In the Land of Birdfishes (29 page)
Winter came that year like a disease that had no cure. Old Man would watch the mortal men and women peering out of the windows of their snow houses, looking for a spring that did not come. He took to walking by himself in the woods, thinking deeply. His wife never came home. The loss of both
her children had left her silent and hard-faced. She had lain down along the frozen river and let the snow bury her deeper and deeper. Sometimes Old Man would call to her, from far above the drifts of snow. He would order her to come home to him and cook his food. But she didn’t answer. Then he would call softly down to her, My love, I am lost without you. Then he would think perhaps he heard something, and he’d press his ear to the snow to listen harder. But she was so far beneath him, and there was so much snow between them, that all he could hear was the sighing wind that blew over the snow and buried her deeper
.
He went home, but he was no longer accustomed to his loneliness. He looked to the world of men and women for amusement, but they only made him sad. Without the hope of spring, they had returned to their old despair and boredom. They were cruel to each other and rarely rose from bed during the day. At night they would lie around in each other’s arms, without love, and grow hungry thinking of the past
.
At last Old Man could take it no longer. He knew he had made terrible mistakes. He wished he knew what his wife’s deep, under-the-snow thoughts were. Why did she leave him and what place had she gone to down there where he couldn’t follow? In the pale city winter, would she one day, suddenly, brush one hand against the other and feel how, palm to palm, lightly, softly, rising and falling, they felt like a late-summer river and a regret. If she were in a boat and she ran out of words, say she was only sorry, sorry and wordless, till the boat ran ashore, and she climbed out weeping, and she left the boat and got a bag, and she took that bag away with her, and after that she was gone, and where she went after that was unknown, a hole at the centre of a zero that made a ring
around everything, what was left in the boat—a lie? A man?
And so Old Man made a flood and it covered the world, it rose even higher than the snow and covered that too. When everything was gone, he said down into the water, This will not be the end of you. You’ll go on in some way or another. But I have failed and been failed by you. So I will try again
.
I will make a new world. It will be better than the last. It will keep no secrets from me. There will be no seasons to begin and end and teach us to leave each other. The new world will not be split by snow and sun or by sky and sea. I will make a land where winged fish and finned birds live in watery skies, in an in-between place, where there is neither ice nor grass nor stars nor sun. Without light or dark, I will find her there. She will say, I’ll never leave this place
.
I
DON’T KNOW HOW
she found me. There is no phone call to tell me she is coming, no warning at all. But I know, the moment I open the door, that it is her. I don’t know what tells me, if it’s the sound of her breath inhaled all at once, or something about her, a smell I couldn’t put words to that something in me recognizes. Or maybe it is true what they say about twins and something else connects us that can’t be broken, not even after thirty years.
My hand goes out to hers, without thinking. Upstairs I can hear him calling, “Mara, who’s at the door?” And before I can even have the thought that I should be ashamed of reaching for her, as if we were still children, as if there weren’t all that time and half a country between us, hers is in mine.
It takes us ages to begin to explain to each other, and longer still to really understand. She asks me if I forgive her and I don’t know how to answer. Then she tells me she went to my son first to be forgiven and it was he who sent her to me. I hold her hand still tighter. After a moment, she says she’d like to go back there someday, to see him again. I tell her we will go together, and then we are quiet, and I know we both are thinking of how far away it is and what a long trip it would be.
There is something I want to ask her but I am frightened of the answer. If the thing I did was the right thing to do, she is the only one who can tell me that. I’d give anything to be told it was. “Tell me,” I beg her at last. “Tell me if he’s all right.” She starts to answer and then I interrupt. “Tell me a story about him.”
S
TILL, EVERY FEW WEEKS,
someone comes and tells me what he’s got to saying, and I have to find him, tell him again.
Sometimes I’ll find him sitting in the kitchen with a suitcase at his feet. “Angel called last night,” he’ll tell me.
“So I hear,” I’ll say.
“The baby’s born. She’s pissed I wasn’t there. I told her I had to get things settled around here first, but she didn’t understand. She’ll forgive me when I see her. I know she will.”
“No, Jason,” I tell him, and then I tell him again what happened.
Once his neighbour called me because he was sitting in his truck for hours with the engine not started, wearing just a flannel shirt and jeans. It took me and the neighbour half an hour to get him back in the house, though he could hardly move from the cold and I was scared he’d lose a toe for it. He said he was going to pick his mother up from the airport, that she was finally bringing her baby home.
Folks are saying his mind’s come unhitched, but I know he knows. The only time he was sure enough of himself to fool me was the night two months ago he told me, as I drove him home from the bar where he bought everybody a round and
said he was the father of two new baby girls, that he’d buried her on the bank of the Klondike River far out past town. I saw him look scared then, and he said, “Minnie, she’s haunting me.”
And I tell him again that he must never speak to anyone of Mara, and he shakes his head and says it’s Aileen he means.
And I did wonder. I did wonder because nobody saw her go, she left so fast, and it wasn’t till I saw he’d got a letter from her—he left it on the table in the kitchen and I read it in front of him and he said nothing—that I could be sure. She asked his permission to visit and I wondered if he’d give it. He shook his head and I knew that much at least was true.
