On Day 10 of the games, slightly wilted by a hangover, I went for a run that lasted an entire morning. I wasn’t running to keep up with my training, I just wanted to get back into myself, to shake my muscles loose after the event and feel the ground beneath my feet. I jogged in loops around the ski resort, weaving between tourists on the boardwalk, trying to find stretches of space to be on my own. Eventually, I came to a steep hill and started climbing it, working from my hips and quads, and pushing my way upwards against the wind. It was hard, for once, to focus exclusively on the tightening of my legs and the rough ground under my shoes. All I could think was that I was jump-a-thon good at something now. The world had just told me so. But was that enough of a reason for Ron and me to continue sliding for another four years, and maybe another four years after that? The German team, who won bronze this time, had been together for almost sixteen years. Looking at those guys, I could see how all those forty-five-second intervals can add up: to years that glide past before you even notice what is happening. What would it be like to keep track of time some other way? The higher I climbed, the more it became clear that simply carrying on, letting life whiz past me, would not be good enough. If I stayed in the sport, I would have to make that decision for myself. I needed to pause the sled long enough to decide if I really wanted to keep going.
After I finished my run, I procrastinated by Experiencing Whistler. I bought a miniature bottle of maple syrup shaped like a maple leaf and drank it. It was kind of gross and kind of delicious all at the same time. I went into a gift shop to browse and examined some novelty shot glasses on the bottom shelf of one of the many Olympic souvenir displays. The nylon tracksuit rustle of another athlete approaching made me turn around. Paresh was standing a few feet behind me in his Team Canada gear, browsing through a revolving rack of postcards and tapping his foot to some rhythm in his head. I had given up on ever seeing him again, so I just stood there. He was close enough to touch. I held still for a moment longer, counting down from forty-five in my head. Then, I stepped forward and hugged him. As soon as my hands left their rightful place in my pockets, I couldn’t believe I’d done it. But then he hugged me back, and once more with feeling. I took another breath, reached for his hand, and, without saying a word, led him out of the store and into the snow.
TOGETHER THE BROTHERS PERFORMED, IN THEIR slow and quiet way, the same daily duties they had carried out for nearly forty years. They tended the sheep, delivered new lambs, and coaxed ancient ewes through their last breaths. Willie was in charge of the clippers during shearing season, and George whistled complicated commands to the dogs. Sometimes it was hard to tell that the brothers were two separate individuals, since they always walked close together across the land, as though they were loosely conjoined twins, George’s free hand clutching one of Willie’s suspenders for guidance. Their practised way of moving was born out of necessity, though, since George was blind, and Willie was deaf.
In the way of people who have long dealt with animals as working creatures, George and Willie felt about the sheep just as they did about the prairie sky and the fences they had built around the fields. Neither brother had ever understood how people could have relationships with animals as if the beasts had human personalities. No member of the flock had a name, and George and Willie neither mourned nor celebrated the creatures’ life events. George liked to joke about a cattle farmer they’d met at the fall fair, who had practically written two-volume biographies of his cows. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he would say, “if the Murphys had a bovine section in the family photo album.” But George never looked into their own sheep’s faces and Willie never came to know their voices. They cared for the animals only as was their duty. If ever one of their flock escaped, the two men lumbered slowly after it, so attuned to one another’s movements that they hardly ever stumbled. At their age, they seldom caught the strays, but it was in their interest to see that none of their practices changed even though their bodies grew frailer as they neared the end of their eighth decade in the world. If anything, over the years George and Willie became more confident shepherds, and would tell anyone who cared to listen just how they managed, year in and year out, to see to it that everything was done properly, each praising the other’s handling of the animals and placing the accomplishment squarely on his brother’s shoulders.
The two men haven’t always minded this flock. In their youth, they worked for the Texas Ranger Division and were paid a dollar a day for their services, which, they often said, was more than they were worth. Presumably they chased down criminals and shot rifles and possibly even pursued Bonnie and Clyde (the timing would have been right), but no one knows much for certain about their doings in law enforcement. They left the States nearly fifty years ago, thinking they’d head to Alaska to prospect for gold. Sure, the Last Great Gold Rush had more or less lost its sparkle by the end of the nineteenth century, but the brothers were convinced that there was still work to be done in the North, cleaning up what the stampede of hapless money-grubbers had left behind. They had driven up to the border, on through the Peace River, and then followed an old fur trader’s route to Fairbanks, almost four thousand miles from Texas. Like their Ranger days, their gold-mining period remained in some silent place in the brothers’ history. Since George and Willie preferred to stick to the shared piece of personal wisdom that it was better to live in the present than to dwell on the past, no one knew how they built their rumoured fortune or what they really did during their decade in Alaska. Maybe they had worked in a mine, or actually struck gold, or maybe they had robbed a bank. Despite the fact that they didn’t like to gloat about their worldly affairs or live in a way that suggested any kind of true wealth, there was a consensus among the locals that there had been great triumphs in the brothers’ past.
