In the Land of Birdfishes (14 page)

She stared at me, expectant of some kind of reaction. Was I meant to be impressed? Sympathetic? “Does that happen often?” I asked at last.

She shrugged. “From time to time. But that’s the closest I saw one get. Didn’t see it long though.”

“What happened?”

“Duncan shot it.” She smiled at me. “He works with Peter there.”

“Shot it dead?”

“Well, if he hadn’t, it would have come back. That’s the thing. A bear that’s lost its fear is a dangerous bear. Can’t have that around the camp.”

I wondered where he had shot it and how it had died. Would it have happened all at once or slowly. “I saw a bear,” I said, remembering. “I think it was dying too.”

But she didn’t seem to hear me and I followed her gaze to the stage, where the lights came up to illuminate Angel standing in front of a tower of scaffolding with her guitar. Behind her, lit in blue, her sister sat at her keyboard and her cousin was seated on a stool with his drum. But the first song, she sang alone.

She didn’t introduce herself or the other members of her tiny band, which the festival program called Black Wing. She didn’t even take time to set down her guitar, and instead wrapped her arms around it and held it like an infant as she sang.

I had not noticed, that day by the river or that afternoon in her yard, how big her voice was. It was so sweet and clear
that I’d lost track of it in the open air somehow. It had seemed to settle into the sky like birdsong does, a satellite of sound, beautiful and distant from life on earth. But now, within the walls of this church, it filled the room and seemed not to float toward us but to surround us.

I turned to whisper to Jason that she was doing great, and then fell silent at the sight of him.

He sat perfectly straight in his chair, his mouth half open as if her singing was something shared between them, and stared steadily at her with eyes that were wide and unguarded. He looked like a child. He was, I realized, in love with her.

The band joined her in the next songs, and they played for only an hour. When they finished, Angel bowed and turned her back to the audience to acknowledge her bandmates, and then they quietly left the stage. Though more than half of the audience stood up and the applause went on long after they’d gone, they did not come back for an encore.

For reasons I didn’t understand, I felt moved by the performance. Or maybe it was Jason’s face that stayed with me. But I didn’t want to talk to Pat or her husband, and so I stood up quickly and snatched my bag from the floor. “It was nice to meet you,” I said with a nod at the two of them. “Are you leaving, Jason?”

Jason turned slowly and looked at me as if he’d just realized I was in the room. “Maybe I’ll stay,” he said.

I nodded. “Yep. Good idea. She’ll be glad to see you.”

“No.” He shook his head. “You stay too.”

I sighed. “I’m tired, Jason.”

He crossed his arms and grinned. “Well,” he said. “Let’s see if we can do something about that.”

Jason led me downstairs to the bar set up at the back of
the church and ordered me a coffee. He leaned against the wall while I drank it, his eyes searching the room behind me.

“You don’t see her?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Just checking who’s here.” Then his eyes met mine. “So you like Peter?”

“I didn’t really talk to him.”

“I should find him. You should talk. You’ll like him. He’s a big storyteller. When we’re together, the two of us, people around town say even the dead are listening. One time, at a party, he got to telling this one story, and whenever he got tired, I’d jump in and keep going, and whenever I got tired, he’d jump in and keep going, so it just didn’t stop. And everyone at the party stopped talking and just listened to us. Morning came, and we kept telling the story all that day and all that night, and then the next day, and the next night. For three days, we told that story, and nobody moved or said a word, they were listening so hard.”

Before I could reply, Jason had pushed his way into the growing crowd, which was filling the church so tight I wondered if he’d ever find his way back. But he returned with his boss, both of them flushed with some kind of energy that seemed to crackle and move between them.

“So, Aileen, do you dye your hair?” Peter boomed.

I touched it, where it had begun to fall over my eyes, needing to be cut. “Well, I used to,” I said. “I’m not sure if I’m going to anymore.”

