Country of Cold (19 page)

When the wood had cooled, she loosened off the clamps and examined the beam. It retained the graceful curve she had impressed upon it. She sat on a sawhorse, admiring it. This had been a straight and solid oak beam. You could have carved it. Now, cold, its new bend would hardly bend itself when she put all her weight on it. This was the best thing she had done so far.

When that poor girl’s mother had called to tell her what Brandy had done to her daughter, Carol had been
unable to say even a word in reply. She listened to the other woman’s anger abstractly, like she was listening in on one of those times that the telephone circuits get crossed and strangers start talking back and forth, unaware of their listener. It was only when she paused after the long bitter monologue and accusation that Carol snapped to, and expressed regret and sympathy for the clothes, the bruising, and the ripped earlobe, from where the girl’s earring had been caught. She offered to pay for the clothes. The other woman was baffled by the proposal.

With the ribs of the boat lined up protruding and parallel out of the keel, the boat looked more than ever like the skeletal fish it was in her imagination, belly to the sky, or, in this instance, the ceiling of the increasingly crowded shop. It felt to her now that she was making real progress. She started the planking, with the fragrant yellow cedar, an hour after the last rib was in place. She could see the vessel forming itself rapidly now, her eyes closed, sitting on a sawhorse and drinking whiskey, and she pictured the bow surging into the sea

By March the days were getting longer again and the planking and decking were complete. Carol had opted for a very spare interior. Her berth was narrow and enclosed. The galley consisted only of a two-burner kerosene stove and some counter space and a sink. There was no refrigerator, no pressurized water, only a bronze
hand pump. There were kerosene lamps, ordered from a chandlery in Vancouver, which swung from the cabin top. When she lit them, the whole boat glowed orange, like very oblique sunlight in late autumn. On relatively warm nights, she took to sleeping in the boat, on her berth. In the shed, among the sawdust and shavings, she imagined she could hear the sea breaking around her and that she was a thousand miles into it.

She had ordered a wooden mast that had been shipped up on the train, arousing the curiosity of everyone at the train station, the day she had driven into town to pick it up. As she had driven it home, the mast jutting out fifteen feet ahead of and behind her pickup, everyone who saw her stepped outside onto the side of the road to stare.

The chandlery had also sent up ready-made stainless-steel stays and sails and a hundred-fathom roll of half-inch Dacron line, for the running rigging. These had arrived in great bundles that she dragged to her truck box, without explanation or discussion, and unloaded into her shed with a growing sense of delight.

In June she called Postelwaithe and asked him to help her launch her boat. He was in the process of putting his things on the train, he said. Do you have time to give me a hand, she asked. I suppose I do, he said.

The next weekend they pulled the boat into town, mounted on a sledge Carol had built. The pulling was
done with a Caterpillar tractor Postelwaithe had borrowed from the harbour. The boat appeared in town at noon that Saturday, and by the time they made it down to the harbour, where Postelwaithe had arranged for a crane, they had acquired an entourage of curious onlookers. Postelwaithe asked Carol what she was naming her boat. She said she hadn’t decided yet. He nodded, and climbed into the crane cab. Carol’s boat was set in the water and it floated serenely. The next day Postelwaithe’s replacement was flying in. Postelwaithe would fly out a week later. He said he was going to be busy that week. Carol nodded. She thanked him for his help. He said you’re welcome. He asked if she would be staying on in the house. She said she supposed not. He said he thought he would try to sell the place to the man replacing him. Carol asked if the man would be interested in buying a table saw. Postelwaithe said he’d be happy to ask.

On the boat that night, bobbing against the wharf beside the grain elevators, Carol stared out at the mouth of the Churchill River and beyond, at the sea. She had made a very fine boat. It was something.

When she first left Etobicoke, she had stayed in the True North Motel in Sault Ste. Marie. Drinking whiskey by noon most days, and smoking cigarettes in a steady succession, lighting one off the other, and filling up aluminum Coke cans until little mounds of ash trickled
down them. Those days were the worst thing she had ever known. A man was staying in the room next to hers and watched pornography all afternoon and then went out someplace until three in the morning. It felt to her like her life had been ruined, that she had ruined her life. It was the first time she ever conceived that as possible, and not as melodramatic overstatement.

