I see a woman in town, a stranger, and the perfume I smell, her frown and weary-eyed burden, are more real to me than the memories of my father. Yet I am compelled to talk about my dad and tell Benny’s story because when they fade what does that say about my life?
I have sought the answers and yet the mystery remains. Linnaeus has been no help. The nuthatch clinging to the tree is not distinct from the jay higher up in the branches, nor from the bark of the tree itself. And Newton’s view of things is not quite right either: the universe is not a pool table where things can be controlled and understood, but a curved foreverness where strange things happen to light and matter. It is a place that does not care for an individual and his sorrow.
The cabin becomes warm and I float, as if rising on a thermal to circle in the sky above. The wind has picked up and blows branches against the metal roof. The bats in the ridge of the roof are scrabbling around, anxious to get outside but unable to fly in this weather.
You’re stabbed with a poison-tipped foil after all that thrust and parry, all that love and effort and pain, and you have nothing more to say. You lie in pain in a hospital bed and are jabbed with a morphine-filled needle after all that love and effort and suffering, and you have nothing left to say. You fall in a lake and water fills your mouth, your lungs, and you have nothing left to say. The rest is silence.
For those left behind that silence is insistent, impossible to ignore, like bats in the ceiling and the arms of trees scratching against your roof.
45
Forest Garden
The end of the year is a quiet time, when hauling water and splitting some firewood is all the work a day requires. I am left to read and do any minor repairs that arise. This morning I am working on my roof under a grey sky, with a brisk wind climbing the slope from the bay, flying through the forest, and cresting the mountain. A section of my Selkirk chimney blew loose in the night and I can’t relight the fire before I fix it. By late afternoon I’m finished. I light a fire in the stove and anticipate the warmth as the smoke goes the direction it is intended to. The cold of last night won’t be repeated.
I sit on my low stone wall after the sun is below the spruce trees. The wind has died down. What a peaceful time of day. Entre chien et loup. I press shreds of tobacco into a rolling paper. The fall rye we planted as a cover crop is a few inches tall and green. The oat straw blanketing the garlic is golden. Blue jays and crows come by to make a racket all around me, keeping me company. I lick the edge of the thin paper, roll it shut, and put the cigarette between my lips. The struck match mingles sulphur with the smoke on my throat. I relish it as it fills my lungs. It’s on this wall that their lives come to me. All those who followed me here. They come to me as their breath, exhaled all those years ago. I breathe them in — their carbon dioxide, their memories, ideas, conversations — and incorporate it all, filtering it through this traitorous body. My father, Leroy, Rachel. When I blow out, the smoke disperses in its own time in the still, cold air. It is my story, moving out of me, a part of me no longer, going out into the world.
I go inside and sit on my bed. My feet are warming under the blanket and Thunder is curled between my knees, resting for her nighttime prowl. The fire crackles and the orange light from it glows on the wall opposite in the dimming afternoon light. Other than the pops of the firewood and the purring of the cat, all is quiet in garden and forest. Then I hear a voice, coming toward the cabin, yelling. Martin bursts through my door out of breath.
“The cops just phoned me. They’re looking for you.”
“What for?”
He’s shaking his head. “Get your coat on and hurry up.”
I want to run. Art must have told them it was me and they’re coming to lock me up.
“What did they say?”
“To meet them at my place. Come on.”
He runs ahead while I walk, trying to decide if I should be going at all. Martin turns to shout.
“Ben, they said Art is hurt.”
And then I am running, the soles of my shoes grabbing gravel. When we get to his back door Jenifer meets us and hugs me. I want her to tell me, but what I see in her eyes tells me all I need to know.
An RCMP car pulls into the driveway. An officer opens the door and strides to the house. We all go inside.
“Are you a relative of Arthur Mosher?”
“Yes.”
“I’m afraid he’s dead.”
They’re all looking at me. There’s a ringing in my ears.
“He shot his wife, then himself.”
He relates the story, seeming to regret having to say it aloud. Art had somehow dragged himself and his festering leg to the rest home in Bridgetown. He went straight to Louise’s room and closed the door. The nurses heard three shots. When the police arrived both of them were dead. Louise had been shot in the heart and in the forehead. The back of Art’s head was gone. His fingers still gripped the gun.
“What gun?” I ask the cop.
“His service revolver from the war. Enfield. Why do you ask?”
So he finally pulled the trigger.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“We’ve been to his place,” the cop continues. “We found this on his kitchen table.” He passes a piece of paper to me. I take it and am startled to see my name at the top. Underneath, in his neat hand:
I can’t bear to think of her there without anyone to come see her. I know my time is running out. It doesn’t matter if I die now or in a few months. But it does matter if she’s rotting there alone with nobody to visit her. This is the only honourable way to go. I’m sorry your left to pick up the pieces. Your a good listener to an old mans stories. Don’t waste your time crying over your past or me. I had a good life. And don’t waste any more time over Lina. She’s gone and you should find yourself a good woman like the one I have.
— Art
I’m not proud of my first thought. Finally, someone kills himself and has the grace to leave me a note.
