Monstrous Affections (16 page)

“Nicholas — we grieve for you. We offer our comfort to your
mother and your baby sister in their pain. We yearn to see the driver
who killed you brought to justice.

“You truly do live on in our hearts, truly . . . truly . . . as no other
boy, living or dead, ever has.

“Now please. Release those hearts. They are not yours to
inhabit.

“As Mayor of this city, I beg you. Rest in peace, son. Please,
Nicholas. Just stop.”

Paul Peletier and I drove up to Cobalt one last time, about seven
years ago. It was my idea. Should have been Paul’s — hell, almost two
decades before that it
was
his idea, going to Cobalt to paint the pit-heads — but lately he hadn’t been painting, hadn’t been out of his
house to so much as
look
in so long, he was convinced he didn’t have
any more ideas.

“Bullshit,” I said to him, ignition keys jangling in my fingers,
coaxing him outside. “You’re more of an artist than that.”

“No,” he said. “And you’re not either.”

But Paul didn’t have much will left to fight me, so he grumbled
around the house looking for his old paint kit, the little green
strongbox filled with the stuff he euphemistically called his
Equipment. Then he climbed into the cab of my pickup, grunted,
“Well come
on
, Picasso, let’s do it,” and we headed north.

Just to see.

There are other things to paint in Cobalt, after all: the black-and-umber tarpaper houses, built high on the rock with materials
as likely stolen as they were bought; the roads wending dangerously
through the lips of bedrock, like the untended streets of a medieval
town; the grocery, built on top of an old mine shaft, a three-hundred-foot-deep root cellar where the owners dangle their overstock of
meat and cheese against the improbable heat of high summer in
northern Ontario.

We’d painted them all before, in every season and under every
sky, and when the pit-heads were still up, they never got old.

So we turned off Highway 11, parked by the grocery and set
up our easels. Paul dallied a bit in his strongbox — took out the old
silver chain and put it around his neck, muttered a little prayer from
his Catholic school days. And then, because there was nothing more
but to get started, he reached into his kit and took out a blank pallet,
squeezed out some acrylic from the little magazine of ancient paint-tubes he kept in a dark recess of the kit.

I even remember what we were painting. I’ve still got the panel
at my studio — it’s not very good, a not-very-confident study of
one of those houses, rambling up a slope of rock and perched on a
foundation of cinderblock. In a fit of whimsy, I included the figure
of a man, bending down at the septic tank, tool box at his feet, an
expression of grim determination painted on his tiny face. In fact,
no one came out of the house the entire time we painted.

Or should I say, the entire time that
I
painted. Paul just sat there,
lifting his brush, swirling it on his pallet. Setting it down again.

“Nothing here anymore, Graham,” said Paul, fingering the chain
at his neck, and squinting over the still rooftops of the town in the
too-bright summer sun. “They’re gone.”

“They’re buried, you mean.”

Paul shook his head, and he smiled. “The mining companies’ll
say it’s because of taxes. Hailiebury taxes dearly for a pit-head, next
to nothing for a cement plug over a dark shaft.”

Then he looked at me, the tiny pewter Jesus at the end of the
chain caught in a vise-grip between his thumb and the hard stem
of his brush.

“As long as the price of silver stays low, the pit-heads stay down.
Holes stay covered, to keep the weather out of the shafts. That’s the
story, eh, Graham?”

“I guess those miners had the right idea, then,” I said. “I guess
it’s time to go.”

“I guess so,” said Paul.

And so we packed up our brushes and pallets and paintings, and
we followed the miners’ example. Paul was inordinately cheerful on
the way back, and so was I, I have to admit. There was an ineffable
feeling of freedom leaving that town — finally admitting it was over
for us there; we were strictly on our own, from that moment on. We
made jokes, shared a few carefully chosen reminiscences, were just
like old friends again on that four-hour drive south.

But much later, back at my own place in the cold dark of the early
morning, I woke up with the once-familiar scream in my throat —
memories of the miner Tevalier’s age-yellowed flesh, his cruel and
hungry grip, renewed in my blood.

Trembling alone in my bed, I vowed to myself that I would not
call Paul Peletier, and I would not go to Cobalt again.