In late June, the twilight in Churchill lasts until shortly before dawn, and at one in the morning she came up top, to urinate. The sky stretched out before her in a glorious arc of orange and pink. Beneath her, and above her, was beauty that was unlike anything she had known. She looked at it through her binoculars, and the colour was even more vivid and the sky even brighter. She moved her feet and felt the dry, tight teak planking creak slightly. Her little boat was in the water and floating. There had been no leaks; she had checked the bilge every twenty minutes for hours after the launch. Dawn would emerge out of dusk in another hour or two.

The Churchill River was nearly a mile wide here at its mouth, and it looked like a broad, cold lake. Beluga whales had been surfacing in it all evening, but at this moment she could no longer hear them. Beyond the bar, the Hudson Bay stretched to the horizon, littered with fractured pans of ice.

The open water in the river merged into Hudson Bay, which flowed in turn past Baffin Island and through
Davis Strait to the Labrador Coast, the North Atlantic, and from there to the world. The water went everywhere. Even home, if she wanted.

This was in 1999.

Every time the woman on the other side of the wall gasped, he could hear the saliva snapping as her mouth opened. His bed swayed in sympathy to theirs and neither of the senses unavailable to him, visual and olfactory, was difficult to summon up on his own.

Jim thought, if he could just have this, it would be enough of a simulation of desire for his purposes.

And then he thought: How ridiculous I am. And he opened the minibar and then looked out on the level landscape of low buildings and glowing summer-night horizons extending away from him, and he wondered why he imagined his life might be different, given what he knew of himself.

“Will you look at this,” my father asks, with the wonderment of unexpected good fortune. “Now who would just throw this out?”

He is holding a rubber sealing ring the size of a hula hoop from an old washing machine, inspecting it carefully, running his thumbnails through the grooves looking for cracks. Not even a blemish. He is wearing a green cotton work shirt and trousers. We are at the Dunsmuir municipal garbage dump. I am sitting in the truck cab. He is exploring.

“Dad,” I say.

“No, Bob, really,” he says. And he takes out his tape measure, trying to judge the diameter. “Last week I paid thirty-four dollars for a new one just like it.” I lean my head against the truck window and slide down in the seat. The Hutterites poking through a pile farther
down look up at his excitement and begin sidling toward him, curious but polite. I shut my eyes. I am appalled. I am fourteen years old. He looks over at me; he sees my disapproval. And he sets the sealing ring down on the pile.

“Pretty good one over here!” he calls to the bearded old men and babushka-clad women, all polka-dotted kerchiefs and coarse woollen trousers. Their children sit in their trucks, slouching and likewise appalled, albeit less vocal. An old man comes closer and my father picks up the ring again and hands it to him. The old man smiles thank you. My father grins back, delighted that the sealing ring is saved. He ambles along the line of smoking detritus, talking to himself. I turn on the radio. The new John Lennon song buzzes through lost change and abandoned bubble gum. It is Sunday afternoon and I have just started smoking cigarettes. My twin brother, Albert, has already retreated into a cavern of science-fiction books and fierce resolution. We hardly see him, except on his way to Star Trek conventions in the city. That whole summer he was at physics camp and none of us had any idea what went on there.

We incinerated our own garbage in forty-gallon oil drums in the backyard. The drums burned through quickly and once a month we had to drive to the dump to empty the ashes and scout for a better barrel. The best
were the dented but practically new oil drums the Esso bulk dealer dropped off on Friday afternoons. These went quickly, but others, trading up, left in exchange barrels with considerable life left in them yet, and Dad was happy to take these, as well. Few would ever consider using
our
rejects—in the bio-niche of the Dunsmuir garbage dump, we were bottom feeders. For my father at least, this was a point of pride.

For as long as I can remember it has been the same with him: Saturday and Sunday afternoons he is in the garden, or the basement, one minute and the next he is suddenly absent. You look through the garage, the toolshed, but no answer. Then the truck rumbles up the driveway and from the kitchen window he can be observed furtively carrying boxes into the garage, there to sort and contemplate.

