In the Land of Birdfishes (23 page)

Opening the door at last, his sister led him inside, where she sat down near the fire. She had grown fat and smiled a deep, true smile at her brother. I have missed you, she said
.

Why does the Bushman visit you? he asked, breathless
.

She smiled still. I cannot tell you that, Brother
.

You must not invite him in or he will hurt you, he cried
.

She licked her wrists a little and held them to the fire. He is not the Bushman but Fire-man. Our people have long seen him in our dreams. We dream of his house of white clay and stone. He has taken me there. In the house there is a small table with a hole like a mouth behind it
.

What is in the hole? the boy asked his sister
.

Even if I were not so in love, I could not tell you, answered his sister. If you dream of it, you must not ever look there. Oh Brother, she said, do you know what it is to love so that it is like a knife drawn inside of you, like the violence of an animal eating another?

Her brother looked into the forest. Yes, he said. Yes
.

Angel stood up without a word and slipped past us to my bedroom, closing the door behind her.

“What’s in the hole,” Aileen said.

I shook my head. “I can’t tell you,” I said. “I can’t tell you.”

The next morning, I woke to the sound of her leaving me. The door shut behind her, and through the window, I watched her throw a match against the wall of my mother’s house. She burned it to the ground.

Mara

A
LL MEN WHEN I
imagined them looked like my father, slightly. He had been the last man I saw. So when I liked a man enough to think of what he looked like, I would give him a little piece of my father. I gave the man called Jason his hands. I gave Father McGivney Da’s rough, curled dark hair and long smile and his ears that stuck out like mine. He already had his way of talking, of making
r
’s stay on in his mouth when other people would be done with them. It made everything he said sound gentle, even when the words themselves were not. Even when he said, “
I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore, who sitteth upon many waters
,” the word
whore
in his mouth was so pretty that I saw her in my mind as a beautiful woman, with Mother’s long yellow hair, streaming down to the shining ocean she floated on, as if she weighed no more than a leaf on the tide.

And when I sat in the confession box, and I knew he knew it was I, I thought of the whore floating there, a golden feather borne by the waves, as I told him I had lain with a man. He asked me who the man was, and I said he was a man not from here. Then I said I thought he might be an Indian man. He was from somewhere away up north. I said how I couldn’t
think of it getting any colder than here in Edmonton, and said how I could never feel the tips of my fingers when we went on our exercise walk, not for months now, but Father McGivney interrupted me. He didn’t tell me how many times to say the Hail Mary, he only said, “Where is this man now?”

I said he was gone away now. I said he’d only been there for the night, on his way back from a job down in Calgary. I told him that after, when we went inside from his truck, he’d even asked me to dance, and we’d had two whole songs before Marla’s sister found us. I never thought anyone would ask me to dance, and when Jason did, I cried because I didn’t know how. And then he showed me how.

Father McGivney didn’t want to hear about the dance and only asked me why I hadn’t told him sooner, and I said I didn’t know I was with child sooner, but now I knew I was because I wasn’t bleeding anymore, and I could feel that my stomach was fatter than it was, and Agnes had said, “Do your tits hurt?” and I said they did, and she said that’s how her sister said she always knew for sure.

I was waiting for Father McGivney to tell me how many Hail Marys, but he never did, he only kept asking me questions. Then he told me, “Get along now,” and one of the sisters would come get me from my room later. I picked up my cane, which I had only just been allowed to have, because Father McGivney said we must learn to be self-sufficient and the canes would make us weak, and pushed open the door, and then I went around the side where he was and knocked.

He was angry and surprised, I could hear it, but I said, “Please, Father, how many Hail Marys?” I was frightened because he had never sounded angry and surprised before, he always sounded like Da before. He always touched me a little,
just like I was a little cat, he’d touch my hair or down my side, and I heard him say to Sister Rose that I was a pretty girl, and I was glad of that.

But he told me to get back to my room, and said, “Don’t you have the sense to know you’ve ruined yourself,” and I didn’t have the sense to know that, I didn’t know what he meant at all. He said, “What chance we try to give you all, and look how you came to us, to our charity, to give you some sort of a life, something small but your own, and you’re as stupid as you are blind, you humiliate the body God gave you and make a slattern of yourself with the first boy who’ll—” And then he stopped and he said, “Get to your room now.”

