’d driven logging trucks. But he didn’t do that kind of work anymore. He was the first-aid man at the mill now.

  One of the best jobs he ever had was when he went north for the first time. He was young, sixteen or seventeen, and working behind a D8 tractor and an arch in the bush up on Highway 16 east of the Hazeltons. He’d set chokers on logs, the heavy treads of the Cat working to drag the timber out of the quagmire that was a late spring logging show in the north interior. The Cat hauled them down to the sorting ground where forklifts loaded them onto the trucks to be taken to the mills and the saws in Smithers. He loved dragging the heavy cable with its four chokers through the tumble of limbs and stumps, his muscles screaming, his body filthy with mud and needles, blackflies, deer flies, blowflies and mosquitoes coursing over his body as they searched for a bare patch of skin they could settle on and drink the blood that would feed the eggs that grew inside them. He loved getting down on his hands and knees and scrabbling in the muck, digging under a trunk of hemlock so he could get the choker cable around it, the satisfaction he got as the Cat winch dragged away the logs he’d choked, the forest shuddering around him, deer and moose breaking for the estuaries, the bears watching them carefully, birds screaming above fallen nests, squirrels, weasels, porcupines, and marten looking for something, anything to run to or climb up to get away from the destruction, nothing left in the cut block but limbs and stumps, bewildered animals, forgotten birds.

  Setting chokers had been mindless work, his body alone, complete in itself. No one to talk to, no one to interfere, him and the Cat operator two separate creatures, one in deep, hard labour, the other driving a machine as he breathed diesel smoke, the blade of the D8 pushing down anything it could just for the pleasure of seeing it fall. He tried it once over in the Kootenays the year after he came home from France, but he quit the job the second day, the roar of the engine and the clanking of the treads reminding him too much of the war. The Caterpillar tractor he worked behind was the same as a tank, the difference being the Cat was a machine without a turret and a gun and a belly full of men intent on killing other men.

  Asking Joel what he was going to do with his life had brought back the Depression years, his father’s drinking, the afternoon he found his mother unconscious, bleeding on the kitchen floor, his drunken father being taken away by the police. Art remembered how he’d tried to scrub clean the floor so his mother wouldn’t see her blood when she came home, and then her never waking up, her never coming back from St. Paul’s, her body in the basement morgue and him standing there by a man in black pants and white coat and saying to him, “Yes, this’s Missus Kenning, my mother, her name is Elizabeth Mary Kenning. Yes.”

  The early years in the thirties, his gang on Gore and Pender, the stealing and the fighting, the drugs and liquor, all of it, his being thrown out of their basement rooms by his uncle a week after his mother died, his father in jail on charges he would later beat only to find his own death two years later in an alley behind the Marble Arch Hotel. Art was fifteen when he first worked the camps up the coast, then the mills on Vancouver Island, Tahsis in the rain, and Honeymoon Bay, the booms on Lake Cowichan crowded with logs, men walking them like pond spiders as their pike poles sorted the fir from the hemlock, the spruce from the cedar. It was in a float camp up Seymour Inlet where he first tried heroin, though he’d sworn he’d never touch the needle after seeing the junkies in the East End, the whores and pimps, the sailors and hustlers.

  He’d never forgotten a Bible puncher saying Art’s people were the wretched of this earth. The preacher cried it out on the corner of Main and Hastings week after week the summer of ’37, people passing him by, women laughing, a kid throwing brick shards at the man, the derisive shouts, the cries, the laughter, and the tears. Art had been just a kid, but when he heard the preacher speak of the wretched he knew who he was talking about. It was his mother and father, his friends and enemies, the Eastside and all who lived, lied, loved, and died there, all and everyone who struggled to survive in the houses, shacks, and walk-ups, the basement rooms, the hovels and hotels, the shooting galleries, the tunnels under Pender Street and Main, the whores on their knees, the cops with their truncheons walking the back streets and alleys as they beat the helpless and the homeless into a deeper submission.

  Art’s mind was floating now, his body slow as soft air, too many things to remember, too much to forget. There was a shivering absence in him. He didn’t want the image of his mother in his mind, the startled halo of blood around her head. He reached down and picked up an armful of wood, four pieces, six, and another until his arm seized up, his muscles straining, and staggering to the pile and slowly, carefully laying them down one at a time to prolong the ache, to make the burning in his arm last, to turn what his mind remembered into nothing but what hurt, the pain eating up the past, the wretched of this earth.

