In Newfoundland, Demasduwit, one of the last of the Beothuks, was captured and died…. Isabel Gunn disguised herself as a man and worked as a labourer for the Hudson’s Bay Company until her secret could no longer be hidden.
DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY, VOL. V. 1801–1820
IN THE MORNING SHE ROSE before him and went to her desk to ponder Vesuvius; the herbs, fennel, feverfew, hyssop — very attractive to bees and butterflies and hummingbirds. He came downstairs soon after and, without speaking, they resorted to the old rituals. She was responsible for the coffee, their drug of choice. It was not clear how that particular responsibility had fallen to her. “Hey white man,” she often said. “Here’s your coffee.” Today she said nothing.
They hovered around the coffee pot in the kitchen, sucking on the narcotic bean, feeling the heat in their mouths and throats. When he was done, Paul left the house with a loose air of purpose and returned with an armful of newspapers including somehow even the Thunder Bay Chronicle News. He spread the papers on the kitchen table and read with a mounting chorus of hoots and chuckles. With a collapsible pair of camping scissors, he cut out stories that he taped into a large notebook. His Doomsday Book, he called it.
HE DRANK LIKE AN ATHLETE only to damp the thirst of his efforts but did not become drunken or sodden or maudlin. Three deep grooves showed between his eyebrows, popping into existence to accompany the new him. He had accepted his fall, he told her. He had accepted the loss of whatever reputation he had, his few books, several strident articles in obscure journals, rarely cited. He was scourged clean, fallen, free to be another man that lurked in the same aging body. He was dead of exposure. Like all of us, he said. The prospect of dying of exposure was in fact deeply intriguing to Paul. He had a great respect for men who died of exposure, exposure to the elements, exposure to what was inside you. It was all media exposure now and he couldn’t imagine a less interesting way to go. There was a time when he was fond of quoting something he’d read about Captain Scott’s demise on the Antarctic barrier ice, his body frozen solid in what the author had called, “an attitude of sleep.” Not sleep, but an attitude of sleep. The distinction appealed to him. Only Brits were allowed to expire in an attitude of sleep, the rest of humanity just fell down and froze to death. Scott’s last diary entry: “We are getting weaker. I do not think I can write more. For God’s sake look after our people,” was a favourite of his. She’d find a note stuck to the fridge; “Have gone for a quart of milk. I do not think I can write more. For God’s sake look after our people.”
With a glass of scotch at his elbow, Paul scissored articles from newspapers. The leftover sheet he made into a hat and put it on his head. Mad as a hatter, he said. In his notebook he compiled a great deal of confusion, four column inches on a family knifed to death by the daughter’s boyfriend who was later picked up wandering on the shoulders of the highway in a trance and holding a carving knife. An elderly woman found decomposing in her bed. A man who bit a dog. A dog that got cloned. He was constructing a quilt to cover the times. He was sewing everything back together, he said.
She stood in the doorway, annoyed with him. Annoyed even with her own annoyance at him. She knew couples whose relationship depended on an ongoing and fervent annoyance with each other.
“Paul, what did you do to that woman to make her hate you so much? Were you too paternalistic, too caring? Did you tell her how to do everything? Show her the right way to hold her fork?”
“She ate with her fingers,” he said, extracting several more column inches about a Korean family that had contracted H1N1, and whose house was burnt down by neighbours. He flattened it into his book. “It would seem that if you grind up the brains of cattle, throw in a few steroids and then feed that stew to other cattle, things go very wrong very quickly. On the other hand, you keep horseshoe bats in cages next to caged marmots, hedgehogs, and Chinese cobras at a food market …” He knew this approach was not going to work. “Ramsay is her family name,” he said quietly. “She is the offspring of an odious fellow named David Ramsay. That’s what she believes. I don’t think she is frankly. Have you heard that name? Ramsay, David. Not to be confused with David Ramsay, the American, who wrote a book about George Washington and was then shot dead by a madman.”
She recalled something appearing from a sheet of creamy thin paper, words that seemed somehow to emerge from an afternoon when the blossoms of Herr Holderlich’s pear tree fell on her shoulders. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography open on the backyard grass, a blue jay shrieking. Rale … Ramezay … Ramsay. There in the Rs, something had happened, she could almost remember it; a man had done something hateful. He wasn’t the first one.
