Man with the Axe
ONE SPRING Hooligan came home with a wooden leg in his mouth. Erie had been listening all that week to thaw, a trickle of melt tickling her inner ear, the sound of water dripping off the eaves, drip into that handful of bare stones by the corner of the barn, drop off the branches of the forsythia out front. Like tears, she thought, cold tears. Then reconsidered, what with the lake opening up and boats arriving from the mainland carrying news and visitors. Tears of joy, or relief. No, that wasn’t right either, and she did like to get things right, finding the exact place that words met events. She had literary ambitions, though not openly nurtured. The evidence was buried in her bureau drawer, well hidden below several layers of underwear. The everyday woollies on top, summer cottons below, next a thin layer of silk surprising to the delving hand as a cold current snaking through shallow water. The silks had belonged to Erie’s Aunt Elaine, who had lived for a time in France.
In family lore Elaine was the restless one, the one with ants in her pants. She twitched and itched, unsettled as a wild bird on a bobbing branch. In pictures she was the disruptive blur, the streak of light cutting through their tight embrace. No one could hold her. I’m not marrying this rock pile, she said at eighteen, and left. She wrote home occasionally – short, energetic messages, the words themselves seeming to sprint and tumble like acrobats off the page. Slow suspicious readers, the family had trouble catching even these. They thought her aimlessly adrift, or saw her wantonly snagged in the silken sly arms of foreigners, when what she clearly needed was the honest anchoring touch of an island man. She’ll die young, predicted Aunt Velma, who had always been jealous of Elaine. But Elaine was too elusive and early death fell like a sudden obliterating snow on Velma instead. Planted by the kitchen sink, a slab of cake in hand and a lump of lard clogging her arteries, damming her heart, she was a target; what could death do but knock her flat like a disgruntled and abusive husband? So it was Velma who failed to see forty while Elaine’s life flowed on, finally pooling in a small package that Erie one day pulled out of the mailbox.
She unwrapped it reverently, thinking it might contain ashes, or Elaine’s delicate bird bones. She certainly hadn’t expected to find underwear, lingerie rather, slippery and spirited as Elaine herself. It practically leapt out of the box, splashing up against Erling who had just come in from the barn. He caught at the flying rat’s nest of silk, a shock like fine cold skin pouring into his hands, and dropped it, horrified. Only once before had he touched anything like it, Manny Nearing’s bare bum in 1909, and that too had been an accident. He shot Erie a look, a sharp fan of annoyance that flared open and trembled ominously for a moment before snapping shut.
Don’t goggle your frog eyes at me, she said in a low growl, stooping to retrieve the pearly soft tangle – almost weightless, like gathering vapour into her arms – and he was gone. The screen door slapped shut and he marched across the yard, ducking back into the barn, where Tidy and Maureen’s hefty brown rumps were scarcely distinguishable in the warm gloom.
Erie had to get rid of their aunt’s bequest (or remains, how was one to view it?) before Erling returned for lunch. Unmentionables, indeed. Apparently some things weren’t fit for words. She tried to picture him, bread and beef stew wadded in one cheek, making a joke of it, this sensual assault. Hardly. He’d forcibly forget the incident; in his mind tamp it down like a freshly buried thing. Over the years they had established a common ground for conversation and you wouldn’t dare ruck that up with inventive or silly talk. Would you, Erie remembers asking herself as she laid Elaine’s gift in her bureau, giving it a place among the hidden inventory of the house. A proper cover somehow for her writing, the broken bits of stories, the letters addressed to no one in particular, the shy stuttering beginnings of a novel. Her soul stretched out in longhand and scattered on loose sheets of paper. She wrote secretly at night while Erling slept. Moonlighting she liked to think. Furtive, shadow-sifting work done by lantern or candle light, even soft slanting moonlight itself. Ghostly sources of illumination that could lead her anywhere while her brother lay snoring and dreamless in the dark back bedroom.
