The Last Woman (17 page)

More silence. He is pretending now, pretending an ongoing interest in the motor, pretending he’s relaxed.

The boy’s voice comes again: “What do you think happens, like – when we die?”

The question chills him. Yet in a way he is not surprised.
Ross Shewaybick
, he thinks. The boy’s stiffened body, head on one side, spindling slowly under a tree.

“You mean, where do we go?”

“Like, do you think we exist still. Is there anything – like, after?”

“I guess that’s the sixty-dollar question.” Billy taps his wrench at a bolt: what does he know? “After my mother died, I felt she was still around. After a while, years really, I didn’t feel that any more. She’d done what she had to here, I guess, then she set out on her three-day journey.”

“You believe that stuff? The three-day journey?”

It was said the spirit travelled for three days to a good place, a better place – not the Christian heaven, he likes to think, but a place of bush and lakes: a place like this, without the pain.

But he does not know if it is true. Sometimes he thinks life’s a crock. You live, without ever having asked for it, life drums on you (and maybe just a little you drum on it) and
then it’s over: and it means nothing. But you could not tell a boy that.

He wishes it was an earlier time, when he was a boy. People believed then, without even knowing they did. Not church belief, but the belief they drew in with their breath. You could sense it all around you – the way a man cut open a hanging carcass; the way a woman stitched up a rabbit-skin blanket – belief flowed in the sureness of their movements, in the shape of their lives.

But now most people ran from one thing to another, or did nothing at all, because belief was seeping away.

But you could not tell a boy that.

You believe that? The three-day journey?
There is as much hope as skepticism in his nephew’s voice, and he can prolong no longer. “I think so,” he says, pausing in his discomfort. “Yup, think so.”

When he gets his motor back on his boat, he lets Jimmy test-drive it, sitting amidships while his nephew steers. Jimmy handles the boat well, but as they come back, the motor splutters and dies. Stepping through the hull, Billy loses his balance, and for a moment has to steady himself by planting his hand on his nephew’s head. It is the first time since Jimmy was little that he’s touched him.

That night he dreams he is walking on a bridge that arches through the sky, over a vast expanse of water. On the other side is a land of such beauty he cannot hold back his tears. It resembles the earth – a place of rivers and forests and light, though the colours are more intense. A circle of men is there, sitting on the ground. At their
invitation, he joins them and speaks about his life in the world he has left: how his deepest joy was to be on the land, amid the trees and the light. To hunt, to walk, simply to breathe: no joy to compare to that joy, no gift so great. The others nod knowingly. There are feathers in their hair. They are warriors and hunters and shamans; and though he does not recognize any of them, he feels completely at home. As he talks, he is overwhelmed with emotion and has to pause from time to time to collect himself.

Now a man who is as grey as ash walks up to the group. He reaches out and touches a finger to Billy’s left cheek and makes a mark there. At first, he is frightened: who is this man, this ghost warrior? But the others do not seem alarmed. Reassured, he goes on talking.

The next day, he wakes in a buoyant mood, as if a screen between him and life has been removed. Everything is fresh, radiant.

He walks to his sister’s. He wants to tell Jimmy that the three-day journey is true. Isn’t that the meaning of his dream? That there is another world beyond this one? But Jimmy has not come home, Yvonne tells him. She hasn’t seen him since yesterday. She’s short with Billy, distracted by her children, and more upset, he senses, than she’s letting on.

In the summer kids will sometimes stay out all night – probably Jimmy is fine. But after looking around the community and not finding him, he walks to the clearing. To his relief he finds it empty.

On the way home, he runs into the boy who had refused to give him his name that day in the clearing. Dwayne Turnbull. Yvonne has told him she doesn’t like Jimmy hanging around with him: he’s trouble, she says.

But he has his own opinion of Dwayne Turnbull. One time at the swimming place, when two boys were arguing, Dwayne, squatting higher on the rock, had observed silently until they started to push at each other, then he had come down the rock and separated them.

And now he is approaching, striding along with that cocky air. Dwayne looks up and Billy catches the openness of surprise. Then the face shuts down.