When George and Willie left Fairbanks, they thought that they were on their way home to Texas as they drove down the Alaska Highway in their black station wagon. Instead, they stopped at Mile Zero. On account of the car, James Callahan the saloon owner had first thought that the brothers were undercover agents on serious international business. Since they were not actually spies, they took up work on Samson Jacobs’s farm when he needed help tending his sheep after his own brother died following a mishap with a combine harvester. They’d planned to stay for a week while he found someone else, then two weeks, and after a while they stopped talking about leaving. “We liked the folk of the Peace on the way up, and I guess we liked ’em just the same on the way down,” Willie would say with a wink, exaggerating his softened drawl. For forty years they remained on their own, no other family, no land of their own, and, after a time, no Samson either, with only the sheep to attend to and no problems to speak of. They saw themselves as the last holdouts of a dying profession, and Sandra Bird, the Hutterite woman who sometimes spun their wool into yarn, assured them that there had been no one in living memory who could match the skill and grace that the brothers brought to the job.
Karen has the face of someone who has swan-dived into love and never hit the bottom. Her eyes are blue and quite round, and her long dark hair is always in an artfully disordered arrangement on the top of her head. She is slim and wears plain, dark sweaters with skinny jeans, and there is a vulnerability about her that is most apparent in her delicate hands, which flutter and weave like sparrows as she speaks. Neither of Karen’s children looks anything like her. They are confident and plucky and olive-skinned like their father, and they cheerfully introduce themselves to strangers. Lately, they have taken to making up silly stories about their own lives and introducing themselves by false names. Sally’s favourite thing to say is that she’s twenty-three and works in a pet store. Karen is not sure whether to be amused or worried about the fact that, in addition to pretending to be in her twenties, her nine-year-old girl has suddenly become flirtatious: Sally has taken to wooing waiters in family restaurants by writing love letters on her napkins and tucking them under the tip. Six-year-old Jackson’s imagination is more whi
msical, and his preferred way of introducing himself is as a cowboy who rides a blue horse.
Sally and Jackson are playing together upstairs now, in the new master bedroom, with a cardboard box that has become a police station. Downstairs in the kitchen, Karen cradles her cellphone between her cheek and her shoulder, and draws the curtains despite the daylight, because she is trying to keep a secret about their new house from her kids.
“When a person buys real estate, she doesn’t expect to arrive at her new home, exhausted after a long drive, to find out that she has not only bought a house, she has also purchased two elderly shepherds.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I assumed you knew.”
“How, Karl? How would I know?”
“Well, Mrs. Schmidt, they were there when we viewed the property.”
“I assumed they would move out with the previous owners. I assumed that they were employed by the previous owners and that my purchasing the property would terminate their employment. That seems to me to be a fair assumption.”
“I guess things don’t work here like they do in Toronto.”
Karen has been suspicious of Karl Kinder from the beginning, when she drove up to the local real estate agency and discovered that the real estate company ads – featuring a photo of Karl with his too-big smile and his slicked-back hair and the slogan “The Only Man for the Job” – were everywhere because he was literally the only person who worked in the town’s only realtor’s office.
“I wish I could laugh at your joke.”
“I’m not trying to be funny, ma’am. They worked for Mr. Samson Jacobs and then for Mr. Jacobs’s son and his wife, the landowners before your good self. Those brothers have been there since nobody knows when. It’s their home. Anyway, they take care of the grounds free of charge, so you won’t have to trouble yourself with the maintenance.”
Karen can see the brothers now through the large picture window of her new kitchen. They seem to be shearing the sheep’s bottoms while awkwardly cuddling each other. “Listen, Karl. I want this situation dealt with. I don’t care how you do it, but you have to get them out.”
“Mrs. Schmidt, why don’t you just go on down and introduce yourself properly? They’ll be happy to see you. They really are nice fellas. Also, if it’s not an impolite question, what were you going to do with that enormous flock of sheep yourself?”
Seeing that the conversation is going nowhere, Karen hangs up on Karl and punches the door of the refrigerator. The stainless steel turns out to be unforgiving. As she nurses her throbbing fist, opening and closing her hand to make sure that all of her fingers still work, Karen wonders for the umpteenth time since she pulled up to the house in the moving van this morning how she wound up in this godforsaken place. It’s true she had felt pent up in the trendy Liberty Village loft where she and James had been living since they got married, so once they knew they’d be moving to rural Northern British Columbia with James’s promotion, she hadn’t thought much about the precise geography of their new home. She had simply imagined that she would grow proportionally with her new house, like one of those foam capsules from the Dollar Store that, dropped in water, blooms into a toy dinosaur. As it was, Sally and Jackson shared a bedroom, and she had devised more systems of organization for papers and toys and kitchen stuff over the years than she cared to count, because for all its sleek lines and its post-industrial design aesthetic, their downtown condo wasn’t terribly practical for a family of four. What was most upsetting was having sex in silence while the kids slept in the open loft bedroom above. It had become a ridiculous mime show, and James’s face contorted with a pleasure she couldn’t hear was one of the saddest sights she could imagine.
