by Patrick Lane
Silence.
And then he asked the oldest question in the world. “Is anybody home?”
He let his breath go and took another.
No one.
He told himself that if Jim came back from wherever he was Art would say Irene had called out to him for help. Thinking that, he stepped in and pulled the door shut behind him. The couch against the front wall was a worn brown, the pebbled cloth rubbed smooth, a sheen of grease on the arm closer to the door. A plywood coffee table sat in front of it, a black leopard ashtray in the centre, one of the cat’s ruby eyes gone as if fallen or pried out and lost. The plywood tabletop was stained a deep red. It looked like Jim had taken a can of oxblood shoe polish and worked the thick greasy stain into the whorls of wood after he bought it. The ashtray was clean and so was the floor.
The floor, the walls, the table and counter, all clean.
He couldn’t exactly remember, but he was pretty sure they weren’t like this before.
He reached out and touched the nail in the wall he’d seen through the window. A picture had hung there last night, he was sure now. He remembered it was of a lake, a sunset, flowers, and mountains, the old dream of a wilderness where harmony and peace reigned. Now there was only a rectangle of pale white below the nail, the spot where it had been cleaner than the wall surrounding it.
He looked around, feeling like he’d never been here before. “Hello?”
The kitchen was part of the living room. In the corner by a small wood stove balanced on bricks was a spider-legged kitchen table with two unmatched metal chairs pushed under it, their brittle plastic cushions, one swirled green, the other ruby red, criss-crossed with duct tape to hold the stuffing in. The table was bare, no cloth or bowls, no knives or forks, no remnant breakfast plates or cups. A sink was sunk in the counter, the worn steel scoured clean, no dishtowel, no washcloth. The cupboards above were closed. He opened the one above the sink. There were four plain white plates, five saucers and three cups, some glasses of different shapes and sizes. The cupboard beside it was empty except for two steel forks and a single table knife, the three of them pushed to the back. He opened the drawer by the sink and found a plastic tray with knives and forks and spoons in it. He hesitated a moment and then for some reason he took the ones out of the cupboard and put them in the tray with the others. It made no sense that they should be in a different place.
He tried to remember the night before. McAllister had raged in this room while Art sewed Irene up in the back bedroom. He’d heard a bottle break out here last night. There should have been broken glass somewhere on the floor, but everything had been swept up. For sure it wasn’t Irene who had cleaned the place. She was helpless.
He remembered taking an almost-full bottle of whisky away from Jim when he left. It was the bottle he’d been drinking from down by the river, the one he’d woken up to. Just before he did that he’d looked around and he was sure the front end here had been a mess.
He looked down the long hall, everything narrowing to the end, a sliding door blocking off the bathroom.
“Missus McAllister?”
Nothing.
“Irene?”
Maybe she was sleeping.
She had to be sleeping.
He held the first-aid kit out in front of him and went along the narrow passage toward the back. Beside him on either side was a row of cupboards and two narrow closets. He opened one with his free hand. Hanging from the wooden rod were McAllister’s work shirts, beside the last one a worn jacket and a hunting vest draped from nails, a row of seven shotgun shells sticking out of the loops of the vest, and a heavy knife, sheathed and hanging from a loop of leather. It wasn’t the knife she’d cut herself with. This one had a broader blade. Behind the shirts and leaning into the corner was a .12-gauge Brittany shotgun, the barrels polished to a heavy blue, two boxes of shells on the floor beside it, one box open and three shells gone. Beside it was Jim’s .308 Browning.
Art turned around and pulled out a wall-cupboard drawer stuffed with work socks, the one below holding a tangle of worn underwear. The drawer below it was deep, work pants folded in a pile in the bottom of it. He opened a cupboard door on the other side. Hanging from the wooden rod was a white shirt, its collar yellowed, and a red striped tie hanging from it. Beside it was a black suit, an old one, the cuffs worn, the lapels wide. On the floor as if forgotten was a pair of white panties. He touched the panties’ frilled edge and remembered the ones she’d been wearing the night before, the blood soaking them. There was a rod in the next closet with nothing hanging from it, just a row of finishing nails below it punched into the wall. Other than the ones with Jim’s stuff, the drawers he looked into were empty.
