SHE STAYED AT HOME PRUNING tomato plants, monitoring the yellow roses, saying good morning and then good afternoon to Mr. Holderlich, who made his regular appearance in the backyard. She made phone calls and pitched story ideas to editors who were rarely interested. She was rarely interested herself.
Mostly she leafed through the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Her father had gifted her with a new volume every year since she was twelve. Their creamy yellow covers had foxed and turned a red brown over time, but the spines remained solid. Even if her spine did not. Her entire collection occupied a bookshelf in the living room, from where it radiated authority. Inside each of those volumes, the words lay packed and dense as plankton, swarming always without exception toward the death of a man. The books were full of men. They all died in the end. They were all men of the book. Even her. Through the years of her raw and often undressed youth she’d developed a consoling passion for those hefty volumes, and wondered if her father did not have some personal motive in insisting that she have them. To give her something else to do in bed? Her father had been an indifferent lover. She knew this because her mother had told her, had told her several times in fact, once suddenly, blurting this to her in his presence, viciously. He hadn’t said a word. Linda was barely thirteen, and had tried to die within herself in the moment. Her mother was unfolding fast, the bottles crashed, the evenings died in agony. The mornings could barely be roused into life. Her father had loved his wife to the bone. Linda, too, she told herself the books had been a way to solidify her character, to make her upright, filling her with facts. To give her a spine. Many spines. Given that her own life was such a mess of longing and dreams, of jealousies, fears and obligations, reading those confident biographies was medicinally soothing to her, men like Claude Guitet who got up in the morning and “consolidated France’s position in the New World.” Why hadn’t she got up in the morning and consolidated France’s position in the New World? She considered it a major triumph to get up in the morning and consolidate a cup of coffee, without which there was no chance of her consolidating anything else, especially herself. In Linda’s experience, the historical imperative was likely to take a back seat to the dry cleaning and was accompanied by the guilt of having, for the second time, cancelled an appointment with an embittered and perhaps unstable woman who had agreed to re-upholster her favourite armchair. Only afterwards, entombed, stone dead, written up in a book, set in type, and laid out in columns, would her life, or anyone’s life, appear to have made any sense at all.
SEVEN DAYS INTO HIS ABSENCE, Paul called her from a lonely truck-whipped phone booth at a gas station on the side of the Trans-Canada. She heard a dark, vast country echoing on the line. He had come down south to the Lakehead. She heard the passing horns of immense trucks. Was she up to anything? Would she like to come up? Meet him. Why not? A rendezvous, an assignation. “A French weekend,” he called it. Come on up for a French weekend, it was only a day’s drive. Okay, two days. She could take the bus to Thunder Bay if she didn’t want to drive. They’d sit up on Hill Street and watch the freighters limp out to sea. The strip malls, the railway sidings. A massive Finnish Breakfast at the Hoito? Maybe watch a baseball game between the Thunder Bay Border Cats and the Traverse City Pitt Spitters. What wasn’t there to like? Are you coming? Why not? Please? Linda? Darling? Come.
With a small suitcase and basket of green Bartlett pears harvested with permission from Mr. Holderlich’s tree, she stood in a ragged line of passengers in the blue fumes of the Bay Street Bus Terminal. Like all of her fellow travellers, she was lost in the terminal loneliness of bus stations. Seedy men shifted from foot to foot, clutching racing forms like letters from someone who had once loved them. Pigeons flew in all directions through the sooty rafters. Every few minutes the great muster of her country crackled through bleak speakers mounted in the ceiling; Greyhound Coach number one fifty departing terminal gate five to Vancouver via Parry Sound Sudbury Espanola Heydon White River Pancake Bay. Such names, such places. They sounded like a gorgeous litany of lovers to her, of muscled thighs that stretched for more than two thousand miles. A journey that ended in a place called Hope, British Columbia. All journeys should end there, she thought. In Hope, in the mountains where the cold air smelled of the pines breathing.
Linda sank into her seat and pressed her forehead to the glass. She slept briefly until Toronto was behind her. Soon, outside the window, she saw off-roads leading to port towns that were unknowable, where the sun dissolved into streaks of fuchsia. Barely legible signs stuck up from the earth; the wages of sin is death. “Are,” she thought. Surely the wages of sin are death. It was the copy editor in her. Was she ready for the coming of Jesus? Sure, she was. Why not? Come on down. Bring your wife. Home-cooked meals and the guaranteed repair of small engines? Fine. Pizza, hamburger, mini golf and the coming of Jesus. She wasn’t ready for any of it.
