Another hundred feet, and she has to admit the stroller isn’t going any further. (It’s the wrong kind of stroller; she had needed one of the new jogging strollers, with a strong, lightweight frame and large wheels, but Trent’s family had given them this one. Trent had not wanted to exchange it.)
The stroller won’t budge. It’s halfway up its little wheels in mud.
She says, trying to get into the spirit of a challenge, We’ll have to go on foot, soldiers.
What if someone steals it? Olivia asks.
She’s thought of that already. We’ll buy a new one, she says.
She puts on the backpack containing the picnic, lifts Sam out of the stroller. He can walk, even in the mud. He’s wearing Olivia’s old boots, but they’re just a little too big still, and they come off, and he is covered in mud before long, not that he seems to mind. But then it’s too rough going for him, and he won’t walk any further. He wants her to pick him up. She doesn’t want to — she’ll then be covered with mud too. She makes him keep walking, and he grizzles.
It occurs to her that if a cougar (bear, pit bull, serial murderer) were to come along, she would not have many options. She can’t move very fast at all. She calls Olivia, over and over, to stay closer to her, but Olivia is impatient, wants to run. I’m full of running today, she says.
Hold Sam’s other hand, she says, and Olivia does so for a while, but then skips off again.
Olivia! she calls. She can hear her voice getting sharper.
It would be her and Sam, or Olivia. She could take on whatever came around the corner, and Olivia could make a run for it, but it would get Sam, too. Or she could pick up Sam and run, probably as fast as Olivia, even burdened, but whatever it was would catch up, and probably pick off Olivia as a smaller, weaker catch.
Sam sits down and refuses to walk further.
The forest path is beautiful, the light streaming green through the treetops, the new-leaved maple and alder. The moss glistens. It’s a kind of paradise.
It’s not for her. It’s not for her, not today. She picks Sam up, mud and all, calls Olivia once more, trudges back to where she has left the stroller. Nobody has stolen it.
She tells Trent that she needs the car one day and drives into the city and takes Olivia and Sam to the science centre, which has, she is surprised to find out, many interactive displays for small children. She feels a kind of gratitude.
Nipple teeth, Cleo reads from the placard over the display. I totally know what those are. Sam has those, don’t you, Sam? But maybe when those teeth emerge, it’s time to stop offering the nipple. Don’t you think, Sam?
The tooth in front of them has cone-shaped projections. Not nipple-shaped at all, Cleo says. Some unmarried Victorian naturalist’s idea of a nipple. Breast-shaped, maybe. Anyway, doesn’t “masto” come from breast? As in “mastectomy” and “mastitis” and so forth? So it’s really breast-tooth, isn’t it?
Pointy, conical breasts: symbols of power. She wishes she had someone to make that observation to. Someone to have a conversation with.
It’s a mastodon tooth, a fossilized tooth, which the placard says is thirteen thousand years old. The tooth is broken — a couple of its roots snapped off. The top surface is not ivory or yellow, but deep amber marbled with carbonized black, and very glossy, like polished stone. The top, the surface part, has eight bumps or cones, each with a corresponding root. The whole thing is a little longer than Cleo’s hand, and about as deep, and as wide as her palm.
A baby’s tooth, the placard says. The mastodon ate tree branches and leaves. The teeth kept growing as they were worn down.
Photographs of mastodon skeletons and artists’ renditions of mastodons are displayed on large posters. A skull with tusks, too, but it’s a cast.
And the correct name is Mammut, not mastodon.
Olivia is up to her elbows in a bin of fossil pieces that has been placed at small child height. There are posters inviting children to match the shapes of pieces with the type of fragment they might be, but Olivia can’t read, and is absorbed in rubbing the knobs and stumps and hooks of bone in her hands. She is humming, a sign she’s concentrating. But when she sees Cleo, she points to the label on the bin. What does it say? It’s almost an automatic gesture with her these days. What it must be like to suddenly be awake to the world as a place of signs you can’t decipher.
Let’s sound it out, Cleo says, and Olivia does, laboriously, with Cleo’s participation. Olivia knows nearly all her letters, and identifies the sounds that the letters make.