Of course Erie didn’t try to fool herself. She understood that Erling was the real writer in the family. Every Sunday after church he composed his weekly column for their local paper, The Gossip. Euchre parties, dances, weddings and births, bake sales, visits paid and repaid – he presided over social commerce in the community like a finicky omniscient author. Unlike the correspondent from Silverwater who padded her column with prayers, poems and gardening tips, Erling crafted a solid substantial block of Blue Lake news, a densely crowded mirror in which anyone could look and see themselves swinging a bat, singing at the Glee Club, or chatting with their cousin Molly at the Come and Go Tea. He didn’t have to scrounge for it, either. News came to him steadily like a wind trained to heel. Wasn’t the phone always ringing or someone dropping by? People loved to bend his ear, to fill it with those tids and tads that by the end of the week added up to a full page report. He’d tinker the whole afternoon, working like a kid on the engine of an old car. He wasn’t satisfied until it purred like a cat; a contented, well-fed, benign creature. That was how he presented their island life. The same smiling character dressed in slightly different detail from one week to the next. He doctored unpleasant news, delivered it with pastoral care. Erling concentrated on a specific kind of weather that was man-made and unfailingly clement. No wonder he didn’t hear the thief in the ice that Erie heard. All that week her ear itched with a telltale trickle of melt like a tap dripping somewhere, and soon water speaking in a hundred, then a thousand voices through rocks and trees and shifting earth. Distracting, listening to winter weep itself away like that. By the time Erling took notice and announced to the world, Well, folks, spring has sprung, an unfurling pouncing vernal light had overwhelmed them all. Strangely unexpected, like Hooligan bounding across the yard and skidding to a stop in front of Erie, a wooden leg in his mouth and a sliver of mischief buried deep in his one good eye.
HOOLIGAN was a real presence in any room. Rock-solid and black as pitch. He had a snake of a tail, fat as an arm and powerful. You got your knees and other low-lying objects out of range when he was happy or excited. Of note among his accomplishments: a short ecclesiastical career (he’d once been owned by a priest); progeny stretching from one end of the island to the other; and murder, quarry all harried to death.
His origins were as dark as he was. He might have wandered off one of the reserves, or swum across the channel from the mainland. Who knows? No one could recall Hooligan as a pup. He appeared full grown and half-blind, having left one of his eyes like a surveillance device in some former life.
Some dogs you can ignore. Shut the door in their beseeching faces and they eventually grow restless and move on. Not Hooligan. When he first came sniffing around the farm, he liked the place and decided right then to stay. He sat on their doorstep the better part of three days, affably tenacious as a salesman, until Erie finally relented and let him in. An irreversible invitation, she realized, like letting a child into your house. Though you couldn’t really compare Hooligan to any child. He’d ripped up his innocence like a rag long ago. He was full of tricks. He could get his nose up a skirt faster than the practiced hand of a lover. Something about a woman’s startled scream gave him the shivers. He enjoyed a good show of emotion, especially in its extreme forms. You could tell he’d been a priest’s dog. He would put his paw in your hand, stare encouragingly, coercively – his one eye focused on you like a pistol – and you’d confess anything to him. Erie had. He knew everything she knew about the boy who courted her for two years before marrying the lake.
His name was Jimmy Brooke. Every Saturday night he rode his bike over from Sheg to see her. He was garrulous and generous, spilling like light into the yard. She’d race down the stairs to greet him, a good-looking boy, with a gorgeous head of hair, thick as a tuft of grass. They used to go dancing in town, or on hot nights steal down to the lake for a swim. He stripped easily – he wasn’t shy – and she lost time watching him. Male hands and faces were all she’d ever seen before, and even those were often turned against a woman’s looking. He was easy in the water. He opened the lake with a high smooth dive. Once in he moved languidly, admiring her on the shore, so transparently eager to be with him she’d be tearing at the buttons of her dress.
For one so talkative, he went without a whisper. By the time she was ready to join him that night he had already disappeared. She stood gripping and wringing her clothing, waiting for the joke to end, for him to break the surface with a laugh. Unbearable, the peacefulness of the lake, a terrible tormenting calm.
To Hooligan, she cursed her slowness. She might have saved him, or followed him. Hooligan was well acquainted with the possibilities, and, with at least mock-sorrow, would place his head in her lap and sigh loudly.
Sure he knew a few things about them, their hoarded secrets, fusty and dry as long-dead mice. Small change really, compared to some lives. Erie said as much, what was there to know? After Mother and then Father died, she and Erling had settled down with each other contentedly enough. Working the farm, meals together, small talk, as good as married except for the sex part of it, and she supposed some brothers and sisters worked that one out to their satisfaction as well. Oh, you couldn’t write that in your local paper, but you could tell a dog like Hooligan who loved to scrabble in the dirt.