*
It is time to vanquish my ghosts. I don’t count Art among them. One day I may be angry at him for doing what he did, but I’m not now. I have no regrets about my friendship with him. His death feels less like a betrayal or an abandonment than a true goodbye.
First, my father. I was angry that he disappeared from my life and I was angry that he became an alcoholic. I learned to live with both of those disappointments and almost accept them because of all the good memories. I could never forgive him for killing himself. I guess I believed he had so my anger could be justified.
I have another doctor’s appointment to get the results of my Pap smear. I walk into Middleton, past the big dairy farm, smelling sweet and fetid like a stagnant pond. Ranged beside one of the corrugated metal barns are the marshmallows of haylage, wrapped in white plastic, shredded in places where the sun and, possibly, my recombinant microbes have begun their work. Another fifteen minutes and I’m in town. The remnants of a grocery bag flap in the crooked fingers of a maple tree. It is a contemporary prayer flag, tattered by sun and wind. Above it, so still that I haven’t noticed it until I am almost at the tree, is a crow. She has been watching me, and when she sees that I see her she caws once, then pushes off to fly away from town.
The liquor store smells of the musty funk of unrinsed returns. I find a mickey with the familiar yellow and red Gordon’s label. I need that label to make this memory trip right. By the cash are the little airline-sized bottles labelled “Stocking Stuffers,” aimed at the heart of pain that is Christmas morning for many of us. The middle-aged woman at the cash has the creases and husky voice of a lifelong smoker. Go on, smoke, I think. It’s not like there’s anything pure for us to breathe anymore. She has a sore on her cheek that glistens with some yellowish pus. She puts my bottle in a big plastic bag with Nova Scotia Liquor Commission plastered on both sides. She sees me eyeing it, thinks I’m worried it will split on the way home.
“These are the new ones that won’t fall apart. They came in ye
sterday.”
I don’t complain about the plastic. Everyone has more pressing personal concerns than the state of the natural world. They don’t want me reminding them of it.
“Merry Christmas,” she says to the counter.
I’m tired of the fight. There’s a cost for the constant sense of guilt we feel for what we’ve wrought. I look at the bag. My distress — anger, frustration, sadness — is one result of having lived in this mad world. At least I didn’t bring a child into it. I imagine if I had a child he would ask me why we pollute so much. The only truthful answer would be because it is convenient to do so.
Down the street to the SaveEasy. There’s not much there this time of year. Canned soup, apples, magazines. I pass the tabloids looking for something to read. There’s Melvin Leach on the cover of Time, again. He’s dressed in a Superman cape, with an asinine smirk on his face. “The Superscientist Who Saved the World.” I put down my basket and flip through, looking for the article. He claims to have created a means to stop the rampaging bacteria that are wreaking havoc around the globe. Nowhere in the article does it point to his lab as the origin of the problem. Apparently, he’s looked at as a pioneer of what is now called genetically engineered environmentalism. Good for him.
Then, along Main Street to Soldier’s Memorial, where I see the resident, who informs me that I might have dysplasia and that it will take another week to get further lab results. I laugh because what else is a guy with a cervix supposed to do?
Hell, we need more labels for all of us out here.
I fill a glass half full with gin and top it with tonic water. I sit in my chair with my feet resting on the edge of the wood stove looking out at the snow-covered garden. Stalks of kale, tomato stakes, and the short beech tree jut out of the snow. I down my drink.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It’s something my virology prof at Cornell used to say to us. She saw that whenever her students came across a novel piece of evidence they were likely to apply it to every circumstance. It was that way with my father’s death. I was a geneticist, studying the molecular mechanisms of disease. At Lowell, after his death, I had looked in my Merck for something, anything, that would explain his behaviour. When I looked under tremors the first listing was alcoholism. But under that, halfway down the page, was another. Angry outbursts, sloppy gait, and moodiness. Depression, myoclonic jerks, facial grimacing, and irritability. I was convinced then that he hadn’t been an alcoholic. He had Huntington’s disease. Attributing his tremors, his angry outbursts, and his mood swings to a genetic disease absolved the man I adored — my hero — of responsibility.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And some little pieces of knowledge are so dangerous we choose to ignore them.
I get up and pour myself another drink. Then another. I take a sip of the third one, am overcome with fatigue and dizziness, and lie on my bunk.
I wake not knowing where I am. It all seems wrong. It’s dark and I smell cigar smoke. My head is pounding and I’m feverish. My hair is wet with sweat, my back soaked and sticking to the sheets. I don’t want to move. The room is pulsating like a heart, seeming to get bigger, then smaller. At the foot of the bed is a figure whose silhouette I can only see when he moves in front of the window. I am afraid of the quiet and want some sound to intrude, even my own voice.
“Is that you?”
Your heartache is not unique, he says. Everyone has suffered. Some people lose their father young. Some lose their mother young.
“I didn’t lose you. You killed yourself.”
It’s not that simple. I’m not speaking only of my death. I’m speaking of our disconnection from that which nurtures us.
“I didn’t say it was simple.”
And you’re not living as if it’s simple. We all experience heartbreak, betrayals, loss. We tell stories to each other to make sense of that suffering. You believe that you’re done with grief. It’s not done with you.
