From Word To Word

This is another of the Manitoulin stories. As usual, I have added it to the Island Stories file on the Longer Works page for anyone who would like to read all the stories together.

The Diner

The diner is just across the border of the reserve, filled about equally with local residents and with the cottagers who lease property from the band.  The laws against smoking in public places don’t apply here, and many of the cottagers come here just for that reason, so the dining room is filled with smoke.

There are three officers from the reserve police in the corner closest to the kitchen, farthest from my own table. They speak to the cook through the open doorway with the ease of regulars.  They are tall and well-built, all of them, with closely cut dark hair and handsome faces, wearing very clean, very sharp uniforms, complete with bullet-proof vests and hand guns and brushed caps set carefully on the table beside their plates.  They know they are the symbols of a new kind of reserve that takes care of its own business.  Much of the reserve is lagging behind them, of course, but they are a symbol of what is possible, law and order and beautiful uniforms, all with a native face.

They are drinking coffee from white diner mugs, and one calls into the kitchen, “Hey, Susan, has that Barbeau kid come around since we picked him up?”

“Nope.  Haven’t seen him,” a woman’s voice replies, disembodied, emerging throaty and sensual from the kitchen, a smoker’s voice.  “You guys didn’t rough him up too badly did ya?  He’s really not a bad kid.”

“He took cash from you at knife point, Susan.  He’s a bad kid.”

“He just steals because his mother steals.”

“Maybe, but she steals for booze.  He just does it for kicks.  He’s gonna be a mean one when he gets older.”

“Maybe.  Band should have done something earlier, placed him with an auntie.”

“That’s what they’d do now, for sure.”  He sipped from his mug.  “But times were different then.”

“Says the boy talking to his grandma.”

The three officers all laugh, bright and handsome.

The girl in the next booth looks up at them and then away again before they can meet her eyes.  She is sipping from a mug of coffee also, staring across at an elderly woman in a pink, floral hat, humped over a pot of tea.  The girl is thin, not like an anorexic or an athlete, but like someone whose body only ever bothered to grow upward, spent all its energy on height and had nothing left over for roundness, for breasts or hips.  Her eyes look past the old woman without interest, past the pink hat with its white and blue flowers, past the hand-knitted pink shawl and the blue dress with its delicately scalloped collar.  She looks at the same time fierce and bored.

“How’s your soda, lamby?” the old woman asks.

The girl’s eyes focus for an instant on the elderly face and then drift into the distance again.  “It’s not soda Grandma.  It’s coffee.  And nobody calls it soda anymore.  It’s called pop.” She fidgets, running her thumb along the inside of her necklace, rearranging the salt and pepper shakers, spinning her rings on her fingers. Her eyes drift across the restaurant toward my table, so I look down to my breakfast until her gaze passes over me, just another teen boy eating his breakfast.

The older woman seems either not to hear or not to care.  She sips daintily from her teacup, the perfect caricature of a grandmother.

“Will you need me this afternoon Grandma?” the girl asks.  Her mouth hardly ever moves, even when she speaks.

“What’s that?”  The older woman tilts her head to the left and leans toward her granddaughter.

“I said, “Do you need me for anything this afternoon?”

“No, not today, lamby.  I think I’ll have a bit of a nap after lunch.  You go ahead and have the afternoon to yourself.”

The girl takes a cigarette from her purse and puts it between her lips but leaves it unlit.  “Can I have the car?” she says.  The cigarette twitches in time to her words.

“You know I never let anyone drive it without me,” her grandmother replies, “and you know I can’t abide smoking, so put that dirty thing away.”

“It’s not lit, grandma.”  She takes the cigarette from her mouth and turns it between her fingers until it breaks.  She tosses it into the ashtray.  “Please, grandma.  Daniel’s parents won’t let him use the car anymore.  And he says he shouldn’t come into town for a while.  Can’t I take it just this once?”

“I certainly will not send you off unattended with my car to see some, some Indian.  Certainly not.”

“Native, Grandma. He’s native.  It’s rude to say Indian.”

“I don’t care what you call him. You may not take my car.”

The girl stood up and grabbed her bag from the seat.  “Fine,” she said,  “I’m going for a smoke,” and she stalked to the door, her heels clicking hollowly on the linoleum floor.

“You’re allowed to smoke in here, you know,” said a man as she passed his table.  She ignored him and pushed her way out through the door.  He shrugged and leaned on the table, its edge pressing deeply into the heavy flesh of his bare forearms.

“Did you see that?” he demanded.  The woman across from him never bothered to look up, kept her eyes on the paper, almost tenderly tapping the ash of her cigarette in the ashtray.  Her silence didn’t deter him.  He lit a cigarette of his own.  “So rude,” he said, brushing his long hair out of his face, his eyes squinting in the smoke as he exhaled.   “First we almost hit that one kid.  Runs into the road right in front of us.  Then gives me the finger when I slam on the breaks, like I didn’t just save his life.”

He leaned back in his chair, pulled his t-shirt down over his belly.  “Then that skinny chick…” he stopped himself and looked at the old lady across the restaurant.  “Then that skinny chick, ” he continued, his voice lower, “gives me a look like that.  For trying to be nice.”  He shook his head and idly moved his homefries around his plate.  “Are you listening to me, Jessica?”

The woman made no sign that she had heard him.  Her blond hair hung long on either side of her face.  It swung slightly as her eyes followed the print in front of her.

“Hey!” the man said suddenly, and something in his voice seemed to register with Jessica enough for her to look up as well.  “It’s that kid!” he hissed, half-whispering.  “The kid we almost hit!”

Jessica turned in her chair, looked behind me to the back door, and I turned too.  A teen boy, a bit older than me maybe, stood just inside the door, peering around the angle of the hallway into the restaurant.  The couple by the door could see him, and so could I, but the wall hid him from everyone else.  He seemed intent on the booth where the girl had been sitting, then noticed the three officers and pulled further back into the door jamb.  His dark hair was long and pulled into a ponytail.

The front door opened, and we all turned to see the girl walk in, her jeans hanging low on her thin hips.  She looked to her left, past the couple by the door, past my table, to the boy hiding in the back hall.  Her eyes widened, and she smiled shyly, checked to see whether her grandmother was watching.  “Um, grandma,” she called, “I’m just going to the bathroom, okay?”

Her grandmother looked over the top of her glasses.  “Sure, lamby.”

The girl crossed the diner to the hallway and threw her arms around the boy’s neck, her shirt pulling up to show a bird tattoo in the small of her back.  She tried to kiss his face, but he looked distracted, whispered something in her ear.  She looked over her shoulder to where the three officers were leaning back in their chairs, coffees in hand.  He tried to lead her outside, but she opened the door to the bathroom and pulled him inside.  There was lettering on the back of his leather jacket.  Grizzlies, it read, over a logo of a bear, and then underneath, Daniel Barbeau, Left Wing.

“I should’ve known,” said the man by the door.  He scratched the stubble on his face.  “Those two were meant for each other.”  Jessica had already gone back to her paper.

I finished my food, but the waitress hadn’t been by in a long while.  I thought about going to ask for my bill, but the reserve police got up first.  “Bill please, Susan,” one called.

“Separate?” came the throaty voice.

“Naw, put it all together.  And put my coffee tab on there too.”

“Sure.”

“Thanks, Eric.  I’ll get it next time,” one of the others said.  “I’m just gonna use the can.”  He left his hat on the table and strolled across the restaurant to the bathroom, tried the handle.  There was no sound from inside.  “Hey,” he asked, “is anyone in there?”  There was still silence.  He tried the door again.  Susan?” he called, “I think someone locked the bathroom on you.”

“Could you open it for me?” she called back.  “It’s just a toothpick lock.”

The officer knocked again.  “I’m coming in, ” he said, “so speak up if you’re in there.”  There was the sudden sound of glass smashing from inside the bathroom, like a window had been broken out, and then a scrambling noise.  “What the hell?” he said.  He didn’t bother finding a toothpick, just stepped back and broke the door in with a kick.  It swung open on its hinges and banged against the inside of the wall.  A girl’s voice started screaming, and I could see the skinny girl pressed into the far corner of the bathroom, her face in her hands.  The officer leapt to stand on the rim of the toilet, peering out through the broken window on the opposite wall. “It’s no use running, Barbeau, ” he yelled.  “You’ve got no where to go!”

He came back into the restaurant.  One of the other officers threw him his cap, and all three dashed through the door.

“Be gentle with him!” Susan yelled after them, then quieter, so only we could hear, “He’s really not a bad kid.”

This is one of the Manitoulin stories that I am writing, but it is different in at least two ways from those I have written so far.   Firstly, it is not a story that I planned to write for the collection, coming to me all of a sudden when I was trying to write something else.  Secondly, because its subject is very different from the others, it required a different style from me, so it uses proper names, and it includes much more dialogue, and its prose style is much more direct.  For both these reasons, it may seem a little out of place with the others, but I like it, so it stays.   As usual, I have added it to the Island Stories file on the Longer Works page for anyone who would like to read all the stories together.

Night Swim

“Hey, kid, hop in the back.  Let Jenn have shotgun.”

I nodded, tried to look nonchalant as I opened the door.  The window slung the late evening sun across the cab of the truck as I dropped to the gravel.  I caught just a look at Jenn, trying not to stare as she came up the driveway.  I saw only long hair and a cotton sundress, both hanging loosely, then I swung into the bed of the truck.  I sat on the spare tire behind the driver, my back against the rear windshield.  From the corner of my eye I saw Denis lean over and pull Jenn to him with his near arm, kiss her hard on the mouth.  His far hand slid up under her dress between her thighs.  I turned away, looked out into the almost dark, at the trees growing closely by the road, the pale length of Jenn’s gravel driveway, the glow of her porchlight.

The truck shifted into drive with a heavy lurch, and I steadied myself against the side.  The paint was light green, like olives, dented and rusted and scratched.  I glanced back through the rear window.  Denis was driving with one hand.  The other had pulled Jenn’s dress up on her thighs, her legs showing whitely in the darkness.  I looked away.  Trees were passing on either side, far too fast, running away from me until they merged around corners or over hills.  The sun was now all but gone, and the trees were only shadow shapes, a great branching mass, split by the stretching, gravel road.  The evening was warm and clinging, the speed of the truck the only breeze, drying the sweat on my face.

Gravel ground loudly beneath the tires, rolling and skidding, as the truck braked beside a driveway.  Faces emerged beyond the truck.

“Shit, Denis, could you stop any louder?” someone whispered.  “My parents think were sleeping out at the barn.”

“Aren’t you a bit old for sneaking around on your parents, Adam?  You’re in college, man.”

“Shut up, Denis.  You’re scared of my mom too.”  Everyone laughed.

A set of lanky limbs climbed over the side of the truck and settled against the cab beside me.  Another set followed it, sat on the wheel well, then helped a smaller, slimmer figure into the truck.  The smaller shape had long hair, like a swaying shadow.

Adam rapped on the window, waited, rapped again.  The window opened.  “Let’s go,” he whispered.

“What’s your hurry?”

“Nothing.  We just don’t feel like waiting around while you two grope each other.”

The truck staggered into motion, and for a minute there was only the sound of wheels on gravel.

“Whose the new guy?”  Adam asked.  He looked at me, met my eyes.

“My nephew.”

“You have a nephew? How old is he?”

“I don’t know.  Hey, kid.  How old are you?”

“Twelve.”

“Shit!  Denis, you brought along a twelve year old?  What are you thinking?”

“Easy.  He’s big for his age.  He’ll be fine.  And it’s not like a had a choice.  My sister dumped him on me for the weekend.”

Adam looked at me again.  “I guess.”  He paused.  “Hell!  The MacInnis girls are coming.  He might even get laid.”

Denis laughed.  The truck swerved left, skated on the gravel, then caught purchase again.

“Do you guys have any booze up there?  All ours is at Mike’s.”

“Sure.”

I was looking out the back of the truck again, away from Adam and from the couple cuddling on the wheel well.  A paper bag crackled, then there was the sound of a bottle being opened.  Adam drank, then offered me the bottle.  It shone golden in the dim light.

“Drink up, kid.  You get to be a big boy tonight.”

I tried to look practiced as I took the bottle.  It was cool in my hands, whiskey by the smell.  I turned away and took as long a pull as I could manage, making sure I didn’t choke.  I wiped my lips with the back of my hand, still not looking at Adam, leaned forward onto my toes, offered the bottle to the couple.  Adam chuckled as I sat back.  I turned to look out at the trees, still passing far too fast, ragged shadows in the darkness.

The trucked stopped again.  An old farmhouse stood beside the dark shapes of two barns.  It was white and wood-sided, ghostly in the night.  Six or eight shadows were sitting on the rail fence, like misshapen crows.  They jumped into the grass at our approach, shouting and laughing, their bodies merging and parting as they scrambled up to the road, over the side of the truck, into the bed.

It was crowded now.  A girl sat on the near wheel well, almost against my feet, her back to me, closing me off from the group.  Somebody stumbled over the tents and sleeping bags and cases of beer that had been set in the middle of the truck, half-fell against the cab between Adam and me, and something cold and metallic brushed my cheek.  I flinched back, saw that it was a rifle barrel.  Its owner was laughing and cursing.  There was alcohol hanging heavy on his breath.

“Denis!” he yelled through the rear-window.  “Stop on the hill by the Burrows’ place!”

“Jason, stop yelling in my ear, you idiot.”

“I said,” Jason’s repeated, his voice now a hoarse stage whisper, “stop on the hill by the Burrows’ place!”  He started giggling.

“Why?”

“Just do it.  I’m gonna put on a show.”

“Whatever.  Just don’t take too long.”

The truck jumped forward again, then shook as Denis tried to get it into gear.  Jason almost fell again, still laughing to himself.

The others in the truck were talking loudly about things that were only meaningful to themselves: a local girl’s supposed pregnancy, the chances of an older brother making the NHL, a litany of drunken exploits.  The bottle was passed from hand to hand, but it was mostly the guys who were drinking.  It was never passed to me again.  I never asked for it.

Jason’s rifle was standing on its butt end, cradled in his arm.  It pressed against my shoulder whenever he leaned forward to see around the girl in front of me or to take the bottle from her.  I kept my face away from him, peering over the edge of the truck to where the streaks of gravel whiteness blurred past.  I looked up now and again to the shape of the girl on the wheel well, only just female in the dark.  She had light hair, I thought, but it could have been dark.  There was not enough light even to tell that much.  Her voice was deep for a girl, like a smoker’s.

The truck slowed, less suddenly than before, as if Denis was uncertain where to stop.   Jason leapt to his feet and looked out over the cab.  “A bit further,” he called.  The truck edged forward.  “Good, good.”  He hefted the rifle, loaded it on top of the cab, looked down the sight.

“What are you doing up there?” Denis asked.

Jason whooped loudly, like a Hollywood Indian.  “Everybody up.  Have a look.”

