From Word To Word

After much begging, cajoling, and threatening, my local library has added several Roberto Bolano books to its collection, which I am now in the process of reading.  I will write more about them later, once I have finished the last of them, The Third Reich, but I could not resist posting a sentence from the one I have just finished, Night in Chile, a remarkable little novel.  It had several sentences that deserved being posted, and even one that I had initially planned to post until I ran across this one, which manages to summarize the entirety of the Allende regime in Chile while also running through an education in classical Greek literature, more than most people would attempt in an entire novel never mind a single, staggering sentence.

“I started with Homer, then moved on to Thales of Miletus, Xenophanes of Colophon, Alcmaeon of Croton, Zeno of Elea (wonderful), and then a pro-Allende general was killed, and Chile restored diplomatic relations with Cuba and the national census recorded a total of 8,884,746 Chileans and the first episodes of the soap opera The Right to Be Born were broadcast on television, and I read Tyrtaios of Sparta and Archilochos of Paros and Solon of Athens and Hipponax of Ephesos and Stesichoros of Himnera and Sappho of Mytilene and Anakreon of Teos and Pindar of Thebes (one of my favourites), and the government nationalized the copper mines and then the nitrate and steel industries and Pablo Neruda won the Nobel Prize and Diaz Casanueva won the National Literature  Prize and Fidel Castro came on visit and many people thought he would stay and live in Chile for ever and Lafourcade published White Dove and I gave it a good review, you might say I hailed it in glowing terms, although deep down I knew it wasn’t much of a book, and the first anti-Allende march was organized, with people banging pots and pans, and I read Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, all the tragedies, and Alkaios of Mytilene and Aesop and Hesiod and Heroditus (a titan among authors), and in Chile there were shortages and inflation and black marketeering and long queus for food and Farewell’s estate was expropriated in the Land Reform along with many others and the Bureau of Women’s Affairs was set up and Allende went to Mexico and visited the seat of the United Nations in New York and there were terrorist attacks, and I read Thucydides, the long wars of Thucydides, the rivers and plains, the winds and the plateaux that traverse the time-darkened pages of Thucydides, and the men he describes, the warriors with their arms, and the civilians, harvesting grapes, or looking from a mountainside at the distant horizon, the horizon where I was just one among millions of beings still to be born, the far-off horizon Thucydides glimpsed and me there trembling indistinguishably, and I also reread Demosthenes and Menander and Aristotle and Plato (whom one cannot read too often), and there were strikes and colonel of a tank regiment tried to mount a coup, and a camera man recorded his own death on film, and then Allende’s navel aide-de-camp was assassinated and there were riots, swearing, Chileans blaspheming, painting on walls, and then nearly half a million people marched in support of Allende, and then came the coup d’etat, the putsch, the military uprising, the bombing of La Moneda and when the bombing was finished, the president committed suicide and that put an end to it all.”

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.”

I hate writers.

I like people who write, of course, like them very much, even the bad ones.  I also like people who do not write, especially the ones who express themselves creatively through other forms.  But I hate writers, those people who are so worried about being a writer, looking like a writer, talking like a writer, and otherwise occupying the role of the writer that they cannot be bothered with actually writing.

You can tell people who write from writers quite easily.  People who write, actually write.  Writers, however, spend all their time going to writers’ groups and writer’s conferences, and writers’ festivals and writers’ seminars.  They attend book launches and book signings, read books on how to get published, sit on local arts boards, and are always talking about the one short story they published back in university, just the student arts magazine, of course, but still quite an accomplishment for a young and aspiring writer, don’t you think.  When you ask them about their writing, they inevitably talk about the hell of sitting in front of a blank screen, drinking mug after caffeinated mug, struggling against all life’s petty distractions, just to say something real, you know, something meaningful, something that will show what kind of writer they really are.