And Nora at the post office said the letters from Toronto came for him often. She said most times he just dropped them in the trash by the door. And I thanked god to know she’d got away and was gone where she couldn’t hurt him, and I thought maybe once she understood that no reply was coming, the letters would stop and he’d be free of her.
A month ago, something else came in the mail for Jason. It came in a little square envelope with only one line from Angie to explain it. Just a shadowy smudge of ink on a bit of shiny paper that she said was her. Their child, not yet born. I gave it to him and said, “This is your daughter,” and asked if he understood me.
And he took it in his hand and I looked away from his face because nobody should ever let everything show like he did then. He said, “Tell me again.”
So I do and then I make him tell it back to me, as many times as it takes. And I can see him fight that wish that comes into his eyes. It isn’t that he doesn’t know what happened. I know that, if no one else around here does. It’s that he isn’t content with things as they took place. But who wouldn’t slap
somebody who said that to them, when not one of us knows a way around the things that happened except straight through, and if we did, wouldn’t we all be there together trying to get around that other way. And that’s what I tell him. And I see him understand, but he’s got such a hankering in him for something that would make a story worth listening to that he can’t stop finding a different way to tell it, and he makes me think of an animal chewing off a leg to get out of a trap it set itself.
But now I see him with that photo, gone tattered from him holding it. He’ll sit there looking at it in his hand, and sometimes he’ll say, “She isn’t born yet, is she?” Or, “Her mother took her to the city.” And once, “Do you think she’ll ever come up here?” And that’s why I told Angie she’d better make sure she brings that baby home as soon as it gets born. I think he could be a real father to that kid and that’s more than anybody else let him be. And maybe if he weren’t wishing things were some other way, he would start to see what way they are.
So I tell him I can see our two lives and it’s not something you would tell somebody, but this is how it happens, what you don’t write or say, we just continue, loved and let down in all the ways we were. And it’s quiet around here now, everyone who’s leaving gone and just us left. I don’t mind the quiet or the cold. And I wouldn’t trust somebody who couldn’t go three quarters of a day without a sunrise. These long nights, I go outside sometimes and the moon just lays on the snow, and dark is the last word for it. Whatever might be there, underneath where you can see, beneath the snow, is no less a part of things for being hidden. And in the end it doesn’t matter much, what is and isn’t there. We know something, those of us that stay after the snow comes. Some nights, I can see everything.
A number of people and books were critical to my research for this book. I regret that I cannot name all of them here, but I am grateful to every one. I was assisted by the following books especially: Helene Dobrowolsky’s
Hammerstones: A History of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in
; Minnie Aodla Freeman’s
Life among the Qallunaat
; Sherrill E. Grace’s
Canada and the Idea of North
; Renée Hulan’s
Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture
; Catharine McClellan et al.’s
Part of the Land, Part of the Water
; Ken S. Coates and William R. Morrison’s
Land of the Midnight Sun: A History of the Yukon
; and Cornelius Osgood’s
The Han Indians
. In particular, I owe thanks to Bina Freiwald, Renée Hulan and the Olynyk family.
I’d also like to note that the first story Jason tells Aileen, beginning on page 97, is based on a traditional Yukon creation myth but departs from it, as Minnie points out, near the end. From that point on, all the stories are Jason’s inventions, though they occasionally allude to figures and traditions from Han culture.
It is a great blessing to have an editor whose faith in your book is unshakable and whose ability to root out its weaknesses, unfaltering—and I’ve had two. Thank you, from my
heart, and beyond measure, to Jennifer Lambert and to Jane Warren. Thank you also to my eagle-eyed copy editor, Stacey Cameron, and to Thomas Grady, Kelly Hope, Allyson Latta, and Maylene Loveland.
To Ellen Levine, my agent and champion, a very special thank you.
I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Nova Scotia Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
I have had a lifetime of wonderful teachers, to all of whom I owe my thanks. A few in particular have been necessary parts of this book: thank you, Stephanie Bolster, Terence Byrnes, and Mikhail Iossel. This book also greatly benefited from the suggestions of its first readers: especially Mary Katherine Carr, Catherine Cooper, Oisín Curran, Sarah Faber, Michael Helm, stef lenk, Susan Paddon, Jocelyn Parr, and Johanna Skibsrud. Thank you to Michael Redhill and the editors and staff of
Brick
magazine—shining examples, labourers of love. Thank you to my family, Margaret Silver, Ian Slayter, and Lisa and Sarah Silver Slayter, for a lifetime of support. And thank you to Conrad Taves, whose conviction never fails and is, fortunately, contagious.
And lastly, most importantly, thank you to the people of Dawson City, for sharing your stories and your extraordinary community with me.
REBECCA SILVER SLAYTER’S
writing has appeared in such publications as
The Antigonish Review, The Hart House Review, Quill & Quire
, and
The Walrus
. An editor of
Brick
literary journal, she lives in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
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In the Land of Birdfishes
Copyright © 2013 by Rebecca Silver Slayter.
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EPub Edition © MARCH 2013 ISBN: 9781443407397
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
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No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
On page vii: the line from “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in”. Copyright 1952, © 1980, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, from
Complete Poems: 1904–1962
by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
All the characters in the following pages are entirely fictional creations and do not represent any actual person, living or dead.
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