I was close by, just at his left elbow.  The headlights of the truck were shining down a slight hill.  There was a tee intersection at the bottom with a stop sign reflecting the glare back redly.  The sound of the first shot startled me.  I flinched back, almost falling from the truck, and someone laughed behind me.  Jason didn’t seem to notice.  He sighted and fired again.  This time there was a pinging sound from the bottom of the hill, and the sign rocked slightly in the harsh light.

“Whoo!” Jason shouted, looking back to his audience, his eyes shining in his pale face.  “One for two, baby!”

“How long is this gonna take?” someone asked.

“I got ten shots, and I’m gonna use them.”  He fired rapidly now, hardly moving between shots.  The sign vibrated almost continually to the sound of pinging bullets.  Jason counted as he shot: ping, “Two for three,” ping, “Three for four,” ping, “Four for five.”  He counted his ten, never missed again.  “Nine for ten!” he crowed, holding his gun aloft like a terrorist on television.

“And them stop signs is quick,” someone drawled.  Everyone laughed.

“Shut up!” Jason called back.  “You couldn”t do better.”

“I don’t go shootin’ signs much,” the voice replied.  “They makes tough eatin’.”  There was laughter again.

“Hey! Can I go now?” Denis demanded.

“Sure, man, sure.”  Jason patted the top of the cab.

The truck ground into gear again before most people could find their seats.  I sat where I was standing, but there were screams and then more laughter as one of the girls half-fell from the truck and had to be helped back in.

The road after the tee became a track, two gravel ruts with weeds growing up between them and on both sides.  The trees were close enough that they reached out over us, sometimes meeting in a canopy, shutting out even the little moonlight that managed to pierce the clouds.  The headlights reflected from the trees strangely, lighting the way up like a tunnel, a cone of light through a long cylinder of darkness.  The branches seemed like arms threatening to tear us away.

The truck was quieter now.  Jason had drunk himself almost to sleep, and the couples were more interested in each other than in conversation.  The girl at the wheel well leaned on the edge of the truck and looked back.  “Jason, are you drunk already?”

“Shut up,” he mumbled.  He didn’t bother to open his eyes.

The girl met my eyes by mistake.  I didn’t look away, so she did.  The reflections along the tunnel of trees showed her hair was blond, like I thought.  It was long too, but her face was broad, manly, with a strong jaw and a heavy brow.  She turned back to me after a moment, embarrassed by the silence.  “I’m Liz,” she said, “Liz Macinnis.”

“Hi,” I said.

There was another embarrassed moment.  “Who are you?”

“Denis’ nephew.”

“Oh.”  She squinted.  “Do you have a name?”

I shrugged.  “Yep.”

She looked offended.  “Fine,” she said, and turned her back to me again.

The blurring of the trees and the gravel slowed, then everything tilted steeply as we began to climb the first of the dunes.  The tunnel of trees was replaced by dark mounds of sand and by the darker hollows between them.  Plants grew along the tops of the dunes like bristles on the backs of sleeping animals, silhouetted by the lights of the truck.  There were already a few campfires, the glow lighting up the dunes right to their crests, like little suns behind sand horizons.  There were other trucks parked here and there, wherever there was a convenient spot.  Tents were pitched beside them, dark domes, like sand dunes in miniature.

People began climbing out of the truck almost before it stopped.  Only Adam stayed, sleeping soundly now.  I waited too, until everything had been unloaded, and I could hear the sounds of bottles being opened and tents being raised, clumsily, in the darkness.  The clouds were starting to thin now.  The moon emerged from behind them now and again.  I slumped down against the cab and set my feet on the wheel well, looked up into the night to watch the moon’s coming and going.

“Hey!” I heard Denis call.  He was leaning over the side of the truck.  “I threw your sleeping bag in the tent.  Adam’s sleeping in his brother’s tent, so it’s just you and me.”  His teeth flashed white.  “And Jenn.”

“Did you put my duffle bag in there too?”

“What duffle bag?”

“The blue one?  With my clothes and swim suit and everything?”

“Oh shit, man!  I thought that was your gym bag.  I left it in the garage when I cleaned out the truck today.”

I sat up.  “You what?”

“Sorry, kid.  I didn’t know.”

“So what am I gonna sleep in?”

He shrugged.  “Just sleep in what you’re wearing.  It’s only one night.”

“And what about swimming?”

“Nobody’s going swimming, kid.   They’re just gonna hang out, and drink a bit, and talk shit.”  He tipped a half-full beer bottle to his lips and finished it with one long pull.

“So what am I supposed to do?”

He tossed the bottle into the darkness.  “Just relax.  Find a girl to talk to.  Go get yourself a beer.  Just don’t tell your mother I let you.  And don’t go puking all over yourself.  I still have to drive you home in the morning.”

He turned away.  Someone turned on a radio.  The music was cut loudly with static.  I laid back again, tried to glimpse the moon, but it was a long time coming.  I gave it up and swung myself over the side of the truck.

I walked away from the campfires, down along the beach.  The moon came out again, longer now.  It struck the peaks of the waves, flickering, like the firelight on the peaks of the dunes.  I was between them, the fire and the moon. 

I took off my sandals and carried them.  My feet made long, dragging prints in the cool sand, a broken line between the waves and the dunes, away from the radio and the laughter and the firelight.  The dry sand at the surface shifted under my feet, exposed the damp sand beneath, smelling of wetness.

The sand at last gave way to alvar, and I stopped at the edge of the rock, not wanting to risk my feet on the stones in the dark.  The beach curved past me, and the headland made a silhouette, blurred against the night.  I looked for the exact place where the trees gave way to sky, but it eluded me.  The breeze off the water was gentle and cool.  The waves only licked at the shore.

I turned back, retracing my path, felt its marks with my feet.  The light of the nearest campfire was visible over the dunes.  I looked steadily at it, tried to keep the path by my feet alone.  I would have missed the three figures sitting against the last of the dunes, but I heard one of them say, half-whispered, “Hey, look.  That’s the kid.  Denis’ nephew.”  I recognized Liz’ voice, deep and masculine.  “The no-name kid?” one of the others asked, whispering too, then louder, “Hey kid!  They don’t have names where you come from?”  They three of them laughed.

I didn’t look in their direction, just walked past them toward the campfire.  There were four tents around it, one of them ours.  Denis and Jenn were half-sitting in front of it, not far from the fire.  They had a sleeping bag pulled up over them.  Denis was kissing Jenn’s neck, and they were laughing about something.

“Hey,” I said, and Denis looked up.

“Are you having fun yet, kid?” He tried to sound teasing, but he looked annoyed. He leaned back on one arm, disentangling himself from Jenn’s body.  The sleeping bag fell open a little, and I saw she had only her underwear on now.

“I want to go swimming.”

“I told you, nobody’s going swimming!” he said.  His voice was exasperated, no longer teasing.

“Yeah, well, then I’ll go by myself.  Do you have some shorts I can borrow?”

“Listen, kid.”  He was trying to keep his temper in front of his friends, but his rising volume gave away his frustration.   “The water will be freezing, okay?  And you shouldn’t swim by yourself anyway.  Your mother will kill me if you drown.”

“I’m not going to drown,” I said, my voice raised a little too.  “So do you have shorts I can borrow or not?” The others around the campfire were quiet.

Denis’ sat up in the sleeping bag, his eyes angry.  “Don’t give me any shit, kid!  I said you’re not swimming, so you’re not swimming!  Got it?”

Everyone’s eyes were on me now, like they expected me to do something, throw a punch maybe, or start crying.  Denis looked past me, noticed his friends watching.  His expression became uncomfortable.

“I am going swimming,” I said, and I started taking off my clothes.  I didn’t turn around to see if people were watching, and I didn’t look at Denis either, just at Jenn, like she was the only one there.  I made myself do it slowly, so I wouldn’t seem embarrassed.  I folded everything carefully and piled it on my sandals. “Well,” Jenn said softly, as if to no one in particular, “he’s not shy, is he?”  There was whispering behind me, but no one else said anything out loud.  Then, as causally as I could, like I did it all the time, I walked naked between the dunes, toward the water.

This is one of the Manitoulin stories. I have also included it in the Island Stories section of the Longer Works page for anyone who would like to read them altogether.

Pel Mel

Oh glory of sun-haloed chaff hanging in newly birthed silence, offspring of the bale-elevator’s clamor, clig-clig-clig, clig-clig-clig, clang, clig-clig-clig, clig-clig-clig, clang, interminable, and the engine chanting beneath it all, a noise gestated in the warm closeness of the mow, in its uterine murk, growing as the hay bales rise, one atop the other, first this way then that, filling the womb of the mow, distending it, and the noise, clig-clig-clig, clig-clig-clig, clang, clig-clig-clig, clig-clig-clig, clang, concentrated with the chaff and the heat, throwing itself into the mow like seed into a womb, interminable, until the moment, oh glory of sun-haloed chaff hanging in the doorway of the afternoon, when the long labour is ended and silence lies in the mess of its afterbirth.  The breeze, so slight, eddies there in the doorway, with the haloes and the silence, where I am standing.  It is too weak even to move the dust of the air, only loiters at the threshold, running its fingertips over the skin of things, delicately, cautiously, intimately, like blind fingers on an unfamiliar face.  It is hiding itself between the heat of the mow and the heat of the sun, in the sliver of shadow that the barn is beginning to cast into the yard, where I am hiding too, on the threshold of the mow, my arms raised to rest against the top jamb of the broad door, leaning out into the yard, like the shadows and like the breeze, attendants at the birth of this sudden quiet, this completion, this expectancy, this waiting for what will come to fill the unforeseen emptiness of an afternoon.

The others have already left the mow, down the ladder, through the void we kept in the hay, layer by layer, to the stairs, then through the barn and the empty stalls and the milkhouse, smelling sweetly of the manure freshly scraped into the gutters and the milk souring where it has spilled on the floor, past the ledge where the basin of milk is set, where the cats can sometimes be surprised and captured, though certainly not without gloves and even then not without risk of bloody arms.  I can see them, those others, drifting off beyond the corner of the barn to the farmhouse, where lunch will be on the table now, surely, sandwiches of cow’s tongue or egg salad between slices of heavily buttered homemade bread, oatmeal cookies with chopped dates and raisins, freshly pressed carrot juice, but I am hungry only for the unexpected emptiness of the day, for what it might bring, for the haloes that the dust motes wrap around themselves, for the tender fingers of the eddying breeze, for the sliver of shadow resting between one heat and another, for the infant silence that sleeps over everything.

The clinging of my shirt becomes suddenly unbearable, the chaff sticking to the wetness.  I pull it over my head and fling it into the yard, floating and twisting, like a bird shot on the wing, drifting and fluttering, passing through the shadow to the sun, landing beneath the wheel of the hay wagon, and I will leave it there, as we have left the wagon, to be collected at the leisure of another time, to become the perfect luxury of an all but completed task.  I sit on the elevator, unlace my boots, and throw them too, no fluttering or drifting, only heavy, projectile flight, then my balled socks, tumbling.  The air hangs cool on my shoulders and feet, trickles with the sweat down my chest.  I let the whole world dangle like my feet, the cool, the shadow, the breeze, the quiet, let it all dangle over the edge of the mow,  kicking absently with my heels, awaiting whatever it is that will come, compelling the world to wait with me, kick its heels, feel the air hang cool on its shoulders.

At last, how long, the waiting calls me to my feet and down the elevator, quietly at first, to keep the metal panels from popping, the supports from creaking, but the elevator’s voice is insistent.  It scoops the infant silence from the shadowed ground, lets it howl its first cries, frees me from caution, so I abandon myself to the clatter of its rungs, clang-clong-cleng, clang-clong-cleng, a ragged and joyous noise that does not end the silence but erupts from it, makes it audible, spills and runs and overflows, like abundance and surplus, like teeming and proliferation, like deluge and cataclysm, like everything abundant, extravagant, profuse.  My feet, bare, slapping, are a riot and a tumult of expectation, cool at first, down the rungs, then suddenly hot, where the shadow ends and the sun rests itself upon the metal: cool-cool-cool, cool-cool-cool, hot-hot-hot, hot-hot-hot, and then a leap into the grass, growing long in the lea of the elevator, smelling of only what it is, grass and summer and the heat of the sun.

Oh, and then, as glorious as any halo, I run, pel mel and trip-trip-tripping on chickory and wild carrot and burdock, what the cows will not eat, stumble and tumble on the hems of my jeans, too long for barefoot and frayed besides and split at the knees and worn to white thread at the thighs by bale after bale, hup, up on the thigh, and toss, and hup, up on the thigh, and toss, but no more, not for another year, so I tear the jeans at the knees until the legs dangle by the seams, cut them away with my knife, cut them like traces from a horse, leave it all in a pile and run free, bare-kneed now and bare-foot, like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and Johnny Appleseed, bare-foot in the cow-meadow.

The meadow runs too, slow and liquid, like honey, like intoxication, like honey-wine, like mead, running, running, and the bees rise in alarm from their pollen-feasts, fly off to make mead of the meadow.  I throw myself into that mellifluence, drink its sweetness up, not merely lapping it from cupped hands like the wise three hundred, nor even drinking it straight from the stream like the foolish thousands, but leaping into its depths, breathing it in, filling my lungs with it, even to drowning.  It is equal parts honey and the blood of gods, this meadow wine, a drink that makes wise, but there are no words for this wine’s wisdom.  Its truths are written in the petals of asters and fleabane and bergamot, held fast to the flesh by sweet-salt sweat, legible only to the meadow, summer-hot, insect-droned, pollen-hazed.

The grasshoppers scatter at my feet, helter-skelter-pelter, then settle to wait and scatter once again, pht-t-t-t-t, pht-t-t-t-t, pht-t-t-t-t, my emissaries, the vanguard of my advance.   They make a way for me, put everything in readiness for my coming, a bare-foot, bare-chested king, dust-caked and mad, leaping and dancing, as if before the ark of a holy covenant.  Locusts and honey, locusts and honey, fit food for prophets, but I have no clear vision, only expectancy, a void that something will arrive to fulfill, I prophesy it.  The grasshoppers leap into the void of the afternoon, not gliding or floating, but hurling themselves, wing-beat by wing-beat, over the plants, their mountaintops, only to sag again on the other side and fall to earth, then hurl themselves again, leaping, leaping, leaping, pht-t-t-t-t, pht-t-t-t-t, pht-t-t-t-t, and I also hurl myself, and I let myself fall, for the joy of falling, tumbling, rolling.  I am submerged in the meadow, drowning in locusts and honey, in wisdom and prophesy that cannot be uttered.