Paul was the first one of our little group to visit Cobalt, and when
he reported back on it, he didn’t tell us the whole of the story. Not
by far.

It was 1974, just a year after Paul’s divorce, and he was making
ends meet teaching landscape painting classes to art clubs in and
around North Bay. In April, he drove up to Cobalt at the invitation
of the Women’s Art League of Hailiebury, and spent a weekend
critiquing the septuagenarian League ladies’ blurry watercolours
out at the Royal Mine #3. He told us about it in July, when the four
regulars in our own little Art League — me, Paul, Jim Osborne and
Harry Fairbank — were camped on the south arm of Opeongo Lake,
on what would turn out to be our last annual midsummer painting
trip together.

“I wasn’t up there to work, which is why it was such a damned
shame. It was all I could do to keep my paints in their tubes,” he said,
leaning against the hull of his canoe as he spoke.

Jim took a swill from his thermos and grinned. Jim worked as a
lawyer back in the city, and at the end of the year I figured he bought
almost as many paintings as he produced. Privately, Paul told me
that he thought Jim Osborne painted pictures the way that other
men went fishing: he didn’t want to catch anything, just get out of
the rat race for a few days every summer and escape to the bush.

“
Keep your paints in the tubes
.” Jim rolled the words thoughtfully.
“Or did you mean keep your tube in your pants? Those art club
biddies can be pretty spry, I hear.”

Paul laughed, but it was a distracted sound, barely an
acknowledgement. He was never easy with vulgarity.

Paul continued: “The geography around this town is spectacular.
It’s all rock and scrub, a few stands of poplar and cedar here and
there, and it’s had the life mined out of it. But I don’t think it’s
possible to make a bad painting there.”

Jim was about to say something, but I shushed him.
“High recommendation,” I said.

Paul grinned. “The pit-heads outside Cobalt are a Mecca for those
ladies — they swear by them, and I can’t argue based on the results.”

“Practice makes perfect,” deadpanned Jim.

Paul gave Jim a look, but I cut in before he could comment. “Just
what kind of pit-heads are these?” I asked. I was only twenty-five
then, and almost all of the out-of-town painting trips I’d been on
had been with Paul and the rest — which pretty much limited me to
Algonquin Park and one quick trip up to Lake Superior.

Paul pulled out his sketch pad and began roughing out an
illustration: “Here’s what they look like.”

Harry put down the paint-smeared panel he’d been swearing
over all afternoon and studied Paul’s drawing in the failing light.

“Do you want to do a trip there?” Harry finally asked.

Paul swatted at a black fly on his neck, and examined the little
bloody speck on his hand. “It’ll be one hell of a drive — about eight
hours from your place in good weather, and I want to go up in
November when the snow will have started. It’s a long way to go for
a painting.”

Harry took another look at the sketch, then at his own failed oil
painting. “This — ” he threw his arms up to include the entire Group-of-Seven, Tom-Thomson splendour of Algonquin Park on a clear
summer evening “ — is already a long way to come for a painting.
And by the looks of things tonight, I don’t even have a decent one to
show for it. Give me a call when you’ve set a schedule; I’m in.”

Paul smiled and set down the sketch on the flat of a rock for all
of us to see. It was crude, but I think it may have been the most
accomplished work we’d ever seen from Paul to that date. His
carpenter pencil had roughed out the thick spruce beams that
splayed out from the narrow, peaked tower head, which Paul had
represented with a carelessly precise rectangle of shadow. The
trestle emerged from the far side, a jumble of cross-beams and track
that draped like a millipede over the spine of a treacherous spill of
rock. The thin curves and jags suggesting hills and a treeline seemed
like an afterthought — although Paul would scarcely have had time
for one. He had completed the whole, perfect sketch in less than a
minute.

“Any other takers?” Paul asked, in a tone that suggested there
might have been a real question.

The forecast had called for frozen rain in the Hailiebury area, but
by the time we pulled onto the mine road the air was just beginning
to fill with fine, January-hard snowflakes. They caught in the
crevasses and crannies of the low cliffs that rimmed the mine road,
making thin white lines like capillaries of frozen quartz.

