11

UNNATURAL HISTORY

Grif entered the journal on the sly, like so many dust motes drifting invisibly into a room, materializing quietly, unobserved, particle by particle, on a shelf, under a bed. He entered like a roach scuttling into a dark corner. Like a moth disguised as a leaf sailing in on a breath of air. Why he had to creep and flit and sift into his own book, a procryptic man, he couldn’t say, except that it seemed a sensible and shrewd thing to do. The saturniid moth, he wrote, has antennae that resemble feathers, and large eye-spots on its wings to alarm predators. What pleased him most about scientific observation, now that he had succumbed to its allure, was how exact it was, and how evasive. Only a very keen reader might discern in his description of a wood nymph or a painted lady the camouflage of the naturalist himself, the one peering warily back through an insect’s eye.

For weeks he and Ned followed a meandering path struck through the water. The quiet was at times unnerving, the channel’s surface black as a bible’s binding. They passed limestone islands smooth as bone, towering virgin stands of pine, white quartzite cliffs, luminous in the sunlight. They passed a lumber mill that broke the silence thunderously, and filled the air with smoke and the lake with log booms that made navigation dodgy. They skirted fishing camps where huge piles of trout were stacked like cordwood, and in one, herons and grebes strung up, hanging from a tree. They waved to a man who was sitting on the end of a dock eating doughnuts, about twenty looped on the end of a broom handle. Another man rode right by them mounted on a swimming moose. He tipped his hat in passing, and said, “Howdeedo.” Pleasure craft, yachts sleek and polished, also slid anonymously by; and in one a young man, stocky and resolute as a bull, stood on the bow and stared down at them with interest. (A guest on board, and not of the moneyed class himself, he was trying to negotiate his own way through the labyrinthine channels of influence and privilege. This was the young Mackenzie King.)

Grif kept his eye turned from the human element when it presented itself, for he had become absorbed in his task of observing and recording, collecting small but potentially essential pieces of information. He’d decided that these were all clues to some mystery of which he might be a part, all forming some pattern that was sunk deeper and was less predictable than anyone before him had possibly discerned. The more closely he observed the natural world, the more fantastic and unreal it appeared. A damselfly wriggled out of its own skin like a girl out of a ball gown. Springtails flew through the air like animated specks of dirt. Fireflies addressed one another in a code of flashing lights. Sphinx moths carried their own deaths on their backs, portable packages laid by the Braconid wasp that, when opened, devoured the recipient.

Ned was satisfied to see him anchored, moored with a written line to that daybook he had unexpectedly produced and begun beavering away in. His grimoire, as Ned thought of it, his book of spells and black magic. The thing looked old enough to play the part, although Ned didn’t say so. Now that Grif did not run away every time Ned opened his mouth to speak, he no longer opened it quite so often. The writing exercise had a grounding effect at any rate, and the young man’s nervous habits that were at times pronounced—of smoothing an unruly eyebrow, scratching an elusive itch, running a finger tentatively along his nose, tracing its outline as if surprised to find it still lodged on his face—these had been diverted into the book. There he was free to search and probe, and to reassure himself of his own existence.

Ned, however, foresaw a technical problem. This was not difficult and required no occult talents. The pencil he had offered Grif when he’d first noticed him frowning into the blank pages of his opened diary had been whittled to within an inch of its own life. He had watched the instrument disappear in Grif’s hands, and presently his fingers were bunched on the point of it, as if his whole being were balanced there. Curious how something so insignificant, a nub of wood encasing a fraction of graphite, had the power, like other small, danger-packed objects—a poison capsule, a bullet—to alter one’s destiny completely. There was going to be a death sooner or later, either in their journey or in Grif’s account of it, and as his partner did not want to stop scribbling—or could not, for he clung to the book as if it were an extension of his own skin—Ned made an agreeable suggestion. Agreeable to himself anyway, for he was beginning to feel crowded by Grif’s company, nostalgic for his own fleet and unobserved peregrinations.

The suggestion was straightforward—and not unwelcome, he thought—and involved dropping Grif off in a bay on the east side of Manitoulin Island, the most accessible spot to land the boat. Ned knew of a family named Cormany who lived on the outskirts of a small village there. He had met them on only a couple of occasions, but found them to be genial and hospitable people—a bit eccentric perhaps, but harmless; and he was certain that they would put Grif up for a day or two while he got his bearings, and might even have a writing instrument to lend him. Or he could buy what he needed in the village store. From the Cormanys’ it was a short walk, fifteen miles or so, to Little Current on the north shore, where the steamers stopped on their way to the Sault and on the return trip to the south—in other words, to whatever destination Grif’s weathervane of a conscience might lead him.

Grif glanced up from his book to nod in agreement—he’d been thinking, whimsically, about what secrets he might reveal if he could dip a pen into the ink of these waters, into their black or indigo or gold—and the next thing he knew he was nodding again, more than a bit surprised to be watching Ned sail away at a buoyant clip, hand raised in a parting salute, fingertips reaching into the air as if the open sky were a font of freedom. He had been dumped, but not without directions, which he supposed he might as well follow. He didn’t want to squander the money Jean had given him—the currency of the drowned after all, and not to be frivolously spent—and so decided that he would try to cadge a meal, maybe even something to write with, from these people and be on his way.

He slid the journal into his pocket and began to walk along the beach, which seemed to consist entirely of slate, pieces the size of dinner plates and platters that broke like crockery as he picked his way over them. It made him feel oafish: here he’d just arrived and already he was wrecking the place. He made a beeline for a bank and clambered up. A path on the other side brought him before too long to the village Ned had mentioned.