“You’re as pretty as your sister,” Peter said. “Natural blond, she was. I loved the colour of her hair. You know, I once dated a blond girl who looked a little like her, if you can believe it. This must have been twenty years ago now. That fall was my first year in these parts, and I came up with money in
my pocket and bought that claim, and went digging around on it like a kid in a sandbox. Didn’t have a clue. Found a skeleton of a dog. A tiny, little dog, must have been wild or belonged to some miner back in the day. Had a broken leg that hadn’t healed right. I felt attached to that little skeleton and sorry as could be for digging it up. That little blond gal would come by in the evenings then in her little car. She lived in town and drove this 1968 VW thing, like a little tin can coming down the road, didn’t make any sense in these parts. She was right creeped out by that skeleton, I’ll tell you. I had it set up on the shelf over my bed. I don’t know why, but it made me feel glad to keep it in there with me warm, and I felt good looking at it there. But she’d make me put a sheet over it whenever we got amorous. I couldn’t blame her for it. Not that she had any right to complain, being the second cousin of a guy who kept his own foot in a jar. Remember him, Jason?”

And the two of them talked back and forth, their voices rising louder and louder to be heard over the crowd that was bigger and bigger and getting drunk waiting for the next show. Every story branched off into three more, and any time Peter paused, Jason would jump in, just like he’d said. Sometimes they’d correct each other, but the corrections were always embellishments. “His wife was hardly up to his elbow,” Peter would say. “Your memory’s got the slip of you, old man,” Jason would interrupt. “If she were walking ahead of him and stopped too sudden, she’d’ve knocked her head on his belt buckle.”

And then the lights, without warning, went out, and I gasped as if the dark were a sea I had plunged into. I heard laughter and shouts across the room, and suddenly felt conscious of the heat of the hundreds of bodies around me, pushing against one another. I felt unsafe.

“Jason?” I whispered. “Jason?”

And then I felt him grab my sleeve and pull me toward the wall. “Come on,” he said in my ear. “Come on over here.”

“I need to go home,” I whispered back, but the words disappeared in the sudden swell of light and sound as the band emerged out of the darkness onstage, washed in violet light and already in the midst of a loud, throbbing chord as the drums kicked at the sound from underneath.

And then the volume dropped and a fiddler appeared in a white spotlight, planted on the highest platform of the scaffolding, elevated above and beside the band, like a dream rising up from the music it was making. She was playing a feverish riff, a twisting line of music that she pulled out of her fiddle, somewhere between rock and the Celtic music I’d grown up with, and beneath her, her feet danced.

Watching her, I felt the steps in my own feet. I’d long forgotten being taught them as a young girl who still could see the world perfectly, lined up with my sister and the other youngest children of our church in its basement, while the older ladies called out
step-shuffle-hop-tap-tap
. I had never danced them again after my mother died. But now, I felt how my feet wanted to join the fiddler in the crazed rhythm of her dance, speeding up as her playing did, the impossible countering of her feet to what her hands were doing to the fiddle they held.

“Jason,” I whispered. “Jason, I …” But I had nothing to say and he couldn’t hear me anyway. And I saw then that mine were not the only feet that had caught the rhythm of the steps from hers. All around me, I saw boys and girls half my age bobbing in the crowd, maybe themselves remembering whoever had first taught them how. Right in front of me a petite girl with dirty-looking pink hair bounced up and down,
kicking out her feet at random, oblivious, apparently, to the sequence of the steps, unaware or uncaring that she didn’t know how.

And then the crashing guitars and drums of the band swelled up behind the fiddler, and the music seemed to break apart in all directions, including everything and everyone in its dizzying swirl, coloured lights cycling around the room to illuminate not just the musicians but the church full of dancers that had been made out of the audience before them, and a cry went up across the crowd and suddenly it seemed everyone was shouting and dancing, a sea of loud and moving bodies set free.

A sudden weight fell against my back and I turned to see that people had filled in the space between me and the wall, and the young man who had, in his exuberance, crashed into me danced on with just a grin in my direction to acknowledge the collision. For a moment, I felt as if I were being swallowed up in this church. I felt myself begin to disappear.

But then something happened. Looking around me, I realized I was wrong. I was not disappearing, I was dissolving—into whatever it was that was happening in the room. And then I looked down and saw, to my surprise, that I was dancing.

The boy behind me, his elbows and hands careless and wild, knees pumping tirelessly beneath him, looked at me approvingly as I spun around and met his eyes. A smile broke out on my face. And then I turned an ankle and crashed to the ground.