And I went there and sat on my bed for a long time, until Sister Margaret came, and she said we’d have to find the boy who did this and make him come back and marry me. And they told me later that they’d found him, that Marla’s sister asked the boy she’d been kissing at the bar, and he knew who the man called Jason was. And she said he’d come to the chapel and marry me, and she helped me pack my suitcase that was a present for my wedding from her, and her face was wet when she kissed me, and I hoped she was happy for me, because I was the youngest girl at our school to get married, and we knew that many never married at all, and I knew it would mean I would wear a long, scratchy dress like Marla’s. I’d thought we’d stay and maybe I could finish the year, but they said I had to go now and start my married life, so the man called Jason came to get me and he had bought a new truck, because the old one was broken, and he took me away in it.

The place he was from was called Dawson and after he put my suitcase in the back of the truck, he shook out a big piece of paper, and then made me put my finger on it. “That’s
where we are,” he said. Then he pulled my hand so my finger dragged up along the map, and he said, “That’s where we’re going.”

“What’s it like there?” I asked him.

He said the people were nicer than in Edmonton. Then he said his sisters would be nice to me and take care of me, so I wouldn’t miss Agnes and Sister Margaret at all.

He helped me into the truck, and pulled out something and put it in my hand.

“What is it?” I asked, rolling it between my fingers. And then I knew. “It’s a necklace,” I said. “It’s for me. It’s a present for me.”

He took it from my hands and put it around my neck. “I saw it and I thought of you. I didn’t know then that I’d ever see you again. But they made me think of you. The beads are beautiful, like you. All different colours.” He touched my hair. “I wish you could see them.”

I liked how strong they felt in my hands. Like something that would last. I’d had a crucifix on a chain once, but the chain had got caught in my hair and I’d broken it. I never could find where the crucifix had fallen, not even when the nuns looked for me. But I felt that this one was stronger, and I wrapped the beads around my fingers, and held them, tight in my hand, as Jason started the truck.

Aileen

late August 1996

I
WAS AT MY DESK
, bent over the galleys for next week’s issue with a magnifying glass, when the door was pushed open so forcefully it banged against the wall, and he stood in the doorway, staring at me.

“Jason,” I said.

His face was somehow altered, as if something had come loose in it. His mouth gone soft, the sharp line of his brow no longer guarding whatever expression might cross over his widened eyes. “She burned the house down,” he whispered.

Beside me, Melvin paused in the tapping of his typewriter keys. “Shall I place a phone call?” he asked me.

“Jason …” I said. “Jason, tell me what happened.”

“I woke up and she was gone. I heard her shutting the door downstairs, and then she threw a match behind her. And maybe she had already set fire to the house before she went outside. She must have lit a match and dropped it on the stairs before she left. That’s what she must have done.”

“You mean Angel,” I said slowly. “Angel burned the house.” Beside me, Melvin picked up the phone and began to dial. I almost stopped him. I didn’t want the authorities called until I knew. But I felt ashamed to doubt him.

Jason nodded, his eyes unstill, glancing from me to Melvin, unsure now of himself.

“Jason, is this a lie?” I asked him, and he didn’t answer. Beside me, I heard Melvin speaking low into the phone, unalarmed as always by disaster. In that moment it seemed like less trouble if Angel had burned the house to the ground.

“False alarm,” Melvin said, hanging up the phone. “Neighbour says the house is fine.” He studied Jason for a moment. “Must have been mistaken. These things happen.”

“Will you come to lunch with me?” Jason asked.

I tried to understand what had come undone in him. I’d thought, in the end, losing Angel would be like everything with him, something that was happening in his imagination as much as in the world, the idea of suffering more than pain itself. I had not been prepared for him to stand before me and come undone. “Okay,” I said, and looked to Melvin, who nodded without raising his gaze from his typewriter. “Sure, let’s get something to eat.”

We walked out together onto a street that was black with crows, a sea of hooked beaks and dark, shining feathers. There must have been a dozen or more, and not one of them flying. Just creeping around one another, scratching at the dirt. Some had their wings unfolded above them, waiting.

“A murder of crows,” I said, remembering the word. It had been our mother who taught us that there were names for the gathering of all animals.
A gulp of cormorants
, she’d called the big, bent-necked birds that roosted near our beach, and the inky marks against a sky they darkened with their wings were
a clutter of starlings
.

“What did you say?”

“Our mother taught us that,” I said. “That’s what you call a whole bunch of crows. Not a flock, but a murder of crows.”

“No,” Jason said. “These are ravens.”

“Okay. A murder of ravens then.”

“No,” he said, looking at them with something like sorrow. “There’s another word.”

“Jason …” I tried to understand his face. “Did you read the article? Is that what this is about?” Though I’d been afraid of how he would take the story I had written about my sister, I was, too, proud of it. I wanted him to read it. And did not have the first idea what he would say or feel when he did.

He shook his head. “I didn’t read anything.”

