Deep River Night

by Patrick Lane

  Art’s belly cramped again and he dry-heaved into his lap, a string of spittle hanging from his lip. He took a long drink from the bottle and gazed at the newspaper walls of his cabin. The pages had been glued flat to the logs to keep out the cold drafts of winter. There were many hundreds of nights Art had lain on this cot, the lamp turned low, the chimney grimed with soot. It was in the dimness Art imagined the old prospector who’d built the cabin lifting a fragile sheet of damp newspaper up to the wall and sticking it there with glue made from melted moose hooves. The walls revealed the sixteen years of the man’s solitude. The earliest paper Art could find was a fragment stuck under the lintel above the door. The date in the corner of the fragile shard was August 7, 1898. The last was October 4, 1914, two months after war was declared. It had been pasted neatly beside the cot where a man could lie and read it over and over. It would be the first thing a man would see when he opened his eyes.

  Art liked to believe whoever built the cabin had come to the far west by sailing out of Liverpool on a steamer. Someone who had left England in the last century, the wind carrying him around the horn of South America through the Drake Passage and then on to Vancouver Island. The gold rush had run out in the Yukon, and the man went up the Fraser and then east and north along the Thompson rivers. He stopped when he got to Little Hell’s Gate and, turning south, began his search for gold in the narrow valley where little or no gold was. The North Thompson and the Clearwater were pyrites country, dead volcanoes dreaming of older days.

  Art sipped at his whisky as he imagined the old man moving in the shadows of his room. He closed his eyes and saw the old prospector pick up a fragile sheet, the last one he glued upon the wall. He wondered how many hours the man had spent lying on the cedar boughs of his poplar-pole bunk staring at the words about his war.

  Before the old remittance man, Sinjun, died he would sit and drink with Art and tell him stories about those early years. Art had asked him about his strange name and Sinjun had laughed and said his name was St. John. “It’s how we say it,” he told Art as they shared a drink. Sinjun had remembered the man who’d lived in Art’s cabin leaving on the train an October night back in 1914. “I called him Smith,” Sinjun said. “He never offered me no other name. He was a prospector who received money from home. He was a fearful drinker,” Sinjun had said before pouring another couple of ounces of Art’s whisky into his glass.

  Both those old-timers had been looking for gold back then. They wanted to find the colour that had run out up in the Yukon. Sinjun said Smith had worked every creek from Tête Jaune Cache to Little Fort but all he ever panned were mica flakes and Gobi dust, pyrites and the wrong quartz. But he kept trying, Sinjun said. Prospecting was a curse, the searching for gold almost more important than the finding it. “We love to lose,” he told Art. “Losing is what we want. We wrap it around ourselves and call it loneliness.”

  There were times Art thought long of those two solitaries at their steady work, a bottle of homemade hooch between their legs at night and gold dust in their heads. Smith’s bones were most likely lying in a grave in France and the other, old Sinjun, was buried in back of the village church. Before he passed on he’d taken Art to the graveyard and shown him where he wanted to be laid. Don’t say any words, he told Art. I never talked to anyone from the summer of 1920 to the spring of 1925, he added. There are far too few good words in this world to waste even one on me.

  It was Art who found him dead, empty bottles of lemon extract littered by his mattress. There were only a few days left in the month and Sinjun had gone through his monthly remittance by the third week. He drank extract after that, every month the same. His skin was stained yellow, scratch marks on his arms and withered chest where he’d scraped at the lemon sweat come out of him in hopes there would be alcohol left in the stain. Art buried him under the young cedar Sinjun had chosen, the old prospector having told Art he thought cedars were like women with long skirts and he wanted to rest under one. Art missed the tales of the old days on the rivers, the Yukon and Nass, the Fraser, Skeena, and the Thompsons, the stories of Sinjun’s years in Africa, the Boer War. He said Africa was hell for soldiers. It seemed like the wars ate everyone in the end.

  Art’s bottle perched like a carrion crow on the corner of the dead stove. There were still two or three inches of whisky left. Art was amazed he hadn’t finished them.

