by John Irving
And the writer had instantly forgotten the young woman's name, if he'd ever really heard it. Once, early in the first winter she worked for him, he'd said to her admiringly, "You are tireless." This was in reference to all the ice-chopping she did--and how many full buckets of water she hauled up from the lake, and left for him in the main cabin. The girl had smiled; she'd liked the tireless word.
"You may call me that--please call me that," she'd told him.
"Tireless?"
"That's my name," the First Nation woman had told him. "That's who I am, all right."
Again, Danny could have asked Andy Grant for her real name, but the woman liked to be called Tireless, and that was good enough for Danny, too.
Sometimes, from his writing shack, he saw Tireless paying obeisance to the inuksuk. She didn't formally bow to the stone cairn, but she respectfully brushed the snow off it--and, in her submissiveness, she demonstrated a kind of deference or homage. Even Hero, who stood eerily apart from Tireless on these solemn occasions, seemed to acknowledge the sacredness of the moment.
Danny worked as well in his writing shack on the one day a week when Tireless came to clean as he did when he was alone with Hero there; the cleaning woman didn't distract him. When she was done with her work in the main cabin--it didn't matter that, on other days, Danny was used to Hero sleeping (and farting and snoring) in the writing shack while he worked--the writer would look up from his writing and suddenly see Tireless standing by that wind-bent little pine. She never touched the crippled tree; she just stood beside it, like a sentinel, with Hero standing beside her. Neither the First Nation cleaning woman nor the bear hound ever stared at Danny through the window of his writing shack. Whenever the writer happened to look up and see them next to the weather-beaten pine, both the dog and the young woman had their backs to him; they appeared to be scouting the frozen bay.
Then Danny would tap the window, and both Tireless and Hero would come inside the writing shack. Danny would leave the shack (and his writing) while Tireless cleaned up in there, which never took her long--usually, less than the time it took Danny to make himself a cup of tea in the main cabin.
Except for Andy Grant--and those repeat old-timers Danny occasionally encountered in the bar at Larry's Tavern, or at the Haven restaurant, and in the grocery store--the First Nation cleaning woman was the only human being Danny had any social intercourse with in his winters on the island in Georgian Bay, and Danny and Hero saw Tireless just once a week for the ten weeks that the writer was there. One time, when Danny was in town and he ran into Andy Grant, the writer had told Andy how well the young First Nation woman was working out.
"Hero and I just love her," he'd said. "She's awfully easy and pleasant to have around."
"Sounds like you're getting ready to marry her," Andy told the writer. Andy was kidding, of course, but Danny--if only for a minute, or two--found himself seriously considering the idea.
Later, back in the airboat--but before he started the engine or put the ear guards on the bear hound--Danny asked the dog: "Do I look lonely to you, Hero? I must be a little lonely, huh?"
--
IN THE KITCHEN OF DANNY'S HOUSE on Cluny Drive--particularly as the year 2004 advanced--the politics on the writer's refrigerator had grown tedious. Conceivably, politics had always been boring and the writer only now had noticed; at least the questions for Ketchum seemed trivial and childish in comparison to the more personal and detailed story Danny was developing in his ninth novel.
As always, he began at the end of the story. He'd not only written what he believed was the last sentence, but Danny had a fairly evolved idea of the trajectory of the new novel--his first as Daniel Baciagalupo. Danny was slowly but gradually making his way backward through the narrative, to where he thought the book should begin. That was just the way he'd always worked: He plotted a story from back to front; hence he conceived of the first chapter last. By the time Danny got to the first sentence--meaning to that actual moment when he wrote the first sentence down--often a couple of years or more had passed, but by then he knew the whole story. From that first sentence, the book flowed forward--or, in Danny's case, back to where he'd begun.
As always, too, the more deeply Danny immersed himself in a novel, the more what passed for his politics fell away. While the writer's political opinions were genuine, Danny would have been the first to admit that he was mistrustful of all politics. Wasn't he a novelist, in part, because he saw the world in a most subjective way? And not only was writing fiction the best of what Daniel Baciagalupo could manage to do; writing a novel was truly all he did. He was a craftsman, not a theorist; he was a storyteller, not an intellectual.
