by Rudy Wiebe
The sounds she makes skim fondly about in his ears, sing, as every concentrated minute he watches her mouth, the bright tip of her tongue against her teeth, her lips — he has been trying to draw her lips for two days, to catch that bottom curve, the tilt of the corners where the sounds she makes seem to catch sometimes like a quick surprise — he does not want to understand any word she ever speaks. None. The freedom of watching, of listening with incomprehension, fills him with staggering happiness: all the reports they are duty-bound to write, the daily journal, the data piled in columns upon page after page — but in this warm place thick with indescribable smells there is no listable fact, not a single word. Never. Simply the insatiable influx of eye and uncomprehending, musical ear, of fingertips and skin. As if time could be eaten out of her hand, ingested and lived into one enveloping physical containment, all thought, all necessary decision, all duty gone. Vanishment.
“We can, together,” she says, “eat it all, all the sweet and bitter things I put into it.”
He feels so gloriously clean, surrounded only by release. Cocooned in warmth no one can find in their ultimately unbeatable cabin that is always full of endless duty where, beside the stone-and-clay fireplace he himself built with such ox-like labour, he can never hold a pencil without mittens and the ink crystallizes between dips of the raven’s quill. Frost white as leprosy he has never seen before, but read about, blossoms along his wall bed between cracked mud and log. The blades of cold slice him long and thin to his very bones, and he loves the brittle beauty of that, the darkening logs, grey mud stroked to the tracks of fingers, the bristle of hoarfrost spidering parallel lines that waver between floor and ceiling. An austerity of ice, unnecessary to number or explain or record — or struggle to mirror somehow in a lined notebook.
So he speaks softly as he sees she is listening to his happiness, trying only to enourage again the rhythm of her voice, beyond his words that she in her turn will never understand either.
“I’m so warm here with you, it’s almost like … like sitting beside the fireplace in the manse kitchen in Bury, eight miles north of Manchester … though that fireplace is so huge and black and hard — I can walk to Bury in two hours, get off the eight-horse coach in Manchester and be — that’s silly, you’ve never seen a horse! — a kind of … ridable caribou, without antlers! — but heavier, more like a movable tree than a caribou! — and my mother knits in winter and our kitchen girl bends to move the pans with their long handles around, as my mother tells her to, on the grate inside the chimney. It’s higher than I am, standing, and I sit inside the chimney, the fire running low on the coals, and this is like that, not that blue fire but red — warm, warm, whenever I come in here, and it smells so different from black coal. Your hide walls are warmer than bricks baked with soot, all these orange flames of sap burning, like fresh apples in your mouth, apples from the cemetery behind St. Mary’s…! wish I could put one in your mouth, how can your mouth never have felt an apple? Crisp, cracking between your beautiful teeth. And you smile, rocking that caribou gut full of whatever you’ve stuffed in there, I’d stuff you with anything you want.…”
He leans closer to Greenstockings, his words such sibilant sound, while they both stare intently into the fire, both bent forwards but aware only (she thinks, he thinks) of each other side by side, the leaping fire that draws them together without touching. How has she always existed here? How could he not know of it? In this circle of leather and fire as distant and unimaginable as the moon. He forgets his paper at last; his pencil falls, it bristles the edge of a flame unnoticed.
“Only my mother,” he whispers, “calls me ‘Robin’. Only when we are alone. She knits by the fire, these long green stockings for me, or mittens, and we play verses,? Robin, my little Robin,’ she sings, ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’ and I recite, ‘I, says the Sparrow, with my bow and arrow, and I killed.…’ ”
Greenstockings lays wood over the burning pencil he has forgotten; if he wants to draw more he can paint his fingers with ash. Why does he keep trying to make her outline on paper? If he wants it, why doesn’t he feel it with her face between his hands? Perhaps she can tell him that — her lips, if he felt them with one hand surely his other one could find them too, even at the end of a pencil or brush. He is different, so quick to understand and so stupid, she says to him whatever she wants and even without words he often does not know anything. Her hand lifts the blazing stick as she considers that: she has never thought it before about a man; she will tell him anything, whatever has always been unspeakable, his incomprehension gives her freedom.
But he is still too stupid, despite this gentle demandlessness that drifts about him. He sits for hours watching her, or whatever is done in the lodge, even Greywing or Keskarrah as they sleep, and he asks nothing, demands nothing, forces nothing to happen with his possible male domineering. As if he isn’t even a man, though he certainly is that, she has felt it. There is a quiet and patience in him, like a hunter dreaming animals to come when they want to — though she is certain he doesn’t think of animals, as if he has always had more than enough to eat — in what world could that be? — but that stillness in him is not at all like every man who has watched her, a piece of something to be groped for inside his thick head but that he won’t find there until he finally takes her between his hands, frees himself between her legs. She is certain he does not think like that, this stranger whom she sometimes believes she can understand. And when he isn’t there in the red, smoky warmth of the lodge she moves effortlessly, turns, works in what she comprehends to be the memory of his gentle tenderness, the kind of undemand he offers her humming a desire within her … strange … strange.