  A white moth flew out from behind the Five Roses curtain and crashed against the kerosene lamp, swirled up, caught in the dark heat of the chimney, its wings withering to ash. Art watched it fall as the boulders deep in the river bottom rolled on bedrock, their low thunder a dark drum. The guns of Walcheren was the song the river sang.

  “Where am I?” he said, his head hurting.

  He spoke quietly into the night, the cat answering him with a guttural moan. The animal was under the bed. He could hear the thin bones of some small creature breaking.

  Art rubbed his knuckles into his eyes and the darkness there exploded, a Fenian fire behind his eyes, a phosphorous bomb in his brain. He pushed his knuckles deeper, grinding there as if he could destroy what he saw. Lightning balls burst and turned into incandescent bats, their shining wings fluttering as they receded into the dark. Art lifted his glass and emptied it. He poured another and took a swallow. As he drank, the guns of Walcheren became the river again and he saw Claude Harper as he had first seen him.

  Claude was in an alley behind Pender Street with a young girl. She was struggling to get away and Claude was laughing as he pressed her against a wet brick wall, his forearm across her chest. A garbage can spilled down the block, some street woman looking for her dinner behind the Pearl Restaurant. It was Chinatown. It was 1935. Art had yelled at Claude to let her go and Claude, surprised anyone was there, turned to see who was trying to stop his fun. As he did the girl twisted out from under his arm and ran past Art out of the alley, her bare feet slapping puddles, her scuffed high heels hanging from clenched fingers. You fucker, she cried. You dirty fucker!

  And that was where it began. He never really understood why Claude took a shine to him. Art was fifteen years old and Claude was ten years older. They were different in other ways too. Art was a homeless East End kid and Claude with family money and a fancy apartment in West Vancouver. They argued, Claude taunting him, a little angry, a little amused, and then he took a flask of whisky from his hip pocket and offered Art a drink. They stood in the alley and finished the flask. Then Art took Claude to his first opium room. After they smoked, Art took him down a side tunnel under Pender Street. It was where Art had lived the past five months. The stone wall up against his mattress was always warm from a sewer pipe that ran behind the rip-rap wall.

  They were to each other a strange kind of friend. Claude had whisky and money on him all the time while Art struggled daily for the dollars he needed to keep alive. He showed Claude around, introduced him to some of the guys in the Alma Dukes and Riley Park gangs, the pimps and whores in the late night Blue Danube, the after-hours at the Mocambo, the Silver Fox dressed to the nines with his ladies on show, Dainty Thelma too who came with her girls and her man, Fat Alfred, who was known to have maimed a dozen johns for his private pleasure. It was always two or three in the morning, the street trade done for the night. And there was the opium. Art could always get Claude opium. Then the war came along and Claude stopped using the drug. He drank, but then who didn’t back then.

  The Depression ate up everyone’s lives. Claude came and went. Art got occasional work on the boats and camps up the coast. When those jobs dried up he scrambled in the street selling heroin, stealing, doing whatever he could to make ends meet. Claude was slumming when he came down to the Eastside. Art knew Claude could always escape back to the safety of West Vancouver when it pleased him. Claude had money. He didn’t have to work.

  After the shell landed near him at Moerbrugge Claude sent him to Paris, Art’s brain concussed, shrapnel in his shoulder. They were going to send him to England and then home, but Art
had asked Claude not to let them send him away. Claude told him after about his begging. “Christ,” he’d said, “you got the perfect wound and there you were asking me to keep you in the war.”

  Claude said he liked having Art around. He told Art once that he was his bad luck charm.

  And then Paris again just after the Liberation, the Germans gone from the city. One night he and Marie had made a slow love, tender, and after sat at the window looking out at the people passing by, the lights, the laughter, the sound of Paris newly free. They sat side by side and watched as a truck came careening down the street and crashed into a car turning into the corner. There was the huge cry of wrenched metal, a sudden silence, and then the blaring of a horn that would not stop. Art pushed Marie from under his arm and as he made a move to get up from the edge of the bed and go down to the street to see if he could help he saw a flame lick out from under the back of the small car, a woman’s scream, and then the gas tank blew.