He tried to remember and the image of Marie’s room above the café in Paris came back to him. He clenched his elbows against his sides and closed his eyes. For a moment he tried not to be in Paris and then he was. He was in the room with the little couch by the window where she always sat looking out at the street. Marie had a closet but he realized he’d never really looked at what was in it. His own stuff was kept in the duffle beside the door, his extra shirt and pants, socks and underwear, his spare things. But Marie’s stuff? He had no idea what she had except that she wore dresses sometimes, other times skirts and blouses. He had no idea where she kept her stockings and underwear.
There was the shotgun and the knife.
Jim hadn’t left town, his truck was in the shed, his tools were in the joy-shack.
But there’d have to be things of Irene’s in the bedroom. He was sure. He remembered seeing a closet there and a tiny bureau pushed into the corner where her bed was. That’d be where she kept her woman stuff.
Art rolled the sliding door into its slot and entered the tiny bathroom. He took three steps and stopped at the last door, the one that opened into the room at the end, the one where Irene had been, the one where she was.
“Irene?” he said, but there was no answer. He hoped she was sleeping and not scared, good if she was asleep, good if she wasn’t afraid.
He didn’t slide open the door. Maybe it was best if he left her sleeping.
She was sure to be in there.
But he had to see if her wounds were okay.
He’d look.
He’d look in a moment.
The bathroom was clean, the smell of vinegar and ammonia stronger there than it had been up in the front of the trailer. He looked again in the sink, saw it as it was the night before with its wet pink cloths soaking, the streaks of dirt smeared on the floor where his boots or Jim’s had slipped in the water Art had spilled from the basin. Crumpled towels and washcloths and torn strips of a pillowcase he hadn’t needed or wanted that had been thrown into the short, four-foot bathtub, everything blotted with her blood, the soaked blanket that was the bedcover where she’d sat and the sheets too. He remembered the stains. They’d been violent red-black lichens on strewn stones, the blood caked at the edges.
He had stood at the sink washing his hands and arms before going in to stitch her up. What else had he done before he went in to see her last night? He knew he didn’t want to remember just as he knew he had to. He’d stood there and he’d seen a cobweb in the corner above the bathroom mirror, but the cobweb was gone now, the wall washed clean.
Art placed his palm gently on the thin sliding door that opened to the bedroom and then took his hand away. He wished it wasn’t him who was here, that he wasn’t the man Claude Harper had found in the hotel bar in Japtown two years ago, that he hadn’t come upriver to work and to maybe find some kind of life far from the city where he’d been lost off and on for years. He set his kit on the floor, slipped the mickey of whisky from his jacket pocket, and took a drink. His stomach recoiled and he swallowed a bit more, his belly muscles tight as he capped the bottle and put it back in his pocket. It was still almost full.
He thought he’d call out, only this time maybe a little louder. He didn’t want to suddenly wake her, to frighten her.
&nbs
p; He said her name again. “Irene?”
Even as he did he knew there’d be no answer.
He tried to understand and didn’t quite, the hope, however confused in him, that she’d be in her bed at rest, the hope for her to be better or at least not worse. For her to have passed the first crisis was what he had wanted, to have survived the shock, the primary one, the kind that killed. He’d seen survivors in the war, had seen men wear terrible wounds and live, seen blood displayed on their bodies like wet medals, an arm holding on by a shred of skin, a piece of skull sheared away by shrapnel, the quiet brain seemingly still thinking in the rivulets of blood, the injured man talking to his mother as if she was there in the mud beside him, the man who told his wife that he was sorry.
