by Patrick Lane
Give me a hand, would ya?
The soldier only said it the once and then stopped a moment as if tired of trying to understand why he couldn’t gather it all up, the tubes of his body slipping through his hands like wet hawsers as he died.
The muscles in Art’s shoulders and chest bound him tight. He barely breathed.
He lifted his hand to the dried-out heads of the daisies beside him, the stems and wilted flowers brushing his palms.
McAllister.
As far as he could tell, Jim hadn’t touched her but for taking the knife away. He told Art he’d had to unwind her fingers from the buckhorn handle of his hunting knife. He’d held the blade out to Art when they got to the trailer, but Art refused the knife she’d used. McAllister said it was the one he’d skinned moose and deer with. And as Jim described the undoing of his wife’s fingers, he asked Art: “Why not one of her own? Tell me that. Why would she go digging around in my stuff to find my hunting knife? There were others in the kitchen just as good.”
How was Art to answer such a question? How speak to such a man?
McAllister had left her sitting in her blood when he came down to the cabin to get him, Art Kenning, the one person McAllister thought would be able to deal with what was, beyond his frustration and rage, a complex puzzle he could not for the life of him solve. He could have woken Oroville Cranmer and got Oroville’s wife, Gladys, to stay with Irene while he went for help. They lived in the cabin just down the path. But it was not in McAllister to ask Oroville or anyone for help for fear of being beholden. No, he went off into the night to get the first-aid man, the only one he knew who could not only staunch the blood and sew up the wounds but keep what his wife had done a secret.
What had she wondered as McAllister went out the door and left her there bleeding?
Or was there wonder left in her?
Jim must have told her where he was going.
Or not, because Art didn’t know what Jim might have said to her, sitting as his wife was on the edge of their bed stuck down in her own blood.
“I’m sorry,” Art said to the river which, for all the many times he’d talked to it, said nothing back, the rapids and currents swirling his words away in obdurate refusal to speak its one mind.
When he’d finished suturing the injuries on her left thigh Art had sharpened the needle again on the stone, disinfected the blade, and begun work on the one deeper cut on the right leg, another small shot from the remnant morphine keeping Irene still as the stitches went in, the tug of the diamond needle, the thin itch he knew she felt as the thread pulled through her flesh, and beyond that nothing but the beating of her heart.
He lay against the river boulder, hands wrung and dry, and lifted the whisky bottle he’d yanked from McAllister’s hand when he left the trailer. He took a deep drink and then a last one, holding the bottle to his mouth until the faint drops touched his tongue. He rested the empty bottle between his thighs, the liquor burning in his belly.
He would go to Wang Po’s. But first he needed to pull himself together.
He laced his fingers around the bottle’s neck.
What had it been like for her to go to such a place?
He knew the wounding wasn’t a cry for help. In that she was like the man who owned her. And she hadn’t given up her life entirely or else she’d have made a better job of it. What she’d done, Art thought, was to make of her body an offering to McAllister, a display of her despair, the blood she shed a kind of message, a missive sent, any kind of written note a lie. Her wounds were like the belongings of a hanged woman’s life arranged neatly around her, everything in order, the floors scrubbed clean, food covered with a cloth to keep off the flies, the plate on the table a cold dish for her man to eat when he came home at last from work, clean underpants and brassiere, clean slip and dress. It was no different than a swept floor, a fire banked, the clothes left folded neatly on a toilet seat by a woman who had drowned herself in a bathtub having taken every pill she could find to keep from waking up in the same wrong world.
Or Helga Fyksen last year who walked the CNR rail line all the way to the great outfall of the river at Little Hell’s Gate, the double-back eddy below the gorge where the drift trees caught, the river slowly and steadily beating them to splinters against the huge rocks blasted from the cliffs a century ago to make room above the canyon for the railway. She was a woman not much different than Irene. Helga had worn the pants and shirt and overcoat of her husband. Olaf’s clothes, not her own. Helga hadn’t taken his clothes off when she clambered down to the river and it wasn’t that clothes mattered at all, but that clothes with pockets were needed for the job at hand. When they found her body downriver her myriad pockets were full of small stones the river hadn’t beaten out of her.
Art had been called to look at her as if saying she was dead confirmed her death to those who’d dragged her lifeless from a sandbar. He had thought of Helga many times since they took him to her. When Art picked through the little stones he found in her pockets he imagined her choosing each one from among the many along the river. One perfect stone, and then another and another, a nimbus around one, a halo, polished ones with white moons, and the coloured pebbles too, the blue and red and green, jasper, carnelian, quartz, iron-flecked, green jade, pyrites, each and all, they were the kind of rocks he knew a woman could lick with her tongue to see if by their shine they were right for her. For Helga, a hundred stones, until she knew she was weighed down with enough beauty to keep from rising up.
A woman like that.
A woman like Irene.
The cuts Irene McAllister made she displayed so her husband might know her and she might therefore become in her suffering what she thought she was to him, his one true and only wife, his pure and terrible dilemma, his hellish Irene.
“See me,” she might have said to him. “Look at me in my blood.”