Yet Danny was unavoidably remembering those last two U.S. helicopters that left Saigon--those poor people clinging to the helicopters' skids, and the hundreds of desperate South Vietnamese who were left behind in the courtyard of the U.S. Embassy. The writer had no doubt that we would see that (or something like that) in Iraq. Shades of Vietnam, Danny was thinking--typical of his age, because Iraq wasn't exactly another Vietnam. (Daniel Baciagalupo was such a sixties fella, as Ketchum had called him; there would be no reforming him.)
It was with little conviction that Danny spoke to the yawning, otherwise unresponsive dog. "I'll bet you a box of dog biscuits, Hero--everything is going to get a lot worse before anything gets a little better." The bear hound didn't even react to the dog biscuits part; Hero found all politics every bit as boring as Danny did. It was just the world as usual, wasn't it? Who among them would ever change anything about the way the world worked? Not a writer, certainly; Hero had as good a chance of changing the world as Danny did. (Fortunately, Danny didn't say this to Hero--not wanting to offend the noble dog.)
IT WAS A DECEMBER MORNING IN 2004, after the final (already forgotten) question for Ketchum had been taped to the door of Danny's refrigerator, when Lupita--that most loyal and long-suffering Mexican cleaning woman--found the writer in his kitchen, where Danny was actually writing. This disturbed Lupita, who--in her necessary departmentalizing of the household--took a totalitarian approach to what the various rooms in a working writer's house were for.
Lupita was used to, if disapproving of, the clipboards and the loose ream of typing paper in the gym, where there was no typewriter; the plethora of Post-it notes, which were everywhere in the house, was a further irritation to her, but one she had suppressed. As for the political questions for Mr. Ketchum, stuck to the fridge door, Lupita read these with ever-decreasing interest--if at all. The taped-up trivia chiefly bothered Lupita because it prevented her from wiping down the refrigerator door, as she would have liked to do.
Caring, as she did, for Danny's house on Cluny Drive had been nothing short of a series of heartbreaks for Lupita. That Mr. Ketchum didn't come to Toronto for Christmas anymore could make the Mexican cleaning woman cry, especially in that late-December time of year--not to mention that the effort she'd had to expend in restoring the late cook's bedroom, following that double shooting, had come close to killing her. Naturally, the blood-soaked bed had been taken away, and the wallpaper was replaced, but Lupita had individually wiped clean every blood-spattered snapshot on Dominic's bulletin boards, and she'd scrubbed the floor until she thought her knees and the heels of her hands were going to bleed. She'd persuaded Danny to replace the curtains, too; otherwise, the smell of gunpowder would have remained in the murderous bedroom.
It is worth noting that, in this period of Danny's life, the two women he maintained the most constant contact with were both cleaning women, though certainly Lupita exerted more influence on the writer than Tireless did. It was because of Lupita's prodding that Danny had gotten rid of the couch in his third-floor writing room, and this was entirely the result of Lupita claiming that the imprint of the loathsome deputy sheriff's body was visible (to her) on that couch. "I can still see him lying there, waiting for you and your dad to fall asleep," Lupita had said to Danny.
Naturally, Danny disposed of the couc
h--not that the imprint of the cowboy's fat body had ever been visible to Daniel Baciagalupo, but once the Mexican cleaning woman claimed to have sighted an imprint of Carl on that couch, the writer soon found himself imagining it.
Lupita hadn't stopped there. It was soon after Hero had come to live with him, Danny was remembering, when Lupita proposed a more monumental change. Those bulletin boards with their collected family history--the hundreds of overlapping snapshots the cook had saved, and there were hundreds more in Dominic's desk drawers--well, you can imagine what the Mexican cleaning woman thought. It made no sense, Lupita had said, for those special photos to be on display in a room where they were now unseen. "They should be in your bedroom, Mr. Writer," Lupita had told Danny. (She'd spontaneously taken to calling him that, or "Senor Writer." Danny couldn't recall exactly when this had started.)
And it followed, of course, that those photographs of Charlotte would have to be moved. "It's no longer appropriate," Lupita had told Danny; she meant that he shouldn't be sleeping with those nostalgic pictures of Charlotte Turner, who was a married woman with a family of her own. (Without a word of resistance from Mr. Writer, Lupita had simply taken charge.)