There is not the slightest moisture in the grass, the dew long gone, only dryness, summer-afternoon-dryness, time-for-haying-to-be-finished-dryness, dust-in-puffs-as-you-pass-by-dryness, and hot, not humid, but pleasantly, the sun on face and on shoulders.  I am covered in the dust by now, caked with it where the sweat of the mow still clings.  I wallow in it, in the heat and the sun, lying where I fall sometimes, looking up through the orange-red sky of my eyelids, through the chain-lightning blood vessels, back-lit by a long distant sun.  I am an offering to the sun, to the heat and dust, to whatever it will bring.  The world is my alter stone.  I sweat honey and blood together, wetting the dust with the sacrifice of my body, and I take its sacrifice with me too, as I stand and run, a tithe of wetted earth on my skin.

And now the meadow is lost to forest, and I am loosed into the trees like an arrow, piercing its borders, through the whipple-trees and raspberries and arrowwoods, along the cowpath, and beneath the canopy.  There is no undergrowth, grazed to stubble and trampled to muck, and the black mud, hardened now so late in the summer, holds the shape of cattle hooves, like a bed of fossils.  The petrified punctures are too round for my naked feet, too hard, so I slow, walk gingerly among them, finding patches of solidity in the midst of them, skirting their edges, where the branches have kept the broad bovine bodies and their soon to be fossilized hoof-prints from approaching the tree trunks.  The cow patties, a few days old, are heat-hardened too, but only to a crust, still moist and muddy within, squishing between my toes when I misstep, deliciously, the profoundest proof of God, that even cow dung should feel like this.

The path runs through the woods, I know, running between two fencelines until it reaches the far field along the highway, across from one of the inland lakes, but the void of the afternoon will accept no highways.  It opens itself only to the hidden and the forgotten, I see it now, only to what nature has half-reclaimed, the bones of cattle, green with moss and piled in a pit beyond the cedar rails, a decaying tractor, red more with rust than paint, eyeless and staring, parked finally a few yards beyond the bones, so I scale the fence, sit astride it for a time, savour the moment, not of indecision, but of a decision made and not yet enacted, of knowing what I will do without yet having to do it, then slide down among the green-white bones, among the long ribs and the unrecognizable skulls.  These are the portents of what the afternoon anticipates, illegible and obscure.  I squat among them, half-naked and smeared with dust, like a madman seeking signs among bones tossed by a giant hand, turning them over in my own hands, reading the omens meant for another, reordering the bones around me, changing who knows what destinies.  Only a madman would dare such things, only someone maddened by anticipation, who has seen the very dust wear haloes, who has attended the birth of infant silence, who has drunk the blood and honey of the meadow, who has seen the sun through red chains of lightening.

The bones send me onward, without direction, only onward, and I obey, past the tractor, the belts hanging limply and the radiator exposed between its gouged eyes.  Whatever trail it made in coming is long overgrown, the skeletal machinery fringed by tall grass, by chokecherry bushes, by young cedars, the growth of several years or more.  I run my hand along it as I pass, red paint and red rust, flaking, speckling the grass, staining my fingers, and then there is only forest, birch and maple among the shield ferns.  One tree leads to another, always, one to the other, each still believing that there is no end to their leading, one to the other, believing that axes and saws have not yet cut the forest into ribbons, believing that each tree still reaches out to touch another across endless spaces, world without end.  I reach my hands too, touching each in turn, and I believe as they do, at least for a time, fall into the eternity that the trees imagine themselves itself to be, lapse into the forest’s  long-past but lingering dream, but a second fenceline, cedar rail, now fallen, dissolves the illusion, running between the woods and a vast, untended field, long untilled.  The trees here do not have the luxury of disbelief.   They are the footsoldiers of war, long in retreat, blow by blow, furrow but furrow, but now advancing on fields gone fallow, their seedlings now freely encroaching on the grain-land, spilling over the fence rails in a long, slow assault on everything cultivated, leaving the fence hidden among the newly unrestrained trees and bushes.  The grasses of the field, uncut, come up almost to my chest, and I leave a trail through them, a wake of bent stalks, golden, and crushed leaves, verdant, as I make for the tractor lane across the field, invisible still, but marked by a double line of trees, a stubborn remnant, so long besieged by the tilled and the planted, but waiting now, just a few decades more, to rejoin the wild fecundity of the forest.

The lane angles away from me, its attendant trees blacking my view, but I can see a barn behind it.  The doors hang open, and the boards are falling from the beams, unused, surely, though the lane has not been abandoned, not wholly, the grass between the ruts shorter than on either side, and tire tread still showing, dried in the mud of the last rain.  I can see now, just a few steps more, where the lane ends, not at the settling barn, but closer, at an old drive shed, barn board too, and subsiding into its foundations.  Its door is ajar, I can see, even from this far, an invitation, and I know that this is what the day has been expecting, what it birthed in silence and drank in the meadow and followed among the trees, this, this, this, but I know not to rush my attendance, approach it slowly, obliquely, as if stalking prey, not raising its suspicions, not causing it alarm, not making my intentions known, until I am right at the door, my hand on the latch, standing at the threshold of possibility, of anticipation, nowhere leading everywhere, nothing holding everything.  To pass through this place is to make things come to be, to end possibility, I know, and I hesitate, then step into what is waiting.

There are light-haloed motes of dust like a universe of meteors, quasars, milky ways, supernovas, suspended in their vast distances, their lightyears, between the low beams of the shed.  They are the constellations of a fate that might be read, if only I knew their language, but I do not read them, only throw myself onto them.  How many million worlds do I wrench from their orbits as I wade among these stars, send them swirling into the dark corners of the universe, where their lights are blackened, and they settle in the cracks and the pits of the cement slab floor?  I am a god, a colossus, striding among the constellations that once foretold my destiny and now foretell nothing.  I have scattered the augers, unseated the heavens, left the magi of countless worlds to wonder at the meaning of their night skies.

There, beneath the timbered heavens, the end of what began in the womb of the mow, are two wooden speed boats, almost twins, with long narrow boards sweeping from bow to stern,  oval cutouts framing their seats, carefully tarped.  They have been here a long time, longer than the rusted tractor in the birch forest, longer than the bones bleaching by the split rail fence, tenderly stored and then forgotten beneath the sagging roof and the rotting beams and the galaxies of dust, all this time, unsuspected, awaiting the day, this day, when the labour of the day would open into an expectancy, when the meadow would intoxicate and the trees lead from one to the other, and place me here, before them, the one who has witnessed the birth of the day, drunk the wine of the meadow, played with the telling-bones of giants, scattered galaxies through the low heavens, and I do not know what they mean, these dry-rotted, boats, not at all, only that they were somehow meant for me, with their peeling marine varnish and their worm-eaten wood.  They are mine.  They called to me, and I followed, and they are mine.

This is another of the Manitoulin stories that I am writing.  I have now posted these stories in a single file in the Island Stories section of the Longer Works page for those who might like to read them altogether.

Cutting Trail

It is early yet, but I wake, smelling cedar and woodsmoke and old mattresses and mosquito repellent, the smell of the camp, the fire, the forest, all of it, still the smell of summer to me now, all these years later, and I am lying in the top-right bunk, my head closest to the window, its pane already cracked on the morning I am imagining, and broken now.  The sun is just rising, and the crack in the glass glistens like frozen lightening, and everything is quiet, not completely, with birds singing and squirrels dropping pine cones from the canopy and trees swaying in the breeze and coals popping in the woodstove, but profoundly, because these sounds do not break the silence so much as they deepen it, make it a mystery.  The sun finds its way between the log walls, between its upright cedars, peeled and knotty and chinked with some kind of cement that is crumbling away, leaving holes for the wind and for the cold but also for the light, weak still and diffused, that finds its way through the mortar and speckles my sleeping bag in patches of lighter green, patches that drift with infinite patience.

I can hear the others beginning to stir, and I slip to the floor, into the cool, trying not to wake the younger ones.  My clothes are hanging on the bookshelf, as near as possible to the black, rust-ringed ventpipe of the woodstove, where they will be warmest.  They are as warm as my bed was, and all the warmer because I have just plunged into the cold of the forest-shadowed, still-darkened morning, my bare feet on the chill of the linoleum with its coal-melted pockmarks, because I have just shed my shirt and shorts, sleep-warm, to feel the morning more keenly.  I am tempted to stand there a moment, prolong the chill and the expectation of warmth together, but the day promises too much, and I am too eager, and I turn to where my clothes hang on the roughcut bookshelf.

I helped make the bookshelf when I was just a child, watched the pine trees being felled and then sat on the back of the old tractor as it pulled the log wagon from the camp up Jerry Co. Road and Timber Bay Road and Carter Bay Road and then along the few hundred yards of Government Road to Lentir’s sawmill, heavy with the smell of diesel and engine oil and conifer.  The logs went through the sawblade, pass after pass, and the planks fell, mostly bark at first, but thicker soon, the sawdust pluming upward and then settling in fragrant piles.  I watched as the men stacked the furred boards, marked with the sawblade’s half-moon scars, piled them on the wagon, left them waiting to be joined by mismatched nails, some heads broader than others, some steel and some brass, driven on angles that had them splitting the wood, but the shelf they became holds books just the same, and it serves also to keep my clothes close to the stove.

It was on the bookshelf that I caught a mouse once, with my bare hands.  I was sitting in the old armchair, the one that used to be Grandpa’s favourite chair, but had become his camp chair, slowly disintegrating, year by year, taking root next to the woodstove.  I was sitting there one morning, my coffee on the bookshelf, my feet on a length of firewood set upright, close to the stove, and I was reading something, I no longer remember what, a fantasy novel or some poetry.  It was later in the morning, after breakfast had been eaten and the dishes washed but before the day had really begun, and I looked up for my cup, saw the mouse from the corner of my eye, and it froze where it was, along one of the bookshelf’s vertical edges, halfway between two shelves, so that we were eye to eye.  I laid my book down on the floor, not slowly or carefully, just as I would, and I put one hand below the mouse, only an inch or so from his head.  It turned around then, quickly, so I put my other hand above it, trapping it along its narrow path, and I took it by its tail, held it close to my eyes, looked at it as nearly as it could, watched its forepaws swim, not frantically, but with a perfect nonchalance, until I took it outside and dashed its head against a tree, threw its body into the woods.

On the morning I am imagining, however, that other morning, the profoundly quiet morning, there is only my warming clothes on the bookshelf, and I dress alongside my brothers, our voices, whispered and sporadic, fulfilling the stillness of everything, establishing its vastness through our insignificance.  We have not lit the lamps, only stoked the fire in the stove, so we dress and pack in the dimness of the firelight and in the suggestion of a still invisible sun, a light that appears only as lightening in a broken window and as patches of colour that drift through holes in the wall.

We cook eggs and bacon in the cast iron pan, bacon first, crisping in its own drippings, then eggs on top, roughly scrambled into the grease and into the now crumbled bacon. The coffee is perking on the stove too, popping, softly popping, and we say nothing as we pull our chairs next to the stove, its door cracked now, to warm ourselves as we eat.  The coals burn red in the draft of the stove, and the new wood blackens and flames, and it feels like the stove is the centre of everything, not just of the three of us who are eating around it, not just of the cabin that it warms against the cool of the forest, but of everything, the world and the universe and everything.  This is what the fireplace means, I think, it means the place where you begin and end, where you leave and return.

It is this centre that we will soon leave behind as we close the too-wide screen door, softly, so as not to wake the others with its characteristic bang, but I hear the bang anyway, because I have opened and closed that door too many times, because I have heard it screech as it opens and slam as it closes too many times, and I can no longer hear one without the other.  The screech of any screen door now, no matter how distant, is always the screech of that wooden camp screen, with its long diagonal board running between too-distant corners, and my mind always follows the screech with a slam, so I hear it slam that morning, though we do not forget to close it softly, and it sounds like a finality, like we are being cut off from the fire at the centre, at least for a time, and I feel this as an exhilaration.

We enter the forest at the back of the cabin, between the old tractor and the outhouse, though I cannot now find the spot exactly, not after the scrub plants have had so many years to grow, and not after the tractor has been moved over beside the new winterized cabin, its crankcase engine refusing ever to die completely and its chassis repainted until it is immune to rust, and not after the outhouse has slumped and toppled, its particle board chewed by porcupines and rotted by damp.  Too much time has passed.  The marks we made were too ephemeral.  We set out that day, passing between the tractor and the outhouse, to cut a path, to blaze a trail, but all signs of our passing have themselves now passed, and I cannot find our blazes, though my search is diligent.  The world does not remember like I do.  Its memories are overgrown, while mine are stark, barren, like solitary trees on a wide plain, and what stands on the plains of that morning is the instant, only just an instant, when we pause beneath the eaves of the forest and let the trail, not yet a trail, but soon to be a trail, choose for us where it will be, the instant when we feel its need, like a living thing, to be. Not just because the road to the lake, the usual one, is circuitous, first winding away from the lake, through the woods along Jerry Co. Road, just a set of tracks, split by grass and devil’s paintbrushes and buttercups, bordered by raspberry canes and dogwood and sumac, and then spilling out onto the logging road that runs along the hundred acre woodlots toward Carter Bay Road, then another two or three kilometers more to the beach, and not just because the new trail will be more direct, will be straight through the bush to the beach, a walking trail at first, then broader and clearer each time, firm, direct, from camp to beach, but also because the trail simply needs to be, because our willingness to make it has breathed a spirit for it that now requires a form.  This is what stands in my memory, the trail’s need to be, a lonely and aching need now that it is only a memory, but an intimate and insistent need then as we stand before it, hesitate, and are pulled along by it, into it.

We bring with us a machete that we have discovered in the woodshed that summer, its handle wrapped in cloth tape and stained with rust along the blade, a wicked looking thing, so that we hardly dared pick it up when we first found it, just looked at one another to see if it had affected us all with the same dread, and then looked back at the menace of it, the bloodiness of it, though we knew rust from blood.  It was probably brought to the camp by one of our uncles, we supposed, or maybe by one of their hunting friends, but it was clearly unclaimed, lying there rusting in the shed, so we cleaned it and oiled it, sharpened it with the whetstone, replaced the tape on the handle, all the while telling stories about it, until it had become something mythological, hovering somewhere between the sacred and the profane, a gift from nameless gods of no firm allegiance.

We bring the limbing axe too, a hatchet head mounted on a full-length handle, deeply worn and darkly stained around the grip, that somehow survived its first axe head, as few handles do, and has now been whittled down to fit the hatchet head and become the limbing axe, longer than the hatchet, lighter than the logging axe, slenderer than the splitting maul, perfect for trimming branches from felled trees or cutting roasting sticks.

I carry the pack first, while the other two wield the machete and the hatchet, one clearing the brush, the other felling small saplings and obstructing limbs.  The machete makes a swishing sound, punctuated by sharp pings, through leaves and stems, swish-ping-swish-ping-ping-swish.  It flickers in the growing sunlight, a rhythmic flash to accompany its rhythmic sound, and it leaves the ground stubbled and bristled like an unshaven face, and the hatchet follows, treading the stubble of the machete underfoot and cutting more deeply into the stuff of the forest, taking the limbs and the saplings, mostly cedar and pine, leaving them to line the path and to scent the air with pitch, like the incense of some sacred procession.