“Here,” said the boy, reaching his hand down, and instinctively I extended mine toward it, thinking he wanted to help me to my feet. But pinched between his fingers was a lit joint,
and there, on the floor, I took it without question. It had been years since I smoked, and then only at a few disorienting wharf parties, where pot was another version of suffering the company of more normal young men and women. I had emerged from boarding school like a snapped elastic band, hurtling into the sighted world of youths who knew far more and dared far less than I did, I who had felt then that I had experienced everything. I had once smoked bowl after bowl by myself at the harbour, as the kids I’d come with found their way back to their cars to make out or follow weaving paths home. I’d passed out there and woken up staring at the shoes of a little girl standing over me. “What are you doing there?” she’d asked me, and I had no answer.

I drew deep on the joint, refusing to let my throat tighten into a cough, feeling the smoke bury its claws in my lungs. I held it for a minute and then let it out all at once, a sweet, musky cloud that I watched travel up into the air, joining a dim haze that now hung over the whole room, exhaled from a thousand lungs. I stood up. And then I took another draw. And another.

When I returned the joint, it occurred to me that I wasn’t sure if I was still dancing or had stopped after my fall. Checked. Feet were still. And yet everything around me moved, and I moved too. I looked at the boy, head back, eyes closed, hauling on the last of the joint, and tapped him on the shoulder. “I danced like this when I was little,” I told him, my voice incredibly loud, cutting through the music like a bell. He opened his eyes, smiled, nodded. “I’m from Nova Scotia,” I explained.

He leaned in and shouted at my ear, “I’m from Conception Bay.”

That made me smile. I leaned in to shout something back,
but hesitated. What was there to be said, really. “Oh,” I told him. “Good!” And then I added, “It was like this. When I was little. Before my mother died. We were learning to dance, and it was like this. My childhood.”

And then I thought happily about a time when it had been. A church even had been part of it, but of course not like this. Yet it had been the same. So full like this. A whole family at home, and people at the church and at school. The world we knew filled to bursting like this room was. I thought that and felt something like sadness, but even that I enjoyed in a deep, satisfied way. Everything was slowing around me, and I felt perfectly still, a point of silence and clarity at the centre of a spinning world. And then I noticed the music had changed to something slower, and that was good too. The room now swayed and rocked, dancing still but horizontally, the frantic bobbing heads tipping from side to side instead.

I wondered where Jason was. I remembered that he had been beside me earlier and saw that now he was not.

It took two songs to find him, standing by himself beside the bar. His eyes were bright and black under the flickering lights, fixed on something in the distance. I turned to see what he was looking at and saw a tall man dancing a very slow waltz with a woman at the end of the room, near the exit where the crowd thinned. He had his face bent down to rest against her shining hair, and all that was touching between them were their faces and their hands. All these people, this loud music, everything went on, while Angel and John circled each other in the corner of the church, like there was music we were deaf to that somehow they could hear.

I tried to think of something I could say to Jason that would make him look away from them. But then I noticed
something more important. The fiddler, who was now playing something slow and tender with closed eyes, looked like she had pulled her fiddle to her out of love; her cheek rested against it, drawing something crooning and beautiful out of it with the stroke of her bow. But underneath her, the pedestal of scaffolding she stood on seemed to be leaning away from the stage, as if releasing her from the band into the arms of the crowd before her.

“She’s falling,” I said, but no one turned or heard. So I watched for a moment, more interested than worried. “After all,” I said to myself tenderly, “you are very high right now.”

But then another song began, this one the heaviest and loudest yet. The crowd roared with joy, and the sound pounded out, beating against the walls of the church. It was an angry sound, and I wanted it to stop now. The fiddler stood on her perch, looking out over us all, her face unreadable as the music played. And then suddenly the guitars and drums sank into a downbeat and the tempo slowed and she raised her fiddle to her shoulder again. I didn’t think to be afraid for her until a clangour of distorted chords and bass resumed, and she began jumping in rhythm on her little pedestal, like the young people throwing themselves against each other just in front of the stage. “Oh my god,” I said, and this time, the heads in front of mine turned.