Now it made sense. The late cook's bedroom served as a second guest room; it was rarely used, but it was particularly useful if a couple with a child (or children) were visiting the writer. Dominic's double bed had been replaced with two twins. The homage to Charlotte in this far-removed guest room--at the opposite end of the hall from Danny's bedroom--seemed more suitable to what Danny's relationship with Charlotte had become.
It made more sense, too, that Danny now slept with those photographs of the cook's immediate and extended families--including some snapshots of the writer's dead son, Joe. Danny had Lupita to thank for this even being possible, and Lupita was the one who maintained the bulletin boards; she chose the new and recycled photographs that she wanted Danny to sleep with. Once or twice a week, Danny looked closely at the pictures on those bulletin boards, just to see what Lupita had rearranged.
Occasionally, there were small glimpses of Charlotte in the snapshots--for the most part, these pictures were of Charlotte with Joe. (They had somehow passed Lupita's unfathomable radar of approval.) And there were pictures of Ketchum galore, of course--even a few new ones of the woodsman, and of Danny's young mother with his even younger dad. These long-saved shots of Cousin Rosie had come into Danny's possession together with Hero, and Ketchum's guns--not to mention the chainsaw. The old photos had been spared any exposure to sunlight, pressed flat in the pages of Rosie's beloved books, which had also come into Danny's possession--now that the old logger could no longer read them. What a lot of books Ketchum had hoarded! How many more might he have read?
That December morning in 2004, when Lupita caught Danny writing in the kitchen, he was closing in on a couple of scenes he imagined might be near the beginning of his novel--even actual sentences, in some cases. He was definitely getting close to the start of the first chapter, but exactly where to begin--the very first sentence, for example--still eluded him. He was writing in a simple spiral notebook on white lined paper; Lupita knew that the writer had a stack of such notebooks in his third-floor writing room, where (she felt strongly) he should have been writing.
"You're writing in the kitchen," the cleaning woman said. It was a straightforward, declarative sentence, but Danny detected an edge to it; from the critical tone of Lupita's remark, it was as if she'd said, "You're fornicating in the driveway." (In broad daylight.) Danny was somewhat taken aback by the Mexican cleaning woman's meaning.
"I'm not exactly writing, Lupita," he said defensively. "I'm making a few notes to myself about what I'm going to write."
"Whatever you're doing, you're doing it in the kitchen," Lupita insisted.
"Yes," Danny answered her cautiously.
"I suppose I could start upstairs--like on the third floor, in your writing room, where you're not writing," the cleaning woman said.
"That would be fine," Danny told her.
Lupita sighed, as if the world were an endless source of pain for her--it had been, Danny knew. He tolerated how difficult she could be, and for the most part Danny accepted Lupita's presumed authority; the writer knew that one had to be more accepting of the authority of someone who'd lost a child, as the cleaning woman had, and more tolerant of her, too. But before Lupita could leave the kitchen--to attend to what she clearly considered her out-of-order (if not altogether wrong) first task of the day--Danny said to her, "Would you please clean the fridge today, Lupita? Just throw everything away."
The Mexican was not easily surprised, but Lupita stood as if she were in shock. Recovering herself, she opened the door to the fridge, which she had cleaned just the other day; there was practically nothing in it. (Except when Danny was having a dinner party, there almost never was.)
"No, I mean the door," Danny told her. "Please clean it off entirely. Throw all those notes away."
At this point, Lupita's disapproval turned to worry. "?Enfermo?" she suddenly asked Danny. Her plump brown hand felt the writer's forehead; to her practiced touch, Danny didn't feel as if he had a fever.
"No, I am not sick, Lupita," Danny told the cleaning woman. "I am merely sick of how I've been distracting myself."
It was a tough time of year for the writer, who was no spring chicken, Lupita knew. Christmas was the hardest time for people who'd lost family; of this, the cleaning woman had little doubt. She immediately did what Danny had asked her to do. (She actually welcomed the opportunity to interrupt his writing, since he was doing it in the wrong place.) Lupita gladly ripped the little scraps of paper off the fridge door; the damn Scotch tape would take longer, she knew, digging at the remaining strips with her fingernails. She would also scour the door with an antibacterial fluid, but she could do that later.
It's not likely that it ever occurred to the cleaning woman that she was throwing away what amounted to Danny's obsession with what Ketchum would have made of Bush's blundering in Iraq, but she was. Maybe in Danny's mind--way in the back, somewhere--the writer was aware that he was, at that moment, letting go of at least a little of the anger he felt at his former country.
