It was an education travelling with Ned Hawke, but Grif wasn’t sure what degree he’d graduate with if he survived the trip: Master of the Minimal? Doctor of Wonders? Ned was as full of information as the lake was water, most of it about as trustworthy. For the first time in his life Grif wished that he weren’t so ignorant of what existed beyond the edges of practicality, so that he could contest some of what Ned told him. His teacher seemed at times to be like those ancient sailors who returned from their explorations with stories of fantastic peoples and distant lands rich with marvels. Yet Ned claimed that science was his subject, not fancy—except when he was teasing Grif, who was entertainingly credulous.
Grif’s instruction began late one afternoon, early into their journey, when they were setting up camp on a small island in a mazy stretch of Lake Huron’s North Channel. Dotted with reefs, shoals and islands that boats had to weave and waggle through, this part of the channel had come to be known as the Turkey Trail. Ned was constructing a steeple of kindling for their campfire and asked Grif if he wouldn’t mind fetching a branch of cedar. Arbor vitae, the tree of life. A handful of cedar was better for a man than a bag of oranges. It could cure snow blindness, scurvy, nasal congestion and possibly what ailed his young companion. Grif was happy to comply, and wandered up the beach and into a small stand of trees, where he snapped a branch off a sapling, easy as breaking a child’s arm. He was glad of it, too, for a couple of horseflies, thugs of the fly tribe, attacked him on the way back and he was able to do battle, using the branch as a switch to drive them off.
Ned regarded the branch—and him—with curiosity. A pileated woodpecker concealed in a bush nearby began shrieking loudly, derisive as any schoolyard bully.
“White pine,” Ned observed. “You will get to know it by its carcass, heading south. The Americans make mail-order catalogues out of it.”
The old man’s look was almost vocal: how was Grif ever going to find his way if he couldn’t tell the difference between one thing and the next, between where he had been and where he was going?
“This won’t do?” Grif waved the branch.
“Not at all. Why don’t you sit down on that rock there and I’ll tell you about what’s under your very arse.”
“Huh?”
“Lichen, two plants. Living symbiotically. Like man and wife.”
“What, this?” Grif pointed to a greenish leprous scale on the rock. “It’s not alive.”
“It’s alive all right, and has been for years, likely for centuries. The manna that fed the Israelites in the desert was a species of lichen. The stuff blows off the rocks in the lowlands there and people do eat it. Miraculous matter indeed.”
Grif protested, as well he might, because Ned had begun to pull him through a grain-high, hair-wide passage into the world of particularity.
Tree, plant, bird, rock. What more did a man need in the way of definition? Vast and plain, categories as large as continents, these words sufficed. You could navigate through a whole life, incurious and detail-blind, without requiring microscopically subtle distinctions and directions. Ignorance had its uses; it kept things whole, and easily comprehensible. But not for Ned, who believed that all animals, especially the arrogant two-legged ones, needed to stay alert. To attend. What if Grif ended up marrying the same woman twice without even realizing it? Ned knew what he knew (Grif talked in his sleep) and had decided that this was not the time to be beggarly with the world’s infinitesimal wealth.
It took Grif a while to catch on. As they travelled through a labyrinth of islands—some nothing more than a hump of smooth rock with a scattering of vegetation on top, like a giant’s bald pate emerging—and dipped into dark-water bays, and as they camped and fished and swam (Grif with the help of an inflated moose’s stomach), he found his attention constantly diverted by Ned to the oddest and most insignificant of things. To the veined wing of a mayfly, or the wriggling bluish legs and orange claw tips of a crayfish, or the papery bark of the birch, encoded as a roll of music for a player piano. He listened, and occasionally grunted to prove he was listening, but then would purposely forget what he had been told, would shake it off as though ridding himself of a smattering of dirt and grit. Not that Ned’s “facts” weren’t interesting, even captivating, for he touched magically on this and that with the slight wand of himself. Grif just didn’t care that every bloodsucking bug he might encounter—and did—had been distinguished with a Latin name. Higher classification didn’t improve their manners in the least. Take Chrysops callidas, the deer fly. Black-banded wings, iridescent green eyes, half an inch in length, quick in attack, tenacious, transporting you away in small burning chunks—Grif might learn everything there was to know about the deer fly, yet it still ate him alive. It knew him more intimately than he would ever know it, unless he happened to swallow one. So much for knowledge and the deflecting power of words.