There was that soldier just before Caen. The man was lying on his back by the side of a ditch when Art saw him. When Art knelt down the soldier opened his eyes and told Art a mortar blast had knocked him out. For a moment Art thought the soldier had lost his legs, but they were only part-buried under dirt-clotted grass and stones. The soldier wore at his throat a blue bandana with white flowers on it and Art remembered thinking he must have brought the bit of rag from home, maybe from the Cypress Hills down by the Montana border or in the desert country in the South Okanagan, somewhere west for sure. A good-luck charm his girlfriend back home had given him, maybe, or sent him in an envelope from home. The twisted bit of cloth made the soldier too human. There was the front of his ruined uniform, his pale face. Art had asked him if he was injured and the soldier lying there on his back said he was hurt only a little. Mostly just knocked out for a bit, he’d said. Art had been going to give him a shot of morphine, but the soldier told him he was all right. He said there’d be someone up ahead who’d likely need it more, and when he’d said that he turned his head away from Art. The man’s Lee–Enfield .303 was lying beside him, the barrel nestled in a shattered willow crook.
Art had tightened the straps of his first-aid kit, someone shouting medic, medic from a cluster of trees on the other side of the field past the ditch. He had backed down the slight slope and was bent over shrugging into his pack when he saw the soldier just above him turn a little, the curve of his back resting against a rock. The man began to shoot with what seemed to Art intimate care and precision at what Art knew were the distant moving wraiths that were the soldier’s enemy.
Two hours later he’d come again to the road, the Germans pushed back to some nameless village crossroad up ahead. He wasn’t looking for the injured soldier when he stepped down into the ditch to piss.
The man was where Art had left him. The soldier lay as if at rest, the rifle barrel still propped in the willow crook, his one hand cupped around the trigger guard and the other as if he’d been trying to pull his coat under him to keep away the chill. The soldier must have thought the cold had been coming from the earth beneath him but it was only his own dying.
He had wondered at the wholeness of a body, how it could so easily be taken apart.
The dirt had been dark with the soldier’s blood, the hole in his back big enough for Art to put his fist into.
He put his hand on the door and pushed it sideways. It slid open, a single shaft of light from the window stretching supine on the empty bed. There was no blanket or cover, only a sheet stretched tight. For a moment he wanted to reach out and lift the edge of the sheet so he could look at the bloodstain that had to be on the mattress, the outline of her buttocks there, her thighs where the blood had run down and soaked in. He wanted to and then he didn’t. Nothing happened for a long time and then he saw his hand resting on the wood and he slid the door back, nudging it into its slot by the sink with a quiet thud. He looked at the door and then turned and went back down the hall to the front of the trailer.
Art sat down on the chair with the swirled green plastic, leaned over Irene McAllister’s rickety table, and looked out the window through a shaft of sun. Midges small as bits of dust danced there, their wings touching the edges of shadows and recoiling. In the corner of the window was a slender spider waiting with the immense patience that all still-hunters had for one or another of the insects to blunder into its web.
He remembered a priest in Belgium sliding beads through his fingers as Art talked to him about forgiveness. They were in a windowless shed outside some village. The two Germans at their feet were dead, one of them with his arm blown off, one half of his head in a helmet by the wall. The other soldier lay perfect in his death, his uniform clean, no wound to see. Wij zijn vergeven, the priest had said.
Art had wanted to kill the priest when he said that, we are all forgiven, and told him so. The little man with his steel spectacles propped on his nose clicked his beads and smiled at the wild idea of his own death by the man who had liberated him. An hour later the priest vanished in a battle, his tidy shed obliterated by a mortar, the little man in the soutane gone as if he never was.
Forgiveness?
Forgive who, forgive what?
All he had was what he remembered and all he’d wanted for these many years was to forget. The soldier lying in a ditch in France with a hole in his back. What was it in the man that he could not, would not tell Art he was wounded? What made him lie there with his rifle, waiting to kill again? What kind of man was that?
The German word for courage was mut. What did a word like that have to do with a man’s will?