“About your mother? It came out today …” His face was blank and I believed him. Then it wasn’t that but Angel who had him looking like this. I’d blamed him before for not giving her any reason to do anything else, never till the moment she said she was leaving showing any sign he wanted her to stay. But now, and suddenly, I felt blindingly angry with her.

“I’ll buy you a sandwich at Klondike Kate’s,” he said. “I’ve got money.”

“Okay,” I answered and tried to keep pace with him. It was all I could do to stay beside him as he led me up the street. Only once did he look back at me.

“An unkindness of ravens,” he said.

At first we ate in silence. The hunted look on his face seemed to preclude conversation.

“There are no bugs here,” I said at last, as I watched him cut his meatloaf into tiny, even pieces. He was a surprisingly
delicate eater. “You ever notice that? I guess it’s because there’s no nighttime, and that’s when they come out. I’ve never seen a summer go by before without a single mosquito.”

“They spray in the spring. A helicopter goes over and shakes out dust and we have to keep our windows closed.”

“Oh.” I took the wrapper from my straw off the table and threaded it between my fingers. “I see.”

I thought those might be all the words that would pass between us, but then he laid his silverware on the table and looked at me earnestly. “I need you to tell me something, Aileen.”

I nodded slowly.

“When it happened to your husband—Stephan. After he fell, how did you know.”

I felt suddenly cold and pulled my jacket more tightly around me. I cleared my throat. “Know what, Jason?”

He looked at me with clear, calm eyes. “That he’d gone crazy.”

I looked at my half-finished chicken, like something naked on my plate, and my stomach turned. I drew a leaf of lettuce over it with my fork. “Well,” I said. “There were doctors.”

“So the doctors told you.”

“Sort of.” I remembered how his doctor had busied himself whenever I’d tried to talk to him, fussing with papers at the nurse’s station or flipping the pages of Stephan’s chart. I’d known he didn’t want to look me in the eye. “I went to see the doctor when something seemed wrong. I asked if something could have happened to his brain to … change him.”

“That’s it,” Jason said triumphantly. “How did you know that something seemed wrong?”

I turned my head from side to side. “When you’re married to someone … When you’re that close …”

“You just know, right?”

“Yes,” I said softly. “I guess you just know.”

“One day he was himself, and the next, he wasn’t.”

“He was distant,” I whispered. “He just wasn’t entirely there anymore.”

Jason was radiant with satisfaction. He returned to eating his lunch, spearing several mouthfuls at a time on his fork. “That’s what I thought of this morning. It was after she burned the house. That was how I knew. We weren’t married so it’s not like you and Stephan. It took me longer to figure it out.”

“Figure out what.” I felt deeply, deeply tired.

“That she’d gone crazy.” He poked his fork into his mouth and gave me a closed-lip grin as he chewed.

“Jason, it’s not the same. That’s not how it was with Stephan.”

“How was it with Stephan?” he asked cheerfully, still chewing.

I closed my eyes. Thought of the strange, awkward girl I’d been at twenty-one. How I’d had to order in special large-print textbooks and sit in the front row of every class to see the board. How it had taken meeting him to know I was pretty or must be, because there was no other reason he would have looked at me that first night like I was the only person in the room. How long it took me to understand he looked at everyone that way. How he walked into a crowded room like a starved man sitting down to a meal and it was only then I understood that what was truly terrifying wasn’t other people, it was being alone. “He had a brain injury,” I snapped. “Angel didn’t fall off a roof.”

“No. That’s true.” Jason thought about that. “But sometimes people just go crazy for no reason at all. Don’t they?”

Yes. “Yes,” I said.

The thousand taxi rides home. The endless series of silences that ended all the nights. All the giddy, beer-eyed chatter and the showing off. The way he’d forget about me and disappear into a crowd or a corner and then appear just when I thought he’d gone home without me, like a star in a dark sky. How he worked that wonder, that joy I felt when I thought I’d lost him and all of a sudden he was there again, like hope itself, his waiting face the world’s tiniest miracle.

“I should have known right away,” Jason said, shaking his head. “First there was that old man—she’d never be interested in him. And then wanting to leave here, when nobody loves this town like she does. And burning down the house—”

“Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes, Jason, it looks like someone’s crazy and it’s something else. It’s that you weren’t really looking at things right. Maybe it’s you who changed. Or maybe nothing has changed at all.” One day, a year after the accident, I’d looked at him lying on the couch reading a magazine and realized that what I was looking at, not just then, but had been looking at for years, was a very tired man who didn’t love me. Not in any way that mattered. “Jason, you know I call Stephan every night now?”

He nodded without looking at me.

“I thought you should know that. It wasn’t just once or twice.”

“So?”