The cuts we make are deep, we think, deep enough to make a lasting wound through the forest, to make a trail of blood that can be followed, something to be reopened again and again, to be packed with ash or horsehair until the scar has formed, a ritual scar, a duelling scar, to show where we have passed, what we have done, badges of honour that we inflict on the body of the forest. We do not merely blaze a trail, we emblazon the flesh of the forest, claim it, make it one of us through the scars of our tribe, through the mutual drawing of blood, for we receive wounds as well as give them, take our mensur marks with the necessary courage, with the requisite indifference, as falling boughs and tangled thorns and stinging nettles trade us mark for mark, badge for badge, brand for brand.

These are the sort of marks that we might expect to find even years later, on our own bodies and on the body of the forest, if we thought about such things then, but we are enraptured by the still open wounds we are making, cannot imagine a future, not of any kind, certainly not a future where we will come looking for traces of the blows we strike today, where we will need those traces, search for them, and not find them, where we will wonder whether the stumps have been covered by forest litter and the severed limbs hidden by new grown branches, or whether we are looking in the wrong places, because the marks that seemed so telling have disappeared in that short a time. We cannot imagine that this thing we are making, this spirit taking on flesh, this need drawing us forward, this presence becoming fuller and heavier in our wake, will ever be anything than it is now. It will always be in this moment of becoming, always be bleeding itself into being.

I first knew the blood of trees like this when I watched the maple sap drip down spigots into tin pails in the sugar bush behind my grandfather’s farm, thinking that the bleeding of the sap, drop by drop, pling, pling, pling, into the empty bucket, and then deeper, hollower, plink, plunk, plonk, as is it filled, that this bleeding made the tree real, made it be.  The maples were still just waking into spring, still just dry bones awaiting flesh, but their blood flowed in them, flowed from far beneath the snow-patched ground to grant each branch a veil of the goldest green to set against the cloud-patched sky, and I stood there to see the drops collect, like the blood that had dripped from my brother’s arm when he fell from the monkey bars and broke the bone so that it punctured the skin, and we helped him home with those same drops falling behind us at every step, and it was unalterably true then, looking into the pail, that everything real must bleed, that only blood makes something truly be, and the sap became suddenly sacrificial, like a cup held to catch the last life of a dying God.

We do not stop to collect the sap-blood that we spill that morning, but it is no less sacrificial in its way.  The blood of a sacrifice is no less holy if it falls to the ground, serves rather to sanctify the earth on which it falls, makes it holy ground, so that we could not turn back if we wanted, could not go back that way, not without taking off our shoes and rending our clothes and putting ashes in our hair, not without consenting to go on our knees, our hands clasped before us, like pilgrims on a sacred way, mopping up the blood with cloths to be the relics of some future faith.  The path behind us is hallowed by the blood we have spilled, by the wounds we have made, and we are no longer worthy to walk it, because it is our sins, our violence that has made it holy.

At last, so soon, the sun rises above the trees, and the dawn chill disappears, all at once, between two breaths, melting the pitch of pine and balsam so that it smears our blades and coats our hands, collects falling needles and flakes of bark to rub our skin to blisters.  The dew evaporates, thick and clinging, mixes with the sweat that no longer cools but paints our skin in streaks of dirt that collect in the corners of our eyes and the creases of our bodies.  Everything has changed, between one blow and the next, and we are staggered by this new and sudden forest, humid and calescent, swarmed by deer flies, swift and relentless.  We stop often now, every time we trade places, exchange pack for machete, machete for hatchet, hatchet for pack, and the pack, once a burden and a nuisance, becomes a relief from the labour of the trail, lightening with every stop, as the water is shared around, dwindling far too quickly.  The ground keeps opening into meadows now, thin grasses growing in the crevices of the shield rock, a hatch of grasses across the lichen-covered stone, like a miniature landscape of fields and hedgerows, so we must mark the path as we can, drag fallen logs from the forest, move what stones can be moved, and all the while there is the sun and the sun-heated rock, and we have not, as best we can guess, gone even a third of our way, though the sun is high enough for us to eat what food we have brought, sheltering in the shade of a birch stand.

We have misjudged. We did not scar the forest, only forced ourselves a little way from its womb, from the frozen lightening and the drifting green sunlight and the gentle fire at its centre, and now we are infants, crawling about in a world we could not have expected. We do not inflict the trail on the forest. We cling to it, like an umbilical cord stretching bloody and white-blue behind us, or like Ariadne’s thread, unspooling through labyrinthine fears, or like the cord tied around the ankles of priests, to drag their bodies from the holy of holies if they should anger their God and be struck down. We dangle on the end of the trail, our weight holding it taut behind us, and our greatest fear now is that it will break, be eaten up like a trail of bread crumbs, leave us untethered to face whatever monsters or gods await us in the forest’s holiest and most labyrinthine places.

The thread of the trail grows tighter and tighter behind us, fraying and unraveling as our arms tire, as we allow ourselves to weave now, between trees and around meadows, taking the path of least resistance, scarcely breaking the skin of the forest, and still, we can only be perhaps two thirds of the way to the lake. We take off our shirts and wrap them in awkward bandages over our raw and blistered hands, and our bodies, pale still so early in the summer, are soon sun-red and scratched, smeared with pitch and pine needles, traced with lines of sweat and dirt, as if the forest is writing its story on our skin, leaving its icons and hieroglyphs, fearful scripts, intelligible only to itself, but surely the language of some primordial magic.

On other days I will walk beneath those same trees, quite apart from any trail, and the forest will move me, and I will write about the dogwood shooting up from the litter, the scrambling junipers, the saplings of spruce and balsam, the birch and cedar, and I will write that they make the sky stand vertical, that they rupture its vastness, trouble its expanse, urge it still higher to the terror of its beyond, and I will write that their limbs are like roots burrowing into a blue, thin, transparent soil, their trunks suspended above a green, impenetrable sky, adrift between two heavens and two earths, surrounded by long shadows, sun-flung and invisible, their branches becoming roots that are cast, insubstantial, into earthen skies, and I will write that the sun strikes down through them to touch the ground and grant each branch and leaf beneath its halo all of gold, but on that day we are unmoved. It is a far different forest that we walk, a forest of stern will and fearful incantations that tolerates us only for a time, inscribes itself on our bodies, drives us through its sacred places, covers our traces almost as soon as we have passed.

It is into this forest that the sun begins to cast itself, so soon, before we have reached our end, touching lightly the tops of the trees to our left, and we know that we have failed, that the trail will not find the lake to link the cabin to the beach with a sure, straight line, not on this day or on any other. The sun sets as finally as the slam of a screen door, and something finds release in us, as if the line that tethered us has been cut by it, as if we are no longer bound to make our scars, no longer tethered to the womb or to the one who holds the thread or to the ones who wait to pull us from the inner sanctuary. We have been loosed into whatever awaits us, be it monster or god, and we no longer walk but run, dodging and tripping and stumbling and running, for it seems to us that we can make out the blue of the water through the trunks of the trees, a blue that has been revealed only by the setting sun, and it calls us, though it is still a long way off, calls us, as surely as the trail has driven us.

It has us by the ears and nostrils now, drags us by sound and smell as much by sight, the water-blue, there, somewhere beneath the sky-blue, there, between the crowding trees, there again, and broader now, nearer and more certain, a rolling-and-crowned-with-white-blue, a curling-and-traced-with-green-blue, through the last of the cedars and over the pitted stones, it casts our things aside, tears our clothes from us, and seizes us at last.

This story, like The Dune, is one in a collection that I am writing based more or less on the summers I spent on Manitoulin Island as a child.  It needs some editing yet, but I am sick of revising it for the moment, so I am soliciting your comments before I take it up again.

All The Other Fish

Do I fish? Well, sure, in a way. I’m certainly not a serious fisherman, not in an Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Ransome, Izaak Walton way. The difference, I think, is that I like the waiting part of fishing rather than the catching. I like the sitting and the thinking and the lingering. Catching fish only interrupts my fishing.

I do have a favourite fishing hole, but it’s for my kind of fishing, you understand, a fishing hole for those who aren’t actually interested in catching fish. It’s under a copse of cedars that comes right down to the water around a shallow bay, a tiny thing, maybe twenty yards wide and half again as deep, just the right size to keep a bit of water warm. On one side, facing into the afternoon sun, there’s a rock shaped almost like a seat, with a flat bottom and an angled back, set below the water just deep enough to come up to your waist when you sit on it, and there’s another to the left, a bit higher, a place for your cooler and your drink and your book and whatever else you want to bring with you, even tackle, assuming that you’re actually going to do much fishing, which I usually don’t.  I mostly read a bit and think a bit and daydream a bit, unless I’m interrupted by catching a fish.

What’s that? No, I didn’t always fish like that. When my brothers and I were kids up on the Island, we were definitely fishing for fish. Not that we ever caught much. So maybe that’s what happened. Maybe I just got used to fishing for nothing and then started thinking that’s how it was supposed to be.

We did sometimes catch fish, of course. I remember once when my cousin’s grandfather took us out to ice fish for perch. We cut our holes, and we dropped our lines, just lengths of twine with hooks on the ends, baited with worms at first and then the eyes of the fish we caught, the dead going to catch the living.  There was no way to reel in our lines when we felt a bite, so we ran with them across the ice until the the fish came flopping behind us in the snow.  I don’t remember waiting for the fish, only running, as if we did nothing but drag perch from the lake all that night.  There’s a picture still, in an album of my mother’s, or maybe my father’s, all of us standing with our catch on a string, all of us who were big enough to go fishing at the time, three or four of us anyway. We’re all wrapped in our winter gear and smiling past this string of eyeless fish.

Some of those fish had roe, though I might be remembering another time, and my grandmother fried them up in butter for breakfast the next morning.  She always cooked breakfast for the whole Island, it seemed, not only for my grandfather and for the regular hired men, but also for the temporary help, and for her three sons, and for their wives, and for her ten or twelve grandchildren, not to mention anyone who might drop by at the breakfast hour, the vet out to help with a breach birth maybe, or someone asking a question of my grandfather the Reeve.  There would be porridge for those who wanted it, and boiled eggs, and fried eggs, and preserves from the pantry, and frozen fruit from the freezer, and honey in the comb from who knows where, and homemade bread, and homemade butter.  My grandfather always took boiled eggs, cooked very soft, thirty seconds or so, just enough to warm them.  He would crack the eggs into a bowl and spoon them up with thick slices of bread and butter. Then he would pour himself a whole bowl of maple syrup, made by his own hands right there on the farm, and that would do for another slice of bread.  Whatever syrup was left he would drink straight from the bowl.  I doubt he had any of the perch roe.

There were so many at breakfast sometimes that we ate in shifts, some of us up early enough to help my grandfather with the chores before sitting at the long table stretching across the big farm kitchen, while others would trickle down over the next few hours, much to my grandmother’s disapproval.  She had no patience for laziness, and the idea of sleeping in was offensive to her, but she would feed the late comers anyway, and they would listen to her lectures about sloth with easy tolerance. I often sat at that table from the moment I came in from chores until lunch was served, reading my book and watching one shift of breakfasters follow another.  My grandmother would hardly leave the kitchen that whole time, maybe just to change some laundry or to bring something up from the basement.  She made sandwiches to send to the fields, kneaded dough for bread, rolled pie crusts for the freezer, and processed whatever fruit and vegetables we had picked for her from the garden the day before.  Sometimes I found myself pressed into service, shelling peas or chopping rhubarb or hulling strawberries.  Those mornings all drift together, the sun coming through the windows at the end of the table as I look up to see the familiar kitchen things, the squirrel-shaped napkin holder made by some long dead relative, the pot holders kept by my grandparent’s from their days as missionaries in the islands, and the circa fifties vacuum cleaner, oval and green-blue, standing propped by the pantry.

All this to say that we did actually catch fish sometimes, but those were the exceptional cases. Far more often we caught nothing, though we fished as well as we knew how. We would usually walk from our grandparent’s house on Monument Road down Highway 542 to where the bridge crosses over the river, just where it meets the southern bay of Lake Mindemoya. We went there every day of the week sometimes, casting all down the banks of the lake and for a mile or more up the river. We would work methodically, talking only now and again, stopping only to eat lunch or sometimes to turn rocks in search of crayfish.

Fishing that river was always dappled. Dappled in a Gerard Manley Hopkins way, if you know what I mean, as in skies of couple-colour and rose stipple on trout that swim and whatnot, even if the trout never did make an appearance for us. Dappled because, though we never caught any fish, ever, we caught cool mornings with breezes that ran up along the stream bed, and we caught afternoons too hot to move except if we were knee deep in the water with the silver maples casting their shadows overhead and with the light broken by the leaves and then broken again by the ripples of the water. Dappled like that. And that’s why we kept fishing there, because the river was too perfect not to fish, too shaded and clear and overhung by banks of weeds and branches, too meandering and full of still pools and sudden holes, too dappled.

Sometimes, though, if we needed a change, we would go further, straight up Monument Road to Old SpringBay on the west side of Lake Mindemoya. The fishing wasn’t any better there, and the scenery was worse, just a long, empty, cement dock jutting out from a beach hardly worth the name. The walk was no pleasure either, the road unpaved until just before the lake, where it dipped down the hill past the trailer park toward the docks. The cars would pass us, kicking up dust that hung and drifted and settled on the roadside grasses until we kicked it up again with our feet. There were raspberries along the way, or chokecherries, depending on the time of year, but hardly worth the scratched arms and sticky fingers we were sure to get picking them. Even telling you about it makes me wonder why we bothered making that hike.  The artificial beach was dirty, and there were always too many people from the rental cottages across the road, and all we ever caught were leeches anyway.

Actually, the leeches were more interesting than the fishing. They clung to our legs as we dangled them from the dock, and we scorched them with lighters, watching their bodies shrivel and fall, then thrash in the dust of the dock, whitening and drying and inching in search of water. I was never one to torture animals as a child, not even flies or ants, but the leeches were somehow different. We burned them and cut them and pulled them to pieces, killed them in any horrible way we could imagine, though they were no more deserving of torment than the mosquitoes and the horseflies and the other bloodsuckers that we killed without mutilation. We felt no remorse for them, and when we found too few victims on our legs, we waded through the shallows and scooped others into sand buckets, collecting roiling masses of them for our amusement.

Those docks at Old West Bay were also a reminder of a much earlier time that almost certainly took place somewhere else, somewhere with a peir that was wooden rather than concrete and with a broader bay and with a rockier shore, but a somewhere that I could never recognize again, because I was so young, and so a somewhere that became replaced by Lake Mindemoya in my imagination. My memories of that day are vast and ambiguous, the kind of memories that I only have from my early childhood, though I was already old enough then to be helping my younger brother detangle his line, knotted in great loops of slender nylon. The lake was immense, massive under a massive sky, and I was small, dangling my line and myself over the edge of a broad expanse, dangling on a bit of dock that jutted only a short way past the edge of everything.  I don’t grow memories like that anymore, and I have a longing for them, for that world, broad and undefined, a world more of potential than of actuality.