Shameless creatures, dogs. Shit-sniffers and disturbers. Behind a show of obedience they follow their own rules, and their own etiquette, which seems to consist of private acts performed in public. Dogs take pleasure in unsettling things, digging up and dragging into sight what would best stay below ground and forgotten. Like Hooligan dropping that leg at Erie’s feet, then gazing up at her eagerly, if disingenuously.
As she picked it up, it pricked her imagination. Comfortable in her palm, snug as a rolling pin or a baseball bat, it made her wonder. Relics. Everyone had them, a wrist-bone in the silverware, a skull hanging on a nail in the shed. People thieved like crows when it came to that sort of thing, skeletons found in caves. It happened on the island. Bones wandered away in hip pockets and purses before the museum folks could get anywhere near them. She appreciated the fascination with something that had survived death, that glowed moon-white, so smooth to touch you felt capable of stroking the unknown right out of it. At least Jim was safe from looting. Or was he? Erie habitually thought of him as he had once been, but a lover of the water now, held and rocked by mothering currents. Though for all she knew, he might have slipped out of his skin and shattered on a reef like a dish hitting a rock. He might have been carried in countless directions, washing up on shore, spangling the island like a broken bone necklace. Even now re-entering her life in some unforeseeable way, borne in a bird’s beak, a stranger’s hand.
A wooden leg wasn’t a bone naturally, though it served. Someone must have been attached to it at one time, a husband or a sweetheart. A pirate, God knows. How did a person lose such a thing, anyway? Easy enough, Erie supposed. You get involved in a barroom brawl. Some tough gets his hands on it, then uses it like a pestle to pulverize glass and flesh.
No, rather this: You’ve been chopping trees, hewing beams all morning for the new house, and you’re exhausted. You find some shade and wolf down lunch. The leg chafes a bit so you loosen it. Settling back, you drift into a troubled sleep, then wake with a start. Just in time to see a large black dog vanish into the bush, jaws clamped firmly – teeth like nails – on the hard flesh of a wooden leg, yours.
THE MOMENT the phone rang, one long and a short, Erie knew that someone had picked up the scent. It didn’t take long in a place as small as Blue Lake for word to get around. Genuine news – not the old stuff Erling dished out – spread infectiously from mind to mind, enjoying a short feverish existence before turning belly-up into history. Erling was simply the one who gave it last rites before burying it in his column.
Nola Wilks’ voice buzzed in her ear like a bee in a blossom. “You know, Erie, your dog came ripping out of the bush behind our place carrying something, I couldn’t tell what exactly, though it looked like oak to me by the grain. I imagine he’s been home with it by now, has he?”
“Yes, he’s back.”
“Well, this might sound kind of funny, but like I said to Bun, that’s no hunk of lumber Hooligan’s got there . . . looked like a pegleg to me.”
“Why, that’s exactly what it is, Nola.”
“Go on, really? Who could it belong to, I wonder? No one from around here, that’s for sure. Maybe some sailor off one of the boats. What’s it look like, Erie, is there anything on it?”
“You mean, like a sock?”
“No, no, marks, scratches, a bear might have, well, you know. Any moss on it, it might’ve been in the bush a long time.”
“Hooligan’s had a bit of a chew. Beyond that I’d say this leg’s in pretty good shape.”
“Hmph, smells fishy to me. Bet there’s more to this than meets the eye. It’s kind of creepy, if you know what I mean. I’m telling you, Erie, a body hardly feels safe any more.”
Erie paused to consider the safety of Nola’s body, which was in fact invulnerable, calling up comparisons to heavy machinery, though she took in the suggestion of danger, nonetheless. Two women talking, that’s all it took to spark a birth, a genesis, to entice someone out of the shadows. A lurking presence, someone just waiting to try that leg on, take a few tottering steps, then wheel through the door whole as any man.
TROUBLE WAS, spring made everyone a bit tipsy and unsteady on their feet. Who could walk a straight line with dandelions popping like burning suns out of an earth that was shaking with life? Minds and tongues quickened, hands speeded up and grew expressive, swooping and carving, trying to define and encompass the thing. The thing being, in most cases, the identity of the man with the wooden leg.
