ALEXANDRA CAMILLE RENWICK
The Hairy Man showed me his pénis today at the castle and though my maman would not have approved I looked with Great Interest and when he pushed his matted brownish hair back over his man-thing and covered it up again he waited and I knew it was hoped I would return the Favour. I did not.
Then Xa finally turned up and threw rocks at the Hairy Man until he ran away. I have decided the Hairy Man is really more of a Hairy Boy or he would not have been so easily frightened. At fourteen Xa is not very Large or Imposing. Not even to myself, who is by all accounts Scrawny and Unfeminine, and though younger stands a head taller than my friend when barefoot.
You should not let that gogit hang around, Xa tells me after the Hairy Manboy runs away.
You are not the Boss of Me, I say to him. And also, What is a gogit?
Gogit is a stinky nasty monster, Xa says. They always lurk at the edges of our village and try to steal food scraps from our communal midden.
But why do you care? I ask him. If you threw it away, why do you care if gogits eat your trash?
He makes that face he makes when I’m being Particularly Annoying. It’s just gogit, he says, or the gogit, but not gogits; they’re all alike enough to be the same nasty creature, all hairy and stinky.
I don’t tell him the Hairy Manboy was not stinky. Also, I don’t tell him about the manboy’s soft little pénis under his matted red-brown fur, pale and defenseless. Instead I hold out my hand and say, Let’s go ghost-hunting. He takes my hand and as we climb together up the rubble hill toward the fire-ruined shell of Craigdarroch Castle I sense everything between us is Forgiven.
Xa is my best friend, but I keep thinking about the Hairy Man. Keep thinking about him that afternoon as we look for dead little girl ghosts, poking through rain-moulded wallpaper and the ruined sticks of charred and rotting furniture that was Oldy-Old even in the beforetimes, before the plagues and fires swept the Island and wiped away the world. Keep thinking about him even after I’m safe home in Fernwood Village, under maman’s warmest quilt, as she and my père talk in the next room about trading with the new Haida settlement in James Bay where Xa’s family lives. Maman is too worried to eat any fish caught there because of the beforetimes Dirty Bomb, but père argues that is Old News and the Least of Our Troubles and he’d One Hundred Percent rather trade with the Haida than Those Bitches on the mainland. It’s here maman shushes him for his Language and Volume because what about the child. I’m not much of a child anymore, but knowing my parents lost others before me, I humour them in maintaining this Minor Fiction.
Opening my eyes wide, I smile big so he knows I’m not asleep when my père peeks in past the cracked-open door. Sorry if I woke you, Kitten, he says. You didn’t, I say, and, Come tell me a story. It’s been a long time since I’ve asked for a story, and though I’m surely too old for bedtime stories by Conventional Wisdom (of which there seems to be plenty in our village), I can see my père is pleased to be asked.
He comes and sits on edge of my bed. His weight pulls the quilt tight over me, binding my arms underneath against my body the way I like it. I indulge in imagining myself an Ancient Mummy in her Wrappings, or a beforetimes Ghost Girl suffocating in her Satin Coffin, or something equally delicious from any number of my père’s excellent stories about all the poor sad lovely monsters and their Tragic Fates.
When I was your age, père begins, I used to detour on my way home from school so I could pass by Craigdarroch Castle and try for a glimpse of the shadowy lady in black and the pale flitting apparition of a little girl peering down from the upper windows, who everyone knew had been dead a hundred years –
Père, I interrupt, that’s a Very Good Story, but could you tell me a different one tonight?
I like it when my père’s eyebrows shoot up. He’s much older than maman, older than most other fathers in Fernwood. His eyebrows are like two wiry white caterpillars thinking of becoming moths. What would you like to hear about? he asks. Airplanes? Tutankhamun? The Internet? Tell me about the gogit, I say.
Eyebrows flocking together, père says, I don’t know that one.
Gogit is a large hairy man, I explain. He walks like this… I sit up straight and tug my arms free from the covers so I can hunch over and swing them from my shoulders as though attached by puppet strings. His feet are very big. Like this. I hold my hands much farther apart than if I was measuring even my père’s foot, which is big and hairy but not nearly so big and hairy as the Hairy Manboy’s.
Ahh, he says. You’re talking about sasquatch.
Who? My eyelids feel heavy. I rub them with my fists like the little girl père still sees.
Not who; what. His voice is low and mellow. Soothing. Long before I was your age, folktales described the sasquatch as a mythological creature living deep in the woods, a huge terrifying beast covered with long filthy hair, with feet like Haida canoes…
I fall asleep to his words as he tells me about the gogit, but nothing he describes is much like the Manboy I met, with his dark shaggy mane and his little pink crotch and his sad brown eyes like a beautiful hungry seal’s.
