by Jane Bow
Old telephones have a jarring, clamorous ring.
Vanessa sipped her wine. Let it ring. Because what if it was Charlie?
What if he was lying in their bed in Toronto, missing her? His thick black hair would be standing in spikes, and if he wanted her back he would paint word pictures she was powerless to resist, would erect logical structures she could not refute. She would catch the next plane back to Toronto. His arms would close around her …
The rhythm of one of Paul Simon’s love songs filled the evening air. Vanessa lit the candles on the deck, turned on the hot tub, poured herself another glass of wine, the wind whipping her hair as she stood watching the darkening sea.
Six years ago at another seaside, in the Canary Islands where she and Brigit were camping on a deserted beach, she had been standing in the morning surf brushing her teeth, wearing only bikini bottoms and a T-shirt, when Charlie had come out of the shoulder-high tomato plants behind the beach. She had moved up to the bamboo and palm leaf shelter the tomato pickers had left behind, had watched him come across the sand. Brigit was in the village learning to solder silver from a German expatriate jeweller. Vanessa was alone.
He was five foot ten, two inches taller than she was, madras shirt and jeans, a backpack with a Canadian flag on it, and he had a lovely fluid erectness, nothing to do with rigidity or convictions, more like the easy grace of a plant stalk. His eyes were green. He was looking for a place to sleep and some guys in the village had told him about two Canadian girls who were camping on the beach behind the deserted tomato plantation.
She had picked up a tomato, offered him a bite. He took it, smiling, then handed it back, watching as she bit into it. A lump of tomato squirted onto the front of her T-shirt. Its juice spread, sticking the cotton to her breast. And standing there by the azure sea, the beach long and empty in the sun, suddenly she had pulled the stained T-shirt up over her head to run, laughing, into the warm Canary Island surf.
He had dropped his knapsack, ripped off his jeans and shirt and something in him was so beautiful, so unaffected. Inside her a river of heat and light erased caution. How could there be any reason, out there among the breakers, not to play?
Later they had lain together on her sleeping bag under the palm leaf shelter, marvelling at what had happened. He told her about growing up in Red Deer, Alberta, trading in his skates for computer gaming with his friend Pete, saving to get to Europe. From there it had been a short hop to Morocco and some of the finest weed in the world, and then into Paulo Coelho’s alchemist’s desert. But camels were hideously uncomfortable and sandstorms had threatened to skin him alive, so now he was on his way home.
She had told him about growing up in Altamira, about Carlita and Paco and going out in their grandfather’s red fishing dory, looking through his glass-bottomed box at the many coloured fish around which he would drop his net. Charlie had listened, stroking her, exploring her curves and hills and crevices until once again the tide had risen.
Love: the perfect joyful confluence of two separate and distinct people, miraculous. After Brigit had left to continue studying jewellery with the Navajos in the western United States, Vanessa had abandoned her studies in Madrid to return with Charlie to Toronto. Her PhD ambitions, she realized, had been founded on the need to recapture the Spain she had lost. What she really wanted was to write, to breathe life into the fantastic confluences of human history with its treasures.
While Charlie and Pete designed revolutionary new computer games, Vanessa would learn to write for newspapers and magazines, maybe television. She had been sending out proposals and eking out a preliminary living writing pamphlets on “Raising A Pet With Personality” and “How To Establish A Healthy Relationship With Your Houseplants,” and “articles” for fact factories that peddled company press releases as news when Charlie and Pete launched “Sky!” their first game. Rated “the game all the business execs are playing,” Sky! had brought dollars, first a trickle then a cascade, into Charlie’s bank account. They had popped champagne corks, made love on the living room rug, bought a condominium overlooking Lake Ontario.
The Paul Simon CD was over. Vanessa sank into the hot tub, let the water’s warmth rise over her chin, her mouth, her nose, let it close over her head, tugging at her hair as it began to float. Failed to hear the doorbell or the knocking, and did not register the sound of footsteps.
“Hello! Van?”
Vanessa sat up. Brigit was climbing the steps at the side of the deck. Her black hair, cut in a pixie style, gleamed blue in the spill of light from the living room.