In the flames she sees the tiny orange spot they are together in the great land spread out by the white darkness of the moon, the shades of the enormous lights burning over them. The People call those lights “caribou running” because stroking the hide of an animal lifts and sparkles the same fire under your hand, the lights vanishing themselves and returning on the deep night sky. She can say it?
She says slowly, aloud, “In the long dark, there are always the animals, their hoofs like quick shovels, their running in herds over the sky lights the winter darkness, and on earth they feed on the fine white moss they dig for us, to feed us from the ground they smell again, under the snow.”
Hood’s body intense, listening. No one intrudes with an acceptable understanding, and her happiness begins to dance with him. She says:
“They already feed our sky mothers, and our unborn children there, in the sky, the animals, and we see them most often in winter because it is then that their stomachs taste so sweet on earth, sweeter than mother’s milk. I heard my mother sing when she nursed me, and my father fed me too, the only way he could when I was little, when he brought her the meat to feed me as the moss feeds the animals who feed us now, and chewed the meat tender and wet for me so I could swallow. My mother sang,
Give me your stomach,
Sweet animal, I am praying to you,
Your beautiful sweet stomach
Filled with sky-white mosses
You have smelled out carefully for me,
Crisp, frozen milk of earth
Which I cannot drink by myself.
Chew it, milk it into my mouth;
Feed me.
And I will sing that song too. For you, I took this stomach out of the animal and poured in its blood and chewed small pieces of ribs and fat, chewed them soft mouthful by mouthful until there were enough to fill you, and spit them into the stomach until it was full, here it is, cooked and smoked too, full and wanting to be eaten, you can eat and I will eat with you, our fingers feeding each other. Or would you like it frozen and sliced so thin we will see each other through our food, your mouth full of it like mine, our chins running with juice warm and frozen? I could feed you now, should I give you my breast, should I sing?”
They both contemplate her hand pointed into the knife as it cuts the full curled stomach down
from its hanging cords. And she may already be singing, as her mother once sang, cooking, or the song her father sang waiting for this animal to dream its way into his snare, into his patient hunting,
The land around me, everywhere
Is rich with your food,
Such beautiful moss
On the land holding me here,
You will want to set your pointed feet,
Your moist nose
In this delicate moss, you will want to come.
Come to me here!
And in her song, which he cannot recognize, Robert Hood sings as well, the acceptable melancholy of the English manse knit into each cell of his personal, endless longing,
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss within the cup,
And I’ll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise,
Doth ask … a drink…
And here the rhythm of her unintelligibilty becomes strangely tangled for him into
I, said the Fly,
With my little eye
And I saw him…
While beside them, unheeded, in her sleep far beyond anything Robert Hood will find imaginable in the quick, desperate brevity of his life, Birdseye murmurs sounds neither she nor Greenstockings fully comprehend. Though they both hear them into existence syllable by deadly syllable. Her breath brushing the fur raises no fire there that anyone can yet see; the inevitabilities already coming there still invisible, the future still hidden though already born. Like the great north lights flaming in the sky at night: always there but so rarely visible to a human eye.
A figure on a wide cliff where the River of Copperwoman plunges over itself, where the river continues to disappear north into mist. Is it a large animal lying down there, or sitting? Skulls and long bones are scattered on the cliff, human bones. One by one men appear, climbing up, burdened with black hats. And two canoes with six legs each, climbing ponderously. The figure does not move.
Hats and canoes circle, the mist from mouths moving through cloudy mosquitoes. An arm, a hand, and the figure falls over — it is an old woman dead, the braided leather rope that strangled her fear still rigid in her rigid hand. Nothing can be said here, nothing explained, nothing that can possibly advise or guide anyone. Only briefly mosquitoes and moss, and the level tundra sloping away into an openness so long that even eyes taught distance by the sea cannot comprehend its blue dimension from among these skulls big and little. A feud? A raid? A war, a massacre licked clean by wind and animal, hard in the sun and snow and so perfect but for a knife’s gouge, a splintered hollow of clubs? Bones broken and sucked hollow as throats. Enemies. A simple comprehensible word.
Endless enemies. Like the endless sea they have already spent two years searching to reach again over land they have fervently wished, nay, prayed every night, would finally relent and cease to be there — always before them. The hats turn among the skulls, trying to separate various horizons, searching to discover the prayed-for undrinkable sea smashing itself steadily upwards upon the stones of the ocean. Where is the trackless sea where they can, with all their articulated skill, manipulate wind and current to carry them where — in the small words that they carry like a bound sentence everywhere with them — they were so comfortably ordered to go? From there, and only from there, can they permit themselves to try to return to where they came from. Water water, where is the water, will they be forced for ever to look for the great stinking water?
When they have walked far enough, only a little farther, they do discover the sea. Where they recognize, then, it has always been. And also occasional ice. True, when with rejoicing they first discern that Royal Navy blue, which they know instantly belongs to them — it is always theirs everywhere on the immense globe of the earth — they decide that their great ships can sail the channels here between sandbars and shoals and strips of rock pointing north; and they are reasonably ecstatic, as behooves them. They are again at sea, all’s right with the world.