Grif liked Ned. How could he not? The man was personable, easy to get along with, undemanding. He had a cricket for a pet. During the day it lived in his pocket, and at night he placed it on his knee so that he could speak to it. And the darn cricket answered. Truth was, Grif had gotten to the point where he would much rather hear the cricket’s monologue than Ned’s. Irrational, no doubt, and ungrateful, but he had developed an aversion to the sound of his companion’s voice, of what it carried, like pins and bits of broken glass that scraped against his inner ear. It was like listening to a wind at first melodious, then monotonous, then causing a deep ache in the head. He made excuses to get away from him. When not sailing on the lake, or drinking as much of it as his gut would hold (giving him a reason to go off and piss privately in the woods—he’d made a nuisance of himself zinging streams scattershot off the rocky beaches, wetting Ned’s pant legs), he began to spend more and more time in it, submerged, ears stuffed with muffling water. As a consequence of being driven into it, he was—incredibly—mending his relationship with the element, and mending himself into it, stepping from water to land and back again as if crafting for himself an amphibious existence.
One day he wandered off to dry himself on a baking haunch of rock. He tilted his head back, opened his mouth and stretched out his tongue, letting the breeze move in and the sun lay down a warm host of light. Despite the lessons, this transient life was not so bad. Ned was only trying to help, after all, and although he had told him a great many things, the subject of a destination had not come up. Grif wasn’t about to suggest one, either. Nowhere in particular was a safe enough place to be. If attention—or some semblance of it—was the tuition he had to pay for this errant life, then he supposed the fee wasn’t beyond his means. He glanced down and watched his wet footprints fading on the rock, as if he himself were evaporating, lifting into the air, stepping up and away, being translated directly into spirit. No man, nowhere. Touching his cheek, though, and his brow, skating his palm down the length of his arm, he felt himself to be solidly, ineradicably present.
He then noticed the blue flower of a harebell that was growing in a narrow crevice beside him, and reached out to touch it instead. Campanula rotundifolia. Grif knew that now, and knowing it didn’t make it less delicate, or less hardy for thriving in this barren spot. He placed a finger under the bell and raised its tiny blue chin to peer inside. Curse the man, he thought, it’s becoming a habit. He was expecting to see lavender stamens tipped with yellow dust, but saw instead a thing dark and twisted, a writhing black seed. He drew closer, eye to flower, body stretched out flat, and distinguished two insects (unnamed even by Ned) stuck together to form one crude and misshapen unit. Disgusted, he ripped the plant up by the roots and smeared its blue bower into the rock with his bare heel. Everything mocked him, even creatures so small you could scarcely see them.
That evening as they sat together by their campfire finishing supper, Ned pulled a pike’s bone out of his mouth as if out of a sheath, ran it over his upper lip, combed it through his beard and said, “You know the Wise Man who brought the gift of myrrh to the Christ child?”
“Yes-s.”
“Think what better shape we’d be in if he had brought mirth instead.”
“Christ would have been telling funny stories instead of parables?”
“Jokes, yes. And the Apostles might have put on skits instead of long faces. There’s no comedy in religion, is there?”
“None that I’ve ever encountered. Except once, when Father Fallon knocked a chalice over during the consecration. Turns out he was having his morning coffee in it.”
“Ha. A sense of humour produces a critical mind, is why. Liberates you to think your own thoughts. Can’t have that where faith is concerned.”
“Does the Pope believe in God, do you think?”
“That old monkey? I’d be very much surprised if he did. Too clever by half.”
“He’s infallible.”
“So’s my cricket.” Ned twirled the fish bone in his fingers, then, pointing it at Grif, said, “Why did you leave her?”
Grif sucked in air, rammed by the very conversation he was cruising along so comfortably in.
“Didn’t you love her?” Ned persisted.
Grif snatched up a chunk of driftwood, flat as a paddle, that lay beside him. It seemed for a second as if he were going to swipe it across Ned’s face—erase the question and the inquisitor both—but instead he drove it into the fire. A spray of sparks leapt up, a tendril of smoke.
“I didn’t even know her,” he said.
Mercifully, when Ned was asleep, he neither snored, nor philosophized, nor interrogated. At night Grif kept himself awake as long as he could to appreciate all the uninterpreted sounds on offer—waves lapping the shore, wind in the trees, bats squeaking. Gazing up at a sky thick with stars, he thought about something Ned had told him: that mariners once possessed the power of seeing the stars during the day, an ability gradually lost with the discovery and use of navigational instruments. Grif didn’t know whether to believe this or not, but he wanted to. Ned had also told him that human beings are made of the same material as the stars, and this he didn’t believe at all.
