Touch (8 page)

“That’s not what your father said when he first told me about ijirait,” Jeannot said. “But perhaps he’s seeing things differently now.”

Lawrence stared at my grandfather, his eyes flashing red from the sun, and then he shook his head. “No more. He
went over more than fifteen years now. Before this one,” he said, pointing to me, “was a thought. But yes, he started seeing things a little differently. What with the way things change, with the new, he said, the old couldn’t stay the same, and he began to think that the old ways might have changed as well.”

“So I shouldn’t worry anymore if I encounter an ijirait?”

Lawrence grinned. “Well now, that’s not exactly what I said. But if you do encounter one you’ll know because you’ll quickly forget about it. Or”—and he grinned again, but this time in a less friendly manner—“they might bring you a message.”

Jeannot laughed. “Well, that’s not particularly helpful,” he said. “But I’ll keep what you said in mind. A message, huh?”

“A message,” Lawrence agreed.

As we watched Lawrence tromp off across the clearing and disappear into the woods, Jeannot turned to me and said, “Ijiraits are evil beings no matter what Lawrence says of it.” He swung his rifle back onto his shoulder. “Let’s head out ourselves.”

DURING THE LAST FEW WEEKS
, as my mother has wasted away, there were times when the house felt like it was closing in on me. I left others to sit with my mother—my aunt Julia, Virginia, my stepfather, my wife—so I could take to the woods like I had as a child. Sometimes I, too, felt like I was seeing things. Except that I wasn’t seeing the places where the trees became dark and dangerous, where monsters lurked, but rather I was seeing where all those places no longer existed.

On one of the walks, my eldest daughter came with me.
I told her about Xiaobo, the Chinese miner turned servant to my great-aunt Rebecca and great-uncle Franklin. I told her how half of his body had been burned: the right half a mass of knotted scars, the left half as unblemished as fresh snow. We walked near Rebecca and Franklin’s house and I pointed to a tree behind the house. I told my daughter how my father had fallen out of the tree and broken his arm, how Xiaobo had set the bone. My father said that Xiaobo’s scarred hand felt hot and burning, as if it were still engulfed in flame, while the other hand felt cool and calming as springwater.

“This tree?” my daughter asked. “This is the one he fell out of?” I nodded and helped her reach the lowest branch, pushed her feet as she hoisted herself up, but even as I did so, I realized that I was wrong. The tree was too low to the ground; it was certainly no older than I was.

The tree my father climbed and fell from had been cut down decades ago. But it did not matter to my daughter. To her, this was my father’s tree, and as I watched her lower herself until she hung from the tree, for at least a moment the tree
was
my father’s tree.

Sawgamet has changed. The darkness driven away. But, I tell my daughters, there are still parts of the forest that remain secret, places where the mountains can loom close upon us, where shape-shifters fly past us in the dark.

MY GRANDFATHER AND I
veered away from the mountain, taking a loping circle around the village, always staying in the woods. As we walked, my grandfather told stories, telling me
how after he left Sawgamet he went as far east as he could go, past Montreal and toward Halifax, lobstering and then working as crew on a fishing boat for a season, nearly dying from hunger he was so seasick. “May I never go to sea again,” he said, holding his hand up. He told me how he worked his way west again, across the plains and mountains, laying track and cutting tunnels on new rail lines, before finally coming back to Sawgamet.

“Why now?” I asked.

Jeannot took a few more steps and then walked over to a small creek. He knelt down and cupped his hands in the water, drinking twice before finally rocking back onto his heels and looking at me.

“The woods,” he said, and then he trailed off. “The woods,” Jeannot said again, but as his voice started to go silent a second time, I nodded as if I understood, and then he stood up fully. “Sometimes the woods ask things of a man.”

There was a small natural clearing where we had stopped, a large plateau of rock and grasses, starting only a few feet away from the creek. Jeannot stared at it and I remained silent. Finally he let out a sigh and then leaned against a tree, still surveying the clearing.

“I killed a man. Did you know that?”

I stayed quiet. I had not known that, and I did not know what to say. But no answer seemed necessary. Once again I wondered if my grandfather was talking to me or to someone else.

“Actually, I killed him twice.”

“Twice?” The sound of my voice startled me.

“The first time he wouldn’t stay dead, but when I killed
him the second time, I made sure to keep the bones and carry them with me.” He laughed, a short, barking laugh like a wolf’s howl. I thought of the shape-shifter, the ijirait, and the idea thrilled me that my grandfather might be one, that he might be able to transform into a wolf. I imagined some sort of wrenching change, skin buckling, my grandfather turned into a brutish, menacing animal with stained teeth. But no transformation took place.

“Have you got them with you now?” I eyed the odd bulges of his pockets, but could see no way for him to be carrying a man’s skeleton.

