By flashlight Burl read the letter he had slipped into his pocket when he was cleaning up the cabin.
Dear Nog:
So you have wormed your way into the Big Apple again! How goes the battle? Are they treating you right at the studio? Is Mr. Gibbons easy to get along with this time around? I can’t wait to hear.
Toronto is breathing a sigh of relief since you left. For one thing, it’s truly quiet at night now without you driving around, the top forty blasting from your car radio. Such bad taste! Really, you ought to be ashamed.
For another thing, it’s infinitely easier to get work done here at the old Canadian Broadcorping Castration. You’re far too interesting—that’s your problem. Here I am, a senior producer trying to work, and there you are being interesting well into the night. Think, Nog—this is the CBC: nobody is paid around here to be interesting!
All kidding aside, I love your idea for a new show and you can bet I’ll put in a good word for it at the Big Annual Meeting. (Frankly, it’s a shoe-in; Bernie loves it already. And anyway, despite what I said above, we all miss our favourite ghost slip-sliding around the halls at night. Miss him a lot.)
Anyhow—my work waits. Please give me a call when you’re back. What am I saying—you call way too much. You support the phone company all by yourself! I mean a proper visit—in person—and not at three in the morning, either. Be a reasonable chap and come around for a meal. In case you didn’t know, that’s what reasonable chaps do.
Take care,
Reggie
The letter was six months old. Burl wondered what it had been doing out on the table. He slipped it back into his pocket. He closed the shed.
Burl stopped as soon as he had made his way out into the clearing where the cabin stood. He clicked off the flashlight. How different the night looked knowing that he had somewhere to stay. Nog had given him a clean shirt and a pair of pants. The pants were baggy but they were dry and clean. And the shirt was the colour of putty but finer and softer than any material Burl had ever felt against his skin. Viyella, it said on the tag. There was a tiny gold N.O.G. embroidered on the pocket.
The moon was high now. He heard Nog playing the piano, something very slow, serene. Burl wondered if this was the effect of the drugs. He had watched Nog take some pills out of a flight bag he kept by his mattress. Burl knew about pills.
A splash caught his attention. A dark shape swam across the head of the bay, leaving a silver wake. A beaver. There was a big lodge to the west. Walking down to the water’s edge, Burl could see the outline of the cliff that marked the eastern head of the bay. He thought of himself curling up in the cave there on a mattress of pine needles with no more blankets than he could manufacture from grass and moss. How far the day had brought him.
Back in the cabin, Nog had turned off the lights and lit candles on the tables and on the piano. The one nearest the door almost guttered when Burl entered. A chilly wind snuck past him into the room.
Nog shivered and stopped playing. He looked up with some surprise, as if he had forgotten all about his house guest.
“Can you play the piano?” he asked, his voice sedated.
“No, sir.”
“Please, don’t call me sir. Call me Baron, if you like. No,
I don’t feel like a baron any more. Nathaniel. Better still, call me Maestro. Yes, I like that. What do you think?”
“Maestro,” said Burl. “That’s like a conductor?”
“Oh, more than just a conductor. Master. Teacher. Here, I’ll teach you something. Then you’ll have to call me Maestro.”
“I can’t.”
“Nonsense. Come.”
Burl washed his hands in the soapy water where he’d left the dirty dishes to soak. There were quite a few. They’d need a lot of soaking.
“I’ll teach you one tiny bit of my new piece,” said the Maestro.
Obediently, Burl presented his freshly cleaned hands. The teacher seemed amused. He pressed each finger, as if they were made of putty, into the proper location on the keyboard. “Quietly,” he said. Burl pressed down. The sound leaped into the darkened room. He pulled his fingers back in alarm.
“That’s the first chord of the Silence in Heaven,” the Maestro whispered. He took Burl’s hands again and moved his fingers until he had played four such chords. “Now again,” he said. Burl watched the keyboard steadily while the man moved his hands as if he, Burl, was a puppet and the Maestro was his puppeteer. Finally, after several rehearsals, Burl tried the four chords by himself.