“Dwayne,” Billy says. The boy barely mutters in response. He clearly intends to push on past, but Billy has blocked his way. He stops, his eyes full of suspicion and hostility. “I’m Billy Johnson. Jimmy’s uncle.”

“The great chief.”

Billy ignores the mockery. “Yup, I was chief for a while. ’Bout ten years back.”

“I heard you were gonna get us our land back.”

“That’s right.”

“I guess it didn’t work out.”

“I was looking for Jimmy,” Billy says. “You seen him?” The boy does not respond but stares in a neutral direction, off the path; Billy has a sense of angry dismissal. But there is something else here too: a kind of patient endurance, terribly familiar. It’s as if all his people are here, waiting as they have always waited.

“No,” Dwayne says finally and prods at the ground with his boot.

“Look, about the land claim,” Billy says. He has a sudden urge to make the kid see how it was, all those years ago. “We put up a tremendous fight. But the thing was, we were before our time. The courts didn’t even recognize we had a
right
to our land back then. So it was uphill all the way. We made some mistakes too. We were learning as we went along. But, Dwayne, we were in the right.”

The boy sniffs. He has scarcely moved.

“It isn’t over, you know. Someday we’ll try again. Maybe when you’re chief.”

Dwayne shoots him a look of outrage and alarm.

“Why not?” Billy says. “You could do it. I know you could.”

The boy’s head goes down. He is breathing hard, as if caught in a sudden ambush not knowing which way to run. He seems on the verge of tears.

“Fuck you,” he mumbles finally and pushes past Billy, nearly falling over a rock as he makes his escape. Billy watches the white T-shirt until it disappears down the path.

Trudging home, he is weighed down by a sadness that gives to the houses a cruel, sharp look in the bright sun. He remembers the ghost warrior – the cold brush of his finger – and the fear that something has happened to Jimmy settles more deeply with each step.

On the dock, several kids are shouting to one another as they jump from boat to boat. Maggie Roundhead. Wayne
McAllister. That boy with the shaved head – Ernie Squance. Giles Mackay’s granddaughter. Balancing for a moment on the end of the dock, she rises a little on her toes and, quick as a kingfisher, knifes into the water.

Jimmy is not among them. Still, Billy climbs onto the dock. He does not know what he is doing now – simply moving forward because his momentum has carried him that way. All around him, the kids go on with their play, balancing on the moored boats or sitting on the edge of the dock as he plods through their midst. When he can go no farther, he stands looking over the bay, as pale as milk in the lowering sun. Below him floats the wet, dark head of Giles Mackay’s granddaughter.

After a while he turns back and sees Jimmy. The boy is lying in a canoe almost hidden behind another boat. He has wormed his way under the thwarts, and is lying on his back with his open hands crossed over his chest, staring at the sky.

Before he can be noticed, Billy slips away.

The phone rings and it’s Gerald Spicer’s secretary; they have a job for him at the lodge. Gerald’s partners are arriving in two days and would like to go fishing. Could Billy come over the night before and get the boat ready?

When the time comes, he walks to the little bay where he parks his boat in fine weather. Half a dozen boys are ranged along the shore, throwing stones at a floating log. Jimmy is there, and Dwayne – his head visible above the
others. Billy’s first instinct is to retreat. He doesn’t want to put either them or himself through the usual awkwardness. But he has to get to his boat.

It sits in their midst, its motor drawn up, its bow pointed up the sand. No avoiding it, he thinks, and walks toward the boat. A couple of the boys, turning to pick up stones, notice him and fall still. “Hey, guys,” he says in acknowledgement. Almost instantly the stone-throwing stops. Tossing his jacket in the boat, he is about to push it out when Lance Cormier says, “Billy! Watch this!” The little boy proceeds to wind up in elaborate imitation of some big-league pitcher – provoking a stir of amusement among the others – and fires his stone a mile wide of the log. Another boy scoffs, but Billy says, “Great form, Lance. You just have to work on the direction.”