He ran the palms of his hands over the wine-dark tabletop. He knew why he’d come back to the trailer. He’d needed to check her stitches, make sure they were secure. She might have panicked and at worst torn some of them. And her dressings needed to be replaced, her wounds checked for inflammation, infection. He had the penicillin from the package Joel picked up. She needed to take some of the pills.
But she wasn’t in bed where she was supposed to be. She wasn’t anywhere.
And McAllister had stood at the door of the joy-shack and denied him? Had she been gone even then? Surely there was some decency in Jim? And Art could have been with her, could have told the sawyer he was going to stay from the very first. She’d still be in her bed then, wouldn’t she, if he’d just sat beside her through the night? Or would McAllister have thrown him out? Of course Jim would have told him to go. She was Jim’s wife. She belonged to him. Jim would have kicked him out if Art had insisted on staying.
Art had wanted him to.
Every thought he had was a betrayal. Had he always lied to himself? The truth was he’d wanted to get out of the trailer and away from the madness in the room, the two of them feeding off each other’s misery and hate, the anger, the fear, and the suffering too. They were eating each other alive.
He’d go down and share his whisky with Wang Po and the cook would share his opium with him. It was part of their ritual. The little bit of opium he kept for himself back at the cabin was his to use when he needed something more than whisky to help get him through the night. But right now Art needed the black tar’s smoke. He needed it bad. And as he thought of the opium he felt the softness spreading through his body, and nothing for him to think, nothing to feel, only the smoke floating him away. He’d be in that safe place. The opium and the whisky took him far away from the world. The past was just a story then, a long dream that couldn’t hurt him anymore. He needed that.
“Fuck,” he said. “Fuck.”
SQUATTED DOWN ON HIS HAMS AND HEELS on the worn boards beside the iron bunk, his whole body pulled into the darkened corner around behind the door where no one coming in from the swamp would ever see him, was a boy. He was hidden in plain sight much as a willow grouse is who hides in a barren field from those who are hunting. He was hiding so perfectly he was as a fallen rock or a clump of winter-burned weeds, something unalive to anyone not knowing how to look, to see. Behind him was the door, the swamp behind the bunkhouse, the sun just coming on, fringes of heat lifting from the windowsill above the bunk.
The boy’s face and hands were draped with thin scars he’d endured from passing through the bush on one of hi
s many wanders, the smaller ones from twigs and branches scratching him. The larger scars he’d given himself deliberately with the tip and edge of his knife. He had done that to himself because he’d seen pictures in a magazine picked up from a chair in front of a bunkhouse a year ago. The pictures were of black men in Africa who decorated themselves with scars, their beauty such he wished the same for himself. He would not have called them beautiful for he thought the word wrong for anything about himself, beauty being something girls and women spoke of, not men.
And the new scar still forming on the side of his face he’d given to himself by falling from the osprey tree into the river, the river alive in him still. The fall was now what Joseph and Art had told him, a moment of flight when he became an osprey, the river his hunting water, the great trout and salmon living there his prey. His mother had changed his bandage that morning, careful not to disturb the thin crust that had formed around the stitches. She had gently placed a salve made from lavender leaves, wild foxglove honey, and crushed garlic over the wound to keep it clear of infection. He had watched her mix the salve in silence. Only his mother could make him sit still long. As she bound the wound again with strips of clean cotton, she had spoken to the wound, asking it to complete its journey from the broken to the whole. Then she sang her healing song, the one she learned from her own mother when she was a girl.
Emerson listened and didn’t listen, his body wanting to leave the house he had slept in the past night. His mother had made him sleep on a straw mattress she laid at the side of her bed. When he had risen in the night to piss she had followed him out under the moon and waited until he was finished. He knew why she was there and did not go to the barn where his real bed was. She stood behind him, her face turned away from his pissing. He was old enough now for her not to look at his pecker. She had followed him not so much because she did not trust him to stay, but because her love for him was boundless. “I have a boundless love for you,” she had told him while she was changing his dressing. “The chains of love were taken away when you slipped from my belly,” she said.
