If Grif were music, he’d be a dirge, moving down the road at a balked, funereal pace, a mourning tempo. Lento, retardando … fin. Anything in pursuit could easily have snatched him up and devoured him, and he would hardly have noticed. Or cared. He felt so weary and flightless, it was all he could do to move one dead man’s shoe, rotted as a face, in front of the other. He slurred his steps as he walked, and what filled his lungs was more lament than breath, what he exhaled a sorry and pointless tune. His life the theme of it.
He arrived in Little Current about the same time as the dawn, and descended a hill following the smell of water and wood, fresh-cut. A port and a mill town. He wandered by houses hushed and sleep-wrapped, past stores with boom-town fronts and signs in limb-high lettering that identified them as Carruthers’ Drugs, Turner’s Dry Goods, Vincent’s Bargain House. A store for everyone. His footsteps made hollow rattling sounds on the wooden sidewalk, and as he waded through patches of morning mist, his pant legs gathering damp, he might have been taken for a revenant, something flushed out of the night and about as substantial. A skunk ran toward him, and then straight across his foot. Even to the creatures he was nothing more than an unravelling patch of grey, fading like the dawn. If it were possible, he would do it—melt into the atmosphere, or become the day’s weather, or even that blasted skunk, if he could figure out how.
He passed by a blacksmith’s, a photography studio, a combination confectionery/butcher shop—another odd union. Outside of a barroom he saw a man curled up in a wheelbarrow, his digested dinner—or someone’s—from the night before piled déjà spew in his outstretched hand. He walked quickly by; the man smelled rank.
The place was dead still, although surely not for long, unless it was Sunday. He pictured the bustle and surge of noon traffic in the street: wagons, horses, dust roiling up, people weaving in and out, a medley of voices, a joke tossed across the road and returned with a laugh. Farmers, fishermen, mill hands, Indians, tourists—more men than women. At present he appeared to be the only actor on this stage, and his performance wasn’t up to much, his soliloquy stuffed so far down his throat he’d never get it out. Someone likely was watching him, someone standing at a window washing his neck with Windsor soap, or sprucing up his hair with Butler and Crisp’s Pomade Divine. He could feel the eyes fixed on him like a gun’s sight, the crosshairs dividing his face like a pie. A drifter, a stranger, anonymous as dirt.
A wanted man. But only for a legal and concluding formality.
He surveyed the facade of a large hotel on the corner. The Mansion House, it was called.
He scanned the windows to see if anyone was watching him and imagined a curtain twitching as a shadowy form stepped back out of sight. No one really—he was only seeing himself, already registered in the hotel’s black book, a party of one standing up there staring out at nothing, scouting for the courage to do away with himself. Surely it wouldn’t be that difficult. He felt so tenuously held together, it could only be a matter of a nick, a slice, a minor undoing.
Taking in the rest of the street, Grif noticed a much smaller building that was stuck like a skewed hyphen between two taller ones. Stealing a few moments from what he regarded as his rapidly dwindling stock of them—insolvent in time as in much else—he wandered over to see what it was.
The building’s clapboard was painted Prussian blue and fixed on at a slightly drunken angle, aspiring upward like an optimist’s handwriting. The shutters were a goldenrod yellow, the door green as leaves. The place was too colourful entirely. Grif craned his neck to read the sign that swung above the door, its lettering flowing and molten. The Dancing Sun. A sun was depicted, too, painted against a black background and bouncing along with its rays sticking out like stiff hair. A barbershop, he thought, or an old-fashioned apothecary, a medical hall. Maybe a public house for foreigners, or pagans, as it was plainly not the Talbot House, the Wellington or the Queen’s, where the subjects of the Crown could drink and bellow at one another in a civilized tongue. What lay behind that green door might be another country altogether.
He stepped forward and gave the door’s brass knob a tentative twist. It turned easily, invitingly, and so he entered.
Once in, he was disappointed to find that it was only a saloon, and one that was as sparsely stocked as it was decorated. There was one table and one chair, and behind the bar one bottle of whisky, unless you counted as a second the reflection of that bottle in the mirror—the single ornament in the room. Also visible behind the bar was the furry nub of the barman’s head. He was obviously seated, as custom in this spare watering hole was not going to be overwhelming at the best of times, let alone first thing in the morning. The barman was singing a song, or rather snatches of several, meandering like a bee along some erratic melodic course. The voice was sweet and high. Grif cleared his throat. This wasn’t, after all, some foreign country where you could air your feelings quite so freely, belt out a tune in public as if you didn’t have a care in the world.
Heading toward the bar, he found himself taking it on the run like a rolling alley. The floor had a considerable tilt to it, and he arrived suddenly, both hands splayed, as if the thing had been tossed at him. The singer, he now saw, was only a boy, a short round boy of about twelve or thirteen, who was busy entering some figures in a ledger. Practising sums for school, Grif supposed.
“Yes sir?” The boy abruptly stopped singing, snapped the ledger shut and regarded Grif pleasantly. He had dark hair and eyes, but fair skin that looked almost polished, overlaid with a sheen of confidence.
“Is your father in?” Grif asked.
“Dead,” said the boy. “As a doornail.”
“Your mother?”