Ketchum had called America a lost nation, but Danny didn't know if this was fair to say--or if the accusation was true yet. All that mattered to Daniel Baciagalupo, as a writer, was that his former country was a lost nation to him. Since Bush's reelection, Danny had accepted that America was lost to him, and that he was--from this minute, forward--an outsider living in Canada, till the end of his days.
While Lupita made a fuss over the refrigerator door, Danny went into the gym and called Kiss of the Wolf. He left a fairly detailed message on the answering machine; he said he wanted to make a reservation at the restaurant for every remaining night that Kiss of the Wolf was open--that is, until Patrice and Silvestro closed for the Christmas holiday. Lupita had been right: Christmas was always hard for Danny. First he'd lost Joe, and those Christmases in Colorado; then Danny's dad had been blown away. And every Christmas since that also-memorable Christmas of 2001, the writer was reminded of how he'd heard about Ketchum, who was lost to him, too.
Danny was not Ketchum; the writer was not even "like" Ketchum, though there'd been times when Danny had tried to be like the old logger. Oh, how he'd tried! But that wasn't Danny's job--to use the job word as Ketchum had meant it. Danny's job was to be a writer, and Ketchum had understood that long before Danny did.
"You've got to stick your nose in the worst of it, and imagine everything, Danny," the veteran river driver had told him. Daniel Baciagalupo was trying; if the writer couldn't be Ketchum, he could at least heroize the logger. Really, how hard was it, the writer was thinking, to make Ketchum a hero?
"Well, writers should know it's sometimes hard work to die, Danny," Ketchum had told him when it had taken Danny three shots to drop his first deer.
Shit, I should have known then what Ketchum meant, the writer was thinking on that day when Lupita was m
adly cleaning all around him. (Yes, he should have.)
CHAPTER 17
KETCHUM EXCEPTED
DANNY DID HAVE SOME GLIMMER OF UNDERSTANDING IN regard to what Ketchum was up to--this had happened around the time of American Thanksgiving, in November 2001. The writer was having dinner one evening--naturally, at Kiss of the Wolf--and Danny's dinner date was his own doctor. Their relationship wasn't sexual, but they had a serious friendship; she'd been Danny's medical-expert reader for a number of his novels. She'd once written him a fan letter, and they'd begun a correspondence--long before he came to Canada. Now they were close friends.
The doctor's name was Erin Reilly. She was almost Danny's age--with two grown children, who had children of their own--and, not long ago, her husband had left her for her receptionist. "I should have seen it coming," Erin had told Danny philosophically. "They both kept asking me, repeatedly--I mean about a hundred times a day--if I was all right."
Erin had become the friend in his Toronto life that Armando DeSimone had been to Danny in Vermont. Danny still corresponded with Armando, but Armando and Mary didn't come to Toronto anymore; the drive from Vermont was too long, and airplane travel had become too inconvenient for people their age, and of their disposition. "The airport-security goons have taken every Swiss Army knife I ever owned," Armando had complained to Danny.
Erin Reilly was a real reader, and when Danny asked her a medical question--whether this was a concern he had for himself, or when he was doing research for a character in a novel--Danny appreciated that the doctor gave long, detailed answers. Erin liked to read long, detailed novels, too.
That night, in Kiss of the Wolf, Danny had said to his doctor: "I have a friend who has a recurrent desire to cut off his left hand; his left hand failed him somehow. Will he bleed to death, if he actually does it?"
Erin was a gangling, heron-like woman with closely cut gray hair and steely hazel eyes. She was intensely absorbed in her work, and in whatever novel or novels she was reading--to a flaw, Danny knew, and maybe the flaw was why he loved her. She could be blind to the world around her to an alarming degree--the way, with the passage of time, the cook had managed to convince himself that the cowboy wasn't really coming after him. Erin could joke that she should have "seen it coming"--meaning her husband's involvement with her receptionist--but the fact that they'd both kept asking Erin if she was all right, was not (in Danny's opinion) what his dear friend Erin should have noticed. Erin had written her husband's Viagra prescriptions; she had to have known how much of that stuff he was taking! But Danny loved this about Erin--her acute innocence, which reminded him of everything his father had been blind to, which Danny had also loved.