Linda sat up front, down one seat from the driver. A sign bolted above his right shoulder sternly prohibited the transportation of caribou heads and stuffed game animals. Another sign directly above it informed her it was against the law to engage the bus driver in conversation. The fine was two hundred dollars. Despite this prohibition she soon realized the driver was speaking to her in a steady even monologue that required him to swivel his head in her direction and leave it there for alarming lengths of time. She watched the twin headlights of the oncoming traffic shoot close and then vanish behind them.
“You don’t hunt, do you? Me, I hunted. Yessir. Not no more but I used to. Used to get myself a deer. Just one. Only one. Every year.” He swivelled his head away from her, checked the road, found it satisfactory, swung back. “So I got me this critter lined up. Put a bead on him. Fired. Bang. Folded that animal right up. Folded him completely up. He’s spinning through the air, hits the ground. I goes over. Knife out. I’m ready to slit that critter’s throat. What’s he do? Shakes his head, gets up, goes running off. Goes running right off. You forget how strong an animal your deer is. Yessir.” He gave her a knowing look before turning away. Linda leaned deep into her seat, smelled the faint medicinal smell of long-distance buses, heard the soft exhalations of human life and gurgling babies, the tinny sound of headphones 5plugged to ears, and was gone, gone into a fast coma-like sleep. She dreamt that the particles of the road were breaking up in front of her, the trees shattered like frozen things. The rivers ran with tar and pizza boxes floated down like wreckage from a lost civilization on its route to the oceans.
AT THE SUDBURY BUS TERMINAL, Linda snapped awake in time to watch a man with his fly unzippered get on drunk and stinking, listing to starboard and muttering darkly about the end of the world which, he announced, was also sick and tired like him. The bus was a third empty, but despite this indisputable fact he sat beside her. “Today’s my goddamn birthday,” he said apparently to her. “Just got outta the hospital.” He appeared to view this disclosure as an invincible pick-up line for he immediately dropped a paw upon the knee of her right leg.
She wrestled with a desire to smash his face into a pulp, but instead stood up and resituated herself in the gloomy rear of the bus. Some of the passengers had fitted white surgical masks to their faces and stared at her sullenly as she passed, as if everything was her fault. Linda was no longer sure of the protocols. She never had been. Did the wearing of the mask mean the wearer was sick and attempting to protect you? Or was it the other way around? Was she the sick one? The infector? Were they protecting themselves from her? From Linda Prescot née Richardson? Protecting themselves from what was inside of her? God help them if that’s what they were trying to do.
Linda set herself down in the aisle seat next to a woman of considerable age. Skeins of white hair fell from a scarf tied to her head. She was reading a folded paperback edition of Tales of An Empty Cabin, by Grey Owl. Linda warmed to her. Paul owned that book somewhere. They exchanged mute introductions performed with short nods of the head and movements of the mouth that were not smiles but close to smiles, the unspoken promises of equanimity and respect. The woman seemed to be expecting her. Linda couldn’t help herself, “My husband has a copy of that book. But I’ve never read it.”
“Oh,” said the woman. “Look.” She turned the book over to show off the Karsh photo on the back. “He wasn’t a real Native, he was a phony. Like everyone, but he was good looking. My god he was handsome. He looks just the way we want our husbands to look forever.”
“He kind of looks like my husband,” murmured Linda, “except that my husband is older. And doesn’t have as much hair. Plus his hair is blond. Blondish. In fact, he doesn’t look like my husband at all.” She laughed. “In fact, my husband’s going bald and looks nothing like that man.”
The other woman laughed too. “That is very remarkable, for he somewhat resembles my husband. In the details of the face, I mean.” The older woman laughed again. “I am talking now of many, many years ago of course. That man. I met him on a dance floor when the bombs were falling. Oh, they were falling the way the leaves fall here in the autumn time. It was London you see. The Blitz. I was a student. Falling like rain I suppose. Bang bang, boom boom. That is how it was. He said to me, ‘Would you like to dance? Please would you like to dance with me?’ He sounded like a count. For all I knew he was a count, I was seventeen years old. We danced to Al Bowlly on a dance floor in London while the bombs were falling all around us. They put thick curtains over the windows you see. He was Polish, from the borderlands. His English was very good. Better than mine really.”
“He asked you to dance?”
“Yes, I danced with him. He was a pilot. A brave pilot. A fighter pilot. An excellent dancer. He kept a tin of wax in his pocket, for his shoes.”
“You didn’t have a chance.”
“No. No chance at all. He had blue eyes. So it really was not fair. We went back to my room that night. Straight to bed. Everyone did back then. I had a roommate, a Belgian girl. She just picked herself up with a blanket and went into the other room and slept on the floor.”
“It’s not fair about pilots.”
“No, it’s not.”
They sighed together over the grief that airmen had inflicted on women.
“Regula, my name is Regula.”
“Linda.”
“You’re not wearing a mask.”
“No,” said Linda. “Neither are you.”