“Gone,” he said. “Like smoke.” He smiled widely, as if at this lark of parents disposed of so easily in a phrase or two, gotten rid of in nothing more cumbersome than language—good place for them.
“Roland Avery, Esquire.” He offered his hand and gave Grif’s a quick, cursory shake. “The proprietor of this fine establishment. How may I be of service? Would you care for a drink?”
“Have you a glass, Mr. Avery?”
“One.”
“A modest investment.” Despite everything, Grif felt his spirits begin to lift. “What I need is a room. Do you have any here at The Dancing Sun?”
“Oh, yes.” Roland flipped open the ledger to a different page and placed it on the bar.
“Sign here, please.”
Grif retrieved the pen that Hattie had given him, choosing to use it rather than the boy’s proferred one. He might have been tempted to lie otherwise, and sign a name not his own. He saw that there was plenty of space to do it in, for he was apparently the only guest registered.
Roland watched with delight, as though Grif’s penmanship constituted some fascinating stunt. “You have relatives in town, Mr. Smolders?”
“No.” Christ. “That is, none that I’m aware of.”
Both he and the boy stared momentarily at the name he had signed in the register, his name, and no one else in the world had a right to it.
“Your room is up the stairs, first on the left,” Roland said.
Grif snatched up the key, gave the young hosteller a grateful nod and made for the stairs.
Roland Avery turned back to his book and found his original place in it, smiling to himself in the way an accountant might if an unexpected and diverting figure had arrived suddenly in the columns of his ledger.
The ceiling of Grif’s room was painted a deep green, the floor done in a checkerboard pattern of red and black, and the walls had been papered with blue roses against a pin-work background. The doorway was stencilled with grapevines and sage leaves, and the Zommo—the cabinet for the chamber pot that sat beside the bed—had been mahoganized, almost successfully. A marine picture, an ambitious garden collage made of shells, crayfish claws and driftwood sticks, decorated one of the walls, and beneath it was inscribed a verse that Grif stepped closer to read: “Call us not weeds; we are flowers of the sea, And lovely and bright and gay-tinted are we.”
All in all, the room was comfortable and welcoming, but a bit cockeyed and out of proportion, as if built with a lax and carefree hand. The painting was slapdash, the baseboards not quite flush, the window frame crooked. He liked it.
In one corner, on a child’s rod-back chair, sat a homemade doll with a nut for a head—a walnut painted with tiny black eyes and red, pursed lips. Her facial features were derived from the nut’s natural bumps and ridges, which aged her some; she looked like she knew a thing or two. Grif regarded it closely, but from a few feet away. Having a rag body, it slumped in the chair. Lost? Left behind by some child travelling with a parent? The doll wore a perturbed expression, yet he decided that it was not blaming him for its own misfortune.
He seated himself on the bed and took off his shoes, so worn and mulish, the things had no flight left in them. If he tried to run away now, to walk or even crawl, his shoe leather would rebel; it would dig in what was left of the heels and hold firm. The room had a coil of rope on the floor by the window, but Grif knew that rope was not going to save him this time. It might even be the end of him, the last thing he’d feel while swinging out of this world. He required something far less homey and practical to get himself out of the fix he was in. He needed something miraculous.
He emptied his pockets, taking out the pen, the purse, the journal, and placed them beside him. He removed the Reverend Bee’s well-travelled ecclesiastical rag, and laid it across the foot of the bed like a tired and dusty old dog.
He waited. This could take a long time, he realized, as long as walking the length of the province. He might wait and wait and wait. He might become the very state he was immersed in, suspended, taut, never released by an arrival.
He did not think this would happen to him. Eventually, someone would come and settle his life for him. The actor, possibly. Fenwick Nashe. He’d glide through the door, dapper in Grif’s own name, that still-unspoken plan wavering on his clever, dissimulating lips. But more likely the police, clattering noisily down the hall, pounding savagely on the door, then bursting in. A brutal eviction.
When it did come, it entered silently, without knocking, without warning, recognition a sudden knife sliding into his chest.
Her, of course. His wife. Avice walked into the room as if only this moment she had slipped out of her bridal chamber at the Belvedere Hotel in London to see what was keeping her husband from coming in to her. Time lost, distance travelled, humiliation suffered—it all might have been nothing more to her than some vile mess on the threshold, easily evaded with one deft scene-splicing step.
She was stark naked. Her body white and smooth, perfect as a stripped and whittled branch of cedar. Unblemished, except for that splatter of moles on her cheek, a faint bruise on her left breast, a crescent-shaped welt on her thigh. Her hair was shorn like a boy’s. She was beautiful. She smelled like a saint, of roses and sweat. She was beautiful, more so than he would have imagined—had he bothered to do such a thing.
But her expression, frankly, was not one a young husband would want to see approaching. Her look was not tremulous and open, a bride blushing with a new-found boldness and excitement, but one that Grif had not known until this moment a woman could possess. Her face was as rigid and hard as the granite he had often run his hands over on his travels with Ned through the North Channel. He did not think he would be running his hands over her features, warming them into a softness, a renewed sympathy and humanity.
Avice, he thought, her name a wick he was about to light with his tongue. He could not even remember what had driven him with such force away from her, why he had run so far; but now, finally, he knew he was ready for her.
And she was ready for him.