There is a most evil custom among the Savages. Those who seek a girl or woman go to her to make love at night.
THE JESUIT RELATIONS, 1639
PAUL SAW HIMSELF IN REVERSE in Loretta Ramsay’s mirror and didn’t like what he saw, the stooped and dim outline of a thief in a room that was not a woman’s room, only a chamber filled with a young person’s confusion and ephemera. The sensation of being spied upon touched him and he searched for the source of it. He found it finally in the form of a stuffed teddy bear on the floor in the corner, dressed it in a child’s T-shirt, Homeland Security Fighting Terrorism Since 1492, shown on the front of it.
For a moment he listened to the city outside meting out its confusion of cars and the hysterias of young people. He heard students who were either singing or screaming or committing violence against one another. Arguing about Hegel and young women. He heard the swish of vehicles and the distant punctuation of car alarms that sounded mournful as trumpets. He heard the great Babylon of the city at night.
On the walls of her apartment hung posters of musicians he’d never heard of and was glad not to have heard of, tall, skinny men with violent names and dark sunglasses. Indoor people. A poster of Malcolm X wearing black shades and machine gun, he recognized. It seemed like something from a movie. In her window hung a massive dream catcher of feathers and deer hide. He wondered what nightmares had been caught in it. He didn’t want to know anymore. It was not his business. There comes a point in a man’s life when a young woman is no longer his business. He thought he knew that.
She lay on a mattress supported from the floor by four plastic milk crates. That tradition strangely had not changed from his own student days from so long ago. The smell of oil paint pressed every inch of the room and her canvasses and boards leaned against the walls randomly. Paul stared somewhat wildly at the stark depictions. He saw again the figures knifed in their sleep, the tortured expressions of mouths, eyes flashing open in colour, others in black and white. Children suffered violent death in her work, one after another. It was the children, always the children where the murders went to nest. The boards pressed against every available space in her apartment, stacked three and four deep. Suddenly he resented the bravado of them. The bravado of other people’s pain. What did she know? Of murder. Of anything, even children. What the hell did people think that they knew anymore?
Paul looked at her, but could barely comprehend how far away she was from him. All of the miles he’d tried to compact into his own life, all the bridges and portages he’d crossed, the solitudes he’d tried to tread, the trails, the car rides. They all flapped away from him like bandages come undone. He stood in a bathroom that felt hostile to him, his urine splashed on the porcelain, a dreary rain of failures. He did not want to turn to where the mirror was. He didn’t want to see his own face. His despicable face. It had begun to look like a shoe. A man had an obligation to be handsome, he thought. He had failed.
He flushed the toilet and went back to her room where she was up and unmindful of him, squatting undressed on the floor. Her hair, her impossible hair, fell down in a tangle against her shoulders and her vertebra flexed like a ridgeline of rock, shining and silver. He would not look at her.
In a white ceramic bowl, the red paint pooled, her fingers sunk knuckle-deep, withdrawn to stroke the board, finessing rivulets of red from the eyes and the mouths of her figures. He continued to watch her. It had always looked like this he thought, in the dark caves at Chauvet it looked like this but darker, the vapour of glaciers hung in the air, at Altamira, at Lascaux, at Creswell Crags, at Agawa, at Peterborough, Ontario, someone crouched, someone infested with insects, someone holding a torch or a stone bowl filled with animal grease while the partner picked vermin from their lover’s hair. Without a paintbrush or a pencil, without paper or practice, a man or woman, forty thousand years ago brought a charred stick to the surface of a cave wall, or his finger, more likely it was his finger, or her finger, and rendered the first painting on the planet — an animal, a horse in profile, or an aurochs in perfect detail, roaming the forests of what would become Poland, showing the very tremor of animal life that throbs beneath the hide.
Paul looked at Loretta Ramsay doing this as she squatted on the floor. The two impressions at the small of her back. He heard the low hum that came from deep inside her throat as she worked. A pop ditty that was as unfathomable to him as cave songs. He understood that a rushing herd of animals thundered past him, like traffic in the city. He turned away. It was not too late. Not midnight yet. He watched her, wanting her to turn and remain in the shine of the streetlight. He thought if he looked at her again, he would turn into stone.
The phone rang, and she allowed her concentration to break. She turned his way and Paul saw she’d painted red and horrendous lips around her own. The effect was as shocking to him as the gash of a wound on her face.
“Look at you,” she laughed. “You have been mad and drunk all winter.”
“What’s the matter with you?” His words knocked against the walls. What’s the matter with you? He didn’t know who he meant exactly. She was already gone into the kitchen.
“Megwetch,” he heard her speak eagerly to someone. Her laughter foamed back. The brilliant bottled sound of her voice had been opened. It flowed for someone else now, someone tattooed and wearing a gold ring in his left ear, though Paul was skeptical the man had ever sailed the China Seas or crossed the equator. For Paul there existed a special place in hell reserved for men who wore a gold earring without having shipped the Asiatic seas, sailed a submarine, or survived the sinking of their ship. Nobody knew their traditions anymore. They just swallowed everything like plankton.
From the other room, he heard her speaking in a voice of extreme intimacy. He’d had that voice directed at him. Only him. Only her. She could take it away in a moment. Her voice lowered and he understood that she was pointedly excluding him from the passions in her life. She had once aimed that brightness at him. Now it was aimed elsewhere and he despised himself.
“I’m not doing anything.” He saw her wipe the red paint away from her mouth, damping at it with a cloth. “I’m just hanging around. What are you doing?”