The woman smiled. “He had blue eyes, my husband, and was very handsome. Still is, at eighty-two. Although I must say that I have become a bit tired of him.” The woman looked out the window and saw the pitch black. “We’ve been married for sixty-four years and I’m getting rather tired of him. He says no all the time. You see? He sits in a chair, his chair, and says no. No I don’t want to do that. No this no that. What is it you want to do? That’s what I ask him. He has no answer. He wants to sit in a chair. I’m not going to be one of those old ladies who sits in a chair and has nothing to do. Can you see yourself doing that?”
Linda shook her head.
“Well exactly. He can sit in a chair if he wants. I was in Toronto visiting someone. A gentleman friend. Widowed. A diplomat. Former diplomat. Though his mind is going now. Still, he has a wonderful laugh. We went bowling.” She fell silent for a moment before adding forcefully, as if speaking to herself. “I’m not going to sit in a silly chair, really.”
They talked effortlessly in the dark in low voices in time to the motion and muffled by the night that pressed the windows. The woman told of her great journeys and migrations, Switzerland, the littleness of things that finally wore her down. The apartment she’d waited four years on a list to live in and how it suffocated her. She felt the great size of her youth and she and her Polish fighter pilot sailed to Canada on a converted cattle boat, the S.S. Columbia, nine days on the Atlantic, up the St. Lawrence, and finally to the towering silos of the Lakehead, Thunder Bay.
“I wanted to go somewhere where there were Natives. Real Natives. Indians and Finns. Finndians.” She laughed. “Don’t ask me why. So Thunder Bay, why not? Oh, it was very exciting, the most exciting thing ever, really. I was so young. I was on a great ship. I saw whales in the St. Lawrence, sunning their backs, turning in the water. Then we got here and the big freighters, the big grain silos, big, everything big, so big.”
She stopped talking and looked out the window. “My second week here, at the Lakehead I mean.” Her voice was barely audible. She cast her eyes to the seat in front of her to a dark spot that she seemed to be familiar with. “I was walking in the woods by myself, I loved to do that, I still do. I heard this howling, it was a bear you see, and I’d never seen a bear before, of course not, and this was such a small bear, it was the size of a dog really, no bigger than a dog, and it was caught in a trap. Oh, my goodness it was crying. They do that, you know. It was crying like a baby. I could see it, the teeth from the trap were in it, the blood was everywhere in the snow, and it was crouched there like a baby crying and crying. It wanted its mother. It must have been there for a long time, I don’t know how long. Terrible. That is the country too,” she said, turning away to hide her face in the boreal black of the night.
They slept fitfully side by side, warm in the company of each other, snuggled in the unfolding miles that sped past through the dark. At Nipigon, the bus turned off the highway, down into the village, and heaved to a noisy stop at a red brick restaurant. Already it teemed with the pre-dawn energy of timber men and mill workers, fuelling up on strong coffee and fragrant scorched meats. The caustic accents of mid-country, white skin, a confident heehaw of laughter and raw talk. The room they sat in was a low-ceilinged angular art deco construction from a different age, the waitress tall, young, gum chewing, her hair in pigtails. She recommended something she called a turkey melt sandwich and leaned in to them and whispered conspiratorially with a grin, “We melt those little suckers right here.”
The two women ate in silence, hungrily, like penitents, and returned to the bus, content in the bodily proximity of each other. They were driven out into the grey morning landscapes of water and rock, the swale of twisted vegetation preceding the straight hundred-metre drops to Superior. On the other side, the vast dark reach of the Nipigon River, crowded with its furred mountains, stretched on forever north to the enormous lake. Sleepily, she remembered Nipigon, their trip there, she and Paul and the lake, the enormous dimensions of it, the haunting beaches made of green sand. Shakespeare Island. The Katatota. The sense she had then of the unlimited-ness of herself, of her life, of the man she was with who chauffeured her around the great earth and shared her bed. Linda slept and saw the flashing tan legs of a man running and charged with sweat. He strode a desert land holding a jar of water stopping to sprinkle it on the parched earth. She awoke, afraid that she had dreamt this dream before. She had always thought there could be no greater punishment than to dream the same dream night after night.
They arrived with a clank at the Thunder Bay bus terminal and in the glinting steel of buses and hubcaps and the haze of exhaust they took their leave from each other. Linda presented her companion with a pear from Mr. Holderlich’s tree. For a moment the woman held the fruit up to the light, as if examining the properties of a fine claret.
“Thank you, dear. What a pleasure to sit with you. To pass miles with you. There are so many of them, aren’t there? So many miles. I want you to have a marvelous life. A big life filled with big weather and big life. I know you will. You have no choice.” She leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. “Such a choice is not given to us is it?”