“There’s something I didn’t tell you about him.” I watched my sister’s son, finishing his lunch, pretending nothing I could say could matter very much to him. “He wasn’t always … He wasn’t always very nice.”

Jason turned his head to the side and narrowed his eyes. “What about now?”

“Now?”

“You talk to him every day now, you said. How come. Did he change?”

“Did he …?”

Once, after a fight we’d had, I’d found Stephan in the kitchen standing in front of the freezer, in the dark. He had his head bowed, like he was looking in the freezer, and I waited for him. But then I realized he was crying, and I’d never seen him cry before. His shoulders shook, as I watched him, standing there in his underwear, lit only by the street light through the window. I didn’t know what to do or say, but suddenly there was nothing left of my anger. I touched his back with my hand and he pulled away as if he thought I’d hurt him, as if the touch of my hand was a threat to him. “Close the freezer,” I said. And he did. I wondered why he’d even opened it. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I’d like to have been some other kind of person.

“I don’t know, Jason,” I said at last. “I don’t know if people change.”

He leaned forward. “Angel doesn’t.” As if he was trying to convince me. “She’s been the same all my life. Till she went crazy.”

I sighed. “Then maybe you’re right. Maybe she’ll come back. Maybe she just needs to be talked out of it.”

“That’s it,” he said happily. He reached out and touched my hand, just for a moment. “I knew,” he said. “I knew you’d understand.”

Then he stood up and went to the bar to pay the waitress, refusing to accept my share. And then I followed him outside and we walked home together without speaking.

That night, while Jason sat at the kitchen table, dialling Angel’s hotel again and again, refusing to leave a message each time, I laid a newspaper beside him and went upstairs to shower.

When I returned to my room, dressed for bed, my hair wrapped up in a towel, I found him blocking the door. I saw the paper in his hand and raised my chin. I was not ashamed of what I had written, however it might trouble him. She was my loss too, and if he chose to grieve for her in sulks and stories, I could damn well grieve for her in print.

“I wanted to surprise you. It’s a new section,” I told him. “Melvin thought of it. I came up with the name, ‘Journeys North.’ Everybody here has a crazy story of how they got to be in Dawson. I mean, not you or people who were born here, but everyone else. So we thought we’d pick a different person every month and tell their story. I thought it would be something special to start with Mara. It’s a tribute to her, don’t you see?”

“Aileen,” he said. I pushed past him and he followed me through the door. “I’ve got a story for you.”

“Jason, I need to go to bed,” I told him.

“I read your article.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know.”

He stepped closer. “It was all lies.”

I sat down on the bed feeling suddenly deeply tired. “But it isn’t, Jason.”

“You didn’t tell anything about what happened to her. And you didn’t say how she came here, or what she was like, or how she died.”

“I don’t know those things, Jason,” I reminded him. “You wouldn’t tell me. I just wrote what I knew.”

“And you didn’t tell about her mother’s shadow or the blindfolds or …”

I stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

“You didn’t tell about how her father put blindfolds over her eyes and yours, so you wouldn’t fall in love with a landscape that could teach you despair, the way it taught your mother. Or the way your mother’s shadow disappeared before she died. Or how you betrayed her, taking off the blindfold, so you kept your eyes and my mother didn’t.”

I felt overwhelmed by the endlessness of his fantasies, his damage, his lies. I was exhausted of it all. “Jason, I don’t know what you’re talking about. It happened like I told you it did, like I wrote in the article. And I betrayed her because I never looked for her. Because I just let her go, like she had never—”

“He killed her,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s just a short story tonight.”

The sister left her house the next day, and was gone till the sun had already made its brief trip beneath the world. Her brother was tireless watching the house. Finally, he saw smoke go up in the dark, and he went there and found her already in bed sleeping, and he made his knife go across her throat and then she died
.

“Jason,” I said. I realized then that he was more confused than I had understood. I’d thought we were two misfits of a kind, like a cockeyed vaudeville duo, this sullen, defensive boy and his aging aunt. I opened my arms to him but couldn’t bring myself to step closer or draw him into them.

“Get out,” he said. “Get out of her room. I’m sick of you and your lies.”

I hesitated. I made so little money and had already spent too much of it at the hotel the other night, trying to give him and Angel space to figure things out. “I’ve got nowhere to go, Jason. Do you really want me to—”

“I don’t give a damn,” he said. “Stay or go. I don’t give a damn what you do.”

He slammed the door behind him, and I immediately felt as if I were trapped inside the room, as if I couldn’t open the door again now that he had closed it. And so I climbed into bed, and lay awake for hours, listening to him slam down the phone downstairs over and over. And I thought about how I hadn’t called Stephan, and how last night when we’d spoken he said there was something important he needed to talk to me about.