“I can’t go crazy,” Art said softly, but there was nothing and no one to answer him.
The railway tracks behind his head gleamed like silver threads dragged by the sickle moon from his skull.
A little brown bat flittered along the river’s edge in search of an errant moth. It cut sideways toward him as if it had an answer to what he hadn’t asked. He felt its skin cross his eyes, the spider bones inside the leather wings startling against the moon.
Art had cut his arm with a razor blade once. He had watched his blood well up in tiny blurts, and then cut himself once more just to make sure it was true.
Perhaps it was simply to know he was alive in there, some proof needed in the end.
“Don’t,” he said, “remember.”
Art put his face in his hands. He and Claude were on leave in Paris. The war was over. Late 1945. It was one of the nights just before Claude went home. As for himself, Art knew he’d be staying to work on the graves. The word had come down the line that no Canadian soldiers could be buried in Germany. The bodies had to be brought back from that cursed ground. Claude had arranged for Art to search out the dead and bring them to Groesbeek in Holland. There was nothing for Art back home, nothing to take him there.
Claude had been drunk on black-market Scotch at his table at the back of the Café L’Oiseau Rouge. Hélène was sitting beside him. Hélène, Claude’s petite putain, the one who had been with him when Claude introduced Art to Marie. She was the girl Claude kept hurting, his disdain for the little prostitute balanced only by his pleasure in using her over and over again for his amusement.
It was the night Claude sold her to a sergeant from the Black Watch.
Pourquoi, Claude, pourquoi?
Claude had ignored her.
“Because it amuses me,” is what he said when Art asked him why.
Art saw Hélène only once more. It was on one of his leaves a few months after searching for bodies and graves around Oldenburg. Marie had gone to Marseilles to get drugs, heroin and morphine from the boat in Marseilles that she sold in Paris, the stuff she brought back for him and for her. When
he saw her Hélène was standing a little way past the Café Olympique a few blocks from Place Pigalle. Two soldiers were talking to her. He watched them as they led her into an alley, Hélène’s skirt partly torn and streaked with oil.
Petite Hélène.
And never again.
Paris.
Sometimes it wouldn’t go away.
Hélène was drunk. But she was always, always drunk, wasn’t she?
At the end she would sit with Marie in the café waiting for Claude, sipping her wine. Every few minutes she’d lean over the table, her hair in clots falling across her eyes. She’d grab Marie’s wrist or the sleeve of her blouse, and say: “Es-tu heureuse, Marie?”
Hélène was serious the way drunks are serious, asking and asking the same questions. For Hélène it was wanting to know if Marie was happy. “Are you happy?”
Marie always told her not to be sad. “Don’t be sad, Hélène. Don’t be sad.”
“Are you happy, Marie?”
And Marie would ask why she stayed with a man who beat her, a man who sold her so he could watch.
And Hélène would say, “Because I love.”
And it would go on like that. On and on.
And long before that, the leave in Paris when Art first met Marie. Was it after Bruges?
Was Marie happy?
They were happy then.
He couldn’t remember if they were ever happy.
Was laughter happy?
Was silence?
But it was Claude’s last leave, Hélène going off with the sergeant from the Black Watch. She turned at the door leading out to the alley and asked Claude, again, why.
Pourquoi?
Sometimes it seemed that word was her one song.
Everyone has a song. Art tried to think of one for himself, but he couldn’t.
“Maybe I don’t have a song,” he said.
Art rolled onto his side and saw the cat leaning across her front paws as she lapped a drink from the pool. Sated, the cat pushed herself up and then rolled over onto a patch of moss and offered him her belly to caress. Art knew enough not to be tempted. Touching her belly was to be attacked by tooth and claw, her game, her play. He leaned over and listened to her purr.
“You have a song, don’t you, cat?”
The cat slowly got up and stretched. She did not look back at him as she disappeared into the long grass.
Hélène had a song.
Pourquoi, pourquoi?
She sang and sang the same refrain and then she was gone, her wrist in the fist of the sergeant from the Black Watch.
Her hair had banged against the sergeant’s elbow, the yellow clots clappers without bells.
A carton of cigarettes and a bottle of Scotch.
Claude said the Luckies and the liquor didn’t matter. He’d have let her go for nothing just so he could watch her walk away.
It was after the Breskens Pocket, after the Scheldt, after the Ardennes, the Rhine, after almost everything.
And Paris.
“Rien ne change,” the words coming unbidden to his tongue. “Nothing changes,” he said to the moss where the cat had laid herself down. “Nothing changes, but us wanting it.”
“Nothing.”
Another bat fluttered toward him as if to touch Art’s voice, a strange sound to hear by the river in the night, and so distracted, the white moth veering. The bat missed his kill, the wings of the moth fluttering small and low over the seething water away.
Art rolled his head on his shoulders. Marie, Hélène, the war. There was reason to be crazy. There was McAllister, his wife Irene, and all the rest, the years that had brought him to this village, these mountains, this huge river.