I remember one time I went out there and found him dismantling old radios and humming. We sat there most of the afternoon, me just watching him putter, trying to discern an endpoint, or goal, of all this. In another three or four months the radios would be thrown out again, under the insistent gaze of my mother, but he didn’t care. For now, he was immersed in his booty, and anyway, who knew what fresh treasure would lie within the next box? Not me.

“Isn’t this great stuff? These things must be forty years old. Look, this radio here looks like it was taken care of. I wonder if I can get it to work.”

“Dad, where on earth do you think you would get new parts for these things?” I say, shaking my head. He looks up at my tone. He blinks.

“From each other maybe.”

“They’re mostly not even the same make, Dad.”

“They didn’t make things as complicated in those days, they might work even so. Hand me that Phillips screwdriver behind you? No, the little one, thanks.”

The next week it would be vacuum cleaners, the following one, bicycles. The things that went in there astonish me even in recollection—where did he find a Depression-era Hebrew typewriter with a seized roller? (In the ditch, he said.)

The other thing we did on the weekends was go to model airplane shows. My father built himself a radio-controlled miniature P-51 Mustang fighter that he used to fly for hours out behind the house. He built it from a kit and every time he ran into snags in the course of building it, he would go to one of the model airplane shows in the vicinity and ask people what he should do. Looking back at it, I don’t know why we didn’t just join one of the clubs. Shyness, I suppose. In the meantime, he and I got to know the secondary road network of southern Manitoba intimately, through our weekend journeys to small-town airports and abandoned Second World War landing strips, looking for the Neepawa Fly-O-Rama, the Teulon Tailspin.

I remember walking with him up and down the rows and rows of model airplanes, all hovered over by fat men in plaid sport shirts and sunglasses. My dad liked the racers, sleek and polished and unadorned. I liked the military models, some of which carried real (well, real-looking) little bombs that had caps in them that would explode with a bang when dropped. At these shows they sometimes had precision bombing contests, with little bridges and miniature factories built out of balsa wood. I was constantly disappointed that the little bangs and puffs of smoke always left the balsa-wood structures largely intact.

In the evenings there would be seminars on new construction techniques, and there would be displays set up by the hobby supply salesmen who hung out at these shows and could smell my father approaching, like he was a bruised and bleeding tuna fish, and they Ravenous Killer Sharks of the Deep.

One night we were sitting in a big canvas tent; it was mid-summer and the flies and moths flickered around the fastidiously hung Chinese lanterns like biological dust demons. There was a speaker, at the front, talking about the essentials of laminated-fibreglass wing construction. My father was on the edge of his seat, scribbling down notes in his little brown notebook with his mechanical pencil—this was exactly what he needed. I knew because we had spent most evenings of the previous month up late in the garage, trying to get the resin
thin enough to meet the weight specifications, yet still thick enough to bind properly to the belts of fibreglass. Even I was a little excited at the prospect of finding out what we had been doing wrong.

“But that’s pretty much all the time I have to talk about the principles of building with fibreglass. However I do have a few minutes to talk about this new formed-polystyrene process you’ve all been hearing about.” Everyone in the room stirred and leaned forward. For everyone but us neophytes the earlier talk had been pretty old hat. My father and I looked at each other.

“Ask him,” I said.

“He didn’t talk about making the resin at all, did he?” my father said, flipping through his notes.

“No—ask him now, before he gets going again.” And my father looked up.

“Ask
him,” I hissed.

“Slide please,” the model airplane expert said, and the lights fell. The crowd breathed in as one at the sight of the wing cross section before them. “I thought you’d like this part,” the man said.

When the speaker had concluded his musings on formed polystyrene my father and I joined the scrum around the podium, each of us hungry for the model airplane expert’s wisdom on matters ranging from retractable landing gears to the future of aeronautical modelling itself. Each time an opening in the conversation
seemed to be appearing a hobbyist named Walt or Stan or Herb would crowd in with a question about any aspect of the modelling world except resin preparation. My father kept raising his finger haltingly and smiling as Walt or Herb or Stan pushed forward with their more sophisticated problems. Then, without warning, the expert looked at his watch, said something about having to make Saskatoon the following afternoon, mumbled goodbyes, and sprinted off to the parking lot huffing and puffing. We watched his car drive away. All the way home I didn’t say a word.