Moral Disorder

by Margaret Atwood

  Meanwhile the nights become longer and longer and darker and darker. Ice forms at the edges of the river. Hauling the canoe over the shallows, through the rushing stone-cold water, leaves them shivering and gasping. The first snowflurries fall.

  “It’s rough country,” says my father. “No moose. Not even bears. That’s always a bad sign, no bears.” He’s been there, or near it; same sort of terrain. He speaks of it with admiration and nostalgia, and a kind of ruefulness. “Now of course you can fly in. You can cover their whole route in a couple of hours.” He waves his fingers dismissively: so much for planes.

  “What about the owl?” I say.

  “What owl?” says my father.

  “The one they ate,” I say. “I think it’s where the canoe dumps, and they save their matches by sticking them in their ears.”

  “I think that was the others,” says my father. “The ones who tried the same thing later. I don’t think this bunch ate an owl.”

  “If they had eaten one, what sort of owl would it have been?” I say.

  “Great horned or boreal,” he says, “if they were lucky. More meat on those. But it may have been something smaller.” He gives a series of thin, eerie barks, like a dog at a distance, and then he grins. He knows every bird up there by its call; he still does.

  He’s sleeping too much in the afternoons,” says my mother.

  “Maybe he’s tired,” I say.

  “He shouldn’t be that tired,” she says. “Tired, and restless as well. He’s losing his appetite.”

  “Maybe he needs a hobby,” I say. “Something to occupy his mind.”

  “He used to have a lot of them,” my mother says.

  I wonder where they’ve all gone, those hobbies. Their tools and materials are still around: the plane and the spirit level, the feathers for tying dry flies, the machine for enlarging prints, the points for making arrows. These bits and pieces seem to me like artifacts, the kind that are dug up at archaeological sites, and then pondered over and classified, and used for deducing the kind of life once lived.

  “He used to say he wanted to write his memoirs,” says my mother. “A sort of account. All the places he’s been. He did begin it several times, but now he’s lost interest. He can’t see too well.”

  “He could use a tape recorder,” I say.

  “Oh help,” says my mother. “More gadgets!”

  The winds howl and cease, the snow falls and stops falling. The three men have traversed across to a different river, hoping it will be better, but it isn’t. One night George has a dream: God appears to him, shining and bright and affable, and speaks in a manner that is friendly but firm. “I can’t spare any more of these trout,” he says, “but if you stick to this river you’ll get down to Grand Lake all right. Just you don’t leave the river, and I’ll get you out safe.”

  George tells the others of his dream. It is discounted. The men abandon their canoe and strike out overland, hoping to reach their old trail. After far too long they do reach it, and stumble along it down the valley of the river they first ascended, rummaging through their former campsites for any food they might have thrown away. They aren’t counting in miles, but in days; how many days they have left, and how many it will take. But that will depend on the weather, and on their own strength: how fast they can go. They find a lump of mouldering flour, a bit of lard, a few bones, some caribou hooves, which they boil. A little tin of dry mustard; they mix it into the soup, and find it encouraging.

  In the third week of October, this is how things stand:

  Hubbard has become too weak to go any farther. He’s been left behind, wrapped in his blankets, in the tent, with a fire going. The other two have gone on; they hope to walk out, then send help back for him. He’s given them the last of the peameal.

  The snow is falling. For dinner he has some strong tea and bone broth, and some boiled rawhide, made from the last of his moccasins; he writes in his journal that it is truly delicious. Now he is without footgear. He has every hope that the others will succeed, and will return and save him, or so he records. Nevertheless he begins a farewell message for his wife. He writes that he has a pair of cowhide mittens he’s looking forward to cooking and eating the next day.

  After that he goes to sleep, and after that he dies.