Consensus took on a life of its own, metamorphic and unpredictable. One minute he was a cranky and miserly old trapper who lost his life in the bush, the next he was younger, lithe and cunning, a drifter who had been seen about town hanging out with a bad crowd.
He’d been noticed, no doubt about it. In the Ocean House that one leg tap tapping on the hardwood floor made William Porter glance up from the guest book. What Bill saw, against a dazzling background of white light flooding through the French doors, was the kind of person he discouraged from staying at his hotel. Not that this man was a tramp or anything, far from it. He was faultlessly groomed, and his clothing an expensive cut, if a bit out of date. No, it was something else about him, that slight scar above his lip, perhaps some immaterial detail, that told Bill he was a gambler. That he would fleece Bill’s customers playing acey deucy and one-eyed jacks, simple games but effective as leeches in sucking rich veins dry. Then one night he’d skip town, leaving nothing behind but a haze of stale smoke.
Sorry, Bill raised his hands helplessly, no room, we’re all booked up. A lie that drew poison like a poultice. The stranger narrowed his eyes, moved closer, breath cool as fog. Bill froze. Blood rushed from his hands and squeezed his heart. Fear blundered out of him, and the man laughed. Then turned, pivoting on his bad leg, and walked back toward the French doors, but slowly, dissolving in light, tap tapping on the hardwood so that the sound of it, the rhythm stayed with Bill and he remembered. He’d never forget, he said.
Memory served William Porter well, as it served everyone, presenting facts of a shifting and malleable property, fluid enough to pour into any mold. The man with the wooden leg was painstakingly, if playfully, restored.
As far as Erie was concerned, the leg might have been a tossed bone that any flop-eared mutt could gnaw on. It seemed all you had to do was shake the dumb inanimate thing until it sprouted limbs. She could conjure a man out of it and do a better job than the good Lord Himself, though that wasn’t the point, she realized. The man’s true identity didn’t really matter; he was selfless and sacrificial. They killed him off repeatedly, speculating on this death or that, then brought him back in a flood of words. Resurrected and sustained him in talk. And how he had multiplied. He was an army, a forest of men by the time Erling got in there and started hacking away, working steadily, methodically, in the end finishing him off with a couple of resounding whacks.
He dropped a few well-placed hints here and there, then finally came out with it. He ran a story one week about a man on the west end, a carpenter, who had by some crazy mistake received a whole crate of wooden legs from the States. He’d been using them up as best he could, Erling reported, as railings and table legs, but still had a pile of them in the shed, and yes he had noticed a black dog, a brute of a thing, snooping around his place awhile back....
Entirely plausible, Erie thought when she read Erling’s account in the paper. Why had a sane explanation not occurred to anyone else? This virgin-pale piece of wood they’d been dreaming on held as much interest as a fence post, a lifeless stump. Erling helped them see this in the sharper, unclotted light his prose provided. Reason had an edge and now they could use it to cut back all that nonsense about a mysterious stranger. How like her brother. Given a chance, he’d kill anything with common sense. As a boy, his plodding devotion to literal truth had made playing games with him almost impossible. Any flight of fancy, let’s pretend we’re horses, let’s gallop away, would drive a stiff wedge of disapproval into his face. Erling held himself back like land that never touched water. That’s stupid, he’d say, or primly, Don’t be childish.
WELL, Hooligan wasn’t the one who dropped it in the fire, though he was lying on the hearth rug with his eye cocked open, when Erling did. A cold night, Erling muttered, unnerved by what he thought was the dog’s amused stare.
Entering the room, Erie was startled to see the leg alive again and angling for their attention once more. Surely it was showing off, shooting blue flames, exhaling plumes of smoke and belching sparks. She sat down before it, compelled to watch it burn, letting it lure her and draw her in.
When Erling at last went up to bed, she found a stray sheet of paper in his desk, and in the splashing wavering firelight, with Hooligan half-asleep at her feet, she began to write. She had no idea what at first. She let her mind drift, phrases rising in waves. Then she saw something, someone, just the tip of a bobbing head, features uncertain. Her words, she knew, would have to be quick and strong as hands to grab that lilting silken hair and lift him out.