“Ever so quiet,” said the Maestro. “The passage is called the Silence in Heaven, not the Bowling Tournament in Heaven.”
Burl wanted to stop playing. His fingers ached, but mostly he was afraid of doing it wrong. No—it wasn’t that. It was the pressure of wanting so much to get it right.
“Hold each chord for a count of four.” The Maestro pointed to the whole notes on the sheet of music, but Burl only glanced up for a second, for as soon as his eyes left the keys, his fingers lost their places. Besides, the pencil marks scribbled on the paper meant nothing to him.
“There’s been a lot of crashing around in the piece up to here,” said the Maestro. “The choir has been booming. So this is a kind of breather for the audience. The strings will play it alone.”
Burl played the progression of four chords as quietly as he could, but this time the music seemed to resonate all around them. The Maestro smiled mischievously. He had his foot on the sustain pedal.
“It’s an oratorio,” he said. “Do you know what that is?”
Burl shook his head. He played his little piece again and again, his tongue firmly fixed between his teeth. Then, as quickly as it had begun, the lesson was over. Though the Maestro did not say anything, Burl felt his impatience to get back to work, and he reluctantly pulled his fingers away from the silky smoothness of the keyboard. But he did not stop looking at the keys. And with his eyes he memorized the paths his fingers had taken to make the sounds.
“What’s an oratorio?” he asked.
“It’s an excuse to make a lot of noise,” said the Maestro, his voice sluggish now. “No, I’m kidding. It’s a dramatic work, usually on a religious theme, with an orchestra and choir and soloists—the whole shooting match—but, unlike an opera, the singers don’t have to act. Which is just as well, really, because most singers can’t act.”
Burl was still sitting at the piano, admiring it in the yellow puddles of light the candles spilled over the keys.
“It’s a great toy,” said the Maestro. Standing, he played a rapid arpeggio at the high end. Burl immediately gave up his seat. His teacher slid behind the piano without lifting his fingers from the keyboard. He seemed oblivious to Burl. Then he said, “Can you imagine. With the right-sized outboard motor what you could do with this thing?” Burl laughed and returned to his dishwashing.
“I’d drive,” said the Maestro. He played what might have been a motor revving up. A very elegant motor. “You could waterski behind.”
It was almost dark in the kitchen corner. Burl didn’t mind. The dishwater was hot and soothing. He felt filled with calmness.
He heard the Maestro shiver. From a corner Burl dragged out an electric heater that he plugged in and placed under the piano. He had already noticed there was no woodstove in the cabin.
“It must get pretty wicked in here in the winter,” he said.
“I can assure you, Master Crow, I never intend to find out.”
Burl stopped washing for a minute and let his hands just sit in the dishwater. It penetrated him and dug out the bone-chilling memory of the night before, the rain-filled shack. He allowed his thoughts to drift into a dream. This place, empty all winter.
“I like the idea of winter,” said the Maestro as he played.
“I like the purity of it. I’m sure winter is the perfect cure.”
“For what?” asked Burl. The Maestro didn’t answer right away. He was caught up in a passage of music. Then he stopped.
&n
bsp; “For everything,” he said at last.
8
The Intruder
BURL LAY IN THE SHADOWS THAT GATHERED AT the end of the piano. The Maestro had given him a pillow and a couple of blankets. The corner behind the piano and beside the door seemed the most out-of-the-way place for him to stay. It was plain that Nathaniel Orlando Gow composed by night.
“I don’t like to see the sun rise,” he said.
Burl, tired as he was, couldn’t quite fall asleep.
“Are you famous?” he asked.
The man looked up from his desk. “Tremendously famous,” he said. “All over the world. Horribly famous.”
He got up and rooted around in the cupboard under the sink for another box of arrowroots. It was the only thing Burl had seen him eat.