I should cough, he thought. Or burp loudly. Instead Paul moved across the room, stopping at her desk which was a wooden door set across two sawhorses. He’d helped her carry it up from the trash out front of a hardware store at the beginning in the sun when they couldn’t stop talking to each other, when every word was rich and blossomed with discovery.
The desk was now heaped with books and the elaborate constructions of her confusion. A white forgotten bra, flattened, a scattering of hair clips, strips of moose hide, a great boxy computer that didn’t work, earrings, pencils, a velvet-lined flute case but no flute, fishing wire, a gram of hashish in tinfoil, a shoe, a scattering of articles clipped from the paper, all concerning the one she was on the phone with. She talked of him increasingly, he was a thin man of considerable height who had achieved notoriety for smuggling six dozen jelly doughnuts through the lines of the Canadian army at Akwesasne and giving them to a garrison of Mohawks. He was the one who had shut down a gravel pit, closed a road. Barricaded a rail line. Paul shuffled the clippings. The photo showed a tall man with long hair and a melodramatic nose — Joseph Maracle, of Tyendinaga, in all his power, Aboriginal Protester Surrenders to Police. Mohawk activist found guilty. Leader of Highway shutdown faces twelve-year sentence. She would do anything for that man on the phone.
“I’m not doing anything,” Paul heard her say. “What are you doing?”
Nothing. She was doing nothing.
The excitement coming out of the next room blew palpably through the hall. He remembered suddenly the way she bit her bottom lip; it had appeared to him as the most breathtaking gesture he’d seen. She’d told everything, her family, her “fucked up family,” as she put it, her lovers, many of them despicable, the exalted position of art in her life, a stranglehold she had called it, a stranglehold. It reassured him that there were still young people in the world who were getting strangled by art. She gloried in art, she gloried in the vision that allowed her to see through hypocrisy in all its stupid ways. She was on fire with herself. Karl Marx to techno pop, from College Street to Kenora. There were times when she was nearly overwhelmed by the brilliance of things and herself.
He shut the folder on her rebel and lover. Insurgent, the reporters called him, activist. They called him a terrorist, or a Mohawk, or Mississaugan; coded words to indicate other, Native, that impregnable thing. He was of the people, first people, Paul had come in second. Or third. He was not impregnable. She was talking on the phone to a man who founded his race beneath the snow-bent boughs of pine trees and stole the sun from a woven box. He was also, according to reports in the news, in default on support payments for three children and facing public mischief charges for pointing a fishing spear at a redneck during a standoff at a Caledonia condo development.
He heard them chuffing in the laughter of their excitement with each other, and prepared to leave this place in his humiliation. Quickly, foolishly, he tried to reassemble her clippings to the order they held before he had mangled his way through them. There was nothing to keep him here.
His knuckles dragged the table skidding a sheaf of papers off a clutter of other papers. He saw exposed a black and white reproduction of a watercolour he had seen before, a James Peachey work of a Loyalist encampment on the banks of the St. Lawrence. An officer mooned importantly in front of a young woman in the foreground. Behind them a row of neat white tents stretched against the shore, a pretty, transitory city made of canvas, and above it the solid detailing of the clouds. The reproduction was dull and barely discernible in places. But the title glared. DAVID RAMSAY, MURDERER. The article was stapled together in the top left corner. That staple astonished him, an act of fastidiousness that was remarkable in the tangle of her life as he knew it.
David Ramsay — Indian Killer.
The piece had been photocopied from a forty-year old Beaver Magazine; Paul recognized the formal typeface and found the byline: Smithers Donaldson, a University of Calgary professor who, if he remembered correctly, was dead, had collapsed following a lecture on the apocalyptic mythology of the Pawnee ten years ago. He had met the man.
He heard her from the kitchen. She would be at the table, her legs folded, her arms wrapped around her knees, an image that was stunning to him. David Ramsay — The Indians captured him and tied his hands to his neck. She’d underlined the text. He saw that half the article was underlined. His gaze slid from one underscoring to another; we have reason to believe that David Ramsay has passed beyond the reach of God Almighty…. the subject of our present visit is the murder of eight of our Indians three of whom were killed at Kettle Creek…. ‘After killing the first Indian I chewed thirty balls of lead…. I thought it a pity to shoot an Indian with a smooth ball … after killing and scalping the woman.…’ Paul looked up slowly at the painted boards slanting against her wall, the primitive rendering of a face torn into two — he evidently performed the same atrocity on her children, one a mere infant … agonized mothers with bellies sundered, the children uncomprehending and amputated. The knife was highlighted with an almost photographic intensity. After which he took a hatchet and killed all of the sleeping …
The page turned here; Paul was about to finger it, but stopped. I’m the distant offspring of someone famous. Serving him a plate of pickerel, she’d said that to him.
The distant offspring of someone famous.
Mad as a hatter, mad from all the lead.
After killing the first Indian I cut lead and chewed above thirty balls, and above three pounds of Goose shot. For a moment he saw a mouth of blackened teeth, stinking with rum or brandy or both, gnawing through three pounds of lead, spitting the ragged bits into a pouch.
Mad as hatters. Within the space of three weeks he killed …
“What are you doing?”
She’d put down the telephone and stood in the grey darkness glaring at him.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said truthfully.
She came to the table and covered up the David Ramsay article. “You have to leave. Someone’s coming over.”
“I’m leaving,” he said, feeling suddenly foolish, even idiotic, as if he had thrown everything away.
In a moment she was back at her painted boards, crouched again and swaying. He heard her humming a song that he did not find comprehensible and finally he closed the door behind him and she disappeared.