The Death of All Things Seen (6 page)

He had arrived in Havre-Saint-Roche following a night and a day hitching north after crossing the border near the shoals of Sault Ste. Marie. He was affirming certain truths to himself about life, how hope and progress could sputter and die without ceremony. He was seeking examples of a truncated and lost history, seeking tangible evidence of the reality of human insignificance, a point of disconnection.

Havre-Saint-Roche wasn’t really a town anymore by 1971 – just a weigh station surviving on a post office and a Department of Forestry and Land Management Bureau.

Nate stayed in the vicinity almost a week, pitching a small canvas tent along the river’s edge. He set fishing lines in a pool of still water, jigging them until he caught three speckled trout which he gutted and salted to add to his supplies. He started a small fire in advance of morning’s pale light, then wandered amidst the remnants of an elaborate network of rigged lines where teams of horses and men had toiled under the boil of black flies and mosquitoes, felled logs carted through the marsh toward the rush of fast-flowing rivers.

Nothing had survived intact. A dormitory house roof had all but collapsed. He stood in the dappled light, a blue sky shining on a series of identical cots, suggesting the compact sameness of an early settlement. In the wide yawn of a dark stable door, he looked at the crucible of what had once been a firepit that had burned in the service of shoeing horses, making sleds, chains and irons, along with all manner of tools required for extracting old growth timber. In the center, an anvil sat near a tarred accordion bellows like the folded wing of a monstrous bat.

In inhabiting the stillness, in surveying the creep of vegetation, the ruin, it had the feel and fallout of a great calamity, but that was what had drawn him there. He had not been seeking to restart life, but to hold life in abeyance, to sit out the rush of destruction in the conscientious objection that too much life was discarded by generals in the vainglory of conflicts that might have been resolved if young men simply refused to serve, if they laid down their arms on both sides, if they chose to run away.

*

At times, in the vast stillness, in his aloneness, Canada rang with a certain unassailable truth that all could and would be subsumed and undone by nature. He said the word,
Canada
, like a mantra when the overwhelming insignificance of it all brought on a flutter of trembling anxiety.

In the torn encyclopedia pages he brought with him, he had circled a reference to one particularly ill-conceived mining operation. Financed out of Ottawa, it had sprung up in the dying days of wood, just as steel began to be used to rebuild the metropolises along the lakes, after the great fires of Chicago and Toronto.

He had found the entrance to the mine, the grim, black mouth agape in the agony of collapse, a splinter of blackened beams within. Twenty-two miners were buried alive a half-mile into the side of a hill in a flash flood in the spring of 1929, the calamity meriting just a footnote in the encyclopedia. The event, and the town, had all but been forgotten after the onset of the Great Depression.

All things changed. Nate let the thought settle. After the depression, men no longer went into the wild, and instead lined up at soup kitchens in the great metropolises on both sides of the border. What it signified was the destitution of the body and the mind, a destruction of the spirit of the age.

It was the prophetic ending Nate had needed when he first arrived, that solitary pilgrimage into desolate lands, inhabiting the cleaving sense of how time could and did outrun the ingenuity of the best-laid plans.
Oh, Canada
.

*

He left Havre-Saint-Roche in the light of early morning for what was his true destination, the town of Grandshire. He extinguished his fire with the stomp of his boot, and made his way along a dirt road following a page with a map torn from the same encyclopedia.

He had read that Grandshire was a town built by an enlightened industrialist, Augustus Grandshire, a prominent socialist with progressive New England sensibilities who had transported his vision of a Utopian collective across the border into the wild Canadian backwoods.

Upon first arriving, Nate surveyed the town. It emerged from a break into a clearing of land run along a river’s edge. It survived in its shabby grandeur. In accordance with its founder’s Utopian reach, a pulp mill had been set at a distance from the residential district, so Grandshire achieved, at the time, a rarefied divide – separating the toil of one’s daily labor with the reprieve of nature.

In the town center stood the remnants of a chapel. Prayer services had been read from a belfry over a loud speaker, so when the wind blew, people forty miles away had been given to proclaiming that they could hear the word of God carried on the wind through the whispering pines.