When it comes to writing, however, the very first criterion is whether or not you actually write.  You either write, or you do not.  Things are really that simple.  There are other criteria, far more ambiguous, that separate good writers from bad, most of which I fear I fail, but the first question is always whether or not you actually write.  Do you have the need to write, the drive to write, the compulsion to write, the discipline to write?  Are you unable to go without writing?  Is it necessary to you, like an addiction or disease?  Then you are a writer, no matter how badly you write.  Do you spend more time reading books about writing and going to book signings than you actually do writing?  Then you are not a writer, no matter how much you claim to be.

We will be screening Paul Saltzman’s Prom Night in Mississippi for Dinner and a Doc this November the 12th. The film portrays the story of the 2008 prom at Charlston High School in Mississippi, which Morgan Freeman offers to fund if it will be the first racially integrated prom in the school’s history. In the course of events, the film also explores the current state of race relations in the American south. Here are a few links for those who would like to see more about the film:

1) The official website for the film;
2) An interview with director, Paul Saltzman; and
3) An interview with Morgan Freedom.

We will meet as usual at First Baptist Church, Guelph, which is located at 255 Woolwich Street, eating at 5:30 and beginning the film at about 6:00. There is no childcare, so children are only welcome if their parents will supervise them during the film. Please post a comment or send me an email to let me know if you will be coming and if you would like to bring something to contribute to the meal.

Here is the schedule for upcoming months:

December 10th – Off for Christmas
January 14th – South of the Border by Oliver Stone
February 11th – Vernon, Florida by Errol Morris

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.

Guelph’s Festival of Moving Media opens tonight and runs through the weekend.  The new baby and various other commitments are going to keep me from seeing as much of it as I would like, but I will get to as much as I can.  If you are interested in the program, you can check it out on the festival’s website, and if you are planning to see something, let me know, and I will try to join you.

Dinner and a Doc will resume this October the 15th. We will be screening Brett Morgan’s Chicago 10, which tells the story of the eight people who were charged in relation to protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the two lawyers who represented them. The film is unique as a documentary because it works extensively with written transcripts of the trial that are read by voice actors and then animated. Here are a few links for those who would like to see more about the film:

1) The official trailer for the film;
2) The official website of director Brett Morgan; and
3) An inteview with director Brett Morgan.

Because of the very new addition of a baby girl to our family, my wife will not be available to run any activities for children this year, so children are only welcome if parents are willing to supervise them during the film.

We will meet as usual at First Baptist Church, Guelph, which is located at 255 Woolwich Street, eating at 5:30 and beginning the film at about 6:00. Please post a comment or send me an email to let me know if you will be coming and if you would like to bring something to contribute to the meal.

Here is the schedule for upcoming months:

November 12th - Prom Night in Mississippi by Paul Saltzman
December 10th – Off for Christmas
January 14th – South of the Border by Oliver Stone

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.

So, at last, I can share the excitement that postponed Dinner and a Doc this month and that has kept our two blogs even quieter than usual.

Our family is very happy to announce that we will be adopting a baby girl, just two months old.  Because she will come to us initially as a foster placement until she is legally a crown ward, I am not allowed to share any identifying details.  All I can say is that she is gorgeous and that we are thrilled to have her join our family.  There are literally no words adequate to the joy we are feeling.

Practically speaking, this means that I will just drop Dinner and a Doc this month.  I will post the information for our next date in due time.

Also, although we are mostly prepared for the baby, we are still looking for a running stroller, so if anyone has one to lend, we would appreciate it.

If you would like to come by and visit the new addition to the family, just give us a call.  We would love to share our joy with you.

I will need to postpone Dinner and a Doc this month.  I apologize for leaving the announcement so late, but I was hoping that some family matters (good and exciting matters, but still time consuming) might clear up in time to hold our screening on its usual date.  Unfortunately, our family’s schedule remains very much unclear, and would be impossible for me to schedule something else this weekend.  I will announce the new date as soon as I can, and I am sorry if I have inconvenienced anyone by canceling so close to the date.