In that world, as I worked to straiten my brother’s line, a fish rose to the surface, or what counted as a fish to us anyway, a sunfish probably, or maybe a rock bass, a perch at best, hardly worth keeping, certainly not worth the agony that it was about to cause.  Only my brother saw it rise and nibble at the tain of the water, but in my mind, like so many other fish I’ve seen, it eases slowly up from the piling of the dock, waits inches below the surface, its body half turned, strikes on whatever bit of drifting food has drawn it from hiding, and then I can see the rod thrusting at the water and the line growing taut, but mostly I can feel the hook drawing up into my thumb, the line tugging at my hand.

My grandfather cut the line fast enough, I’m sure, and I’m also sure that my young imagination exaggerated the incident beyond all proportion, but even now that hook hurts me more than any other injury I’ve ever suffered.  I screamed, and I kept screaming, my grandfather, with his unrelenting patience, saying all the while that screaming wasn’t helping anything, that closing my eyes would make it hurt less, and then he took advantage of my blindness to grab the hook with the pliers and push the barb through the heel of my thumb in one swift pain. I opened my eyes in time to see him snip the barb and pull the hook back through the wound.  I laid on the dock, rough and wooden, my head turned to one side to feel the weather-etched grain against my cheek as my grandfather bandaged my thumb, with what I can’t remember, a ripped shirt maybe, or a rag from the car, and I resolved that I would never fish again.

I did fish again, of course, despite the hook in the thumb, but the memory of that day hung over the Old West Bay docks, wrongly but vividly, and we never caught anything there anyway, so I was always trying to get my father to drive us further afield, usually just to one of the Island’s innumerable docks, Manitowaning perhaps, or Kagawong. We had better luck at Kagawong, but there was a nicer beach at Manitowaning, and there was the Norisle there too, the old ferry that advertized itself as a museum but that never seemed to be open. There’s a theatre there now, just beside the ferry, or what goes by the name of a theatre on the Island, and there’s also something like a used bookstore beneath it, though I’ve never been there during open hours, which are haphazard and have little relation to the ones posted on the door.

Neither the theatre nor the bookstore was there when I was a child, or I don’t remember them if they were, though I do remember passing that building as we descended the switchback from the town to the docks, sharply downward toward the old mill, then back past the theatre on our left, and finally out toward the beach. We never bothered with a closer look. We always set our things up under the pavilion and then went straight to fishing from the long docks. The boys who were hired to run the marine fuelling station watched us with amusement, knowing as well as we did that there was little or nothing to be caught. We watched them too, their feet up on the windows of the booth, talking, smoking, tossing stones into the water, and infrequently, very infrequently, filling up a boat that was either lost enough to find its way into the harbour at Manitowaning or bored enough to visit the rusting hulk of the Norisle.

It was beneath the keel of the Norisle, actually, that I saw a small school of trout once, brown trout, I think, but I’m certainly not an expert on these things. The day was clear, and the lake was still, and I could see a long way beneath the water as I was walking up behind the mill, a few hundred yards around the bay from the beach and a short way beyond the ferry, when four trout came edging just off the shore. Three of them were a true brownish colour, the other one more silver, their dark spots sharply defined in the clearness of the water, the sun illuminating their fins like broken halos. They moved slowly, hardly seeming to move, drifting in tandem with their shadows, a double school of fish, and they found the shelter of the ship, became one with their shadows, and their halos were extinguished. They hovered there a long while, and I thought about getting my rod from the dock and trying to catch one of them, but it was more pleasure to watch them than to catch them, so I let them be until they turned together and headed away under the ferry out into the lake.

That was later though, when I already had children of my own. They watched the trout with me, my two sons, and never asked to catch them as I was sure they would. We just watched them, the three of us, and I found myself remembering a time when I had watched the pike in my uncle’s hoop nets much as my sons were now watching the trout, with real wonder, just before we pulled the nets over the side and dumped the fish into the bottom of the boat, wonderless. I used to have a picture, now long lost, where I’m holding two of those pike, a hand buried in the gills of each fish, almost as tall as I am. I have forgotten my expression in that picture, so I may have been smiling, but I wasn’t feeling happiness just then, when it was taken, only a kind of loss, a loss of the long, quavering, mottled bodies that had so recently been hovering in the nets below the surface.

Commercial fishing with my uncle that summer was filled with that feeling, filled with the smell of the water and of the boat warming in the sun, with the skip of the flat aluminium bottom on the swells, with the taste of black coffee early in the morning, too early, but then also with the fish that we caught without fishing, without waiting and daydreaming. Our fishing was all catching but no sitting, no reflecting, none of what I love most about fishing. The nets went over the side, and then they came up again, and the fish dropped into the totes one after the other, and there was never time for waiting, never time for wondering.

The problem with those pike, caught in the hoops, and hung by the gills, and dropped in the totes, was that they had no stories.  Okay, okay, you’re right, everything has its story, but they didn’t have the kinds of stories that I want to catch when I go fishing.  They didn’t have stories worth telling, stories with any wonder in them, stories with the sun dappling like a poem on a stream or with a school of trout drifting in their own halos.  And you can’t go fishing for those kinds of stories like you go fishing for fish, finding the right lure or rod or bait or fishing hole.  You can’t go expecting to catch them.  You just go fishing, and you wait, and sometimes there’s a fish with a story worth catching, but usually there isn’t.  Usually you just end up waiting, or you catch fish without much story at all.

I know, I know, I’m not explaining myself very well.  Let me give you an example.  I was on another lake once, Otter Lake, just south of Parry Sound, and I was idly casting from the dock, just because I wanted to be alone and to be on the dock and not to be playing cards in the cottage kitchen. I was standing on a bit of walkway on the far side of the boathouse, and I don’t remember that exact moment very clearly, but I’ve stood in that same spot many times before and since, so I know that I was listening to the sound of the motorboat nodding against the rubber bumpers, making the water slap and gurgle hollowly, and I was smelling the acid of evergreen forest, sharp, cut with the scent of some not too distant campfire, and I was feeling the temperature fall away with the sun behind the trees, and I was casting a small silver spinner out into the lake.

I have since caught any number of sunfish under that dock with my kids, but I had never yet seen anything caught there when I was casting that evening, so I was startled when I felt a strike on the lure, and more startled still when the fish ran strongly with the line. When it slacked, I reeled it in as far as I could, and then the fish ran again against the line and it jumped, in sprays of silver, it jumped. No fish has ever jumped for me before or since, and I stopped reeling, amazed, paused expectantly, hoping it would jump again, but then I felt it pull sharply again, and the line grew suddenly slack, and I knew that I’d lost it, and the lure too, the line was so light. Then, as I was reeling the empty line, the fish jumped gain, almost straight out of the water, less than thirty yards away, a bit to the left of where I’d seen it jump first, and it was my fish, because I heard the jingle of the lure as it thrashed its head in the cool evening air, the fish that I hadn’t intended to catch at all.

There was the time, too, when I caught a fish even without line or hook, with my bare hands, as all of us boys, some cousins too, were sitting in the mouth of the river at Providence Bay one the evening, later in the year, one of the last times we went swimming that year, and the water was warm beneath the cold of the air. I was half-sitting, my legs folded under me, stroking the water back and forth with my arms, and then I felt something in my lap, a bunch of water weeds perhaps, so I reached down, and I found in my hands a salmon, almost still, alive but apparently unafraid. I took my hands away in reflex, but when I returned them the salmon was there still, and so, as much by reflex again as by thought, I stood, lifting it from the water, and tossed it onto the bank.

It lay in the sand, its colour muted in the dusk, flapping lethargically.  Wading out of the water, I knelt beside it, laid my hand on its side, and I felt that same loss that I had felt with my hands buried in pike gills, the same sense of unfairness, but I couldn’t bring myself to return it to the water somehow, not until a passerby began yelling about how fishing was illegal there and threatened to call the police. So I lifted it again, cradled it more like, walked it back into the shallows, released it, my body cold and shivering, but I wanted it back again the next moment, wanted to fish not just for any fish, not for the countless fish that were still unknown to me, but for that fish, for the fish that I had just been holding.

Those are the fish worth catching.  The one’s you never set out to catch but that somehow end up being caught.  The ones with stories worth knowing and worth telling, and so I don’t go fishing to catch fish.  I go fishing to catch those fish in particular, to catch their stories and their memories, to catch the salmon that I cradled in my arms like a child, to catch all the others too, the eyeless perch on the string, the shadowed trout beneath the Norisle, and the bass jumping with my lost lure, these and all the other fish I’ve ever caught or failed to catch.  I’m waiting for them, and I don’t need any others.

Once there was a baby boy named Chairon who was born into a family so large that even his parents were not sure how many children they had.  There were children old enough to go and find their own way in the world, and children old enough to run the family vineyard, and children old enough to care for the smaller children, and children like Chairon who were too young to do much of anything, and soon, as Chairon grew, there were children who were even younger still.  Among all these children, Chairon was not very remarkable.  He was neither particularly beautiful nor particularly ugly.  He had the same plain brown eyes and the same plain brown hair and the same plain broad face as the rest of his many siblings.  He was dressed in the used clothes of his older brothers, and he passed these same clothes on to his younger brothers in turn, so there was not much to distinguish him from the rest of his family, except for his peculiar love of singing.

Now, there perhaps is nothing so very peculiar about loving to sing, but Chairon loved to sing to a peculiar degree.  As an infant he cooed and gurgled at his mother’s breast as none of her other children had ever done, and as a toddler he began singing gibberish even before he could properly speak, and as a child he seemed always to be singing, day or night, at home or in the street, by himself or in the midst of a crowd.  He loved to sing, and he loved to hear others sing, and he loved most of all to sing with others, so he eagerly joined the hymns at church and the carols at Christmas and the nursery rhymes on the playground.

The problem was that Chairon had the worst voice that anyone had ever heard.  It was strained and shrill, and it was always cracking and breaking, and it was never on key, and it was continually out of rhythm.  Even his mother and father, who seemed to have love enough to spare for all their many children, could never bear to hear Chairon sing for very long, and the whole family seemed forever to be telling him, as politely as they could, to please stop singing.  Others in their little town were not nearly so polite.  The other children began chasing Chairon away whenever he sang, but when that failed to stop him, they teased him in the most horrible ways and even threw rocks at him if he dared so much as open his mouth.  Although Chairon was allowed to come to church on Sundays and to walk with the carollers at Christmas and even sometimes to sit with the children as they sang their nursery rhymes, he was never allowed to sing along, though this is what he wanted most in the world.

Things went on like this until Chairon at last turned seven years old.  This was considered a very important age in his village, and his family held a special birthday party in his honour.  They prepared all his favourite foods, and they organized all his favourite games and songs, and they invited almost everyone in town to the party.  Chairon had never been so happy, and though he wanted very much to join in the singing, he remembered that the others would only laugh at him, so he kept quiet and contented himself with hearing the voices of the townspeople.  When it came time to sing the birthday song, however, Chairon was so excited that he could no longer help himself from singing.  He began as quietly as he could, but he grew louder and louder as he became lost in the music, until at last he was singing as loudly as he could, and everyone else had grown quiet to hold their ears against his noise.

At last Chairon stopped, and all the other children began to laugh at him, and some even threw bits of food.  Their parents quickly put an end to this, and none of the older people said anything to hurt his feelings on such an important birthday, but Chairon knew that his voice had once again shamed him in front of everyone, and he could no longer bear to be near them.  He ran from the house and into the fields of the vineyard, and though his parents called after him, he kept straight on until he reached the ridge that ran along one side of the village, and then he began to climb.

He had often climbed on the ridge before, though he had not dared to go very high.  Some of the children boasted that they had climbed all the way to its top, some hundreds of feet, but Chairon had never seen anyone reach higher than fifty or so, because the face of the ridge was very sheer in places, more a cliff than a ridge despite what the villagers called it.  Chairon, however, sad and angry and ashamed as he was, determined now that he would climb to the very summit, though he was not himself quite sure what there was to be gained in so doing, and though he knew very well that he was as likely as not to fall and die in the attempt.

All that afternoon he climbed.  The cliff face was cut by ledges here and there, so he could sometimes stop and rest and sometimes work his way in one direction or another to find easier places to climb.  In this way he reached a height of a hundred feet or more before evening began to fall, and it was then that he stumbled on something like a path that cut back and forth across the cliff face in some places and ran upwards with rough steps in others.  Chairon went quite quickly now, more than doubling his height in only a short time, until the trail stopped abruptly in a small hollow.  It was walled on three sides by rocks that were far too sheer to climb, and the fourth side looked out over the small town and the sea beyond it and the setting sun beyond that.

Chairon could go no higher, not without descending to find another route, and he was too tired to go further anyway, so he sat himself on the edge of the hollow among the few grassy plants that had managed to grow there, and he looked out at the sunset.  The air at that height was clear and cool, and everything was silent except for the sound of some songbirds drifting up from far below him, and Chairon sat thinking as he had never done before. For the first time in his young life he truly understood that he would never be able to do the thing that he loved most, and for the first time also he felt the sadness that one only feels when a great love is disappointed.  He began to cry to himself, and then he heard his own shrill voice cry out loudly into the still air of the evening, “Oh, if only I could sing, if only, if only,” and at that moment the sinking sun touched the curve of the distant sea, and a shaft of its light shone full in Chairon’s eyes, and there was the sound of flapping wings, and then the light was gone, and there was sitting at Chairon’s feet a most large and handsome nightingale.  Its wings and back were the colour of rich caramel, and its breast was so grey that it might have been silver, and its eyes were large and black and bright.

“Chairon,” it said, and its voice was sweet and trilling and clear, “I am the attendant of the sun, and it is my duty each evening to sing the sun to its rest from this place, which is my pulpit.”

Chairon was so awed by the beauty of the creature and by the melody of its voice that he could say nothing.

“I heard you call to the sun,” said the nightingale “and I heard in your voice that your desire was true, and so I offer you my voice in exchange for your own, but on one condition, that you come to this very place each evening in my stead and sing to the sun as it sets.”

Chairon was still speechless, but at last he manged to nod, and instantly his mouth was opened and filled with the most beautiful sounds.  The song that came from his own throat was so marvelous, so magnificent, so wonderful that he could hardly stand its beauty, and the colours of the sunset seemed to deepen and vibrate with his song.  It was as if all the world was full of his singing, and he felt that he might sing forever, but at last the sun disappeared entirely beneath the horizon, and the song in him come to an end also, and he sank to his knees.

He realized then that the nightingale was perched on his shoulder.  “Remember,” it croaked, its voice as broken now as Chairon’s had been only a few minutes before, a sound more proper to a raven than a nightingale, “you must come each evening without fail.”