It was not then the place it had once been, but it showed how one man’s influence could make a difference, how those who might not have fared so well could be saved by being born into a place where attitudes and ways of conduct were well-established. In a way, it reminded Nate of the influence of John F. Kennedy on his own adolescence, how the decade started with a promise of putting a man on the moon. How strange, Kennedy long dead, and Nate out in the Canadian wilds, while at the decade’s end, a man
did
walk on the moon, and the world knew all about the
Sea of Tranquility
, while, in South East Asia, war raged unabated.

How could it have been, that anomalous proposition, the claiming of a moon when there was so much yet up for grabs on Earth?

*

Nate lodged for the first few months in what had once been a plush hotel, complete with a grand tearoom with velvet-covered couches and a dance hall with draped curtains and a stage.

At the time, everyone understood what brought an American up there, and yet he was regarded with neither suspicion nor interest. Vietnam was not Canada’s war. The work at the mill kept the workers busy and attentive. The whirling bite of a blade could cut a man in two. Nate was hired and worked a year that shaped him into a man.

He met Ursula Abenakis right after he arrived. She was a twenty-two-year-old half-blood native who worked at the hotel. She met his stare with the greenest of eyes, her sallow skin framed by a black sheen of hair, betraying her lineage.

She wrote his name into a leather bound ledger, the languid sweep of her writing style suggesting a convent education. She had, in fact, been brought up in a Catholicism that never took hold. In the pulse of nature, in daily life, there was a more powerful God.

She became his fascination, this Ursula Abenakis. He took his meals at the hotel, tipping with a view to catching her attention. He watched the way she filled the pepper and salt shakers, topped up the milk jugs, turned over the damp brown sugar in the glass bowls, and at the day’s end dutifully changed the fly-strip paper.

He learned, in the coming weeks, sitting by her in the dying evenings, that her father had been a fur trapper, three-quarters First Nation and a quarter French-Canadian, as were most trappers in the region after centuries of interbreeding along the Saint Lawrence and the fur-trade routes.

Nate was fresh-faced back then, a young man destined for great things. Or so Ursula told him. It didn’t take her long to come out to the cabin he found in the fall, her housewarming gift a rhubarb pie and a pound of ground coffee beans.

At the hotel, she had called him ‘My American’, smiling with a beatific grace. He had thought her a beauty he could never possess, and he carried the thought of her in the way men carried lost dreams into battle. He loved her for her intelligence and mystery. When she poured him coffee, he felt like weeping. He thought he would never have her.

When she arrived with the rhubarb pie, she wore nylons under her jeans, but no underwear or bra. It was revealed as she removed her top and then her jeans, placing them by her side, and doing so without the slightest sense of urgency or impropriety. She observed a polite restraint in the wake of their lovemaking, which was full of struggle and passion. She never asked directly about his family, or if he might return to America. Vietnam was the reason for his being there, and yet it seemed so remote, it didn’t bear mentioning.

For her part, she revealed she was from the Anishinaabeg tribe, a name which literally meant, ‘Beings made out of nothing’, a conjuring that set Nate into a swooning sense that, yes, all came from nothing, that all things had to be envisioned and decided upon and then made real. He considered their relationship the same way, something made out of nothing.

Of course, Ursula came with a past, something before the current nothingness. She was honest, open and proud. She had been with a First Nation man, Frank Grey Eyes, born into the Wolf Clan, a ponytailed, equine-faced native with wolf eyes and a temper. He wore a black bowler hat and a poncho. His favorite things in the whole world were scratch lottery tickets and booze. This was where mystery and revelation had gone, or so he believed.

They had ventured to Toronto in 1968 so Frank could work construction, but Frank couldn’t handle the booze or the loneliness and, though he complained that Toronto was killing him, he stayed and got attached to white women in bars where his kind fell easy prey to women on the way down, white women who held a certain allure of what non-white males felt was a conquest, a victory of sorts. It just exacerbated the decline, because it felt like something other than it was, when it was nothing but the end.