  Art heard the explosion, he didn’t see it. His eyes were closed and he was back in Moerbrugge and the shell was bursting behind him. Something punched him hard in the shoulder and he was thrown into the air, gravel and dirt spraying around him in a fan, smoke and dust and nothing.

  The explosion in the street outside her room brought back the scattered stones of Moerbrugge and it was only then that he remembered lying by the rubble wall, the garden he had stepped into gone. He remembered staggering into the night and one of the men finding him, he didn’t remember who. The medics got him then and he was taken to the field hospital, Claude intervening two days later when they were going to send him to England, Claude taking him to Paris, the hospital, and then Marie.

  Even now, fifteen years later, his brain would break and he wouldn’t be able to find anything to hold on to. There were places beyond the curtain, but he couldn’t find a way through. People talked and shouted there. They lived and died and he didn’t know how to save them. Fragments, nothing more. And still the nightmares, someone shouting, his own cries to someone, no one.

  He’d loved Notre-Dame, loved to lean back against the ancient walls while they talked. They had begun to learn the rudiments of each other’s language, enough to laugh at their mistakes, enough to be sure of the silences that lay between them.

  He remembered their first time together and the milk from her breasts. He hadn’t known there was a baby until she lay naked beside him. Her milk leaked and when he pressed her breast gently the milk sprayed out in tiny fountains.

  Confused, afraid he was hurting her, he said, “Is it okay?”

  And she said oui, her eyes looking up at him as if he were a man far off, someone she had found for a moment only, no more. She told him he was the stranger in her life. You I cannot know, she told him.

  Her milk was a last blue, the colour of the winter sky in the north just before the night has arrived, the colour darkness dreams before it can become a colour. After they made love he had licked the milk from her belly, the sweetness pooled in her navel, and they talked. He had no French beyond a few words. Her English was better, but not much.

  “A baby?” he asked, pointing to her belly. “Where is he?”

  “A girl, no boy.”

  “Where is the baby?”

  “Not here,” she said, rolling away from him.

  And her milk began to dry up and Claude sent him back to his unit in Belgium, the battle for the Scheldt begun.

  She would be sixteen years old now, that baby of Marie’s. Two years older than the Indian girl in the store, Alice. Marie’s baby would be a beautiful young French girl laughing in a café on the Left Bank, a café like the one her mother knew. The Café Olympique, perhaps. Or not. Maybe the baby was dead when they lay there together back in Paris. Why didn’t she have a name, that baby?

  He didn’t want her to be dead. A few days after that first time Marie had told him the baby was with friends in Lyon. Days later she said the baby was with her family in Marseilles. If the baby was alive why wasn’t it with her? If the baby was dead then why was it dead? What happened?

  And Marie?

  She told him not to love her. She said love in a war is only an hour. Rien de plus.

  But that wasn’t nothing, was it?

  When he left to go back to the fighting she told him he would forget her. But he wasn’t good at forgetting. He told her he would come back to Paris, to her. The war will end, he told her.

  Some nights he wished he could put it all together. He wished the past would stay in the past so he could forget it. But it wouldn’t go away. It lived inside him, the war, Marie.

  Who was he to feel sorry for himself? He’d made his life. Who was Marie? Who had she ever been? And for a fragile moment she was there in his cabin standing by the stove warming her hands over the fire, her dark hair hanging loose against a white shift, and then she was a wisp, a thread of smoke in a dingy room above a sad café.

  He opened a new bottle, whisky splashing, waves and tremors swirling as he filled the glass with its three ounces. He screwed the cap down on the bottle, setting it gentle on the table, the whisky trembling into stillness. He was about to reach for the bottle again when the cat leapt from under the bed and up onto the windowsill. She turned her body sideways to the night, her ears erect, the hair on her neck stiffened, and a hack and another hack from her throat as if trying to dislodge something, a bone gone down wrong, a smell she wanted gone, or a need to have her lungs clear for whatever was outside. She settled on her paws and softly hissed.