The sign says These are fossilized bone fragments. It takes them a very long time to sound out the words. Olivia gets bored halfway through fossilized, and runs off. Maybe Cleo should have started them with bone.
She does not know how to articulate what she’s thinking: her quick ephemeral sense, back there, of the fragility of connection to the physical world. Of how small children have it, unmediated, and then it’s gone.
Can I see a mammoth? Olivia asks.
No. They are all extinct. They don’t live here anymore.
At the next table, the skull of a cat, its fangs as long and as thick, at the base, as Olivia’s arms. I met a cougar once, in the bush, when I was a little girl, she tells Olivia. I had to remember not to run away from it or it would chase me. She’d been lucky.
Wow, that was so brave, Olivia says.
A basket of fossilized fish skeletons, black and bony and broken. These from the mouth of the Mackenzie River, in the far north. The placard tells them to look for marks on the bones — marks made by tools, by knives cutting fish up for food. The bones, ancient table scraps, are thirty thousand years old. Ten million days.
Her foster family had not believed in evolution. She was allowed to watch nature shows, but the Giesbrechts would get upset if anyone said, this plant has been around for millions of years. You couldn’t have a conversation about it. Once she had said to Mrs. Giesbrecht, what about all the fossils? And she had replied, God must have made the earth out of bits and pieces of other planets, and those bits had fossils in them.
Mrs. Giesbrecht had been making pie: She had squeezed together a ball of scraps, then opened her hand to show Cleo the shapes of the scraps pressed into the ball.
SHE TELLS TRENT she wants the car again, and takes Olivia and Sam down to the market by the river, to the mall, to the petting zoo. There are pygmy goats, with baby pygmy goats, only days old. The goats smell barnyard, ammoniac, not too unpleasantly. Their fur or hair is coarse and their legs short and they look primitive and industrial at the same time: low-slung, basic, functional. Their mouths look mildly discontented, or sneering.
The children are allowed to come into the pen and pat the goats. Olivia enters into this activity with enthusiasm. Olivia pats the goats on their backs and tries to move them around by pushing them, like her toy trucks. She wants Cleo to tell her the goats’ names, to read them from the sign over the shed. She wants to sort them into families. Which babies belong to which mom? Where are the daddy goats? The kids are cat-sized with soft blunt muzzles and gangly legs, like fawns. They butt at the nannies’ udders, hard, and keep butting while they lip the teats. Sometimes the nannies don’t seem to notice and sometimes they bleat, a hard hoarse sound, and suddenly trot away, as if offended.
One of the nannies is pregnant, loaded with a kid or maybe two: They mostly seem to have twins. Her sides bulge like panniers and the kids jostle, inside, and Cleo can see ripples and nudges through the goat’s hide.
Cleo has been carrying Sam on her shoulders and sets him down to look at a goat. But Sam whimpers, won’t touch the animals, shrinks from them. A kid approaches Sam from behind and licks his fingers, and Sam screams and holds his hand out toward Cleo. Cleo looks at it closely. I don’t think it bit you, she says. Just saliva. He looks up at Cleo, somewhat anxiously. I don’t think it bit you, she says again.
But Sam is sobbing now, and Cleo picks him up and takes him back through the gate. You can stay for a while, she
tells Olivia. But Olivia loses interest quickly, without Cleo to interact with. She sees Olivia try to attach herself to a preschool group, but grow frustrated: The other kids aren’t interested in conversation at her level, yet.
Look, Cleo says, when Olivia comes back out of the pen: Look at the goats’ eyes.
The pupils of their eyes are odd, horizontal bars that flare slightly at each end, bone-shaped. Letterbox. Does it affect their vision at all? What do you think the world looks like through those pupils? she asks Olivia.
Food, Olivia says.
The eyes look evil or at any rate like primitive talismans, symbolic shapes whose meaning has been lost for millennia. Of course, primitive is a dubious word. Does she mean pre-industrial?
She needs someone grown up to have conversations with. She needs someone grown up.