An empty bottle wasn’t going to get him through the night. He held it up and imagined it full for a moment, the click of the cap when he cracked it open, the first whiff of whisky. Art looked through the glass darkly and then set it down on the moss.
Things were quiet in the village up the hill. Everyone had gone to sleep. He knew Joel would be perched on his upended log back of the store stealing a look at the Indian girl in her lean-to shack, but he’d be the only one around. The rest of the men were long returned from their Friday night in Clearwater or Blue River. Reiner and whoever else had gone there with him would be passed out in their truck somewhere or laid out on their bunks like discarded bodies. Most of the drunks and the gamblers, the loners and losers, were lost in sleep in the bunkhouses. What had or hadn’t happened to them was already dim, almost forgotten except for the groans in their sleep.
Art closed his eyes and saw behind them Wang Po standing on his short stool at the cookhouse, his thin body leaning over the counter as he punched down the dough, those small, hard hands of his disappearing into the body of the bread.
The first loaves would be out of the oven now, Wang Po almost ready to hunch over his pipe as he waited for the bread to cool, the work done, the last of night to dream.
The sea water in the fields, the polders blown by the Germans, and the pig, the pig. The little sow screamed like a child when Tommy cut her throat, blood in dribbling ribbons hanging from his arm.
Art pulled his fingers through his hair.
“Stop,” he said, scratching at his skull.
“Just stop.”
He needed not to think of Irene McAllister either, because thinking wasn’t going to make anything better, only worse. He needed to chase the dragon with Wang Po. The cramps in his belly whispered. He’d go down to the cookhouse.
A few months after he’d come to work at the mill he’d passed by the cookhouse late one night and smelled opium outside the narrow window of Wang Po’s basement room. He had talked to Wang Po and they had shared his opium and Art’s whisky. When Art told him one night that he could use penicillin to help people Wang Po said there was a way to get some.
All the law allowed him as a first-aid man was Aspirin and what good was that for a man with his legs broken, a child with a fever he couldn’t put out, a woman with influenza, infections, one who’d cut the tops of her legs open?
He wanted Irene McAllister out of his head, even as he knew he’d have to go back up to the trailer in a few more hours to check on her bandages and make sure the stitches were okay, that she hadn’t done something crazy and pulled them out to start the cuts bleeding again.
There were hours to go before light.
Irene should’ve gone out to the hospital in Kamloops after he stitched her up. McAllister had the money for it, and the truck, but Jim had said no to taking her. And Art knew asking Claude to try and make Jim do it would have ended up with McAllister quitting. There was nowhere for her to go and no way to get there short of walking and she couldn’t do that. The next passenger train was at noon and it was going north. The Jasper hospital was two nurses and a wish, and Edmonton? Alberta didn’t take people from away. The southbound passenger wasn’t till Sunday.
Jim had said no to that too.
Art could hear Major Claude Harper of the Fourth Canadian Armoured Division asking him where he was supposed to get another sawyer as good as Jim McAllister.
“Not, for damn sure,” Claude would say, “am I going to get a replacement sawyer out of some gondola car on a CNR southbound night freight where I got that winter-frozen, love-besotted Joel kid you made me feel sorry for, an act I regret each time I see the boy at the store mooning over that damned Indian girl that Piet bought for fifty dollars, or for that matter anyone else that from time to time I’ve needed out of desperation because some other miserable wretch has hit the road with the dream that somewhere out there’s a better job in a bigger town with more women in it, a place where if you run out of booze there’s a liquor store nearby where you can buy a case of beer or a bottle and so he’s caught a truck going south or north or jumped one of the freights like the kid arrived on, the trains that are, at times, my only source of labour: bums and fools, backward children from families who didn’t want them or wanted them too much, escapees from fundame
ntalist fathers or loose mothers, the old men, cripples, cranks, and idiots, the drunks and junkies, and in those I include you, Art, knowing full well you’re here only because I couldn’t find anyone else to take on the first-aid job so far from a hospital and because too you were with me in the war and I haven’t forgotten that even as I’ve tried to forget it, and the halfwits, ragheads, and retards too, anyone who can walk while he pushes a broom and a wheelbarrow under a gang saw or trim saw or can hold a twelve-foot pole and push a log on the pond toward the chains that will carry it up into the maw of my mill where the steam dogs wait to set the logs on the carriage and the head saws whine in the hands of the sawyer who will, if I’m lucky and all goes well on Monday, send a clean, half-assed fir log into the blades, carving it into the cants that in their turn will be turned into spaghetti lumber by the gang saws and edgers for the half-naked blacks to sort in Louisiana or the Carolinas, Texas or Arkansas.”
Art would sit there across the desk from Claude and wait for him to be done.
“No,” Claude would say, “McAllister can do what he wants short of murder and even that’s got a question attached to it depending on who got murdered and why. If McAllister’s wife is crazy enough to carve herself up, then it’s McAllister’s problem, not mine and not yours beyond you sewing her up so she can go back to being his wife. He’s my best sawyer. What he does in his spare time up in that forty-foot tin-can trailer is for him to know and no one else. There’s no one in this shithole village I can trust to do a job of things. Not one man…”
