The Big Why (10 page)

We went to visit the cow. Tom fed her some hay. There was a three-legged dog keeping her company.

That’s Smoky.

Hello Smoky. Where do you keep your geese?

We dont have geese. We had a goose.

Jesus, Tom. You should have served me fish.

Mom wouldnt cook you fish.

Smoky wagged his tail and lifted his head.

So youre doing all right here.

It’s been a year, Tom Dobie said, since my father destroyed himself.

They were living in Labrador. Tom and his father had left his mother and the twins in their rooms in Turnavik.

There were twins?

I had two sisters.

My God.

His father carried a sack with a wood plane, a rifle, and a herring net. He carried them to trade for food. They were starved. The young twins had stayed with their mother while Tom went with his father. They were all getting pretty thin, Tom said, but the twins they were losing out. They walked three miles south in a blizzard to the Henleys’ and Alphonse Henley had shown the Dobies his flour barrel, the tub with the pound of salt meat, and the Henley family was as destitute as his own and who, Alphonse Henley asked, needed a wood plane or a herring net this time of winter. The father and son walked inland to the mouth of Red Head and found the trapper Goudie, but Goudie had nothing either and showed them everything in his store to say he was not lying. It was this revealing of empty tubs that put shame in Tom Dobie’s father, not the asking. It was the hollow sound of a wooden lid on a dry keg.

They walked north and came upon an errant caribou track and the father could not believe it. It was a fresh footing as snow was falling and the caribou, which are not known at this time of year, must have been some lost soul himself. They followed the track and crossed a frozen river and saw the deep punches through the snow crust as the caribou hauled himself up the shore and through the woods. They followed the deep trail up a hill to a crest where the woods fell away and they saw him now with his snout low and frozen on them. The caribou knew of them. The father shouldered the rifle and aimed and it was a long shot, just in range. The caribou lunged forward and stumbled to the side and plunged into the snow and treeline.

They ran after the point in the trees and there was a ribbon of blood in the snow. The father stopped and said, Remember this spot, Tom. Look behind you. They pushed into the woods and at first the trail was easy with the blood, but then the snow pelted down furious and hard and softened the trail and covered the blood. Or maybe, Tom Dobie said, the wound had closed over. Yes, there was less blood. They should have stopped at the first tracking and let the caribou run his course, but they were eager to get the animal down.

They tracked and retraced their steps all day and they confused their own footprints with the caribou’s. The father was not a woodsman, he was a fisherman, and he cursed himself now for chasing after the animal.

Late that night they bivouacked under some fir and made a fire and boiled the kettle and slept on some boughs. In the morning Tom realized that he could not feel his feet. His father unlaced his son’s boots and rubbed the toes. Tom remembers this as his father’s last gift before the sad decision. Robert Dobie took off his own socks and gave them to Tom and they walked north some more. They passed back over the frozen river. The surface of the river had raised up high and fastened over and they walked on this. Near the centre the ice was rotten. They fell through. Tom was expecting to enter cold black water, but he fell through a hollowness. They plummeted ten feet to the bed of the river. They smashed into four inches of frozen water and hard stone. As they lay there, stunned, on the cold rocks, they looked up and saw the pale blue ice of the bright ceiling above them. It glowed blue with the light of the world. It was as if they had fallen into another one.

Dont breathe in too deep, his father had said. Or you’ll sear your lungs.

They were hurt from the fall but full of adrenalin. They took small breaths. The air was charged with cold under this ice.

They were chilled to the bone.

The river was a long empty tunnel and the floor of the river was slippery but well lit. They walked along it, hoping to see a crack in the roof along the side where they might climb up and get through. They slipped on the rocks. They were getting colder. It was a glowing chamber. They got to a bend in the river’s bank where it was less steep. The father chopped at the frozen rock and soil. Sparks flicked off the axe. He made footholds. They climbed up the side of the hollow riverbed to the ice roof above. The ice above them was eight inches thick. The father chopped away at it until he had a hole to pull themselves through. They re-entered the world. They were cold and wet in the raw wind, so they built another fire.

You know how long a stick like this will last, his father said. A burnt stick, he said. They find sticks like this in burial grounds. If you burn a stick, he said, and bury it.

He plunged the charred stick in the snow. Tom did not know what his father was saying. It had something to do with lasting.

They paced themselves over barrens and crushed through snowdrifts. They passed the ridges of spruce and found Drodge at his winter camp, by a brook that had not frozen. But Drodge was not there and there were no provisions here either. Robert Dobie laid his plane on Drodge’s cutting board and wept. He wept for a minute and then picked up the plane and said, This is it. There seemed to be hope in the tone of his father. Tom hauled together the net and they bore up southeast for home. When they saw their own salt store, Robert Dobie said to his son that he loved him and that he was sorry. They walked in together and Rachel Dobie had snared a partridge the day before and they had a little soup with the twins and this cheered them. But then Robert Dobie told Tom to go with his mother and try to find some food at the Halls’, he hadnt tried Hall and Tom said there is no point for Hall was known as useless and coarse and Robert Dobie said, I’m telling you now to go. None of them was thinking correctly any more. Tom asked if he was okay and the father said he was very tired or he’d go himself and maybe a woman would help the story, who knew, and he would take care of the twins and to see you noon tomorrow, Hall would have you over. The twins were five, hungry and screeching. They were all hungry and the boy said okay and the mother said yes she would go.

He must have taken up the axe and, with the back of it, tapped the twins on their heads soon after. That stopped them. He would have said, Forgive me. And the quiet crowded the room. Tom’s father had sat at the table and fed some wood to the fire. Then he fished the wood out again, to save it. The father took up the rifle and sat himself in the corner. He was going to destroy himself. He would have done it in the woods, but they needed the rifle and he did not want to risk their not finding it. He would have used a rope, but he did not want them to see him hanging. His grandfather had hanged himself in a stone barn in Brigus and Robert Dobie was the one who had discovered him.