“Is it horrible, being famous?”
The Maestro chewed thoughtfully. “There’s only one thing harder than being famous,” he said. “And that is being Nathaniel Orlando Gow.”
He carried his box of cookies to the piano, where he picked up one of the candles and blew the other one out. He resettled himself at his writing desk.
“You don’t have to stop playing for me,” said Burl.
“No,” said the Maestro. “But I do have to stop playing if I’m to begin working.” He yawned, but his movements, fast and jerky, showed no signs of drowsiness. He had taken more pills. He put on his glasses and started writing by candlelight. He leaned down close to the surface of the table.
“This bit at the beginning is all flies and heat,” he said.
He was talking to the music. “Flies and heat and visions. Here I am in the freezing northern woods writing about visions in the Greek Islands.”
He mumbled on like this in sporadic bursts. His voice was slurred. This was the drugs, Burl was sure. He had heard his mother’s voice grow lazy like this.
Burl began to drift off, then awoke again, for the Maestro’s voice had risen.
“I’ve been farther north than this, you know. Right up to James Bay. It’s impossibly beautiful. No trees to get in the way. Vast. Scary as sin. And that was only in summer. I still have not experienced the dark of a winter in the north. I don’t think I’m ready for it. This lake is my compromise. A glimpse of the Big Dark, as it were, if not the whole thing.” He picked up his pen again.
Burl remembered catching the morning school bus in Pharaoh in the pitch-black dead of winter. He left school in the same darkness.
“It gets very dark here,” he said.
The Maestro bent to his writing with renewed attention, his hand curling awkwardly.
We’re both left-handed, thought Burl. He turned on his side so that he could see out the huge sail of a window. It was alive with stars.
Burl dreamed of the rainbow trout he had caught at his father’s secret place. It would have been nice to mount that trout on some lacquered plank of wood, arching with the lure still in its mouth, still fighting.
“This was the fish I was catching,” he imagined saying to someone. The phrase hung in the dream air, the middle of a conversation. What was he talking about? To whom?
Suddenly it was his father looking up at the mounted fish above the mantel. “I seen that fish before. That fish is mine!” he said, grabbing Burl by the collar. “You stole that from me.” He shook his son and though it was only a dream, Burl felt the room shake around him.
Thwack!
The old man was hitting him.
Thwack!
And a third time. Burl twisted and turned. He had to wake up, get away. He bumped into something hard and woke up wrapped around the leg of the piano. Then he heard a whimpering sound that wasn’t him or his dream father. It came from the other side of sleep. He sat up.
The Maestro was standing behind his writing desk, his face underlit by the low candles. Horror-struck. From behind Burl there was a creaking sound followed by a blast against the cabin wall. Something at the door.
Burl was on his knees in a flash. It was his father—that was his first thought—breaking down the door with an axe. Then there was another blast, and though the Maestro whimpered again, this time Burl was awake enough to recognize the sound for what it was. He scrambled out from under the piano. He approached the door. There it was again. A thump that rattled the doorknob, followed by a scratching sound. A grunt. With the heels of both hands, Burl pounded on the door, shouting a loud curse.
The creature on the other side backed away, moved across the deck. Burl rushed to the lakeside window and there it was, a deeper blackness than the night, a bear. The Maestro saw it, too. It was sniffing at the glass, rising on its hind legs, poking at the glass with its long claws.
“Oh, Christ!” The Maestro sat down with a thud, his arms wrapped around his chest as if to hold himself together.
Turning towards him, Burl saw the paperweight rocks on the desk. He raced across the room, grabbing the two largest. He headed towards the door.
“No!” he heard the Maestro say, but by then he had flung open the door and stepped outside.
“Shoo!” he cried. “Shoo!”
The bear turned, stepped towards the noise, squinting nearsightedly, sniffing the air. Burl hurled one of the rocks. It missed the bear and clattered across the deck. The bear ran off a couple of paces and warily circled the lone deck chair.