“He was an Indian killer. David Ramsay. He slaughtered them in their sleep, with a knife. Men, women, the children even, scalped them all. It’s a declaration of war to do that. He knew that. Became a folk hero for doing it. You know the sort, the man who heroically rescues himself from drunken Natives, dispatches them to hell. That sort of thing. In truth, he was drunker than any of them. It was his booze as matter of fact. He was selling it. Quite a piece of work that fellow, the dark side of being Canadian really, and that’s who she is, who she believes herself to be descended from. I don’t think she is but so what? It happened quite close to here. The crimes that call to us from the past. It’s because of him. Atonement. The last of the Beothuks, Mary March, Waunathoake, the crimes that call to us from the past. She calls it that.” He slugged his drink to the bottom, placed it on the table, and turned to look at her. “I don’t recall being any more odious to her than anyone else. You, for example.” He tried to smile. “Perhaps she needed to crucify someone. We all need to crucify someone eventually. It was my turn. I was due, wasn’t I?”
“And she painted the L.R. site on the Coldwell Peninsula? You couldn’t tell that? I thought you were an expert?”
“Well,” he started. “An expert, yes. Of course, she didn’t paint it. You could spend your whole life looking for that site without ever coming close to finding it. Let alone faking the writing on it. That would be the easy part.”
“She said she did.”
“She was lying. Don’t you see that? She was atoning for the crimes that haunt us from the past. Lying through her teeth. She was making a career for herself, God bless her. They all have to do that now.”
“It was in the papers. On television.”
“Yes.”
“Those paintings were carbon dated. They found paint, real paint, like you buy in the hardware store.”
“You can’t carbon date rock paintings. You know that.”
“Yes. But you can date other things. You can analyze them, you can determine what they are. Whether it’s oil-based enamel from a hardware store. Or whether it’s sturgeon oil. They did the analysis.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know.” She was irritated now. He was nitpicking. “Someone in the news. An expert. One of those experts that forever get dredged up.”
“Like the ones they pull out of thin air.”
“Is that what they do?”
“Apparently they do. Prendergast. Walter Prendergast? That man? With Beta Analytic Inc.? Right? Am I right?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Walter Prendergast, believe me. Lab technician with a D.Sc. from the Université de Paris? Just happened to be kicking around the Algoma District in Ontario during blackfly season, running a lab out of a local college and waiting for a reporter to send him a hundred micrograms of carbon from a rock painting that is situated somewhere, and I mean somewhere on the north shore of Lake Superior. Superior for God’s sake. It’s the size of Portugal. Somewhere between Missing Horse Creek, and Dead Horse Creek? but on the coastal side, right? Is that how it worked? Somewhere east of Aguasabon Falls but slightly west of Chigamiwinigum? Is that it? She canoed forty-foot breakers and put in rather handily at latitude forty-nine degrees north and west of the prime meridian at latitude forty-seven? Closer to forty-six really. She just showed up there?”
Linda watched him with some uncertainty as if Paul were suddenly another person standing there in her husband’s body. Three months ago he’d been invited to give a lecture at the Art Gallery of Ontario on the subject of historical Aboriginal rock art. The lecture had been cancelled.
“I don’t know how it works,” she said.
“Beta Analytic Inc., is based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Was based in Fort Lauderdale. They closed down shop three years ago. It doesn’t exist anymore. That reporter made it up. Don’t ask me why, and her, she believes she’s related to that man, Ramsay. That’s what I think, that’s what I found out. That was my crime. I was snooping. I was an old man in a young woman’s room. That’s never right. I found some stuff, a folder. She’s got everything, the genealogical charts from the archives, even transcripts from the Western Historical Society get-togethers. Those meetings were held in nineteen-forty-four. There’s not a lot. She’s got it all. It’s in her head, a great big murder spree. It galls her. She’s on fire with it. She wants to make amends.”
There was a sustained silence out of which Linda suddenly said, “You must have found her so beautiful.”
“No. Not really,” Paul said quickly. But he was lying. There was the matter of her face. “Her face,” he wanted to add. He couldn’t stop himself. “It was her face,” he said softly, staring into nowhere. “I think she reminded me of my mother.”
He laughed ruefully.