I watched Paul’s taillights through the scratch of snow. He drove
an old Ford panel van, and he had set up a small household in the
back of it — a foam-rubber mattress near the back for sleeping,
a little chemical toilet tucked in a jury-rigged bracket behind the
driver’s seat, a big cooler filled with enough groceries to feed him
for several weeks if need be. And a 12-gauge shotgun with a box of
ammunition, in a case beside the mattress, for painting trips during
bear season. Paul made his living from his painting, but it wasn’t
enough of a living to spring for a week in a motel every time he went
off on an overnight painting trip. The rest of us followed his lead.

It was scarcely four o’clock, but darkening towards night already,
when we finally reached the pit-heads of the Royal Mine. We pulled
up on the edge of a wide gravel turnaround maybe three hundred
feet downslope from the nearest of the two pit-heads.

The turnaround was near the top of a great boulder of a hill,
gouged by glaciers from the tiny slit of a lake that was barely visible
through a stand of poplar to the north. The two ancient pit-heads
rode that hill’s peak, like signal-towers for some forgotten empire.

“We won’t have enough light to get any work done tonight,” said
Paul as he emerged from his van. “But we should be able to go up
and have a look inside before nightfall.” He hefted a big, ten-battery
flashlight on a shoulder-strap he’d tied together from old bootlaces.

Harry put his hands in the small of his back and stretched,
making a noise like an old man. “Are those things safe?” he asked.

Paul tromped past him up the slope towards the nearest pit-head.

“Not entirely,” he said simply. “No, not entirely.”

The pit-head was in disuse that year, so the main room underneath
the tower was black and empty. Before anyone went in, Paul speared
the flashlight beam inside and ran down a brief inventory of what
would otherwise have filled the darkness: the great cable spool,
driven by a diesel motor in the back of the hoist house, connected
to a wheel that would perch in the very top of the tower, where
the belfry would be if this were a church. The bare rock floor of
the hoist-house was empty, though, the tower just a dark column
of cold, lined by beams and tarpaper; according to Paul, the Royal
company had moved their operation out of here three years ago, and
had warehoused anything remotely portable in Hailiebury. He ran
the flashlight beam across the floor in the middle of the chamber,
where the cable would have attached to the lift platform. At first, I
couldn’t even see the mouth of the pit: Jim had to point it out.

“It’s pretty small,” said Jim, and he was right: the hole leading
into the depths of the Royal Mine wasn’t more than eight feet on a
side.

“This was one of the first mines in the area,” said Paul. “One of
the ladies from Hailiebury told me it dates back to 1903, when the
whole silver rush got its start. Story goes that a prospector found a
vein of silver by accident, getting his boot out from where it stuck in
a crack in the rock. This pit wouldn’t be legal if it’d been dug today —
the minimum width now is something like ten feet.”

“You sound like a Goddamned tour guide,” I said.

Paul chuckled. “Why don’t you go in and take a look for yourself, Graham?”

Not taking my eyes off the pit, I stepped inside the structure.
The top of the tower was partly open, and the north wind blew a
steady beer-bottle C-sharp across it.

“How deep is it?” asked Harry.

“I didn’t ask.” Paul’s flashlight beam followed me like a spotlight
as he spoke.

As I got closer to the edge of the pit, it seemed as though the
ground were actually sloping inward towards it, growing unsteady
beneath my feet. A smell of machine oil and something like must
wafted out of the hole. I stepped back.

“That’s good, Graham,” said Paul, motioning me back to the wall
with the flashlight. “Don’t get too close to the opening. I’d hate to
have to tell your mother we left you at the bottom.”

Both Jim and Harry sniggered at that, and I laughed as well,
with deliberate good humour. I backed up a few more steps, until my
shoulders were pressed against an old wooden ladder. The wood felt
soft, ancient; like it would crumble under my weight.

“You find this place inspirational, do you, Paul?” I asked, fighting
to keep the quaver out of my voice.

“The Art League ladies swear by it.”

The ladder shifted minutely behind my back. From up high,
a sprinkle of sand fell, catching like a miniature nebula in the
flashlight beam. I tried to imagine how far that sand would fall into
the earth before it found something to settle on.