“But how will I climb all this way each day,” Chairon asked.  Though he was afraid to anger the bird, he was still more afraid of failing in his task.  “I am not even able to return to my house now that it is dark.”

“You need not climb at all,” assured the nightingale in its croaking voice.  “You must only wish yourself here or wish yourself home, and it will be so, but come you must.  Let nothing keep you from your duty, for the great star is not an easy master.”

“I will not fail,” Chairon said, and he had never meant anything more truly in all his life.  Then the nightingale launched itself into the night sky, and Chairon watched it fly as far as the thin moonlight would allow his eyes to see.

When Chairon returned home he told his parents everything that had happened.  Everyone was as amazed by his story as they were by his beautiful new voice, and his parents told him that he should do whatever the nightingale had instructed, and so every evening he wished himself to the nightingale’s pulpit, and every evening he sang to the setting sun, and people from the village gathered to hear his strong, pure voice ringing out from the cliffs high above them.  It seemed to them that the sunsets were more beautiful now than they had ever been, and the whole village stopped each evening to see the splendour of the sun setting to the sound of Chairon’s voice.

Suddenly Chairon was a favourite in the town.  He was given all the best parts in the church choir, and he was always being asked to sing at weddings and birthdays and funerals.  The village began to hold concerts for him on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, and soon people were coming from many miles around to hear him sing.  At first all of this excitement and attention made him very happy.  He loved the solemn duty of singing to the sun each evening, with the people gathered hundreds of feet below to hear him.  He loved to sing with the church choir, to sing the choral parts even more than the solos, so that he could hear his voice mingling with the voices of the others.  In fact, he still loved to sing whenever he could, even just to put his younger siblings asleep, and he was full of happiness.

As year followed year, however, Chairon became used to his new voice, and he began to forget that it had not always belonged to him.  Like many young men, he became a little vain and a little proud, and he started rejecting offers to sing just so that he could hear people flatter him and give him gifts.  He also began to feel burdened by his duty to sing to the sun each evening, especially because it meant that he could never accept offers to go and sing in the city, since the concerts were always held in the evening.  He still had everything that had made him happy before, but he was no longer truly happy, and his heart was no longer in his singing.  The other villagers noticed the change in him as well.  Though his voice was still as beautiful, they said, it no longer came from his heart, and though he still sang to the sun each evening, the sunsets no longer had their unearthly beauty, but were only sunsets, and gradually the people gave up going to hear Chairon sing from the nightingale’s pulpit altogether.

Things went on this way for some time, until one day an invitation came for Chairon to sing a concert in the city.  It seemed that the Crown Prince himself had heard of Chairon’s talent and had requested a special afternoon performance to be held in the city so that Chairon could sing for the Prince and still wish himself back to his pulpit in time to sing for the sunset.  The concert was to be held on Chairon’s fourteenth birthday as a celebration, and the program was to have Chairon performing with all the great singers and musicians that the city had to offer.  There was great excitement in the city, since all the best people in society were planning to be at the concert, and there was great excitement in Chairon’s village as well, as the city’s most famous musicians came to and fro to rehearse with the young singer.

On the day of the concert, Chairon left early for the city in a splendid coach sent to him by the Prince.   People cheered him as he entered the theatre and showered him with gifts and with praise.  It seemed that the whole world had stopped to celebrate his birthday. The concert too was wonderful.  One musician after another, only the city’s finest, stepped onto the stage to perform with Chairon, and he seemed only to sing better as the afternoon wore on.  Between each of the performances, the attending dignitaries took turns approaching the stage and offering him the most marvellous birthday gifts, and the Crown Prince himself came after the final song to present Chairon with an order of knighthood.  The applause was deafening, and the audience called for encore after encore until Chairon thought that the concert would never end.

At last, just as it seemed that the last encore had indeed been sung, the conductor motioned, and the orchestra began to play the birthday song.  The whole audience immediately took it up, and Chairon joined them happily, his clear strong voice floating above all the others.

And then, at that very moment, his voice cracked.

All in an instant he could sing nothing but the croaks and shrills that he remembered from his childhood.  He stopped in a panic and cleared his throat and tried again, but his new voice was utterly gone, and then he was seized by the terrible thought that perhaps he had stayed too late, that the sun had set without him there to sing for it.  Immediately he wished himself back to his pulpit, and just as he feared, the sun was already half hidden by the horizon, and there was the nightingale, perched on the edge of the cliff, singing the sun to its rest.

“Wait,” Chairon cried, “I have come to sing as I promised,” but the nightingale never so much as turned its head.  In desperation, Chairon began to sing along, but the words and the melodies would no longer come to him, and he could only follow the nightingale’s sweet voice with the brokenness of his own.

At last the sun had fully set, and the nightingale ceased its song.  “I am sorry, dear Chairon,” it said, “but the sun must have its song, and you were not here to sing, so I had no choice but to take back my voice and sing its song myself.”

“Can I have my voice back again,” pleaded Chairon, “now that you have finished the song?  I promise that I will never again neglect my duty.”

“Alas, Chairon,” said the nightingale, “some gifts may only be given once, and the voice of a nightingale is such a gift.”

“But what will I do?” demanded Chairon.

“You will live your life as best you can, just as every other must live.  This has always been true, and it will always be true, no matter how beautiful or how ugly a voice you have.”

“Tell me, nightingale,” said Chairon after a moment, “will I still be able to wish myself here to your pulpit?”

“Certainly,” replied the nightingale.  “That gift was never taken from you, and it would please me very much if you would join me now and again as I sing to the sun.”

“No, nightingale,” said Chairon, speaking more strongly and surely, “not now and again, for I promised that I would come and sing to the sun each evening without fail, and though I have failed in my duty today, I will not do so again.”

“You will come and sing, even without a nightingale’s voice?”

“I will.”

“This is a noble thing you promise,” said the nightingale, “but promises are more easily made than kept, as you now know, and you must keep this promise without hope of reward, for a nightingale’s voice will never more be yours.”

“I am not now making a promise in the hope of a reward,” said Chairon.  “I am only keeping a promise that I have already made and for which I have already been rewarded more than I deserve.”

Farewell, then, Chairon,” said the nightingale, “I will see you tomorrow as the sun sets.”

From that day forward, Chairon never sang again for any mortal person.  Though he took as much joy in music and in song as he always had, and though he still sought out those places where music was to be heard, he never again opened his mouth in song except when he sang to the sun each evening.

At first people still sought him out, offering to hold concerts for him or asking him to sing for the events of the village, but he refused them all, though he never told them why.  There were many rumours begun about why he had chosen to end his career just as it was beginning, but as with all things, people soon became disinterested, and other things captured their attention, and before long Chairon’s voice was only a story that people remembered now and again with a shake of the head and a wry sort of smile at what might have been.

Chairon himself sold all of the many gifts that his admirers had given him during the time of his fame, and he took this money while he was still very young, and he bought a tenant cottage from his father and worked in his father’s vineyards. In time, he married a young woman from a neighbouring village, and he had several fine children, and he kept his affairs in order, but he never again distinguished himself in any way, except perhaps for his hard work and for his kindness to his neighbours.

Each evening, however, no matter if the weather was at its worst or if his health was at its poorest or even if his wife was in the midst of labour, Chairon would wish himself to the nightingale’s pulpit and join his own poor voice with the bird’s beautiful song.  The other villagers all knew this, and they could even see him standing high on the cliff if the evening was clear and they chose to look, but his voice was no longer strong, and he never sang loudly now anyway, so they could not hear him down below, and nobody ever bothered to come and see Chairon sing.

Chairon lived in this way until he came at last to his sixty-third birthday, which was a very old age in those days.  His wife, though younger than he, had died a few winters earlier, and he could no longer do much more than feed himself, and on this particular day he was very ill indeed.  His daughter-in-law, who now cared for his house and who loved him like her own father, tried to keep him inside, saying that he was far too sick to leave the house, but Chairon would hear none of it, and he wished himself once more to the nightingale’s pulpit.  Though it was still a few minutes until the sun would set, the nightingale was already on its perch, and it spoke to Chairon, as it had not done in many years.

“Dear Chairon,” it said, “you have now been coming to sing with me these forty-nine years, and do you remember what I told you when you promised to do so all that long time ago?”

“Oh nightingale,” the old man replied, “I will remember those words even if age swallows up all others.  You said that promises are easier made than kept, and I have found this to be true, but I have kept my promise thus far, and I will keep it yet, so long as there is breath in me to sing.”

“You remember truly, Chairon, but what more did I say?”

“You said that I must keep my promise without hope of reward, but I have found that keeping my promise has been its own reward, and I have been blessed many times over again besides, blessed in my wife and in my children and in my labour.  I need no greater reward than this.”

“Even so,” said the nightingale, “I spoke wrongly then, for I have come now to grant you a reward for all your long years of singing, though it is a reward that will require an even greater duty of you than the one you promised those many years ago.  The time has come at last when I have grown young enough to put off the form of a nightingale and walk again as a mortal man on the earth, and someone must be found who will take my place as the attendant of the sun.  I offer this to you now.  Though it will bind you more closely still to the will of the sun, and though you will find it a still greater duty than the one you now bear, you will have the voice of a nightingale once more, and it will be your own for the keeping.  Will you accept this duty?”

“I will accept it,” said Chairon, and then the edge of the sun brushed the horizon, and a single beam flashed straight and true into Chairon’s eyes, and when he could see again, he knew that he had become the nightingale and that the body he had left behind him, no longer his, had become full of youth and life once more.  Chairon leapt to his perch then, and he cast his song like beams of light and like arrows, like lightening and like the crash of waves, and it was more beautiful than anything he had ever sung, more beautiful than anything he could ever have thought to sing, and the sunset that he sang that night was spoken of for a generation.

Once there was a man named Silas, a good and quiet man, a farmer, and known in all the country around for his honesty and his generosity.  He had three children: two older girls, now grown with families of their own, and a younger son, just now coming into his strength. They were good children, though the elder daughter was perhaps too proud, and the younger daughter was perhaps too vain, and the son was perhaps too willful, but something of this kind could be said about us all, and Silas was proud to be the father of three such fine children.  Indeed, the only thing that gave him sadness was that his wife had not lived to see her children grow, for she had died of a fever when her son was only a few months old.  Silas had not mourned much, for that was not his way, and there were many who said that the marriage must have been an unhappy one if so few tears were spent at its ending, but Silas had loved his wife deeply, and he never married again, though there were many women who would have been glad to have a man as honest and gentle as he was.

One day, just before midsummer, the year his younger daughter married, Silas set out to drive a few cows from his own farm to the farm of his new son-in-law who lived some way to the west.  The journey was a long one by the main road, because it led first southward through the nearest town, but there was another path of sorts, a cattle trail and a woodcutters’ track that ran more directly westward, bending only slightly to skirt Charcoal Hill and then joining the main road close by his son-in-law’s farm.  The path had been often used in earlier days, despite the many strange stories that were told of Charcoal Hill with its blackened and fire-blasted summit, but the woods had been mostly logged now, and there were fewer farms now also, so the track had fallen into disuse and become almost overgrown in places.  This suited Silas very well, for the tall grass was no obstacle to his cattle, and he was less likely to meet someone on the way who would want to talk with him if he was the only one on the road.

He had taken this path many times, first rambling as a child and then driving cattle as an adult and now visiting his children in his old age.  He had even now and again seen the forest folk who lived around Charcoal Hill, though always from a distance, just a glimmer and a shimmer and a glimpse of something unearthly, and he had always made sure to give the forest folk a wide berth, for there were too many stories of travellers who had angered the forest folk and been taken into their halls forever.  There were other stories as well, of course, where the forest folk granted wishes or wisdom to those who pleased them, but Silas had never much wanted for these things, and he had been content to see the uncanny forest dwellers from afar, though he had not seen even so much for many years.

Silas was thinking idly about these and other things as he drove his cattle along the track, whistling to himself in his quiet little half-whistle, when the air became suddenly dim and thick and golden, and he knew that forest folk were near.  He continued quietly on his path, knowing that the people of the forest most often leave alone those who mind their business, but a little man, slender and lithe, soon appeared on the path in front of him, and the cattle stopped so stiffly that they might have been frozen.  The little man looked at Silas closely and then placed his right hand over his heart.  “Mortal,” he asked, “what is it that you most desire in all the world?”

Silas chose his words carefully, not wanting to risk offence.  “Spirit,” he said, for he knew that the forest folk were pleased to be addressed in this way, “though you honour me with your question, truly, my happiness needs nothing more than it has to be complete,” though even as he said this he remembered to himself his long dead wife, and his voice betrayed him.

Your words are well chosen,” said the little man, “but they anger me, for they are untrue.”

Silas was frightened because he knew that even the least of the forest folk could be terrible when angered. “You are wise, Spirit, to see so keenly,” he said. “There is indeed something that my happiness lacks, but it was not my intent to deceive you, since the thing I desire lies not within the power of any to grant, neither man nor spirit.”

“Do you presume that I will grant what you desire?” answered the forest man.  “And are you so wise that you can judge what is possible for me?  There is much within my power.  Only do as I ask, and speak your desire truly.”

Silas did not want to speak of the wife that he had lost, but he knew that the forest man would tolerate no further lie, so he said, “Please, Spirit, the only thing my happiness lacks is the wife of my youth, for she died many years ago, and I have never found another to love so much.”

“Would you have me return her to you?”

Though Silas knew that he should be wary of gifts offered by the forest folk, his mind was suddenly full of memories, and he yearned to see his wife again, and he spoke with his passion and against his judgement.  “Oh, Spirit,” he cried, “if such a thing was possible, I would desire nothing more from this life.”

“The thing you desire is possible,” replied the forest man, “though it is difficult, even for me, and it must come at a cost.  You must go with me under the hill, and you must obtain something for me, something that lies beyond me because of my power, but that you may gain because of your weakness.  This will be our bargain: your wife in exchange for the Leaf-Crown.  Are we agreed?”

Though Silas felt even more now that he should accept nothing from the little man, he could not overcome his longing for his wife, so he bowed his head, and he said, “We are agreed,” and he felt then a sudden hurt like a knife in his left palm, and he saw his blood drip onto the forest floor to seal the bargain he had made.

“You may call me Metsan-Vaki,” said the forest man, “and you must follow me closely.  Leave your cattle behind.  No harm will come to them, but if you do not follow in my very footprints, great harm may come to you.”

So Silas followed the little man, and they made their away around the base of Charcoal Hill, first in wide circles, and then narrower, until they were winding their way around its very slopes, and all the while the sun did not move in the sky, but hung still like a distant lamp.  Their path wove this way and that in its circuit, squeezing between trees and climbing over rocks, until at last they came to a tall  stone of white quartz, roughly hewn, standing where the forest gave way to the blackened summit of the hill.

