Twenty-Six

by Leo McKay

  Now Ennis sees himself as if watching out of Arvel’s eyes. He appears like a dark cloud from behind the jet-black Chevy Bel-Air. Arvel runs headlong through the alders and scrub fir to a partial clearing. Cursing and panting, Ennis comes after him. Arvel, in a panic now, begins to cry, which slows his ability to run. He dives into some raspberry canes at the other side of the clearing, tearing his shirt and scratching his arms on the thorns. Ennis reaches into the canes and draws him out by the scruff of his neck, ripping the collar almost completely off of his T-shirt.

  Ennis whacks Arvel hard over his left ear and walks wordlessly back to the car.

  In the dream, Ennis’s own ear burns like a hot coal on the side of his face.

  First thing in the morning, Ennis faces himself in the bathroom mirror. He puts a hand on the ear that had been burning in the dream, but it feels normal now. He knows he does not look very good, and is reminded of the diagram in his wallet, a quick, gruesome portrait drawn up by the plastic surgeon who pieced his head back together. It shows a human skull: big, blank forehead, gigantic eye sockets, grisly nose holes. Black pen-ink squiggles spread out from the centre of the face to show the fracture lines, the places where his skull came apart against the impact of Dunya’s pounding. Little squares, five in all, mark the plates, the pieces of metal the surgeon used to hold his face bones in place. The surgeon had told him that eventually the swelling in the damaged tissue would go down completely and no one would be able to tell he’d ever been injured. But the surgeon never saw what Ennis looked like before the injury, so Ennis has no confidence that he will ever be the same as he once was. He does not care. In fact, the less he looks like he did, the better, as far as he is concerned.

  At first when he lay in bed in the hospital, his skull crumbled inside his head, he felt ready to die. He was not yet sixty, but he felt like an old man, a used-up old man who had been on a steady decline from age twenty-five. He had told his son he was happy to see him go into the pit. And his son had died there. He had driven his wife, a woman inherently gentle and forgiving, to a heinous act of violence. But he had no power to will himself to die. The spirit inside of him might curl up and wait to fade out, but his body kept pumping itself full of life.

  Winter mornings are beautiful and clear. The cold wrings the moisture from the air, chiselling the outlines of things to a crisp sharpness. When there is snow, even the dark is light, the blanket of white like the thrown beam from a massive floodlight.

  This morning, as always when he skis, Ennis wears a pair of work pants with red wool socks stretched up to the knees, a long-sleeved cotton turtleneck with a wool sweater pulled over it. He puts these things on in his bedroom and descends the stairs quietly. Dunya is asleep on her futon in the front room, and he pauses a moment to look at her, curled on her side beneath a thick comforter, the expression on her face peaceful.

  In the porch, he covers the wool sweater with his parka while he gets ready to go. When he starts skiing, he’ll take off the parka and leave it in the car.

  He shuts off the coffeemaker and pours what is left in the pot into a plastic Thermos. He fills a water bottle at the tap and tucks it under the parka into a waist pouch that hangs from his belt. He takes the skis and poles from a corner of the porch, slips the blue wax, scraper, and smoother block into the waist pouch, and walks outside to the driveway. Slipping the Chronicle-Herald out of the box by the back door, he re-enters the porch a moment. With ski gear clutched under his right arm, he awkwardly unfolds the paper with his left hand and glances at the front page. Just a few months ago he would have gone through the whole paper and clipped out anything related to Eastyard. But he’s given up on this clipping as pointless. He folds the paper and tosses it onto the porch floor.

  It is still dark as night out, though the sky in the east is beginning to lighten. He straps the skis to the roof racks of the car, throws the poles into the passenger seat, and pulls out of the driveway.

  The bulk of this snow is two days old now, but enough has fallen overnight to soften everything again with its fullness. He stops at a red light at the corner of Bridge Avenue and looks up the snow-blanketed surface of Foord Street to the south. The big red letters of the Tim Horton’s gleam out of the crumbling darkness. Two or three cars are parked in front, and the fluorescent-lit interior beams out the big square windows onto the snow. Nothing moves anywhere. To his right, the new snow on Bridge Avenue where it comes down the hill is unbroken by tire tracks.