  But the memories wouldn’t go away. When he came back from the war East End Vancouver had changed. It was 1946. He was twenty-six years old and the people he’d hung around with before the war were mostly gone. A few old guys were still around, but the girls he’d known were married with ki
ds or without, nuns or nurses, or working in the city. The guys he’d hung around with were in jail, moved away, or dead. He had his poke from leaving the army. He holed up with it in a nowhere room on Water Street and a little later in a basement off Trounce Alley. The bars were what kept him alive. When he ran out of money he could always lose himself in some float camp or another, some bunkhouse, shack, or cabin, any shack, any cabin, the one he lived in now in this wretched river valley, this North Thompson River mill town. His hand settled a crooked chunk of wood on top of the pile, his other hand clenched into a fist.

  The mill chains clanked and the treads of his tank ground through the mud of Holland. He wasn’t on the push into Holland. There was no farm, no mother, no girl called Godelieve, no pig, no fire, no Tommy. And Paris was a dream too. There were no tanks anymore, no Marie. He was the first-aid man in a sawmill up the North Thompson River. He could feel the split wood under his hand. The film of sap sucked at his fingers. But the sounds of the chains in the mill banging were the treads of their Sherman Firefly on the road to Antwerp, the far-off rapids in the river the waves eating the beaches along the North Sea.

  He staggered into the shed and bent over beside the last row he’d stacked. Lifting his calloused hands to his face he pushed the heels against his eyes, dragging the worn skin of his palms against his eyelids, the wet salt from his sweat stinging his sight, and then rubbing even harder as if by doing so he could rid himself of what he heard. And he scoured his face and struck his head with his fist and as he did the sounds fled back into the cul-de-sac where they kept themselves alive waiting to torment him.

  He dropped his hands hoping what he saw next would not be the flooded fields of Holland, and they weren’t. It was the grass and shrubs beyond his cabin, the CNR railway and the river beyond, the huge murmur of its brown heave and the mountains rearing up in waves of dense green on the eastern shore. That other world was gone. He took a single step and stopped. Standing in the shadows at the edge of the field where the path turned from the dirt road and wove its way down to his cabin was the figure of a tall, thin man.

  Art knew who it was.

  “I’m the first-aid man,” Art said to the mountains, the cat suddenly between his legs, passing through him and around him and gone. He closed his eyes. “That’s all I am. There’s nothing I can do for Jaswant Singh Gill.”

  Jaswant’s standing alone there was a reprimand to Art’s futilities. Art knew that and because he did he couldn’t refuse him. The man would stay where he was at the end of the road, at the head of the path, right into the night out of some misguided politeness, some formality he’d learned back in India and which he practised at the mill and in the village, speaking only when spoken to, moving aside from men who were not Sikhs, white men whose surly, good-natured casual ways defined who they were, white men whose fear and hatred of anyone different ran deep in their blood.

  Art went to the pile, picked up the splitting axe, and drove it into the wood, the block shuddering. Leaving the axe buried there he walked over to the cabin and beckoned with his arm for Jaswant to come down. Art didn’t want him to. But he knew if he didn’t call out or make a motion Jaswant wouldn’t move from where he stood. As it was, he could have already been there for an hour.

  He knew why Jaswant was there. It was the sick baby. The mother must still be up there in that shack Jaswant had found for them. Art had been sure she’d go south following after the man who had left her there, the man who’d promised he’d come back. And maybe he had come back and got her and the little one, but even as Art thought that he knew the man hadn’t returned. Art knew that men who leave women and sick babies on the side of a road never come back. There are no eyes in the backs of their heads. All men like that have in them is where they are going and it’s always alone.

  It’s why Jaswant was standing out there right now.

  They’d been two down-on-their-luck drifters with a sick newborn. They’d been dropped off on the high road by a trucker they’d caught a ride with up in Tête Jaune Cache. Why the trucker dropped them off instead of taking them the whole way south was anyone’s guess. From what Jaswant had told him a week ago the family had intended to head west to Prince George along the Fraser, but they got confused and took the truck heading south down the wrong river. It was Jaswant who found them and took them to the deserted shack. And then the man leaving, saying he’d be back. When? As soon as what? As soon as he got some money together? As soon as he found some help?

  Jaswant and his wife had been helping the woman as best they could, but the baby was sick, the woman helpless. When Art first saw it the baby wasn’t much more than a weightless bag of tiny bones wrapped up in a wool shawl, the skin of its head pulled tight around its skull and two huge blue eyes that stared out at a world the tiny body had entered however briefly, the life in it raging with a sickness Art did not understand, an illness he knew he could not cure no matter his first aid, no matter his wanting to. He told them the baby needed to see a doctor, that there was nothing he could do. He told them they had to make their way south to Kamloops. And he’d thought that’s what the woman had done. After her man left Art had been sure she would follow hard on his heels, the baby in her arms. But he knew Jaswant standing there meant she hadn’t.