The forest man turned then and said to Silas, “Here lies the marker between your lands and mine.  Once you pass it, you may not return until our bargain is complete,” and Silas stepped past the stone.

Their way now turned uphill, toward the summit of Charcoal Hill, but it was much higher now and no longer blackened or barren but covered with a huge grove of trees that would have reached high above the rest of the forest even had they not been standing atop the highest ground in a hundred miles.  They seemed to Silas like a great fortress or cathedral, stern and massive, and he was afraid, but his feet took him ever closer to that imposing height against the little will that remained to him.

When they reached the summit of the hill at last, the trees of the great grove rose above them to such a height that Silas could not guess at it, many hundreds of feet, and the tunnels that ran between their trunks, close-spaced and massive, were like the galleries of a vast cave, dark and cool and still.  There was no brush on the floor of the great wood,  so wholly did the canopy shade the light of the sun, and the branches of the trees all lay high in the dimness, so there were only the trunks of trees to be seen, huge, like pillars for the sky.   Silas followed Metsan-Vaki among these vast trunks, but he shrank from touching them, though his guide ever chose the path that came most closely to them and never lost a chance to run his hands along the cavernous crevices of their bark.

In this way they came at last to the centre of the wood, though there was little to mark it, lying as dark and as still as the rest, only there was also a small sapling, the first that Silas had seen in all that forest, no taller than himself, with small leaves, deeply and darkly green, and with still smaller berries, wetly and lusciously red, and with a crown of many-coloured leaves, interwoven gold and green and red and brown, set on its topmost branch.

“There,” said Metsan-Vaki, “on the topmost bough, lies the Leaf-Crown.  Bring it to me, and I will restore to you the desire of your heart.”  As he said this, he cupped his hands together, and droplets of water began to bead on the trunks of the trees and on the litter of the forest floor, like a sudden dew, and the droplets rushed toward the forest man, one following the other, running up over his body and filling his hands, and then they subsided again, with a sound like a sigh, and disappeared once more.

“Look into my hands,” the forest man commanded, “and see that I can do as I have said.”

Silas was afraid almost to sickness of what he would see in those hands, but he could no longer command himself, and he stumbled to his knees before the little man and looked into his cupped hands.  There, just as he remembered her, was the face of his wife, so many years gone from him, and he began to weep at the sight.  Her eyes were closed, as though she were sleeping, and Silas knew that he would not now refuse anything the forest man asked of him.

He rose to his feet and rushed toward the sapling at the centre of the clearing, neither knowing nor caring what might await him there, but as he reached to take the crown from where it lay on the highest bough, his sight was overcome by a vision of such power that he could move no further.  No longer could he see the sapling or its crown, but in every direction he seemed to be surrounded by the most beautiful figures, tall and grave and green-gold and filled with light, and their voices spoke as one, like a great chorus, and the sound of it was like a great music.

“Mortal,” they asked, “by what right do you take the Leaf-Crown?”

Silas was filled by a great dread, and he despaired that he would ever see his wife again, but he was by nature an honest man, and he felt besides that these spirits would surely penetrate any deception, so he spoke his heart truly.  “I take the crown by no right that I know,” he confessed, “but only by the instruction of another, so that he will restore to me my wife who has been dead now these fifteen years.”

“To whom would you give the crown?” the spirits sang, and there was concern now in their singing, though their faces remained unmoved.  “Who promises to return the dead to the living?”

“His true name is unknown to me,” said Silas, “for he is one of the forest folk, and they guard their names closely, but he told me that I might call him Metsan-Vaki, if this name is known to you.”

The faces of the spirits were suddenly moved, and they swirled among each other, blending themselves together into one great light of green and gold, and their song became filled with anger.  “Mortal,” they said, “the laws that govern the Leaf-Crown compel us to grant you the Leaf-Crown, for you will not purpose to do evil with its power, but you must know that great evil may be done if you give the crown to Metsan-Vaki.  Though he is a creature more of mischief and trickery than of evil, he will certainly do great harm should he have the power of the Leaf-Crown.  Though we cannot deny the crown to you, still we would beg that you refrain from taking it, though we know that it means sacrificing what is most dear to you.”

As they said this, the column of light began to dissolve into separate figures once again, still tall and grave and beautiful, and Silas could see that their faces were saddened and grim, and he thought to himself that they had little hope in his choice, but were prepared already to have Metsan-Vaki wear the crown.  Silas felt in himself the demand of both his duty and of his heart, and it seemed to him that they waged a very war in his spirit, so that he knew nothing but their conflict.  “Please, Great Spirits,” he asked, “is it true that Metsan-Vaki has the power to return my wife to me?”

“Yes,” they replied, “once he wears the Leaf-Crown, Metsan-Vaki will be able to do many things, even make the dead live, though the cost to him will be very great.  His oath to you binds him, and he will grant your wife to you as he has promised.  Is this your choice then?  Will you take the crown?”

Such was the conflict in Silas that he could not at first reply, and when words came to him at last, they seemed not of his choosing, but of another who spoke through him.  “Please,” he begged again, “I know my duty, but I also know my heart, and I cannot choose between them.  Is there no choice that might bring them into unity?”

“No,” the spirits sang, gently now, “Our nature will not allow us to return your wife to you, and your weakness, even with the Leaf-Crown, would make it impossible for you to raise her yourself.  If you were to attempt this thing, you would surely join her in death rather than have her join you in life.”

These words, though they were not meant as a consolation, came to Silas like a fresh hope, and he suddenly knew his course.  “I will take the Leaf-Crown,” he said, and the singing of the great spirits lapsed instantly into silence, and they disappeared from his sight, and he awoke to himself and found that he had indeed seized the crown in both his hands.

“Yes!” cried Metsan-Vaki, his face filled with a sudden and terrible joy, “now give me the crown, and I will grant you what your heart desires!”

Silas held the crown in his hands for a moment, and he felt the certainty of his choice, and he set the crown on his own head, and he willed nothing other than his own death, that he would be where his wife lay waiting for him, and then the clearing was filled with a fierce light, white beyond all whiteness, and he was gone, leaving the Leaf-Crown on the branch where it had first rested, and it is said that Metsan-Vaki’s eyes were ever after blind.

I have a suspicion that this piece would benefit from some introduction, but I am unsure that I can give it, so I guess you will just need to make of it what you can.

Hurtling

So, we’re on this train, and we’re hurtling along.  Actually, let me interrupt.  I hope you don’t mind that I’m using the word ‘hurtling’ here.  It’s too obvious a word, I know. It’s the sort of word people are always using to describe a train.  They might say ‘chugging’ instead, or maybe ’steaming’, but we’re talking about a diesel locomotive here, so most would just say ‘hurtling’ or something equally unoriginal.  What I like about the word ‘hurtle’, though, even if it lacks imagination, is that you can make it sound like a train running over the railroad ties.  You just need to put the emphasis on the second syllable.  You know, “hur-TEL, hur-TEL, hur-TEL.”  Say it a few times.  You’ll see what I mean.

Anyway, like I said, we’re hurtling along to the city.  That’s where we’re going, whether we want to or not. This is also why I think ‘hurtling’ is a good word, because it says to me that the train is out of control, which is true.  Not that someone isn’t in control of it, I hope, but it’s certainly out of my control.  Out of our control.  We’re going to the city, and there’s nothing we can do about it, assuming that we wanted to do something, though I’m not sure we do.  Trains always hurtle like this.  You never have any control over them.  Once you get on, you have to wait until they stop.  You don’t get a brake or a steering wheel.  You don’t get a chance to turn around or take the next exit or choose a different destination.  Trains just hurtle, and so we’re hurtling.

This is what I like about the train, now that I think about it.  You never have to decide what turn to take.  You never have to watch for an exit.  You never even have to pull a cord when it’s your stop.  You just get on or not, and when the train stops, you get off or not.  The rest is just being, just being on a train, letting it go where it’s going, letting it fulfill its destiny.  The rest is just hur-TEL, hur-TEL, hur-TEL.

Okay, I know this story isn’t getting anywhere very quickly.  I’ll try to stay on subject from here on in, I promise.  So, where was I?  Right.  We’re still on this train, just being on the train, and it is, should I say it again, hurtling toward the city, whether we like it or not, and we’re cut off from everything outside us.  We’re cut off by our speed, I think, and by our destination.

Of course, I should be careful of saying ‘our’ like this, careful of saying ‘we’, though I don’t know what to say instead.  There aren’t any better words I don’t think, but we should still be careful, because there isn’t really any ‘we’, and there isn’t really any ‘our’.  We’re as cut off from each other as we’re cut off from everything else.  The train hurtles, and we hurtle too. We have our own velocities, our own destinations.  We can’t turn to the right or the left.  There’s no exit for us to take.  We just hurtle.

I’m sorry for talking in metaphors like this.  I’m sure it’s only boring you.  I’m not at all saying that you’re like a train or even that you’re hurtling like a train, whatever that might mean.  I don’t know myself.  Actually, now that I’ve said it once, maybe you are like a train.  Just a little.  But I’m not very attached to the idea, so you can take it or leave it, whatever you like.

What I really mean to say is that there isn’t any ‘we’ here on the train.  No, that’s not even quite right.  What I really mean to say is that whatever ‘we’ there is here doesn’t mean much.  We’re only a ‘we’ because all of us are sitting here, just being on the train, all listening to the hur-TEL, hur-TEL, hur-TEL.  That’s our only ‘we’.

Except for our cellphones and laptops, of course.  These make a ‘we’ of sorts.  They keep us from being cut off by the train, more or less, in their way, don’t they?  Or maybe they don’t.  I don’t know.  Maybe they’re only looking for a ‘we’ that they never manage to find.  And maybe, though I said I wouldn’t talk like this any more, maybe we’re all hurtling along, hur-TEL, hur-TEL, hur-TEL, and calling from out of our velocities, our destinations, trying to make a ‘we’, creating the illusion of a ‘we’.  At least, that’s the sort of thing I might say if I thought it would interest you, which I’m sure it doesn’t.

You’d probably much rather I just went on with the story about the train.  I can understand that.  I’d want the same, if I were you.  I’d want to hear about where this train is going.  Actually, I was just about to say, “I’d want to hear about where this train is hurtling,” only you’re likely tired of the word ‘hurtling’ by this point.  Even I’m getting tired of it, but it’s hard to give up on a word once you’ve started with it, and I have a lot invested in this word by now, so we’ll both have to live with it.  I can’t avoid the sound anyway, not here.  It’s just hurt-TEL, hur-TEL, hur-TEL.  Hurtle, hurtle, hurtle.  There’s no escaping it.

In fact, I’m not sure that anything else about this story even matters.  If it does, and it might, for all I know, I certainly can’t tell it anymore.  Not with that sound in my ears: hur-TEL, hur-TEL, hur-TEL.  Hurtling.

Here is a story that I have been writing over the last few weeks, though bits of it are far older than that.  It is long for this medium, very long, so those who would prefer to read it offline can avail themselves of this printable file.

Mister Laurence Bailey

At exactly noon, on a Saturday in October, Mister Laurence Bailey began slowly to ascend into heaven.

He had been standing where he always stood on a Saturday morning, in the little courtyard between the farmer’s market and the railroad overpass, across from the rows of bicycle racks, a place that had become his own by common consent of the people who passed him each week, though the place itself had changed around him over the years, particularly when a now forgotten session of the city council, quite ignorant of Mister Laurence Bailey and of the material effects that their decision would have on him, tendered a contract to beautify Norfolk Street, which ran along the west side of the market, including Mister Bailey’s courtyard in its sidewalk, and then led under the railroad overpass, where the beautification project’s first phase ended, not to be followed by a second phase until several years had passed and until a sudden downturn in the economy prompted a national stimulus program that made funds available to municipalities for just such infrastructure projects. This was called putting tax dollars to work, even though the tax dollars being collected did not remotely cover these funds, but before the stimulus dollars went to work, the municipal taxes had done a little work of their own, widening the sidewalks, and adding new trees to the boulevards, and replacing the old wooden light posts with tall new metal ones that had decorative metalwork hanging from them in the shape of the city’s crest. These changes, which forced Mister Bailey away from his regular place for several months, were the only interruption to his weekly routine that anyone could remember, though he seemed himself unperturbed by the disruption, keeping right on with his business a few hundred feet down the sidewalk until he was able to return to his regular courtyard, which was now, at least according to some municipal office’s understanding of urban landscape design, slightly more beautiful.

On the Saturday that he began to drift skyward, Mister Bailey, or Bailey-o, as he was most commonly known, especially among his market customers and among his friends at the local drop-in, was in his courtyard, across from the bicycles, and he was leaning over the writing stand that he had constructed from an old wooden wagon that had once been red and was now an indeterminate weathered-grey with flecks of its original colour, like glitter, glistening here and there. In the middle of this wagon there stood a heavy wooden lectern, the former property, it could only be assumed, of a church hall or of a university classroom, dating from a time when lecterns were not only more commonly used in these places but were also of much greater significance, reflecting so essentially on the honour and the dignity of the speakers who stood behind them that they warranted an honour and a dignity of their own. This particular specimen was carved in ornate patterns of vines and flowers along its upper and lower edges, and its support had been finely turned from a single piece of oak that was something like ten inches across at its widest points, so it retained a kind of august solidity despite its many dents and its peeling varnish and its rather undignified means of transportation. Unlike the wagon, however, its wood was not weathered, a distinction due to a quite massive umbrella that was clamped to its upper edge, an umbrella so large and so productive of lift in windy weather that it required an object of no less weight than its ancient and ponderous lectern to keep it from flying into the heavens. In fact, the battle between the force of gravity operating on the lectern and the force of lift operating on the umbrella became, at times, so fierce that the umbrella itself was a casualty, and Baily-o had long ago learned to keep a spare or two in the bottom of his wagon, though where he was able to find a steady supply of umbrellas in so a vast size no one was quite sure.

However he got them, at least one of these umbrellas went with Baily-o everywhere, even in the best of weather, and even between Saturdays, when his wagon and lectern were left behind, wherever it was that he found space to store them, which was a subject of some discussion among Baily-o’s adherents. What was certain was that he did not keep the wagon and its contents under the bridge where he most often slept, nor at any of the houses where he was known to go when weather drove him indoors, but nothing else definite could be discovered. Though there were those who kept him company on his way back from the market to shed light on just this mystery, and though there were even those who followed him secretly at a distance to surprise him in the act of hiding his things away, they all reported that the wagon stayed with Baily-o for hours at a time, or perhaps only for a few minutes, but in every case, until the exact moment when the onlookers were distracted, and then it disappeared, wherever he happened to be just then, and this was accounted as merely one more sign that Baily-o was made of slightly more than common stuff.