“Like this!” one of the other boys says, and he flings out a stone that drops close to the target.

“Good one!” Billy says and sees the stone lying beside his boat – a perfect throwing stone, a little flat, about the size of a plum, white granite streaked with grey.

He can feel their eyes on him as he picks it up and takes aim. He hasn’t thrown for ages, and though he wasn’t a bad ballplayer in his time, he knows he’s rusty, that he might let the stone go a fraction too soon, or hold on to it too long and embarrass himself. But he’s lucky, the stone arcs out, curving a little, and drops: a white blossom erupts beside the log.

“Anyone beat that!”

Pausing to push back his hair, Jimmy throws.

Another stone answers. And another. Soon everyone is throwing, the air is thick with stones, and over the western islands, the sun is a great yellow stone falling slowly.

He stands in their midst, throwing and encouraging them, laughing with pleasure. At the end of the line of boys, ten yards to his right, Dwayne, too, is throwing – though his manner is sullen and restrained.

Billy begins to throw alongside him, timing his shots to answer to Dwayne’s. Soon they’re engaged in a silent competition. He can feel the boy’s anger in the snap of his arm, his eagerness to beat him. So he throws a little wide intentionally, and when one of Dwayne’s shots bounces off the log, says, “You’ve got a damned fine arm. Ever play ball?”

Dwayne turns away to find another stone.

“You remind me of Pete Roundhead,” Billy says, persisting. “Played third for us the year we went to the championships. Had a cannon for an arm. Accurate too. Norval Tooke hardly had to move his trapper.”

Dwayne frowns as if he were examining each detail warily. Another boy asks, “You went to the championships?”

So he tells them. “Every game, that park over there would be full of people. We had this hitter, Bob Lavoie, came from the Falls – one home run, he drove that sucker so far into the bush we never found her till spring.” They laugh at that, all except Dwayne. Yet Billy senses he’s listening. “You guys’d make good ballplayers,” Billy says. “Sure, you got good arms. We could give it a try some time – play a bit of ball.” The boys stir a little, but none of
them speak. Soon afterwards he shoves out his boat and starts the engine. As he pulls away, he looks back. The boys have not moved. They stand along the shore with the sun on their faces, watching him.

He sits in the same low chair as before while Gerald leans back against his desk in tennis whites, his arms folded, his face drawn. In the window behind him, the golf course refracts the glow of the evening through its emerald depths; a shaft of gold light falls across the carpet and burnishes the photo of the racing cars on the opposite wall. “This party I want you to take out – they’re my biggest backers – it’s important they have a good time. Between you and me, Billy, I’m not sure they really get what we do here.

“Frank Carpino – he’s the main guy – puts up half the new buildings in Toronto. This place is really peanuts to him, more of a hobby, you might say. It would be a very good thing, Billy, if you could find him some fish. Maybe take them to the west there, some of the more remote bays. No portages, though – don’t want him to have a heart attack – he’s already had a couple. And don’t go too far north, especially if there’s a wind coming from that direction. Don’t want them to hear the logging.”

He spends the twilight hour readying the boat: a big new launch with a futuristic hull of white plastic, seats sheathed in red leather, a mini-bar, a fish finder, two powerful outboards. He checks the rods, the tackle, the live bait, and as darkness falls he retires to the cabin
they’ve reserved for him. The swaybacked mattresses of Jack’s era are gone: he reclines on a firm bed with half a dozen fragrant pillows behind him, flicking through the satellite channels.

On the wall by the bathroom, half-hidden by a lamp, hangs a black and white photograph taken, he guesses, about forty years before. A group of fishermen pose with their arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning in tipsy, exaggerated camaraderie. Recognizing the guide squatting before them, he cries out. Matt looks younger than Billy is now; and it is partly this that moves him, to see him in his prime: barrel-chested, his black hair combed straight back. He thinks he knows how it was in that camp, at that moment. Matt would not have wanted to appear in the photo, but the men would have insisted.
Matt, Matt, you get in here
: raising him to equality with them – as they saw it – and enjoying their own generosity.