“Get out of here!” Burl yelled. He moved towards it, stamping his foot. He heard a voice behind him, pleading with him to close the door.
The deck was cold on Burl’s bare feet. The bear stepped out from behind the chair. Burl heaved the second rock. It hit the bear in the side.
In two strides the animal took to the railing, and with a speed that seemed improbable for such a lumbering huge creature, it tore off, only stopping when it was on the beach.
Burl clapped his hands loudly, but the bear stood its ground.
The Maestro was at the door. He handed Burl a third stone as big as an orange. Burl stealthily made his way down the steps to the shore, his eyes never leaving his adversary, ready to run back at any moment. His toes gripped the wet earth. He felt every root and pebble.
The bear lifted its nose in the air. It made as if to return, took a step up the shore. A second step. Reconsidered, turned away. It was then, with the bear’s flank as a target, that Burl summoned all his strength and launched the third stone. It hit the animal in the head.
With a dreadful grunt the bear turned on its heels towards the water. In great loping strides it plunged into the lake until it was swimming across the bay. Burl watched it regain the land at the beaver lodge and tear off into the bush. He waited a full minute until the crashing progress through the underbrush had faded to nothing, and the only sound left was the song of a wood thrush. Morning was coming.
He marched back to the cabin, shaking. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a trail of empty cans and crusts, a jam jar, a chocolate bar wrapper. The trail stretched back into the woods in the direction of the shed.
He would have to deal with that soon, he thought, but not now. Not yet.
9
The Book of Revelation
“WHAT AM I DOING HERE?” THE MAESTRO HAD collapsed on his mattress. Burl, wearing one of his host’s heavy overcoats, was busy making coffee. “This is utterly ridiculous, insane. Do you think I’m insane, Master Burl?”
Burl brought him a cup of coffee. The man sat up, looked at him through eyes that brimmed more with outrage than with fear.
“I don’t know how you take it,” said Burl.
“I don’t know, either.”
“I mean the coffee,” said Burl.
The Maestro took the coffee black. He wrapped his fingers tightly around it as if to squeeze the warmth right out of it.
Already the sun was poking its own long translucent fingers through the trees on the eastern rim of the lake.
“Do you need one of your pills?” Burl asked.
The Maestro stared at him. “One of them?” He laughed a little hysterically, coughed and nodded.<
br />
Burl crawled across the unslept-in bed to the shoulder bag. The inside was like a medicine cabinet. He had never seen so many drugs. He read them out by the grey light seeping in the window.
“The Fiorinal,” said the Maestro. Burl took out the Fiorinal. “And the Valium.” Burl found the Valium.
The Maestro took a couple of each, swallowed some of his coffee, stood up and made his way to the work table. The candles had guttered while the door was open. He switched on the table lamp and sat at the mess on his desk.
“I’m a lunatic, Burl.”
“Maybe.” Burl sat at the piano. “My mother eats those Valium ones like candy.”
The Maestro scowled. “I gather by that, that your mother is trying to escape this weary world.”
“I guess so,” said Burl.
“Then we do not share much in common, your mother and I. For I am merely trying, against all the odds, to stay in this weary world.”
Burl looked down. He hadn’t meant to be rude.
“Bears are more afraid of us than we are of them,” he said.
“Don’t be so sure,” said the Maestro. He had been looking through a fat briefcase on the floor and now he drew from it a weird piece of rubbery equipment that Burl at first thought might be an instrument but then realized was the little sleeve and pump that a doctor used to check blood pressure.
The Maestro strapped the sleeve to his arm and pumped it up. With a watch he recorded the change in his heart rate as he let out the air.
“I’m a very sick man,” he said.
“Mostly,” said Burl, “my mother’s just sick and tired.”
“Well, yes … there is that.”
Burl tried to imagine his mother. Asleep? Alone? He didn’t want to think about it.
The Maestro Page 5