The dream home she had imagined floated by itself on a generic prairie landscape, like a giant unmoored houseboat with only her family on it. When she travelled west on her own three months ago to find a house, this house, she had looked out this window and seen the world as though it were a Rothko painting: broad strokes of blue and yellow-green. A single sheep wandered into the tableau and made an endearing ornamental bleat. When she peered out at the fields and couldn’t see their edges, she felt a rush of openness, as though the pastures were as deep as they were wide. The house was finished perfectly: the kitchen cupboards were robin’s egg blue with small round knobs, and Sally’s room had a secret door at the back of the closet that was sure to delight her. There was a quaintness about the town itself, the way it had just one of everything – one gas station, one grocery store, one pub – that initially seemed pleasingly minimalist. She had failed to notice the wind turbines along the highway on the drive from the centre of town to the property, because she’d been distracted by the buffalo waddling about the farm in their big, slow way, nudging one another and lying down like sleepy, picture-book giants.
She runs her hand across the butcher-block countertop in the middle of the south-facing kitchen, tracing her fingers over what had seemed on that first house-hunting visit like acres of prep space. Somehow, the room is smaller than she remembers.
When they finally arrived at the house, Jackson leapt gleefully from the van and pointed at the sheep plodding about the pasture in the distance.
“Mum, are those our sheep?”
“No, sweetie, they’re … Well, actually, I don’t know who they belong to, but they’re not ours.”
“I’ll take care of them! I’ll take them for walks!” Jack was pumping his fists with excitement.
“You don’t take sheep for walks, Jack,” Sally weighed in. “They do their own walking.”
“I bet they feel baaaaaad,” said Jackson. Just as Sally began to laugh so hard she sounded like a love-sick donkey, Karen saw the shepherds for the first time, ambling across the pasture behind the sheep. “Okay, guys. Inside! Time to explore the new house!” She kept her voice deliberately bright and clear as she squinted into the distance to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating the brothers.
To finally arrive on the otherwise unspoiled rural property she had fantasized about for months and was so relieved – overjoyed, even – to have found, only to discover the land (though not the house itself, thank God) already inhabited by crazy old men, to find trespassers in her idyll, to find herself in a real place that could be located on any map, with its own sleazy realtors – well, it all seems like an especially cruel joke. She isn’t sure what her husband will do when he hears about the problem, but as she watches one of the brothers adjust his suspenders while the other leans precariously against his shoulder, she picks up the phone, dials their old number, and waits to find out.
Willie was six-foot-two and wore large plastic-rimmed glasses with perpetually foggy lenses that often fell halfway down his nose. His neck was bent like a swan’s and his clothes hung in a billowing way off his emaciated body. His hair was a salt-and-pepper cloud hovering above his head and this gave him an appearance of calm that his short temper did not bear out. George, on the other hand, was an exceptionally small man whose stature seemed to vary with his mood. At his tallest and most confident, he stood at about five-foot-six, though most of the time he appeared to be a petite five-foot-three. He wore the same sized work pants as Willie, the difference between their physiques somewhat corrected by the complicated system of suspenders Willie had devised to hold the pants up. The pants were purchased at the local Peavey Mart in the same aisle as the steel-toed boots and flannel shirts that the two men also wore. These garments were made of the kind of canvas that delivered so thoroughly on its promise of durability that the shirts and trousers gave the impression that they would outlast the men who sported them.
Willie was the older of the brothers by three years, and although he had lived a marginally longer life and had been given certain advantages that George never received when they were growing up, it was generally assumed that George was secretly the wiser of the two, having an outgoing way about him that made him seem like the natural leader. This was unexpected not only because George was the younger brother, but also
because his blindness had him literally following Willie’s every step. There was, however, something about his smallness and his certainty that made George the one who took charge, and after all, he hadn’t always been blind, just as his brother hadn’t always been deaf.
Willie’s hearing had disappeared overnight. There was no logical explanation. He went to bed one night shortly after his fiftieth birthday and woke up the next morning entirely deaf. His only medical intervention into the problem was to have George drip tar into his ears every so often, which is what they did when a sheep had an infection or a wound that needed cauterizing. Needless to say, this didn’t do much for the deafness, but it did produce in Willie a feeling of pleasant seclusion inside the newly sealed chamber of his own head. George’s affliction was much slower. His vision grew gradually worse over several years until, by the time he was sixty, he could no longer recognize objects or walk in a straight line. It was difficult to say which was harder to bear, slow deterioration or rapid trauma, but the brothers were stoical in this as in all matters, and considered themselves darn lucky, in any case, to have each other.
“Sweetheart, there’s something the realtor neglected to mention about the house.”
“Oh? Oh.” James steels himself for news of rotten foundations, blocked plumbing, a flooded basement.
“There are two old men living on the property in that old shack down by the pasture.”
“What, you mean homeless guys? Or wait, what did Sally tell us is the politically correct term now? Urban outdoorsmen. Although I guess it’s not so urban there. Outdoorsmen? That doesn’t sound right.”
Circus Page 10