In the perpetual brightness of July arctic night, both north and east ahead of them, what they consider to be the open sea glows from somewhere beyond where they can see, a strange iridescence of white as though the moon were burning like a sun just below and all along the horizon. But those may well be Northern Lights, yes, undoubtedly that is what it is, that must be recorded, another new and fascinating manifestation of the aurora borealis in conjunction with the yet-unsearched Polar Sea. They have been accumulating words about those lights since they left the Orkneys, so write it down, notes on “sea horizon glow” for further analysis, soon, when there will be time next winter.
And once they have named that iridescence, tamed it with a blurted sound, they are again content not to recognize what they can see; to ignore what the wind is breathing over them. And the icepans, small bergs, rotten chunks really, dripping and never flat but often tilted picturesquely on edge in the near water, which is never blue but black, ice always lingering a bit as if waiting for a glimpse of them when they round a cape, and then gone shyly every morning — long ago they saw true icebergs, and these are mere playthings for small animals like seals, toys to anchor terns — neither of which, oddly, they have yet spied anywhere, though they would certainly try to kill any living thing they saw and even more gladly eat if only any appeared.
And then, one morning out of silent fog, comes the Everlasting Ice.
They recognize it instantly, for it does not come to them smooth and flat the way cold would skin over English water. This ice is no skin at all; from out of the fog it is merely, implacably, itself, bristling like an emerging avalanche of jagged stone, a coming cataclysm that everywhere shades into other tinges of something that nevertheless remains grotesquely, featurelessly white, off-white with the grim age of broken bone smashed and crushed down upon itself and re-formed again out of its crushing; which, if a man stumbled into, he would have to twist, clamber, slip, as between blades or spears — no one can walk on teeth, or needles — and surely vanish pronged in three gasps. Or a tall ship to its very mast in as many minutes, shredded into splinters.
This ice does not come silently, without motion. No. Carried by its own particular wind and water destiny, it approaches muttering, or passes them faster than a man can run along the twisted sand. Where it wasn’t yesterday it may be today, or not be tomorrow. In the bright, temporary disorientation of a summer midnight fog they were forced to hear it, but now they see what they heard without comprehension: out of freezing fog they see the ice grinding, crunching, groaning, cracking, eating itself from horizon and water into existence before them. Already there is barely enough open water left to launch the narrow canoes. While they stare, horrified, the ice advances, heaves itself out in long, rending groans, hesitates and backs off and sighs to a tinkle and splash like frozen bells, then heaves forwards again, groaning, gouging up the naked shingle. Already it splinters and falls into cliffs over itself, humping at them and their canoes. It is ramming ridges up under their very tents on the slender beach, black sand and stone avalanches.
Behold: ice has discovered itself to These English at last. It is seeking them out. Behold: the Everlasting Ice is advancing upon them by land.
Hood tries to feed Greenstockings with the silver spoon he has carried inside his clothes from England, but she ducks her head aside. The thick fall of her hair swings to hide her face.
“Just purse your lips a little,” he says as her face emerges again, “it’s hot, an ‘oo’ like this, then it won’t clink against your beautiful … teeth.”
He is almost laughing at “beautiful”, which he has never said aloud to a woman before, and at his shaky hand, at the metallic weight with which he is offering her own food to her wet, open mouth. Even stranger — the gelatinous food scooped steaming from a cooked or smoked caribou stomach; as if English silver could ever place that savage concoction acceptably on white linen, lift it to perfect teeth and without a though
t his mouth blurts aloud, “Haggis — Scots and haggis!”
She raises her face to him to catch the corner of his astonishment at whatever he has said. Laughter pulls her mouth wide at his exploding breath, at this game of eating, together, learning with simple silly laughter what they have both done since before consciousness. But he seems to think he is teaching her, and she will play anything as easily as parting her lips for him.
“Yes,” he says, “o-o-o … round and pursed, like that, yes,” moving the spoon upwards and not comprehending what he is doing, knowing nothing of how she is shaping his name as round and long between her lips to meet his spoon. Beyond him the capricious fire flares high in a strand of smoke as his hand with the laden spoon, and her eyes tighten with laughter bursting from her, as it trembles towards her — is it the fire or his excitement? — but her mouth opens to accept it for certainly he will feed her, she very nearly touches his hand with hers to slow him down, to breathe him over it slowly.
“Ho-o-o-o-o,” she blows. And he has become so delicate she can touch his hand and the spoon waits for her, entering between her lips into her hollow mouth. “O-o-o-o … d.” Closing around the spoon.
Robert Hood has never fed a child, and certainly never a woman. This spoon slipping along her tongue as if it were his hand has never been in anyone’s mouth but his own. And hers — like his heart bursting, he wants his hand inside her mouth.
“It was given to me…” he says with extreme care, though his heart staggers. “Who fed Cock Robin … who fed … who fed.…” The spoon’s English shape vanishing perfectly in the red firelight of her red mouth. He lifts fingers to her lips, tips moist against her mouth, and a shadow of red along the silver curve withdrawing between her folding lips, which are all he sees, swallowing as he senses her swallow. The spoon lies uplifted between his fingers, with the complete weight of her body beside him in the fiery cone of the lodge. He cannot comprehend what is happening.