  As he crosses the first bridge at Blue Acres, the still-lit silos of Eastyard Coal come into view on the right. If there were not fifteen bodies still underground, the government would have dynamited all surface reminders of the Eastyard fiasco the day after the explosion. Some in the families group are pushing to demolish this landmark, this testament to the province’s rotten soul. He understands the desire to push the whole ugly incident into the past, but it is misguided. Getting rid of the silos would be playing into the hands of the government, who wish to erase the whole affair from history. But Ennis no longer attends meetings of the families’ group. He’d never felt comfortable there to begin with, but as time went on he realized that he no longer had a fight left in him. His name is still on the members’ list, and he still gets occasional reports in the mail, but he barely pays attention to what the group is doing any more.

  The judicial inquiry into the explosion is still on, day after day of witnesses to the same crime. There is talk of a criminal trial for some managers. Ziv is going now most days. In the mornings he gets ready for his afternoon shift at Zellers and stops at the inquiry proceedings on the way. Ennis cannot bring himself to go. The inquiry is important and eventually some good may come out of its findings, some changes may be made to labour standards and how they are monitored and upheld. But none of this will bring Arvel back. No matter what the inquiry finds in their hearings, no matter whether a criminal trial takes place, and no matter the outcome if one does. His son is dead. Nothing is going to make his death right. Nothing can justify it, nothing can explain it, nothing can make it hurt less. His son is dead.

  Ennis can do nothing about any of this. He can look at the silos, think these thoughts, then turn back to face the life he is living.

  He drives to MacLellan’s Brook and keeps going, taking the turn deeper into the woods every time the road forks. He passes old farms, some run by the same family for generations, some owned by greying hippies: American draft-dodgers and old back-to-the-landers who bought these properties abandoned and brought them back to life. Some of the houses out here are suburban-style bungalows and split-entries, constructed on building-sized lots and lived in by people who drive to town each day to work. Some of the dwellings are little more than shacks, covered over by tarpaper tacked on with laths or converted from camper-trailers and stuck up on railroad ties.

  Ennis drives to the place where the snowplough stopped and turned back. He parks the car alongside the banked-up snow and pours himself some milky coffee into the red plastic cup from the top of his Thermos. The road continues before him, unploughed for miles, a perfect surface for skiing. The sun will not be up for some time yet, but enough light has crept into the overcast sky to set the snow atwinkle, each flake visible in the place where it has fallen. A fenced pasture slopes down on the left, rolls up into a knoll with four twisted apple trees on it, then drops steeply off into a little valley on the other side. When his coffee is finished, he steps out of the car. He frees the blue wax from the pouch and drops it into the snow to let it cool as he undoes the straps and brings the skis down from the roof racks.

  He was here yesterday, and the trail he pressed into the snow is still clear and visible under the buff of the fresh fall. The two sets of circles his poles made, one from the trip in, the other from the return, show that no one else has skied here since. He keeps an eye out for other tracks as he skis, deer, moose, rabbit, anything that will show the landscape is still alive. When he was young and spent time hunting and fishing the woods, animals
were plentiful. At dawn or dusk you’d almost always catch sight of a deer. If there was snow on the ground, you’d see moose and deer and rabbit tracks just about anywhere you went. The forest has changed in his lifetime. It doesn’t seem so much like a forest any more. The wild has gone out of it, making it more like grown-over farm land: tame, fenced-off, predictable.

  He waxes the skis, locks what he will not need in the car, steps over the bank, and drops the skis onto the grooves in the trail. Once his boots are clipped into place, he wraps his wrists with the straps from the poles and stands looking at the trail before him. The rising sun has suffused the overcast with light, illuminating the snow. In this state of partial light, the trees at the sides of the trail form almost solid walls of darkness at the edges of the luminous path. Big spruces and firs rise up to where their black silhouettes chafe at the purple-blue sky. Smaller, shrubby evergreens and naked hawthorn and wild rose creep in low beneath them, filling in the lighter spaces between the trunks of the bigger trees. A plume of steam escapes Ennis’s mouth at every breath.