CLIFF’S FAVOURITE PROPERTY to work on is a big estate in West Vancouver. When they go it’s for a whole day and with a team, as it’s an expedition just getting there, and the place is so big. They take three vehicles: Ray drives the big truck with the mower and the other equipment, Nicki drives the small truck with the buckets and refuse bags in the bed and Fong and Fazil, the two new guys, labourers, in the cab, and Cliff drives the van with its shelves of sprays and dusts and concentrates in locked cabinets.
The client is a movie producer, Ray says. Loaded. They go four times a year, extra for doing the lawns in the summer. There are gates: They have to be buzzed in. Cliff thinks that the gatehouse would be a sweet place to live. They drive up the long curve of asphalt past the house, which is built of cedar and glass, with cantilevered parts, and looks about the size of Cliff’s apartment building.
In front is a sweep of lawn ringed by trees: fir, maple, blue spruce, ornamental cherry, with a lower layer of elder and cotoneaster and red-osier and smoke bush, so that it looks like a painting. In fall it takes his breath away. They’ll spray the trees for Anthracnose, the lawn for moss and leatherjackets, today. The movie producer says no chemicals, but it’s all chemicals, Cliff knows. He means no fancy names, Ray says. Call it copper and lime treatment.
Behind the house, the slope has been landscaped with terraces and outdoor rooms with walls of cedar and stone and even metal. Each room is a little different: The Japanese garden with its small pond and round stones and mosses and azaleas; the Van Gogh, which in later spring will be all blues and yellows: jostaberry and iris and tulips, and open to the view of the sea, so that it seems to hang on the edge of the land; the Lovecraft, where twisted, bulbous, bizarre-looking plants grow out of polished black river stones. These plants are almost all tropical, and live in pots buried under the gravel, and are taken out in the winter and kept in the green house. He can see that this room is supposed to be a kind of nightmare or bad trip. Nicki thinks it’s funny: She calls it the Twisted Garden.
But the best part is beyond the terraces: the wild acre. It’s not really wild. Cliff must go in two or three times a year and rake leaves, prune back branches and vines, snub off plants trying to push through the paths, clean benches with lime. More, even: Remove a branch here and there to let light splash on a pool of bluebells or lady’s slipper; augment moss or ferns where something has rubbed or scratched too much ground bare.
Mrs. Cookshaw herself had taught him how to take care of the wild acre. She said: Ray is too heavy-handed, he’d make it look like a city park. And Nicki wouldn’t do enough. Someone would break his neck in there. You’re the one with the right touch, Cliff.
They had sat on a stone bench, warming themselves in the sun, Mrs. Cookshaw resting her hands on the head of her cane, which was carved with an owl’s face. It’s a secret, Mrs. Cookshaw had said. You don’t talk to Mr. Edelman about the maintenance of the wild acre.
Doesn’t he know we do it? Cliff had asked.
He knows.
Cliff had nodded, but felt confused. He doesn’t want it to just be left natural?
He knows, but he doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to think about it.
Then Cliff had understood. He wants to imagine that it’s really wild.
You’ve got it, Cliff, Mrs. Cookshaw had said.
Mrs. Cookshaw doesn’t come out to the jobs much anymore. She broke her hip, the winter before last. And she’s nearly ninety, Nicki says.
Cliff’s other favourite place is quite different: an older house right in the city, with big grounds. It’s all very structured, and unified: Italianate, Mrs. Cookshaw had told him. Everything is lined up, spaced evenly, planned, even the kitchen garden inside its stone walls. When he’s here he feels his mind finding a new way of seeing. It’s different than the work of seeing the wild acre double, seeing both what is there and what could be there, at the same time. In the Italian garden he feels his mind floating on the expected, regular, symmetrical patterns of the walls and pavers and plantings. It’s as if a net — or a hammock — is holding up his brain so that it doesn’t have to worry about keeping upright or afloat or in motion, and can then go somewhere else. It can relax into a different place.