  Some days farther down the trail, Wallace too has to give up. He and George part company: Wallace intends to go back with the latest leavings they’ve managed to locate – a few handfuls of mouldy flour. He will find Hubbard, and together they will await rescue. But he’s been caught in a blizzard and has lost his bearings; at the moment he’s in a shelter made of branches, waiting for the snow to let up. He is amazingly weak, and no longer hungry, which he knows is a bad sign. Every movement he makes is slow and deliberate, and at the same time unreal, as if his body is apart from him and he is only watching it. In the white light of day or the red flicker of the fire – for he still has fire – the whorls on the ends of his own fingers appear miraculous to him. Such clarity and detail; he follows the pattern of the woven blanket as if tracing a map.

  His dead wife has appeared to him, and has given him several pieces of practical advice concerning his sleeping arrangements: a thicker layer of spruce boughs underneath, she’s said, would be more comfortable. Sometimes he only hears her, sometimes he sees her as well; she’s wearing a blue summer dress, her long hair pinned up in a shining coil. She appears perfectly at home; the poles of the shelter are visible through her back. Wallace has ceased to be surprised by this.

  Even farther along, George continues to walk; to walk out. He knows more or less where he’s going; he will find help and return with it. But he isn’t out yet, he’s still in. Snow surrounds him, the blank grey sky enfolds him; at one point he comes across his own tracks and realizes he’s been walking in a circle. He too is thin and weak, but he’s managed to shoot a porcupine. He pauses to think it through: he could turn around, retrace his steps, take the porcupine back to share with the others; or he could eat all of it himself, and go forward. He knows that if he goes back it’s likely that none of them will get out alive; but if he goes on, there’s at least a possibility, at least for him. He goes on, hoarding the bones.

  “That George did the right thing,” says my father.

  A week later, while sitting at the dinner table, my father has another stroke. This time it knocks out half the vision in each eye, and his short-term memory, and his sense of where he is. From one minute to the next he has become lost; he gropes through the living room as if he’s never been in such a place before. The doctors say this time it’s unlikely he’ll recover.

  Time passes. Now the lilacs are in bloom outside the window, and he can see them, or parts of them. Despite this, he thinks it’s October. Yet the core of him is still there. He sits in his armchair, trying to figure things out. One sofa cushion looks much like another unless you have something to go by. He watches the sunlight gleaming on the hardwood floor; his best guess is it’s a river. In extreme situations you have to use your wits.

  “I’m here,” I say, kissing his dry cheek. He hasn’t gone bald, not in the least. He has silvery-white hair, like an egret frozen.

  He peers at me, out of the left sides of his eyes, which are the ones that work.

  “You seem to have become very old all of a sudden,” he says.

  As far as we can tell he’s missing the last four or five years, and several blocks of time before that as well. He’s disappointed in me: not because of anything I’ve done, but because of what I’ve failed to do. I’ve failed to remain young. If I could have managed that I could have saved him; then he too could have remained as he was.

  I wish I could think of something to amuse him. I’ve tried recordings of bird songs, but he doesn’t like them: they remind him that there’s something he once knew, but can’t remember. Stories are no good, not even short ones, because by the time you get to the second page he’s forgotten the beginning. Where are we without our plots?

&nbs
p; Music is better; it takes place drop by drop.

  My mother doesn’t know what to do, and so she rearranges: cups and plates, documents, bureau drawers. Right now she’s outside, yanking weeds out of the garden in a bewildered frenzy. Dirt and couch grass fly through the air: that at least will get done! There’s a wind; her hair is wild, blown up around her head like feathers.

  I’ve told her I can’t stay long. “You can’t?” she said. “But we could have tea, I could light a fire …”

  “Not today,” I said firmly.

  He can see her out there, more or less, and he wants her to come back in. He doesn’t like it that she’s on the other side of the glass. If he lets her slip away, out of his sight, who knows where she might go? She might vanish forever.

  I hold his good hand. “She’ll come in soon,” I say; but soon could be a year.

  “I want to go home,” he says. I know there’s no point telling him that home is where he now is, because he means something else. He means the way he was before.