  Art stepped up on the narrow porch, stilled his trembling hands, and waved to the waiting man. He stood by the door as Jaswant came along the path. Art’s body cried out for a drink from the bottle that was on the table inside. He knew he couldn’t help that baby. Art’s was a first aid, not a last.

  The Sikh’s feet were too narrow in boots too large for him. Art could see his feet slipping inside them. His turban was a faded yellow, subdued, its paleness a failing sun. Jaswant did not look down as he walked over the uneven ground. It was like his feet in those loose boots knew the ground before they stepped on it. He had come from a place in northern India. Somewhere in the mountains. Jaswant walked on the ground like he knew what the earth was, uneven, stone strewn, yet forgiving. Art knew the place he’d come from was the Kashmir, but why he knew he didn’t remember. It must have been Wang Po told him. The cook knew about everyone who worked in the mill, everyone in the village, everyone on the hill farms. He knew because no one paid attention to him beyond eating the food he served. He knew because he listened.

  Jaswant had to know there was nothing Art could do for that baby. And there was no penicillin in Art’s stash, no sulpha. He’d left it all out on a shelf by the door four or five days ago and the cat had knocked it to the floor into a spilled drink when she was trying to catch a hawk moth. He didn’t think the drugs would have helped anyway. But maybe they might have. Maybe they still could.

  The new supply would come tomorrow when the package came up from Vancouver on the Express with the morphine for his kit and the opium for Wang Po and a little for himself. There would be medicine in the package if Li Wei had found medicine to send. He might not have. And even if Art risked giving the baby some penicillin he knew it could easily kill rather than cure, the baby so impossibly small.

  “Yes,” Art said, as much to himself as to the man approaching.

  Jaswant stopped, his boots a foot below the porch deck, his head even with Art’s. There was a silence and Art waited, hoping for what was not going to be said and knowing it would be. They waited and finally Art broke and said, “Is it the baby?”

  “It is the baby, sir,” said Jaswant.

  “It is no better?” replied Art, the word sir dumbfounding him as it always did when he talked to the man, Jaswant thinking because Art was the first-aid man he was the same as a doctor. And Art’s own reply, his words slipping into the odd clipped formality Jaswant used when he spoke in an English that was Art’s language and was not quite.

  “She is no better,” Jaswant said. “The woman has milk, but the baby throws it up. That baby is feeble now and I think she will die.”

  “A girl?”

  “The baby,” said Jaswant. “A girl, yes.”

  H
e hadn’t known it was a girl. When he’d seen it last it was only a tiny face and two fists wrapped in a yellow shawl Jaswant’s wife had given to the mother. Art didn’t want it to be a girl, a daughter. And he didn’t want it to have a name. He wanted it to be just a baby. A daughter was too real. If it was a daughter she would have a name and if she had a name he would have to try to do something, anything.

  “Her name is Beate.”

  “The mother?”

  “The baby, sir,” said Jaswant. “The mother’s name is Gerda. Gerda Dunkle.”

  “And the father? Is he back?”

  “No.”

  It was quiet as they waited for one or the other to say something more. There was a soft thump at the edge of the porch and both of them turned and stared at the cat with a mouse in her jaws. The cat stopped for a moment and then walked across the worn boards and wound her liquid body in and around Art’s boots. As it did Art reached behind him and opened the door, the cat making one more pass by a boot and from there into the cabin. Art pulled the door behind it, the single thought in his head a bottle of whisky glinting.

  “It is the cat,” Art said, asking himself why he was speaking like this. Jaswant knew the cat was a cat. He didn’t have to be told.

  Art waited again in the vain hope he would leave and then Jaswant said, “What can you do?”

  Art stood there stunned. For a moment he found the question impossible. What had he ever been able to do?

  Art stepped out onto the grass and said, “I don’t know. Something. Nothing. The woman shouldn’t be here. She should be in Kamloops.”

  He waited, but Jaswant said nothing in return.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” Art said. “If the medicine package comes on the Express. But only if the package comes and only if there is medicine in it,” adding this last even as he knew the package was coming on the Express, but needing a way out. He didn’t want to have to make good on a promise he knew would change nothing and probably make everything worse. It was the hope a promise gave that worried him, the offering an obligation.