In the Italianate garden he feels his mind finding new openings, sending tendrils of thought places it has not gone before. Questions, maybe. But not the usual questions, like is Sophie safe, or why is Ray mad at me now, or should I sharpen the lawnmower now or is it going to rain soon? Instead, new questions: Does Sophie think about me while I am gone? What is her thinking like? How could I ever find this out? Do alliums and periwinkle and club mosses think? How could we know? And: What was the first thought?
Which are pretty pointless questions, he guesses. But as long as he is doing the work, snipping or digging or raking up, at a good enough clip, nobody minds.
The labourers go at the lawn and trees, mowing and spraying, with Ray supervising them, and Nicki is dealing with the ponds and Cliff moves into the wild acre. He finds here that he needs to use another set of senses, kind of like a different pair of glasses, except it feels more like they’re inside himself, like smelling and hearing. He uses something inside himself to get a sense of how everything looks, and how it should look, at the same time. The vegetation is coastal forest: western red cedar, Douglas fir, broadleaf maple as the apex trees. Some trees have been removed, though, so there are light wells, and in the understory, trailing blackberry, mock orange, ocean spray currant, hazel, salal. Then sword fern, and this time of spring, False Solomon’s Seal, Queen’s Cup, trillium, violets.
It’s natural, but just a little bit prettier than a real forest.
As he walks through, he sees a vireo, a warbler, a lazuli bunting; hears the hairy woodpecker on the snag they’ve left for it.
He has his loppers, his pruners, his knives and scrapers, his bags. Under the trees, he slips into his listening: senses the breathing of the cedars, the slow attentiveness of the maple, the clock-rotation of the sun wells, the dancing of insects. He listens with his augmented senses, and what he hears or sees or smells is balance, he thinks: light and dark, height and breadth, matter and space, coolness and warmth. He takes them in and his brain sorts them in a way that he can’t explain, and his hands move to excise a root here, scrape off some excess moss there, disappear a clump of opportunistic hawkweed, lop off a small branch. In this state, he breathes in the forest, becomes it, moves in it, as if he belongs.
On his new television he watches Nature and The Knowledge Network and Discovery Channel. He watches shows about plant reproduction, about orchids, about sharks and stingrays, about Kermode bears and bower birds and penguins and jaguars. He has watched shows about Jane Goodall and her chimpanzees, and about Koko the sign-language-using gorilla. He has watched shows about all the parts of the planet, the seas, the deserts, the tropical and temperate forests, the arctic regions.
His favourite are the ones about tropical reefs, about coral reefs and all of the fish and other creatures that live there: lobsters like fancy jewellery, long-spined sea urchins, giant clams, octopus. All of the creatures that look like plants but are really animals: sea pens and sea sq
uirts. Sea turtles, of course. And the fish: the striped and spotted, the black-and-white and the neon, the box-shaped and the tube-shaped, the parrot-beaked and trumpet-headed. He’s watched them so avidly that he can now recognize them on the screen: yellow tangs, convict fish. One day — maybe not till he’s pretty old — he’ll go snorkelling or skin diving in some tropical sea. He’ll save up for that.
There is a man, suddenly, behind him on the path. He has on a yellow pullover sweater and butterscotch-coloured loafers and sunglasses propped on his silver hair. He says to Cliff: Ah. I’m so glad to have found you. I want to show you something.
Down the looping path to where the section of a fallen cedar has been left to rot and become a nurse log, just like in nature.
There the man says. Wet.
It’s a seasonal pool. The wild acre is always a little boggy there, in spring. Cliff nods.
It would be fantastic, the man says, if it were a little more dramatically wet.
Like a little pond, Cliff says, finally figuring it out.
Yes. The man waits.
What is he supposed to say? He has realized who this must be, and guesses what he’s asking, but how much can Cliff suggest? He remembers Mrs. Cookshaw’s warnings.
The client is swaying a little now. Cliff’s guts clench. Well, he says. There is a natural depression. It could be deeper.
The man nods.
Pond vegetation might grow there, Cliff says. It might need — another source — of water. For when the spring or whatever dries up.
The man waits. He has stopped swaying.
Cliff swallows, involuntarily. Maybe — it could be a little larger?
What is Going to Happen Next Page 7