Morning is my favourite time of day. There’s a fleeting Moment before the sun rises over the ocean when the sky is Forever Blue and almost everything on the Island is still asleep. Maman and I sometimes wrap ourselves in quilts and sit on our back porch and watch the sky pinken between black branches. But this particular morning I find her standing inside the back-door screen. She puts a finger to her lips when I approach. She stands as still as when hummingbirds come for the sweet sugared water she leaves them even in snow, quiet as when she watches a mother deer and fawn pick their way through our wild mint with sharp dainty steps. She points. I look. At the edge of our garden, past the winter beans and neat-trimmed lavender stalks and budding pumpkins, sits the gogit.
I don’t know if it’s my gogit, but he looks to be the same size as the one I met yesterday. He has the same hunched posture where he crouches balanced on the split-log fence that runs along the back edge of our family garden and keeps at bay the Brambles and Tangled Trees that choke the uninhabited houses surrounding ours. Père has of course told me a million stories about all the people who lived in all these houses when he was growing up, but only about School and Saturday Market and Soccer Practice, never about the sickness and fear and neighbours shooting each other over canned peas or because they hoped to prevent their own families from catching the diseases so many were dying from.
A tug on aman’s sleeve gets her to lean close enough for me to whisper, Maman, he looks hungry. Can we give him something to eat?
She slips away from the screen and I listen to her rummage behind me as I watch the gogit watch me back. I imagine my face is a blur to him, obscured by wire mesh as his is obscured by cowlicked tufts of hair. Maman returns with a cloth bundle my Nose and rumbling Morning-Stomach tell me is cold roast squash and sweet crumbly bread from last night’s supper. Though she always warns me to be wary of Random Men and their man-things, she and I appreciate in each other the qualities of Fearlessness and, above all, Compassion. In the blue dawn stillness the gogit is very obviously Young, and looks more Vulnerable even than when he exposed himself to me. I unhook the screen door and push it open. Maman grips my hand tight, and together we step into the Forever Blue air of the garden.
Slow as cold honey, maman and I ease over rounded yellow pumpkins and past blueberry bushes already disrobed by fall. We pause at the rosemary border, spikes tinting the air between us and the gogit with sharp green scent. This close the Manboy’s eyes are even larger than I’d thought. His lips are pink and bare in his hairy face, which is flatter than my own rounded cheeks. The lashes above his enormous eyes are a lush black, so different from the reddish down over his chin, the longer, thicker hair covering his head, the matted tangles between his legs and on his forearms. Mirroring our cautious motions, he reaches to take the food. Still slow, he peels back the cloth, then holds it to us in a gesture of Unmistakable Invitation to Share.
I break free a small corner of maman’s rich honey bread, break it again in half and pass one to her. We three chew and munch companionably in Silence as the sky streaks lavender, then canary. When the Sun crests over the humped black winter brambles, the gogit slips back into the dense woody growth, leaving us with a neat-folded cloth empty even of crumbs, and the memory of a final careful gesture of open hand held palm inward, fingertips toward lips, then dropping in what we easily understood to be a Sign of Thanks.
A strange Hollow Fullness sits in the centre of my chest, a winded elation similar to what one feels reaching the top of a steep rocky ocean cliffside: exhilaration tinged by the knowledge one might yet Fall, one’s footing give way to send one crashing to Waves and Ruin.
As maman and I return to the kitchen to make our Morning Tea, I contemplate with no small Satisfaction that the gogit had not been even remotely stinky. Xa is not always right about everything after all.
That afternoon at the castle, Xa is in what my maman would call a State of High Excitement. His father and some other men have discovered a gogit den in the dense northern woods near Elk Lake. They plan to burn it down.
My ribs are suddenly clamping too tight onto my lungs.
I clutch my friend’s hand. I have to go home, speak to my père, I tell him. Now.
Sometimes I find it charming when he pouts, but not today. I thought we were going to look for the little dead girl, he says.
Thoughts of Violence at Elk Lake Woods make cold prickles stab the base of my spine. I’m itching to shout at him that ghosts aren’t real. What has seemed a pleasing Pastime, an Adventure, suddenly feels childish. I want to scream. I want to tell Xa I only poke and muddle through these moulding ruins all day to Spend Time with him, to hold his hand while we clamber over rubble, to grasp him close in Emulation of Fright at Imagined Sightings of apparitions and spirits. I want to tell him it’s okay the Hairy Manboy showed me his sweet little pénis and to Not Worry I might have liked it better or thought it more Handsome than his because I didn’t, despite looking on that tender organ with Great Interest in the moment. All this seems it would take an awful long time to explain and so I choose the quickest shortcut I can think of: I kiss him hard on the mouth.