  The first movement is a push forward with both poles, setting the gliding in motion. There is a gentle incline downward for a kilometre or so until a steeper, banked turn curves in front of an empty farmhouse. He begins simply pushing one ski back, then the other, poling with the opposite arm until his legs and arms loosen. Blood moves quickly to all the places it is needed, and he feels himself get warmer, more relaxed. It will not be long and he’ll be able to take his hat off. He pulls his heels up a little now at the back, bends each knee so the skis come up in an arc from the trail. When he reaches the curve in front of the old farmhouse he feels the evil of the world come chunking down directly onto his shoulders, like a cake of lodged ice from the lip of a roof. He breaks the rhythm of his poling and shakes his shoulders once. All the evil inside of him rises through his torso, quivers nervously in his chest a moment, then squeezes up onto his shoulders beside the evil of the world. The two evils fuse into one dark mass pressing down on Ennis’s shoulders. He leans into a turn, poles and kicks and twists around it. He shakes his shoulders once more and the evil lump that’s been weighing him down falls off. He hears it thump and curse him as it pitches headlong into the snow behind. He will not look back now. He can see where the upward incline begins, at the bottom of the curve. The sun cracks through a blue patch at the horizon and touches the tips of the bare trees overhead. He wants momentum for the uphill section, so he poles like hell for bottom.

  The world is divided in two, and he enters at the edge of the dark dream half, lit by the eerie light of snow. As Ennis draws in breath, the landscape expands, the hills before him ripple out like the surface of a shaken blanket.

  Double-pole, kick-kick. Double-pole, kick-kick. The back of a ski slaps the flattened snow behind him: a mistake. Fss, the tips plough through the white powder like dorsal fins. He begins poling with each kick, conscious of fully straightening each arm at the end of the push back, getting power from the full motion. The cotton turtleneck beneath the wool sweater begins to paste itself to his torso. His face flushes with warmth, and when his lungs take deeply from the cold air, bringing oxygen to refresh his blood, he feels his head tingle. Down low on the left, where some small dark fir trees push out from a wood grove to meet the road, a white rabbit flashes before the green, throws itself through a channel in the brush, and zags across the trail a small distance ahead of him.

  Something inside of him is growing. He can feel it swelling like a sheltered flame. He feels lit from the inside, like a tent with a burning lantern at night, like an igloo he saw once in National Geographic, translucent and perfect, sending out rays to the snow beneath a dark purple clear Arctic sky.

  There is a narrow little path that he has never taken before. It veers left through a ditch where some mountain ash berries, orange and wrinkled, still cling to their stems beneath tiny caps of snow. He decides to follow this little notch in the trees over the crest where the land falls away quickly. He finds himself in a place where a brook has cut a deep V through some shaley rock. The floor of this little valley is only as wide as the brook, which is mostly frozen over. He skis carefully down on snow-cushioned ice, watching for rocks in the brook bed that will scrape the bottom of his skis.

  Where the walls of shale end there is a thick, low overhang of leafless willow branches that he must crouch almost to his knees to get under. He emerges on the other side and finds himself at the bottom of a shallow swampy basin. The country is pockmarked by holes like these, places where long-abandoned mine workings, far below the surface, have given way, collapsed. At the centre of the basin, up to its knees where the animal has gone through the ice, is the biggest bull moose Ennis has ever seen. The moose has already dug big holes in the snow with his snout. The giant rack of his antlers, jutting out from either side of his head like two half-sheets of plywood, are covered with dirty snow and mud from where he has rummaged for food.

  Three steps and Ennis would practically be riding him. His heart thumps wildly in the cage of his chest. The moose turns to look straight at him, and beneath the pungent smell of the swamp where the moose has been digging, Ennis gets a hot whiff of the animal, the smell of fur and shit and musk. A single sweep of that massive head could break Ennis in two.