  “Where are we now?” I say.

  He gives me a crafty look: am I trying to trip him up? “In a forest,” he says. “We need to get back.”

  “We’re all right here,” I say.

  He considers. “Not much to eat.”

  “We brought the right supplies,” I say.

  He is reassured. “But there’s not enough wood.” He’s anxious about this; he says it every day. His feet are cold, he says.

  “We can get more wood,” I say. “We can cut it.”

  He’s not so sure. “I never thought this would happen,” he says. He doesn’t mean the stroke, because he doesn’t know he’s had one. He means getting lost.

  “We know what to do,” I say. “Anyway, we’ll be fine.”

  “We’ll be fine,” he says, but he sounds dubious. He doesn’t trust me, and he is right.

  The Boys at the Lab

  The boys at the Lab were not boys. They were young men, but not extremely young: a couple of them were already thinning at the temples. They must have been in their twenties. If you were speaking of one of them – one at a time – you would never have called him a boy. Yet, in a group, they were boys. They were “The Boys,” with quotation marks around them, standing all together on the dock, some with their shirts off. They had tans: the sunlight was thinner then, the ozone layer was thicker, but still they had tans.

  The boys had muscles, and also grins, of a sort that you don’t see any more on men’s faces. Faces like theirs date from the wartime; they went with pipes, and with moustaches. I think the boys had pipes – I seem to recall a pipe or two – and one of them had a moustache. You can see it in the picture of him.

  I found the boys very glamorous. Or no: I was too young for glamour. I found them, instead, magical. They were a longed-for destination, the object of a quest. Going to see them was – in anticipation, at least – a radiant event.

  The boys arrived at the Lab every spring, around the time the new leaves and the blackflies and mosquitoes appeared. They came from many directions; there were different ones every year; they worked with my father. I wasn’t sure what this work involved, but it must have been exciting because the Lab itself was exciting. Anywhere we didn’t go often was exciting.

  We would get there in a heavy wooden rowboat, built in the five-house village half a mile away – our mother would row, she was quite good at it – or by following a twisty, winding footpath, over fallen trees and stumps and around boulders and across wet patches where a few slippery planks were laid across the sphagnum moss, breathing in the mildewy smell of damp wood and slowly decaying leaves. It was too far for us to walk, our legs were too short, so mostly we went in the rowboat.

  The Lab was made of logs; it seemed enormous, though in the two photographs of it that survive it looks like a shack. It did however have a screened porch, with log railings. Inside it there were things we weren’t allowed to touch – bottles containing a dangerous liquid in which white grubs floated, their six tiny front legs clasped together like praying fingers, and corks that smelled like poison and were poison, and trays with dried insects pinned to them with long, thin pins, each with a tiny, alluring black knob for a head. All of this was so forbidden it made us dizzy.

  At the Lab we could hide in the ice house, a dim and mysterious place that was always bigger on the inside than it was on the outside, and where there was a hush, and a lot of sawdust to keep the blocks of ice cool. Sometimes there would be a tin of evaporated milk with holes punched in the top and wax paper stuck over them; sometimes there would be a carefully hoarded stub of butter or an end of bacon; sometimes there would be a fish or two, pickerel or lake trout, already filleted, laid out on a chipped enamel pie plate.

  What did we do in there? There was nothing to actually do. We’d pretend we had vanished – that nobody knew where we were. This in itself was strangely energizing. Then we’d come out, away from the silence, back into the pine-needle scent and the sound of waves plocking against the shore, and our mother’s voice calling us, because it was time to get back into the rowboat and row home.

  The boys at the Lab had caught the ice-house fish, and would cook them for their supper. They did their own cooking – another unusual thing to know about them – because there weren’t any women there to do the cooking for them. They slept in tents, big canvas tents, two or three to a tent; they had air mattresses, and heavy kapok sleeping bags. They horsed around a lot, or so I like to believe. There’s a photo of them pretending to be asleep, with their bare feet sticking out the end of the tent. The names of the boys with the feet were Cam and Ray. They are the only ones with names.