“You sounded so low when the phone cut out the other night, so instead of going home I drove to Calgary and then flew—”
Vanessa gaped.
“Well, why not? My professor’s away, and I’ve sold everything I’ve made.” Businessmen visiting Vancouver paid hundreds of dollars for Brigit’s intricately designed gold and silver bracelets, rings, pendants. “So, I thought, how long is it since I’ve taken a holiday?” The sides of a brown paper bag she had put down on one of the chaises began to crackle in and out. “Lobsters. I picked them up at a place up the highway. I Called …”
As if dropping everything to fly four thousand kilometres across the country to comfort a friend was natural, ordinary behaviour.
“Am I dreaming?” Vanessa stood up, reached for her robe, and then they were hugging, laughing, crying in an evening full of the scents of lilac and spruce and the sea.
IV
BRIGIT AND VANESSA HAD MET at the beginning of their first year at York University’s Glendon College, one night when Brigit had knocked on Vanessa’s door in residence, looking for a cigarette. Sitting in the middle of a pile of old photographs, Vanessa had tossed her the package, also an old pasteboard photograph. The assignment was to explore their roots by examining family photographs, talking to aged relatives, meshing these with recorded history. The woman in the picture had light-coloured hair — probably honey gold like Vanessa’s — but done up in braids pinned around the top of her head. The high cheekbones and grey eyes could have been Vanessa’s too but their look was austere. Her tight-lipped mouth was tucked at each side.
Brigit tilted the picture toward the desk light.
“Hmm, I see a woman who met this guy who told her he was a preacher and took her off into the fields to show her God’s marvels …”
She flicked a glance at Vanessa, who took the picture back.
“And then, whispering ‘The Lord is my shepherd,’ he unlaced her corsets—”
“And suddenly she was on fire—!”
“But when she had his baby she turned into the most pious, self-righteous prude. God,” Vanessa said, tossing the photograph back onto the stack on the floor, “how am I ever going to have a life with ancestors like that?”
There was nothing unique about the macramé necklaces Brigit wore or the multi-coloured Indian bangles jangling on her wrists, or her earrings, exotic dangling designs one day, garnet studs to match an antique garnet necklace the next. But there was an authenticity to Brigit, her choices inspired by the energy governing her daily relationship to the world: army fatigues today, a slinky skirt and boots tomorrow.
She had studied meditation during three high school years in India, where her parents had run an irrigation project, so now she and Vanessa could trade stories about their shock on finding, here in Canada, classrooms where girls and boys were allowed to wear whatever they imagined would attract the opposite sex; where teachers did not seem to mind interruptions from the public address system or the telephone and nobody did anything about the spitballs that punctuated the social studies lessons; where green playing fields lay empty and unused for most of the day. One afternoon Brigit had simply got up and left the classroom, had taken her grade twelve English poetry book out across the high school’s empty football field to read William Wordsworth under an old oak tree on the far side and then to sit, eyes closed, until the chipmunks, mice, ants, beetles returned to the grasses beside he
r, until all that faded too so that only the damp chlorophyll earthiness of Wordsworth’s sorrow remained.
After graduation Brigit had returned to India and Vanessa thought she had lost her best friend to a closed community of contemplation until one rainy winter evening four years later when, answering the door of her cubbyhole apartment in Madrid, she had found a smiling Brigit. Huddled by Vanessa’s gas heater, they had cracked open a bottle of vino tinto and talked into the small hours. Brigit was on her way home.
“Hermithood doesn’t work for me. I need to live the teachings, I’m not sure how yet. But, oh Van, the symbols are so perfect. So beautiful, their geometry, flawless! And the same geometric designs have been popping up all over the globe forever. Why? Because everything, nature, the winds, the storms, heat, chemistry, everything inside and outside us is the same thing: energy! Is that not cool?”
Vanessa was blinking at the concept, wondering if coffee was a good idea at 3 am, when Brigit had bounced to her feet.
“What you need, girl, is a break. Why don’t we go south like the birds, out of this cold. You can show me Altamira—”
“No.” Vanessa had already taken the train down over the mountains to the south coast, had rehearsed the hugs she would give Carlita and Paco, and had found that both were gone; Carlita to Valencia where she was married and already raising three children, and Paco to join the military. She had tried to see past the new Altamira hotels, neon nightclubs, buses belching tourists onto the headland above the ancient harbour while down on the beach a large lobster-pink family of British bathers in straw hats were calling to each other, “Cooooee—!”