  They stand there, man and beast, each looking curiously at the other. The moose chews slowly on some root it has pulled up from the cold mud. Black water drips placidly from the bell beneath its chin. Steam rises from its warm nostrils into the cold air. Ennis unclips his skis, gently shoves them to the other side of the willows, and crawls back through the way he’s come.

  On the other side of the thicket, he tries with trembling hands to reclip the skis to the boots. When his fingers prove unable to do this, he takes a step onto the snow with just his boots and finds himself up to his knees, as the moose had been, locked in place. He lies back on the snow and closes his eyes, waits for his breath to come back to him. He opens his eyes in the light of early morning and watches the steam rising up from his own nostrils. When he arrives back at the house, Dunya is sitting alone on the floor of the front room. Her eyes are closed, her back is straight. A cup of clear tea steams on the floor beside her. Ennis peels off his outer clothes, right down to the long underwear, and goes into the room with her. She opens her eyes at the sound of him entering. Without looking, she picks up her teacup and drinks from it. She closes her eyes again. Ennis sits on the futon across from her. He feels himself trembling slightly, so slightly it would be invisible to Dunya, even if she had her eyes open.

  “I saw a moose,” he says.

  She opens her eyes and regards him.

  “A moose,” says Ennis. “It was like …” He has no words for the experience. He places a hand flat on the centre of his chest until he feels the beating of his heart. He moves closer to his wife, sits on the floor in front of her, the closest he’s been in months.

  Looking at the soft features of her face, he remembers the petite, pretty girl she was growing up. She came from what then seemed the exotic north end of the Red Row, a place where the Poles, Ukrainians, Belgians, and other European immigrant families settled. She was always so gentle and shy. He walked past her house on the way to the tracks, taking the iron bridge to New Glasgow in the days before the highway. And there she’d be, bent over with her father in the garden at the front of the place, using her strong bare hands to pull weeds from the dahlia beds. They were no longer kids the first time he’d taken her out on a date. They had both been out of school and working for their keep for a long time. He remembers how tall and self-confident she looked in a short-sleeved floral dress on a summer night, standing at the far end of the plank-covered dirt walkway to her front door, waiting for him. When he reached the step, he smelled the late peonies against the fence. Through the screen on her front door, he heard her parents talking in the kitchen, speaking a language he did not understand. Ennis and Dunya walked the tracks down to the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow, holding hand
s the whole way. On the iron bridge that crossed the East River, he thought he’d impress her by walking on the ties, which were not far enough apart to fall through, but were empty in between all the way down to the water. But she followed right behind him without saying a word. She’d done it a hundred times before.

  Later, on the way back up the tracks in the dark, after the movie was over, he tried to slip his hand under the dress. She didn’t say a word, but backed away quietly, and backed away again when he tried again.

  Slowly, apprehensively, one hand still over his own heart, he reaches out and puts the other hand on Dunya’s shoulder. She holds his gaze without saying anything. Her shoulder tenses at his touch, then relaxes again. She closes her eyes once more and he can hear her exhaling slowly.

  When their train pulled into the main station in Hakone, they transferred to a local that took them to a funicular station. They rode the funicular uphill about a kilometre to a pretty little subdivision on the side of a mountain. If the day were clearer, Meta doubtless would be able to see a great distance from the mountainside, but in Tokyo it is raining, and big, low pillowy clouds are banked against the mountainside, locking them in.

  Yuka has a little map that is printed on the back of the glossy brochure for the rest house, and she peers into it for a few moments, orienting herself. A few times she peers up from the map and shifts her position slightly, lining up the map with the grid of streets before her.

  Meta imagines the rest house will be a run-down concrete box of a building. She’s learned that you get what you pay for in Japan, where she’s been charged more than ten dollars for a simple cup of coffee. And she and Yuka are paying almost nothing for these accommodations, compared, that is, to what they’d pay for a hotel. Yuka has assured her that the price is low because it is subsidized by the municipal ward. “Rest house is beautiful,” Yuka said when she’d first made the invitation for Meta to come along.