Frontenac asked Outoutagan, “a bad Christian and a great drunkard,” what he thought liquor was made of. The Ottawa is said to have replied that “it was an extract of tongues and hearts, for when I have had a drink, I fear nothing and I speak like an angel.”
DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY VOL. II, 1701 TO 1740
LINDA FELL ASLEEP WITH VOLUME V (1801 TO 1820) on the bed, beside her where Paul would have slept. The short and pathetic life of Jacob Overhosler, an illiterate Canadian farmer falsely accused of treason by his envious neighbours, punctuated her dreams. “You are to be hanged by the neck, but not until you are dead, for you must be cut down while alive and your entrails taken out and burnt before your face. Your head is then to be cut off and your body to be divided into four quarters.” Great, she thought. Have a nice day. The poor soul blended into Ougier, Peter, 1775, who insisted the Newfoundland fishery was on the verge of collapse, and then committed suicide to back up his claim. She paged backward into Ouabachas (see Wapasha) chief of the Santee Sioux. Osborn, Mary, “you are to be hanged until dead dead dead and afterwards your body to be dissected.” O’Hara, Felix, “a sensible well-informed man.” Her disembodied neighbours flitted before her eyes; O’Donel, James Louis, (March 18, 1811), burst into flames while sitting in a chair.”
When she fell asleep, the rats were there again, crawling through the rusted gears of a ruined machine. She saw the letters L.R. tattooed on a man’s hard belly; his eyes opened, blinked, and sent out two shafts of light that danced on the ceiling above her. Help me, he said. She was almost positive that’s what he said. Help me. Help all of us. For God’s sake. We must put out the fire. But why did his voice sound like tin?
The cough of the walkie-talkies broke in on her harsh and loud, punctuated by static. She lay in bed listening to the urgent voices of men doing what they’re trained to do. I’m awake, she thought, and to prove it she watched the red emergency lights flash against her ceiling. For a moment they seemed to have the ability to hypnotize her. Then she was up, wearing Paul’s housecoat, she moved to the window and saw that the church was on fire, the Dormition was over, the Virgin had erupted in flames. Dark billows of smoke crept upward from the building, flashing into orange and uncurling behind the stained glass windows. Flames ignited the old window frames, guttering from the dark alter, and raced from the chancel into the night. Fire burned in the body of the church. She saw Corpus Christi set aflame by a candle. Linda watched, paying her ancient tribute to fire as the smoke escaped from the ceiling and poured upside down into the night, like black water. The roof shimmered for a moment, trembled, then at once blew open, shattering into tiles and glassy splinters, hurling black shards into the night on a column of flame and cinders. Her bedroom window became too hot to stand beside, the heat radiated through the glass and burned on her forehead. She watched as the church crashed in on itself and flamed in a bonfire of walnut banisters, oak panels, and pine spindles, a shower of incandescent ash circled upward into the night.
The phone rang. Her phone. It sounded like music. Like a song she’d heard before. She wasn’t surprised. There would be a voice on the other end of it. Help me I’m on fire. My consciousness is burning. Please help me. The world is burning.
The telephone rang with a melodious patience that suggested many years of shared history, a song in search of itself, unhurried, even resigned. Her arms drifted in the dark to the bed table, not really an arm, a thing remote from her, an appendage belonging to someone else. She felt the press of plastic on her ear.
“Hey.”
In the street, the firefighters manoeuvred frantically, shooting water at windows, smashing them beneath the force of the jets.
“The church is on fire. Fort God is burning. Didn’t I tell you that would happen, I mean, sooner or later?”
Paul laughed.
She heard a dull cheer in the background. It would seem Paul was whiling away his life without her in a dubious Irish bar along with the audible gibberish of a half dozen televisions.
“Are you all right?”
“The church is on fire. I’m watching it on television.”
“Yes,” she said. “You’re all right?”
“I’m fine. I’m drunk. A little. Not Peter O’Toole drunk. What are you doing?”
“I’m proofreading a seed catalogue. I’m watching the church burn.” Another film crew had arrived and debouched expertly from the van. She watched them leap out of their vehicles, wielding walkie-talkies. Cameras were cocked and aimed at a woman in a long leather jacket holding a microphone. She knew the routine: first the fire. Then the filming of the fire. Then the commentary.
“It looks like Christ’s blood,” she said suddenly.
“What?”
“It looks like Christ’s blood streaming in the firmament.” She had a vivid picture of what this looked like, a flood of rich red fluid, thicker than blood, searching the land, arcing the sky, like a comet.
“Ah, the firmament.” Paul cleared his throat. “That old thing.”
“Your books came,” she said. “A box came, they’re here.”
“Good.”
“There’s something else. I was talking to someone.”
“What? What did you say?”
“Someone called. From the media. Someone’s looking for you.”
“Who?”
“Some reporter. I don’t know. I can’t remember his name.”
“Was his name Gratton? Arthur Gratton?”
“Yes, that’s who I think it was.”
She heard her husband laugh.
“The guy’s an asshole. You think I’m an asshole? This guy’s a superior form of asshole. He has a doctorate in being an asshole. What did he want?”
“He has some questions,” she said quietly. “He wants to know about the L.R. site at Port Coldwell.”
“Good. Questions are good.”
“I don’t think so. He says the site’s not authentic. He thinks L.R. stands for Loretta Ramsay and that she painted the entire site. It’s bogus. The whole thing is bogus and that you’ve been taken in. You’ve been had, Paul.”
“He said that?”
“She said it. She wrote a letter. Some sort of manifesto, I don’t know, she sent a copy to him. Not just to him. Those paintings you wrote about, the Port Coldwell ones? She painted them. It was her.”
They were silent, linked by a telephone wire, staring at different glass surfaces. She heard the squawk of radios from the street, the hissing disquiet of the place where Paul was. In front of her, a telescopic hose unfolded upward over the flaming roof, and she watched as the water burst furiously from the nozzle.