  Who took these photos? And why? My father? More interestingly, my mother? I expect she was laughing as she did it; I expect they were playacting, having fun. Maybe there was some harmless flirtation of the sort that used to go on more because everyone knew there would be no consequences. It was my mother who pasted the boys into her photo album, and wrote captions under them: “The boys.” “The boys at the Lab.” “Cam and Ray, ‘sleeping.’ ”

  My mother is lying in bed, where’s she been for a year now. In some ways it’s an act of will. She became progressively blinder, and then she couldn’t go walking alone because she’d fall down, and she needed to have someone with her, one of her elderly friends; but even when the two of them would set out, arms linked, she’d trip and stumble and then they might both fall down. She got a black eye or two, and finally she broke a rib – she fell onto the nightstand beside her bed and must have spent many hours on the floor, painfully pulling herself up and falling down again, like a beetle inside a jar, trying to get herself back into the bed, and was discovered by the woman who’d been hired – over her protests – to come in during the days.

  Then she became afraid to walk, although she never said so, and then she became angry at her own fear. Finally she became rebellious. She rebelled against all of it: the blindness, the restriction, the falling down, the injuries, the fear. She no longer wanted to have anything to do with these sources of misery, and so she retreated under the bedcovers. It was a way of changing the subject.

  Nowadays she couldn’t walk even if she tried to: her muscles have become too weak. But her heart has always been strong, and it keeps her going. Soon she’ll be ninety-two.

  I sit down on her right side, where her good ear is: she’s stone deaf in the other. The hearing in this good ear and her sense of touch are her last two contacts with the outside world. For a while we believed she could still smell; we’d bring bouquets – scented flowers only, roses and freesia and phlox and sweet peas – and shove them under her nose.

  “There!” we would say. “Doesn’t that smell nice?”

  She would say nothing. Throughout her life she lied less than most people, a great deal less: you might even say never. On occasions when a lie might have been called for, she would provide a silence. A mother of a different sort would have said, “Yes, that’s just lovely, thank you so much.”
But she did not say that.

  “You don’t smell anything at all, do you?” I said at last.

  “No,” she said.

  She’s curled up on her side with her eyes closed, but she isn’t asleep. The green wool blanket is pulled up to her chin. The tips of her fingers stick out: wizened fingers, almost entirely bone, closed into a little fist. Her hands have to be opened up and massaged, and that takes some doing because her fingers are clenched so tight. It’s as if she’s holding on to an invisible rope. It’s a rope on a ship, a rope on a cliff – some rope she absolutely has to cling on to, so she won’t fall overboard, so she can climb up.

  She has her good ear against the pillow, shutting things out. I turn her head gently to the side so she can hear me.

  “It’s me,” I say. Talking into her ear is like talking into the end of a long narrow tunnel that leads through darkness to a place I can’t really imagine. What does she do in there all day? All day, and all night. What does she think about? Is she bored, is she sad, what’s really going on? Her ear is the single link to a whole world of buried activity; it’s like a mushroom, a brief pale signal thrust up from under the ground to show that a large network of interconnected threads is still alive and flourishing down there.

  “Do you know who I am?” I say to the ear. It even looks like a mushroom.

  “Yes,” she says, and I know it’s true: as I’ve said, she doesn’t lie.

  It’s my function on these occasions to tell her stories. The stories she most wants to hear are about herself, herself when younger; herself when much younger. She smiles at those; on occasion she might even join in. She’s no longer voluble, she can’t carry a plot, not all by herself, but she knows what’s happening, or what happened once, and she can manage a sentence or two. I’m hampered in my task because I can play back to her only the stories she once told me, which are limited in number. She likes the exciting stories best, or the ones that show her in a strong light – getting her own way against the odds – or the ones with fun in them.