Even when the wagon had disappeared, however, the umbrella remained, though it was infrequently opened even when the rain was at its worst. It rested most often on Baily-o’s shoulder, its great length reaching a few feet over his head, making him seem like a soldier parading with a spear, which had at first caused him no little conflict with the police, who maintained, perhaps with some cause, that the umbrella was far larger than any one man could need for any purpose except that of a weapon, and they had confiscated a dozen or so of them before it became obvious that Baily-o was not really a threat to public safety and not at all worth the effort to disarm, though the confiscated umbrellas were never returned, which was a sore point among some of Baily-o’s disciples, even if their master himself did not seem much concerned about it, but then, Bailey-o did not seem much concerned even that he had disciples.

It was these very disciples, who would perhaps be better called adherents, or even hangers-on, since Baily-o was never seen to encourage them even in the smallest degree, who first saw his feet leave the ground on the Saturday in question. There were four of these hangers-on gathered around the public bench behind Bailey-o’s wagon, across from the bicycle racks, one of them actually sitting on the bench, and the others standing near it or leaning on it, and it was one of those who was leaning who first noticed the growing space between Bailey-o’s shoes and the sidewalk. His name was Jackie,which was his given name, not his nick-name, and he had spent the greater part of his life struggling with having what he considered a feminine name, introducing himself to everyone as “Jack, not Jackie, just Jack,” so that everyone now called him Not-Jackie-just-Jack, which seemed both to please and infuriate him in equal measure.

When Not-Jackie-just-Jack realized that something strange was happening to Bailey-o’s relationship with gravity, something that defied all of the admittedly few laws of nature and probability that were known to him, he began instinctively to alert his fellow hangers-on, but his mouth was just at that moment filled with one of the delicious breakfast sandwiches from the cafe at the far end of the market, sandwiches that were justly famous among the market’s patrons for their freshly fried eggs and back bacon. This cafe, besides serving these sandwiches, was also the only place in the market that sold brewed coffee, organic and fairly traded and available in ceramic mugs that could be borrowed and returned so that coffee drinkers could avoid using a paper cup, all of which was to be expected given the market’s peculiar demographic, so the cafe sometimes attracted large lineups of customers waiting for their morally impeccable coffees and their gastronomically depraved sandwiches, a wait that Not-Jackie-just-Jack had endured only moments before, causing him to be very hungry indeed by the time that he got his sandwich. This was why he was eating just a little too quickly as he saw Baily-o begin his skyward drift, and so his attempts at speech were muffled by a mouth that was far too full, and he choked on a bit of bacon in his haste, and he ended up saying nothing at all, but only spewing the better part of his sandwich onto the ground and then falling into a fit of coughing that, far from drawing the eyes of his companions to the ascending Bailey-o, succeeded only in fixing their attention, and their ridicule, on his convulsive gasps and wheezes.

None of this commotion seemed to distract Bailey-o, however, who remained bent over his work, even as his feet became separated from the ground by several inches, and it had as little effect on his clients, who stood in a line, much smaller than that of the cafe, a line of only three or four, waiting for the greeting cards that Bailey-o wrote and drew and otherwise produced by hand, the business that had occupied him each Saturday morning, and only on Saturday mornings, for well more than a decade, during which time he had created thousands of these cards and given rise to the countless miraculous stories that were the source both of his fame and of the small clutch of devotees, choking or laughing, largely ignored, who sat on the bench behind him.

The cards appeared insignificant enough, not only at first glance but at any glance, being handwritten in an overly elaborate script that many of his clients, but only those who did not know any better, described as calligraphy, and being formed from card stock in a mottled colour that would have been called off-white if the package did not specify clearly that its proper name was “Parchment”. The text of the card, which Bailey-o did not allow his clients to supply, restricting their input to the name of the person to whom the card was to be addressed and the occasion on which it was to be given, was most often merely a bit of folk wisdom, a common saying, a message from a fortune cookie, a quotation from the more popular sorts of spiritual writers, or a passage from one of several sacred scriptures: “He who hurries cannot walk with dignity,” one might say, or “Kind words make kind echoes,” or “Love covers a multitude of sins,” or “Shallow brooks are noisy while still waters run deep,” and so on, never straying far from cliche and aphorism, and never seeming to be anything more than the work of a very amateur artist, even if they were also decorated with little cartoons and line drawings that remained, as far as anyone else could tell, entirely unrelated to the text of the card, which was itself most often entirely unrelated to the occasion on which it was to be presented.

Even so, there must have been a few people, at least in the beginning, who bought Bailey-o’s cards without expecting them to be anything more than cards, out of pity, perhaps, or novelty, or laziness, or any of the other reasons that people do things that they might not otherwise do, and some of these people, only a few at first, but then more and more as it became a phenomenon and everyone wanted to play a part, began to attribute the most extraordinary happenings, impossibly but also unavoidably, to the cards themselves.

One early story, perhaps the earliest, though these things are always difficult to determine so far after the fact, was told by a woman named Josephine, a public school teacher incidentally, though this fact does not bear materially on the story, who had bought a card from Bailey-o as a Birthday gift for her father, with whom she had only a very strained relationship, on his birthday. The card read, “Happy Birthday John Snider,” for that was the name of the woman’s father, “Where one race finishes is where another race begins,” and it had an orb that looked something like a sun drawn in the top left corner corner and a very little man, drawn in the bottom right corner,with an exceedingly long beard that intertwined with some of the letters in a jumbled and confusing way, which was not, you must admit, the sort of thing that might be expected to cause a miracle, not of any sort. Yet, immediately upon receiving the card, John Snider, long known both for his grim determination in keeping his grudges and for his mangled right hand, the result of an old industrial accident, burst into tears, begged his daughter’s forgiveness for years of mistreatment, embraced her warmly, and discovered, immediately upon releasing her, that his mangled hand was now as whole as it had been before it was injured some thirty years before, not even suffering from the arthritis that plagued the rest of his body.

Another story, from a slightly later time, as far as these things can be determined, concerned a young man named Al,sometimes known as Alley-Cat, or sometimes, to distinguish him from some other possible Al, as Al-with-the-big-hair, who had made himself a reputation as a jack of all petty thievery and shady dealing. According to Al himself, he had received one of Bailey-o’s cards anonymously, or found it, actually, lying on his diningroom table, at which there had never been any actual dining since it had come into Al’s possession through means that he did not now quite remember. He had been unsure even that the card was intended for him, since it did not include his name, reading only, “Think like a man of action; act like a man of thought,” and it had a chain of strange little animals, like monstrous pets, drawn around its edges. Al, never one to cry, remained entirely dry-eyed, but the experience still clearly moved him, as he said himself, “It was like my soul got a good kick in the balls,”and he promptly went out and began trying to make amends with the multitude of people that he had swindled, robbed, cheated, fleeced, and otherwise victimized over the years, returning stolen items, confessing to an astonishing number of petty crimes, finding himself a straight job with a local stone mason, and even beating, without a single sign of withdrawal, his small but growing crack habit, though he still smoked better than a pack of cigarettes a day and saw no reason to do without an occasional joint, but only when he was under too much stress, for example, or at the end of a long day, or when he was having some friends over, but not more than, you know, eight or ten times a week.

When these kinds of stories began to spread, slowly, to be sure, but steadily, Bailey-o’s courtyard began to fill in proportion, more and more, Saturday by Saturday, as people came looking for a card that would change, if not their lives, at least a particular circumstance, paying their dollars for “Parchment” card stock that told them only,”Respect ends when you stop giving it,” or “Counting time is not as important as making time count,” or “You cannot teach a wolf how to live in the forest,” but that held the hope of something miraculous, even if the hope was mostly, as they soon found, vain. Much more quickly than the original rumours of the miraculous cards had spread, it also became widely known that the cards could not be coerced, that they granted their miracles in whatever way they would, or not at all, and that they rarely, perhaps never, granted the miracle that had driven the buyer to Bailey-o’s cart in the first place.

One story that began to be told about this time, testifying to the unpredictable nature of the card-granted miracles, was about an elderly woman whose son had been struck by a car and, though living, was no longer able even to recognize his own mother, so the woman had gone to Bailey-o and asked him to draw a card for her son, hoping desperately that a miracle might return her child to his senses, but when she placed the card in her son’s hands, and when she then read it to him herself, “Nothing is impossible to a willing heart,” he remained exactly as he was, only a light like a halo appeared around him, and he began to speak in a language that neither the woman nor anyone else could identify, continuing day and night, an indecipherable oracle, even while his mother changed his diapers and tried to feed him through the unceasing movement of his lips.

This story, and others like it, strange and incomprehensible, reduced Bailey-o’s business considerably, by all accounts, but they did not entirely deter the desperate and the curious, so he still sold enough cards to cover his needs, which were by no means great, and he still maintained a certain notoriety in the city, especially in the drop-ins and food banks, where he was a regular patron but also a regular volunteer, and where he was a great favourite, especially with the older women and with the socially awkward of either gender, to whom he merely listened, hour after hour, saying nothing very much at all, except perhaps, when something seemed to be expected of him, he might offer one of his aphorisms, saying to an elderly pensioner, without any particular relevance to her complaint, “A wise man accomplishes his goals without the love of violence,” or to a recovering addict, again with little obvious reason, “Goodness is a flame that can never be extinguished,” and those who were listening to him would nod, feeling that some great wisdom had been imparted, and would discover, sometimes, that something had changed in them, something that was, if not exactly miraculous, then at least not insignificant.

Some of those who spoke with Bailey-o in this way, not the hangers-on but the lovers-of, went so far as to suggest that it was not what he said or wrote that was miraculous at all, claiming that he granted the miracles, unwittingly to be sure, merely by his attention, that the wonders and marvels were only the outward signs of his inward care, and that Bailey-o’s true difference from his fellow creatures lay in his miraculous capacity to care, though they admitted that the full extent of this care was not necessarily evident to the casual observer, to whom he appeared only to be writing cards and offering a listening ear, but they maintained, against any opposition, and there were plenty of unbelievers, that his cards were the signs of an almost supernatural love for his fellow man

It is unfortunate, perhaps, that none of these believers were present when Bailey-o actually began his heavenward ascent, for they at least would have recognized it for what it was, as an ascension into heaven, justly granted by whatever gods ruled over such things, and would have behaved with the proper decorum: kneeling, raising their arms to heaven, weeping in loss and in gratitude, and offering the other gestures that these kinds of occasions might be supposed to require. In the event, however, there were only Bailey-o’s hangers-on present, otherwise distracted, and a small line of customers, the usual assortment of the curious and the forlorn, and Bailey-o himself, who was leaning over his lectern, writing what would be his last card, an elaborate piece that had been commissioned by a tall man in cowboy boots and black jeans and a baggy sweater, a local of no fixed address for whom Bailey-o made a card almost every week, a man who was locally known as Cockroach Boots or just Boots, a name that he wore with a great deal of dignity, since it referred to his most prized possession. Boots, who loved nothing better than the opportunity to display his cowhide footwear, continually putting them up on chairs and benches at the drop-in or in the local coffee shops, was standing with one foot conspicuously apart from his body, the black denim of his pants tucked neatly into the top of his beloved boots, and he was looking in the direction of these boots, both to admire them and to signal to others that there was something there to be admired, when he saw another set of feet, not so far from his own, hovering a few inches above the ground, and he became, not the first to see Bailey-o’s ascent, this distinction belonging to someone who was coughing too violently to take much pleasure from it at the moment, but the first to exclaim about it, calling out, more awed than excited,”Holy crap, man. You’re flying.”

Bailey-o ignored Boots altogether, only grabbing the lectern with his left hand and leaning himself forward so that he could keep writing, even as his feet kept rising, until his body was almost parallel to the ground, his right hand busily writing his last card, while everyone else in the area, alerted by Boot’s exclamation, was looking on by now, pointing and talking excitedly, and edging closer, though too frightened yet to approach the phenomenon closely. Even Boots, who was closest, had not dared to touch Bailey-o, but when the writer’s feet had actually risen above his head, so that he looked to be working on the card while balanced precariously on the lectern by a single hand, Boots could restrain himself no longer, and he stepped forward, or dashed perhaps, and he clasped Bailey-o by the shoulders, holding him there for a moment, his feet now much higher than his head, looking like some kind of circus performer, balancing on one hand and writing with the other. Bailey hung like this for several seconds, and then he set the pen aside and offered the newly finished card to Boots, who let go, instinctively, of Mister Laurence Bailey’s shoulders to take it, and then gave a little cry of shock as the other man, entirely free now of the earth that had bound him every previous second of his life, drifted ever higher and then disappeared.

Those who had witnessed the event, among them the hangers-on, still gathered around the bench, but now no longer choking or laughing, lapsed into a great silence, and it seemed to them all that Boots, standing beside Bailey-o’s wagon and holding the last artifact of Bailey-o’s pen, was somehow meant to preside over what would happen next, a feeling that even Boots himself sensed strongly, and so he opened the last card, which seemed the thing to do, and he read aloud the last message, which said only, but absolutely, “Love one another.”

She appeared in the light of a streetlamp across the darkened parking lot and approached him obliquely, as if slipping into the wake of a ship, closing the distance between them until he could see her in the periphery of his vision, matching his pace a few steps behind him and to his left. She looked unremarkable, though underdressed for the cold of a spring night, wearing only a light blouse and a pair of dirty jeans against a temperature that made fog of her breath and kept her hands buried in her pockets, arms pressed to her sides. In her eyes and mouth their was a kind of prettiness, but her cheeks and chin were sagging and heavy, as were the breasts and belly that dominated her figure unpleasantly, disproportionate with her narrow hips, her thin legs and arms.

She began speaking to him suddenly, without introduction, looking fixedly ahead of her, avoiding his eyes, even when he turned his head to the sound of her voice. Her words were quick, delivered in short, emotionless bursts. “My boyfriend took off,” she said, “with all my stuff. I need some money, to get back east, where I’m from, ’cause I just have what I’m wearing, and I don’t really need to eat or anything, but I can’t get home.” She paused, glanced briefly at him, gaging his response, then continued in the same tone, “Is there any way I could make forty bucks with you tonight?”

Both she and he had continued walking, as if stopping would be to admit the embarrassment of their exchange. “I have no money,” he replied at last, but her footsteps continued to match his expectantly. “I have a car,” he said then, after a moment. “I could give you a ride somewhere, but I really don’t have any money.” Even still she followed, and they were approaching his car very quickly.

He stopped, turning to face her, his eye catching hers for a moment. “I don’t need a ride,” she said, then ducked her head. “I need money, just forty bucks. I’ll do whatever.”

He was held there by her somehow, though he could find in himself no desire to buy from her what she offered, would not have followed the desire even if he had found it, but there seemed to be no response that would release him from her. She raised her eyes to him again, and he instinctively looked away. “Sorry, I have no money,” he said a third time, and he turned to his car, opened the door, and bent to enter it.

She suddenly spoke again, her voice no longer empty but touching lightly a kind of sadness. “I hope you don’t think I’m a whore. I’m not. I just need to get home, you know?” He closed the door and drove past her through the streetlamps and the darkness.