Lessons in astronomy had come his way too, and he could pick out the constellations—Pegasus, Perseus, Cygnus—most of which had tragic stories attached. The night sky was god-infested with Olympian memorials. How oppressive this was. The stars were more beautiful, he had decided, as abstract splatter, their designs loose and unresolved. Once you saw the patterns the constellations formed, you always saw them, ancient and changeless (although Ned claimed they did change over time); they rode ceaselessly overhead, dragging their sad stories with them, no matter how rent their forms.
Clouds. He preferred clouds, which were too rapidly changeable for the mythmakers to do anything with. Try to stop one with an imprisoning story and the sky would clear instantly.
But there was one constellation that he had grown fond of, and he sought it out this night: a giant who strode across the heavens in a drunken, rangy swagger, his being like glinting shards of broken bar glass tossed up into the sky, his open self a wild lament burning into the darkness. O’Brien he was called, or at least that’s what he thought Ned had called him. He had a red star embedded in his right shoulder and a blue star in his left leg. Around his waist he wore a belt of pearls, and from this a mirror-bright dagger depended. O’Brien had two dogs following him, and was himself standing on Lepus, the hare—which did not seem like inconsistent behaviour for a rogue Irish star man who must, with blather and charm, have elbowed his way among the Greeks. When sleep finally claimed him, Grif drifted off secure in the knowledge that although the giant continuously pursued those girls, the Pleiades (Colleen, Sheila, Emer …), the chase was endless. He’d never catch them—nor would he know what to do if he did.
The morning after Ned so irritatingly questioned him, invoking his wife, Grif woke pulling and scratching at his chest. In sleep he had been clawing at himself, trying to remove a holy medal, hot as a brand, that was sinking into him as if his flesh was as soft as butter. With dream cognition he recognized this medal as one that had been given to him at birth, his first possession, long since lost. The medal was about the size of a child’s thumbprint and on it was embossed the figure of the Virgin Mary, tiny and ghostly.
He sat up suddenly, jerked out of sleep, and looked toward the fire, suspecting that a flaming spark had landed on him; but the pit was cold, filled with nothing but grey ash and charred chunks of wood. He rubbed at the spot, stinging and itchy, and unbuttoned the top of his union suit. A red, angry lesion had risen in the centre of his chest like a bull’s eye. I’m a marked man, he thought. And aloud, “Hey Ned, does that infallible cricket of yours bite?”
Ned was out of earshot, up to his knees in the lake and standing perfectly still, concentrating, poised as a heron, ready to catch their breakfast with his bare hands.
A spider, then. Lycosidae gulosa, which is Latin for “sneaky bastard.” A smother of spiders. Grif shuddered to think what could have passed over him in the night. He reached for his jacket and the journal, thinking he might just go arachnid hunting, stub out a few sons of that furtive night-walking family for the offence of trespass. Then again, maybe it was hard not to trespass when you have eight legs.
Weighing the book in his hand, it occurred to him that he hadn’t held it for some time, although he was ever aware of its weight, like an extra hand riding in his pocket. He supposed he could actually use it for something more dignified than squashing bugs. The journal was only half full, and what a waste, how incomplete. There wasn’t any reason not to write in it himself. Throw enough mud and some of it will stick, as his father was overly fond of saying; and although he meant aspersion rather than knowledge, Grif felt that in this case knowledge applied—and had been applied, liberally. Ned had thrown it at him by the bucketful, and it had stuck, some of it. Observing, learning, knowing, might even be another bolt-hole, another way out. It wouldn’t hurt to record some of what Ned had told him, what had truly begun to interest him, and perhaps to add to that an account of his days. He could pick up where the original writer—so methodical in his account of ecclesiastical destruction—had left off. In doing so, he would bridge a hiatus of centuries, grafting his own experience, his green growth, onto that old, twisted stock. The liberating dissent and mayhem would nourish him like black, tilled earth. That he might deface an object of considerable historic value did not trouble him overmuch. Like the roving creature that had nipped him during the night, trespass was a sin of freedom he had become comfortable with, if not entirely reconciled to.
Ned plunged his hands into the lake and an arc of silvery water flashed up.
Grif felt a thrill of rising excitement possess him, as if he were a hunter about to skin an animal still faintly warm with life. He slipped the cord off the package and began to divest the journal of its canvas wrapping.