“It’s funny how little the bones of a man weigh,” he said. “Kept bound in cloth, they’ve been the only thing constant that I’ve carried with me these past thirty years.” He was silent for a moment and then he glanced over at me. “No. I don’t have them with me anymore. Sounds odd, I suppose, but I can’t know how much you’ll understand at this age, Stephen. So I’ll tell you this: I kept his bones because it was the only way I could make sure that he stayed dead. Turns out he was a man, after all. But I was afraid to let those bones out of my possession; afraid he would come back here and come after your father. And then it was time, and I knew it didn’t matter anymore. I knew I could put the bones to rest in the ground, that I couldn’t protect your father anymore. The woods and the river claim their own in the end.”

He took a step into the clearing. I heard some echo of a soft voice float through the air. I realized that we had circled up and around the village. We were past my stepfather’s church, but not quite on the trail that led to the cuts. A ten-minute walk or less from my house if done straight and true.

“And how did you know it was time,” I asked, “that you could bury the bones?”

“Your grandmother,” Jeannot said. “She came to me in a dream. Said to be done with it, to bury the bones, to come find you.” He turned to look at me, and I realized that he had tears in his eyes. “She didn’t tell me about your sister, Stephen, didn’t tell me about my son.”

“A dream?”

“Sometimes it’s as simple as that,” he said. He wiped at his eyes with his fingers, and then he leaned his rifle against a tree. “This will do,” he pronounced.

“For what?”

“For a home site. I’ll need a place to sleep come winter.”

“You’re staying?” I asked.

“I mean to,” Jeannot said, “at least for a while. There’s two ways of seeing your grandmother. One’s in you,” he said, and he looked hard into my face. “You look her grandson more than you look mine. You’re ten? Eleven? So that might still change, but for now it’s one way for me to see a piece of what I lost.” He stopped talking a moment and then patted me gently on the cheek. “You know, there was once a time when I didn’t care if I ever came back. I didn’t care if I ever saw your father again.”

He stared at me expectantly, and I did not know what to say.

I DON’T KNOW
when my father stopped expecting my grandfather to return to Sawgamet—or if he ever did stop expecting
it—but I know that the stories about Jeannot were something he held on to. He lived with my great-aunt and great-uncle and their daughter, and though Franklin and Rebecca treated him like a son, my great-aunt told me more than once that every knock at the door, every footstep in the distance, every person who came out of the dark who was not Jeannot, was like a splinter in my father’s heart.

When school wasn’t in session, and when he wasn’t helping Franklin in the store or at home, my father spent much of his time with Pearl. My father loved Franklin and Rebecca, but he was made for the cuts, and after that first year away at school in Vancouver, he said he would not leave Sawgamet again.

The summer after he returned from school, the summer that my father and Pearl built the steps and the chute beside the mill, my father was stunned at how soft he had become in only a single year away. He had turned sixteen while in Vancouver, but back in Sawgamet he found himself spent before midday.

First he and Pearl cut and planked the stairs down from the mill, an arduous process that left my father’s hands raw. Sixteen was young enough, however, that the extra flesh on his body melted quickly, and he turned hard and lean working with Pearl. By the time they finished digging and driving the pilings, my father had come to enjoy the work, and he was disappointed that the chute was nearly finished.

There was more to it than that, of course. Pearl and Mrs. Gasseur had not had any children of their own, and there had been a time when my father had studied Pearl’s appearance with great care, hoping to find some truth to the idea that he might be Pearl’s son. By the time he was seven or eight,
however, my father knew with certainty that Pearl was not his father—from looking in the mirror and from what little my great-uncle Franklin had been willing to speak of Jeannot—but one summer afternoon he asked Pearl anyway.

They had canoed across the Sawgamet and taken the fork up the Bear River, paddling an hour or so before beaching the canoe on a shaded gravel bank that Pearl promised was rife with fish. This was something, my father told me, that he and Pearl had done most Sunday afternoons that he could remember, gone off into the woods together, snow or sun, to fish or hunt or just for him to have a chance to get away from his aunt and uncle for a while. Occasionally Franklin’s daughter, my father’s cousin, Julia, came along with them, but mostly it was just Pearl and my father together. Usually Mrs. Gasseur packed something for them to eat, always thinking to include something that my father—or, for that matter, any boy of seven or eight—liked: shortbread, a few slices of fruit bread, jam-filled scones.

Pearl had been right about the fish, and in short order they caught enough to fill the creel. Pearl set his rod aside and leaned back on the shore, tipping his hat over his eyes to block the sun. My father kept casting idly, carefully pulling the hook out of the mouth of fish he caught and then gently lowering their twitching bodies back into the cool water. When I was a boy and fished with him, he told me that he loved the way the fish stayed in his hands, hovering in the water for a moment after he released them, how when they darted away they were like streaks of gold flashing in the water.

He let one go and then he finally turned and asked if Pearl was his father. Pearl touched his hand to his hat but he did not uncover his face. “You know I’m not your father, Pierre.”