“All right then,” Brigit had said, “Let’s take a ferry from Algeciras to the Canary Islands.”
Now Vanessa took Brigit’s assortment of embroidered tote bags inside the French doors, then poured her a glass of wine.
“You must be tired. I’ll get you a robe and then why don’t you join me in the tub?”
And lying in the hot water under the June moon there was such joy in sharing her find and Brother Bart’s story of love and treasure.
“So let me get this straight,” said Brigit when finally Vanessa came to the end. “You, who grew up in Altamira, who are the only person within hundreds of miles who can read ancient Spanish, who has been coming down here for years and knows all about the Oak Island treasure hunt, you arrive here feeling lost and alone and discover a diary about lost love and hidden treasure written by a monk—”
“A failed monk.”
“—from Altamira. Who may have been here.” Brigit’s face, all that was visible of her, looked as if it was floating, an oracle on the water’s candlelit surface. “You know what they say, Van: ‘coincidence’ is a word used by people who don’t know any better.”
Vanessa stood up, shrugged into her robe. “Why don’t I put the lobster water on to boil? Then, while we’re waiting, you can start your holiday with a massage.” Before Charlie had turned up on the Canary Island beach, an Austrian masseur in the village had taught Vanessa his skills.
Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria” swelled into Gran’s living room. Brigit lay on a beach towel spread across the long pine dining table, a glass of white wine within reach by her head as Vanessa kneaded the soles of her feet.
“Oh God, Van, I’ve died and gone to Heaven.” Brigit raised her head to sip her wine. “You won’t believe what I did on the way here. Remember the old wooden mine head we found that time, after I went west and you came out to visit?”
“Right. It was sticking up out of the trees beside a rushing creek where there was a gold mine—”
“Where I met Daniel.”
There had been a little log museum below the mine tower. It was closed but there were photographs in the window: a man in a rumpled wool jacket standing beside a sluice box, holding a gold nugget the size of a fist. He had turned out to be Daniel’s ancestor.
Vanessa finished massaging Brigit’s calves, dribbled more lotion onto her hands, and started to work on her thigh muscles.
“I remember we decided to walk a little way up the path to the gorge the creek had cut, just far enough to peek into some of the original mine shafts, and you could practically hear the little rail cars loaded with ore that once rattled down through the gorge to the mine head—”
Three years later it was good, Vanessa thought, that they could talk about it.
“Yes. Well, I went back there this week. Remember how the path turned right at the edge of the gorge—?”
“And became a ledge about a foot wide, with little pole bridges in places, thirty feet above the rushing water. How could I forget? I was terrified, remember? I turned back.”
A piano began to pound out Schubert’s Der Erlkönig.
“A woman died there last year, an anthropology professor from Vancouver.
Apparently she stepped onto one of those bridges and the support snapped—”
“But still you went out there all alone—?” Vanessa raised her voice above the music.
“I was taking a walk, and anyway that part’s fixed now. So what was there to be afraid of?”
“Bears! Men! Crumbling rock!”
A mezzo-soprano burst into song.
“Ouch!” Brigit pulled away from the knot Vanessa’s fingers were digging out of her buttock.
“A broken ankle miles from anywhere and nobody on the face of the earth knowing where you were!”
“So what would you have me do? Stay in the car?” Brigit had to shout over the soprano. “Not go anywhere, do anything ever because maybe a bear or the wind or God-only-knows-what-else might get me?” She drank some wine, waited while the soprano finished scaling the heights, then twisted around. “Life happens wherever we are Van, and I’d rather not live caged up—”
Vanessa pushed her back down.
“I need to feel the air on my skin, to hear the trees — Ouch! Take it easy, will you?”
“Sorry. But there is so much tension built up.” Vanessa worked upward, kneading the small of Brigit’s back and remembering.