When Frank was sad he used to trace the outline of a circle around himself, shuffling in a circular, tribal, tomahawk-wielding dance, a slow vortex spun against the spin of the cosmos, as though he could create some concept of home. He wore his bowler hat, so it was sobering, sad and moving to witness him dance in the dark of the apartment.

Sometimes he scratched a lottery ticket, the silver filings sifting through the air like a spell. He was looking for small, contained miracles. He was fascinated, too, by fortune cookies. He felt revelation was hiding in the most unlikely places, and that you had to work against the petulance of the spirit world. Toronto seemed like a place that the spirit world might inhabit. It was worth a look.

Frank was good like that in understanding the ways of the spirit world. But it was white women that destroyed him. They didn’t understand his energy. They could reach in and tear his heart out. There was no magic against white women. Frank was helpless. They passed right through the circle.

The last time Ursula saw Frank he was in a Drunk Tank. He called her not by Ursula, a Christian name bestowed upon her, but by a native name, which translated meant, ‘Something Good Cooking by a Fire’.

Frank was bestowing a grace on her, releasing her. His face and nose were smashed in. He kept drawing an invisible circle around himself so the cops thought he was nuts.

Ursula watched him through a one-way mirror before she left for the last time. She drew a circle around herself. Then she was gone. She took a bus back home in the magic of her aura, and so ended the summative history of what had been almost three years of her life.

Frank was eventually stabbed and died in a Toronto hospital.

She revealed the story, working a fire that Nate couldn’t start. There was a trick, the bedding of embers had to be packed with sawdust dipped in a gel paraffin, which, when she lit it, gave off a bright blue light like the star of first creation. Nate was taken by the flint of light caught in her eyes, the light licking the sheen of her cleavage and up under her chin as she turned and faced him.

*

By seven thirty, after a day and night of snow, Nate eased toward the outskirts of Windsor. Almost thirty-eight years had passed since he had crossed the border at Sault Ste. Marie as a desperate nineteen-year-old.

If felt like a lifetime ago. Ursula was dead almost eight years, her radiant face still the trademark design of the organics enterprise he had sold the year after she succumbed to cancer. He had sketched her face up by Handsome Lake in the first year of their marriage.

He didn’t go out of his way to tell those who didn’t know the story of the origin of the company logo when it might have increased the sale price of the business. Nor did he reveal his own personal story, his Vietnam history and exile that, equally, might have lowered the price. His voice had leveled, with a broadening of his vowels, so he sounded Canadian without consciously trying. He sounded like a man without a history.

In approaching the border crossing, he could see how the divide between America and Canada had diminished in the push of global sameness, the eastern Canadian cities running along the border filled with the same big box stores – the Walmarts and Lowes and Sears and Targets – the same fast food franchises, the same car manufacturers. These Canadian cities now inhabiting just a slightly altered version of the American experience, a reprise of the American experiment overlaid with a sense of decency and socialist tendencies, though it was all becoming a oneness, so there was no real understanding of a divergent past, or it didn’t much matter anymore.

He considered calling his only daughter. They had not talked in a great while. Against his and her mother’s wishes, she had married a Pakistani immigrant, Rahim Hafeez, who had gone on to great success with a controlling interest in a call center in Karachi, and whose view of English Imperialism was exceedingly gracious.

Disconcertingly, Rahim had made his daughter dress according to a conservative Muslim code, while he dressed like any one of the terrorists who had hijacked and crashed the planes into the Twin Towers – in button-down shirts, Levi jeans, Nikes, and a Blue Jays baseball cap. It was a fight Nate knew best to put off for another time. Perhaps he would visit, but not just then.

In truth, Nate’s mind was elsewhere. He had found Norman Price’s email address on a theater website. He might contact him, making polite reference that he was returning to Chicago.

In fact, he knew he would contact him. It was decided in his heart, though it would be a delicate matter, how to broach the subject of Helen Price, but for now there was the advancing line of cars ahead of him, and America awaiting his return.