He stands there for a long time.
You’ll find love, he says, love that matters and feels like home. But only after you’ve let me go. Let them all go.
I say nothing, and then he’s gone.
I start up in bed, gasping for breath in the darkness. I am puffing like a steam engine, disoriented, tangled in the sheet. I had been running the 26.2 miles from Lowell to our house in Newton on the day my father died but my feet were leaden and I couldn’t move them. Once I catch my breath, I flop down, facing the wall. Then someone is rubbing my back, soothing me. I lie there, not frightened at all by that hand.
“Dad?” I whisper. There is no answer.
I have the urge to talk to him about things I don’t even know how to bring up with the living. So I do, in a whisper, afraid that my voice will break the spell.
“Did it all happen? Remember casting our lines from the canoe in Moosehead Lake, hoping to catch pike? Just the two of us, best friends spending an easy afternoon together. I loved having you to myself, like in the old days when we were driving for days through New England.”
I try to get the words out, but they fill my mouth, leaving little room for breath. I am so tired. I have to know whether he committed suicide. He did drown. But he didn’t leave me a note, and the coroner reported that his blood alcohol level indicated he had been drinking heavily. Perhaps he meant to drown and got drunk to give him the courage to do it. Perhaps he slipped and it was a mistake. Either way, his drinking wasn’t an accident, and that was what killed him.
The tapping of a woodpecker on the tin roof wakes me. The hand on my back is gone. The smell of cigar smoke is gone. What continues to confound are the skates he left on my bed before he died.
My third drink, the one I poured before falling asleep, sits nearly full on the floor by the chair. I can smell the juniper berries and I remember. I get up, take the glass to the door, open it, and pour the gin and tonic out. It separates into droplets that, by the time they reach the snow below, are no more than a mist.
Christmas morning. I wake from a dream of my death. A blanket is wrapped around my arms and over my head. I am struggling, unable to breathe. I squirm and my wings are free. I shake my tail feathers and leap from the branch. Up, up and circling the treetops, snow glistening on spruce boughs in the bright sun.
One day soon I will take the train to Montreal. Leroy’s name was in The Globe and Mail this morning. He recently published work on the genetics of colon cancer that should make screening easier. I wrote to his lab at McGill and got a response from him immediately. He wrote about his efforts in the lab and told me that he and Rachel had married before leaving New York. He invited me to visit them — they have a daughter — but I can’t face that right now. He said my “escape,” as he called it, worked well. The RCMP had phoned Rachel to say her passport had been found, along with Leroy’s sweater, on the rocks by Herring Cove by a woman walking her retriever. He also wrote:
We had no idea why you put $37,000 into Rachel’s account. We were sure you were dead, but then you asked Rachel to send you that money to the bank in Toronto and we thought we’d find you. I looked in telephone directories, online. Nothing. You did a good job of erasing yourself.
It’s ironic that your work in L’s lab forced the development of biodegradable plastics. They’re still finding ways to swamp us in the shit. There’s a landfill outside the city here that uses microbes like yours, and I read last week that an Australian environmental organization is hoping to collect the plastic in ocean gyres in nets, bring it ashore, and digest it to CO2 and H20. It all seems too little, too late to me, but you never know.
He said that American authorities had been led to Leach when DNA analysis of the bacteria revealed an engineered plasmid with cassettes that could only have come from his lab. Leach was able to convince them that it was Benny, describing me as a rogue element in his lab. That I stole Rachel’s passport to get across the border convinced them, and when the FBI went looking for me, the trail ended on the container ship. They had to assume that
I drowned off the coast of Nova Scotia.
It is dark in the cabin by five o’clock. Dark and cold. The fire has gone out. I light a candle. I speak with the dead. They haunt me because they are me. I climb into the rafters of this tiny cabin and pull down the boxes of letters and photos I have stored. As if happiness can be hoarded for lean nights. The two days I am most concerned with don’t exist.
It is time to bury yesterday. Tomorrow will look after itself.
I open the wood stove door and handle each letter. I remember what is in every one. Letters from Katharine. Lay them on top of the cold ashes. A card from my mother when I left home for the first time, to go to summer camp. She was sad and wrote that she’d miss me. The few from my father that I’ve cherished. More from Lina.
I strike a match and touch it to the pile.
In my hands is the photo of my dad laughing as he holds me over Crystal Lake. I am wearing the blue bathing suit with the frilly skirt that I adored. He looks so happy. I had trusted him to protect me. I throw it into the fire. The flames change the colour of his face and erase his smile.
I close the door when it’s all in the fire. Once the fire dies down I take the ashes from the wood stove and put them in a bowl. I unscrew the cap of the gin bottle and smell the juniper. I take a small sip, enough to coat my tongue, and hold it there. I put on my rubber boots and a sweater and go out into the cold. The stars are magnificent. I find the oak Lina and I planted on my birthday. I sprinkle the ashes around its stem, then pour the remaining gin on top of them. This oak has been through a lot. Back in my cabin I blow out the candle and go to bed.
The Rest is Silence Page 24