Three years ago, after she had gone back down to the car, Brigit had turned a corner in the cliffside path to see the opening of a new mine tunnel on the other side of the creek. Above it a huge orange pipe, a metre in diameter, with an accordion elbow bending it upstream, hung out over the creek, suspended from a wire attached to a steel cable strung across the gorge.
Upstream the creek dropped, laughing, over a waterfall. It would not laugh for long. At the top of the falls a new three-sided concrete dam extended out from this side of the creek. A second cable and wire holding this end of the orange pipe crossed the gorge right above Brigit’s head. When the pipe was joined to the dam it would suck the life out of the creek, send it down into the tunnel to wash chiselled rock out of the mountain’s vein into a sluice box somewhere further down. As she stood under those ugly pipes and cables, everything that Brigit was had revolted.
Someone had left an aluminum ladder leaning against the side of the gorge. She had climbed it. The cable was wrapped around the trunk of a thick-waisted Douglas fir in a clearing at the top, where there was a heavy woodsman’s axe. The shock as the axe struck the cable had nearly knocked Brigit off her feet, but she had hit it again and again, her back arching, then bucking forward, her feet nearly coming off the ground, the clang of metal on metal ringing out over the gorge as the orange pipe screeched and danced. Finally her grip on the wooden axe handle must have loosened. When Brigit brought the axe down the next time the impact sent a shock back up the handle into her palms.
They let go. The axe flew up, out over the falls. Brigit was shaking, sweating, her tank top sticking to her breasts. There were four tiny shiny dents in the cable. And still no one came.
The glacial water pooling behind the dam was emerald green so she had peeled off her clothes, the water pricking her skin as she waded in, sending a sweet ache up through her bones into her skull. She had come up gasping, had splashed out onto the riverbank, but still the
re was no sound beyond the occasional creaking hemlock, the pines soughing, the chucking of a whisky jack. She was lying in the sun on top of the dam when Daniel arrived, the sun highlighting the scraggly ends of auburn hair sticking out from under a ridiculous bucket hat.
Big square hands were clenched by his sides.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he had said, “This is private property.”
“Private?” Brigit had pulled on her tank top, covered herself with her shorts. “You think this creek and all the fish and birds and plants whose lives you are so busy destroying, you think they’re your property?”
“Oh great,” he had replied, “a hippy-dippy granola-head.”
He had followed Brigit back down the path, had met Vanessa at the road. They had thought he was seeing them off the property, but then he said, “Come down to Joe’s for steaks.” He wanted to explain that the cables and tubing were portable, extractable, here today gone tomorrow.
After Vanessa had flown back to the east, Brigit had returned to the mine head. A week later she was sharing Daniel’s tent. “I know it’s sudden,” she had emailed, “but oh Van, it’s as if a closed casing, a bud curled tightly in sleep, unconscious, that’s all I’ve ever been. Now I wake up every morning smiling, my every cell open, my colors unfurling, pistils quivering.”
During the following year Brigit had learned about how molten minerals deposit themselves under the earth, how nuggets found in creeks are distinct from the veins of gold lacing through rock, had broken boulders to discover the hidden beauty of crystallized amethyst, had watched the sun shine through rose quartz and garnets, reflect off polished jade.
“And the symbols, oh Van, the geometry, the symmetry they came from is all right here, resonating everywhere, so beautiful!”
But symbols and their meanings had no part in the plan Daniel devised of using ropes to explore the mineral veins in the cliff above another of Daniel’s great-great-great grandfather’s mining claims north of Hope. Brigit had watched him reach up past where his foot could safely sustain its hold. Below him, at the low end of the rope, she had seen the danger and called to him. But, intent upon gaining the next ledge, Daniel had refused to listen. He had known she was tethered to him, but still he had reached. And so, as she clung to the rock below, she had been unable to do anything but watch him shift his weight onto the shaky foothold. The rock under him, crumbling, had sent his body sliding back down toward her, faster, faster, bouncing down past her until the rope that bound them had ripped her off the cliff face too, bashed her again and again against the rock, breaking bones, shredding skin, until the safety spike Daniel had sunk into the cliff above held. She had dangled there, waves of pain washing through her, calling down to Daniel whose skull, split open, was dripping blood. By the time a passing hiker heard her, just before nightfall, he was dead.