  Then Art heard a noise far off.

  Outside was something close and closing. Whatever it was it hadn’t lost its way in the dark. There was only the faint sound of grass brushing against a body, boots on the path.

  Art didn’t think. He got up in a single motion, his legs obeying muscles that had long ago learned how to move by themselves, took two long steps to the door, reached around a padded coat for his Winchester, and then stopped himself. He stepped back and waited, wondering at his reaching for his rifle. There was nothing strange about someone needing him in the night.

  A boot came down soft on the porch and then another boot, quieter, and then nothing.

  A man, then, Art thought.

  “Hello, the door,” Art said, and when there was no answer, asked, “Who’s there?”

  He watched the handle turn and the door push slowly open. Jim McAllister stood just beyond the doorway on the porch. The darkness was behind the sawyer, the light from the kerosene lamp on the table, faint glimmers feeding on his face.

  “Jim?”

  “It’s my woman,” the sawyer said, his voice quiet.

  “Your woman?”

  “You come,” said Jim. He spoke as if from a place far off only he knew was there.

  JOEL’S SWEATY HAND LIFTED from the butt end of a log beside the path, a chip of bark falling away. The shard slipped through the air and came to rest in the dust beside the sill. He stood quiet as he watched a rat poke its head out of its burrow and touch the fallen flake. It sniffed at the bitterness of what he had touched and he imagined the alien smell of sweat and salt melting in the rat’s delicate nose. Joel took a step. He could see the pale cups of the rat’s ears catch at his footfall, his slightest breathing, the frayed cuff of his shirt catching at a leaf, a shard of stone flittering away, a chokecherry branch whimpering as he bent it back upon itself. The dry limb of a cedar shifted as he moved again along the trail, brittle red needles sweeping the air behind him.

  He had watched the small creatures many times, just as he watched birds and bears. He closed his eyes and imagined the rat rubbing its face with praying paws before retreating to its burrow, the small hieroglyphs left by its clawed feet faint in the dusty earth. He knew the rat would sit in its dark mouth of dirt and suck at its teeth as it listened to the worn threads of his pants brush against the chokecherry, his boot heel click against a rock as he moved away.

  The dark caught at Joel as he passed along the trail. His muscles hadn’t yet caught
up to his bones. Scrawny, his lean legs stuck out from his stagged-off canvas pants, his narrow feet bound in boots too wide and too short for him. He’d pulled the laces tight and wound the rawhide strips around the boot tops, lapping the eye holes, binding the stiff leather to his skinny ankles.

  He thought again of the morning he got the boots, Art Kenning standing at the bunkhouse door holding them crooked in his two fingers. Art had dropped them on the bunk and told him to get dressed and come down to the cookhouse. As Art left, Joel asked him where the cookhouse was. Art told him he’d been there last night, but Joel said he didn’t remember, it was so cold, there was so much snow. Art just said Joel would find it if he was hungry enough. Joel had slept past breakfast, his muscles still aching, frost burns on the backs of his hands, his face chapped and brittle. Even his hair hurt. Pain, yes, but not enough to go hungry. The thought of food drove it away.

  He remembered that morning, his walk around the bunkhouse, half the men gone on shift at the mill, the rest sleeping or staring vacantly into the shadows. He’d walked between the rows of bunks, each one defined by the man who slept there, cots left rumpled, blankets askew, and others with sheets and blankets pulled tight to keep the winter chill out. He didn’t know then that the men who had made their beds were veterans from the war, the messed beds left by younger men. On the wall above the cots men had nailed shelves to hold what they had, soap, razors, knives and such, nails to hang their coats and jackets from. Some had photographs of family, people left behind or people a man might be going back to, a woman, kids, someone waiting for the man’s return. Joel had looked at the faces of happy strangers as he wondered if he’d ever have a family. Maybe someday. There were books too, ratty magazines with girls on the covers, quiet things, a postcard from somewhere, thin letters bound with string. Each man had made the space he was allowed into a room without walls, a kind of home, its space clear and defined, an invisible line marking off where one imagined room stopped and another started.