After this story I walked back around the cove of Brigus and along the Pomeroy headland. It was dark. There was a pony hauling itself into the light of the Pomeroy shed, and then I saw Stan Pomeroy. I waved to him.

You need a light?

I’ll make it.

What, by feeling your way along? Let me get you a light.

I’ll be fine, I said.

Suit yourself.

The snow was dark blue. I could see the sweep of lighthouse light over the water, but not the lighthouse. It lit up, intermittently, the pile of stones they called the naked man. The house is cupped into the land, so not even the lighthouse could help me find it. The walk was long enough that the darkness had begun to sink into me. Black sky and a dark blue acre of snow slanting down to the water. The sense of vision diminished and all became a crunching surface under my feet. I could hear the rut of the shore. The cold, fresh air on my face. But I felt with my feet and I put out a hand to fend off a wayward branch or cliff face. I walked slower. It was stupid not to have lit a lamp. I heard the ocean and then the hollow sound of the brook. I saw the naked man. I was near the house. The mass of the house blanketed sound in front of me. But I could not see it. I made my way in the black until my hand was surprised by the side of the house. I felt my way around the corner of it. There was a window, but I could not find the door. I brushed the side of the house. The house was longer than I thought. There, a sill. And now the door. But where was the latch. The latch was missing. I did not know where I was. I was losing my memory. I focused on the present. Was I where I thought I was? And where did I think I was? Who was I? I flattened myself against the side of the house. I was against something flat. That was for sure. But the sense of a particular place drifted away from me and I could not remember any place, not even my childhood home. Then my fingers felt the latch, the door latch of the house in Brigus, and that entire house reappeared in my head.

In the land of no refrigeration, the salted pig is king. I missed grated carrot, slices of cucumber. I ached for lettuce and a ripe tomato.

Bartlett’s was the only home in Brigus with electricity. The power was a month old when I arrived. They had running water, and had a pump for a toilet. I had barrels of water and tins of kerosene and a woodstove and two fireplaces. I had a shallow outhouse and the iced-over brook four feet from the new corner of the house. The brook sounded different from month to month. Frozen over in March, like water rushing out of a bottle.

Each morning Tom Dobie walked the path through Pomeroy’s. I watched him throw a stick at the cows and stroll along the road towards my yard. It seemed the walk altered him, as if my house was a transition from a life he knew to one that offered a better opinion of himself. The only times he’d been over here were to pick berries or walk out to the lighthouse on a Sunday, perhaps with the boys. Berry picking, he said, meant time with a girl.

He assisted me with the front mullions. He kept remarking on the southern view, compared with the northerly he and most of Brigus had.

Brigus, I said, does not take advantage of the seascape. Youve got small windows in your houses.

We have to keep the saltbox warm. Lovely big windows make the draftiest of rooms.

But the view, Tom.

Why would we want to look at the salt water? When we’re out on it all day long and that’s enough of it.

This shut me up for a while.

Tom Dobie’s foot brought up solid in the snow of Pomeroy’s garden. He banged something free, a dark log. He tilted up the log and pushed snow and stiff grass from a face. We gouged soil from the eyes with our thumbs. A woman’s face. A grey, tarnished head and shoulders and sweet waist. Her torso was sawed at a slant, from spine to navel. A figurehead. She had pointed a schooner out of harbours, Tom said. Had leaned her way across water and directed men into port. I turned the wet figurehead over and asked for it. And Mrs Pomeroy said of course, without a thought to it.

We carted her back to the cottage. I left her, elevated, to dry slowly in the woodshed. Then scraped her with a rasp and sandpapered her and doused her with preservative. I painted her skin white, with blush in her cheeks. I dyed her hair black. I gave her a necklace and daubed her earlobes with gold fleck. It was silly, and the whole time, while my skill as a craftsman showed through, I laughed at the joke. I’ll set her up, I told Tom, where every man may look at her.

I let Tom varnish her once a day for three days.

We bolted her to the lintel over the front door.

Her breasts of hard wood, straining from the house. Shiny and wet. A bowl of goldfish and lava rock.

Tom: You know who she looks like?

I didnt.

Emily Edwards.

It was erotic. It was the first thing Tom had seen, the first artifact, that caused him to fall in love with made things. I could tell that he looked at a boat now and saw the work that went into making it sail. How a window let in light yet kept weather out and detoured the weight above it around the sills. I saw these notions revealed to him.

The Pomeroy cows kept us company. Their brown-and-white faces smudging the windows. I wanted a fence up for Kathleen’s arrival, I said, and a gateway arched over with the rib of a boat.

We could put up a garden rod fence, he said.

I want pickets and posts. I want you and Stan Pomeroy to cut me a fence.

Tom witnessed my certainty and could not fully articulate the delight in his skin.

Lonely. I met Kathleen Whiting when Abbott Thayer was giving a talk on art. She entered the theatre late, as I had done. She was with Gerald Thayer. I was leaning against the acoustic wall and I saw them arrive. She stood at the open doors as we waited for Abbott Thayer to finish taking questions, the doors closing behind her on their pistoned hinges, her hands flat against the doors, slowing their progress. I want, Abbott Thayer said, everyone to get down on their stomachs. Please. I want you to approximate the viewpoint of a predator.

Some of us lay down.

Kathleen stared at the floor, shy, ears listening to Abbott Thayer, her hands flat in front of her as if in some eastern prayer. It was that consideration and grace.