We run the whole way back to my house, dodging lichen-covered branches, leaping over asphalt buckled by fire and rain and years. The inhabited shopfronts along Fort Street glow warm and inviting in an afternoon turned cold and wet, the way it can on the Island without Warning or Preamble. We find père in his woodshop beside the house. He looks up from his workbench with surprise to see us in his open doorway, drenched and breathless. Xa as always goes abruptly silent in my père’s presence, but nods in mute support to my panted words as they tumble from me, about the gogit in the woods to the north, and how his father plans to burn them out.
Père looks down at the piece clamped in his lathe. A spindle, I know, for a new cradle ordered by a neighbour. It’s a beautiful piece of wood. All my père’s pieces are beautiful. At last he says to me, Is this why you were asking about sasquatch last night?
He’s not like either of you describe him! I say. He’s not stinky. And he’s not a monster. He’s polite. He likes honey bread. And his eyes are very sad. Ask maman, she’ll tell you I’m right. Ask her!
Both Xa and my père are watching me with flat expressions. It’s a Subtle and Unwelcome feeling to be the odd one out in a group of three. Something occurs to me with what maman would call a Flash of Insight and I buckle at the knees, clutch for balance. It’s as if rock I’ve always taken for Solid has crumbled under my feet, those footholds on the steep cliffside giving way, those crashing waves below…
You knew, I say. You knew about burning down the Elk Lake Woods.
Père picks up a small brush and begins whisking away bright curls of wood from his spindle. Fernwood Council and the Haida Elders have agreed it’s best for everyone. But I didn’t associate your sasquatch with—
You can’t! I don’t want to hear more. He likes honey bread!
When Père looks up from his spindle again I see how unhappy my unhappiness makes him. His eyes are almost as sad as those of the Hairy Manboy. Kitten, remember when I told you stories about mutation? About genetic aberrations, about radiation from the west? About unknown weaknesses compromising the gene pool?
Like with Xa before, I want to scream. Want to shout and yell, as though it’s the only way my words will be heard. Instead I wrap my arms around my middle, hugging myself, squeezing across my chest to make my heart stop hurting so much. I say, So what if the gogit isn’t exactly like you or me? So what?
So, most think it’s safest for the health and longevity of our community not to encourage proliferation of obvious genetic abnormalities…
In my imaginings I see the mass of men who will gather, coming together from Xa’s village and mine. I picture the clubs and spears, the guns and axes they’ll carry with them to the edge of the forest. Almost, I can smell the torches, the noxious burning pitch they make which ignites even in drizzle, even in sleet. My stomach heaves at the sensation of tumbling, crashing. Falling. Waves and Ruin.
Unable to listen to more I turn and stagger from the work-shop toward the house. Xa runs after me, catches at my hand where it swings with the angry flailing sway of my arms. Go home, I tell him, shaking free from his grip . Go be with the other men. My tone must ring with the authority of Righteous Fury, because he stops following. I feel his Injured Gaze on the back of my neck even after I disappear into our house and slam the door behind me.
Sagging, I slide to the floor, the door the only thing holding my spine straight. I scrub my burning eyes with angry fists and try to think. Dry clothes, warm scarf, rainproof hood and jacket, good hiking boots: this is what I need.
Dressing in speed and stealth is difficult when one’s Breath aches in one’s Chest with that old Hollow Fullness. Having intended to slip out through the garden and avoid my père’s view from his workshop, I’m startled to find maman waiting at the back door. She’s wearing a warm scarf, a rainproof hood and jacket, and her good hiking boots.
Spoke to your father, she tells me, sliding a rainproof pack over my anger-stiff shoulder. Scents of warm honey bread waft up, fresh from her covered outdoor ovens. I wrapped a couple extra loaves for you to take, as a gift for when you get there to warn them, she says. One for us too, of course. It’s a three-hour trek in this weather, and the road between here and Elk Lake isn’t so great. We’re bound to get hungry.
This time, I let my eyes sting. Wordless with Gratitude, I grasp her close. The rain pounds its light tattoo on our back porch, batting down wide squash leaves in the garden, rattling the dead sticks of spent summertime perennials. Maman’s hair smells like ground wheat and rosemary in the cool moist air. I’m startled to notice we’re practically the same height, she and I – when did that happen?
I draw back and lift my hand to my chin, palm flat inside, fingertips toward lips. I let my hand drop away. Thank you, I’m telling her, Thank you.