In keeping with his newly acquired interests, Grif paid more attention as he walked to the skimming dragonflies and the tumbling sulphurs than to the wharf and fishing boats on his left, or the grist mill and hotel up ahead. He was recalling what Ned had told him about the fritillary larva and its preferred menu—the tender leaves of violets—and didn’t notice the villagers, who had ceased all activity and stood motionless, as if caught in a photograph, to watch him, a stranger who had apparently stepped right out of the lake. Even a woman hammering shingles onto her roof, a rope tied to her skirts to hold her dress down, paused in mid-swing to stare. He was unshaven, had long hair, was oddly dressed—and shod—and was as preoccupied as any phantom on a midday patrol. He brought with him an unsettling chill, a breath from the grave that rushed through them as he wandered by.

The only citizen unaware of the passing stranger was a young man, a pianist who had retired to this obscure corner of the world and to the loving care of his sister due to ill health (consumption). Enfolded in the gloom of his parlour, he was sunk up to his elbows in a Chopin nocturne (no. 6 in G Minor, op. 15, no. 3), and was as intently focused on the technicalities of this passage as Grif also happened to be on the entomological minutiae of his. As he walked by the young man’s house, Grif was startled by a brace of beautifully articulated notes that drifted out of an open window and into a net of dancing midges. Looking around, taking in a wider view for the first time, he began to wonder what sort of enchanted shore he had been abandoned on. And indeed, the people of this village were standing around stock-still, arrested and staring, as if bewitched. He could easily guess who was responsible, too: that woman tied like a witch to her roof.

His impression of strangeness wasn’t alleviated any as he approached the Cormanys’ residence, which was located several miles beyond the village. It was a four-square frame house, two and a half storeys high, bracketed by tall chimneys and graced with several large windows in front, each decorated with arching eyebrow cornices. This architectural detail made it seem as if the house were watching him, as the villagers had watched, although this was not what struck him as unusual. What did were the three grown men in the front yard playing leapfrog, bounding through the long grass, hurtling over one another and roaring with laughter.

He paused, and studied the scene. He shook his head, dismissing it as if it were an illusion, and was about to move on towards the town, thinking it might be wiser to forgo an acquaintance with this family, when he paused again in a stutter of indecision and the gambollers caught sight of him. All the energy the men had been pouring into their game was instantly directed at him. They laid a welcoming siege, shouting greetings and motioning him in with large arm-swooping gestures. To Grif, an uncertain, flickering figure on the road, the force of their inexplicable friendliness was irresistible, and against all caution he was drawn down the lane toward them.

One of the men was older, but each bore a striking resemblance to the others. The elder gentleman was a vintage version of the younger two, who were handsome, pale-eyed and fair, and all displayed a great many white teeth—a fleck of pink dentifrice powder evident in the older man’s gums—as they took turns clasping Grif’s hand and introducing themselves. William Cormany and his sons, Edgar and Albert. The sons brimmed with health and high spirits, and Grif was intrigued to see such delicate, beautiful skin on these young male faces. He doubted if they even shaved. Like angels, they seemed, or overlarge cherubs. Beside them he felt like a plate of leftovers, a man woven together out of hair and creases and stains.

When he mentioned Ned’s name, the welcome was amplified and extended, and he was swept into the house to meet the rest of the family. The men led him down a hallway, past an unoccupied drawing room, and into a dining room where four women were seated around a thick-legged cherrywood table, the surface of which was cluttered with a welter of objects: unwashed dishes, a pile of mending, an apple skewered with a knitting needle, magazines, a pipe, orange peels, a scatter of chess pieces and a half-eaten butter tart in which a dental impression was clearly visible. The women’s hands might have been idle, but their chins weren’t, for they had been busy wagging them in an excited whispered conversation that stopped dead the moment the men appeared. They turned very slowly and all at once, as if the act were choreographed; and Grif saw it was a planned jest, for each woman had a maple key, split at the seed base, stuck to the bridge of her nose. They looked as fetchingly peculiar as any of the insects he had lately become smitten with. They began to titter and laugh, and the Cormany men joined in, and Grif too caught on to the tail end of it, but with a faltering grasp, like that of a flying child who is last to latch on in a game of crack-the-whip.

“You must forgive us, Mr. Smolders,” said Ina Cormany, the mother of this merry crew, when he was introduced, “but we do like to have a bit of fun.”

The daughters—Victoria, Maud, Polly—shared in the limited but excellent range of features that were allowed this family, and all were lovely, especially Polly, the youngest. Grif judged her to be about sixteen, and perhaps to distinguish herself from her neatly coiffed and carefully dressed sisters, she wore her hair down, an unruly reddish-blonde blaze, and she had on a dress she’d grown out of.

He had to turn his eyes away from her (no corset)—the burning rims of his ears shame enough—which is when he spotted another member of the family, tucked up in a bucket and presently putting in service as a doorstop. It was a baby with a sooty tuft of down on its head, a poet’s sideburns and a very serious expression on its small, ugly face. This child didn’t seem to belong here among them—dark, glowering, an imp in a pail—nor was anyone paying it the slightest bit of attention. But the baby drew Grif’s eye as if it had some magnetic power to which he alone was susceptible.

“Who is this little fellow?” he finally asked.

“That?” said Edgar, the elder brother. “What’s it called, Polly?”

“Why, Master Rumwold, I believe.”

“Fitting. He is a rum one.”

This sally provoked more laughter from the family, as if the ridiculous lay all about them, discoverable in the most unyielding places, even in Master Rumwold’s grave demeanour. Not that they worried the baby for any further entertainment; the full glare of their attention, especially the women’s, was turned upon Grif. He was offered tea, brandy, a cigar, a chair, a bed for the night, for as many nights as he wished. They pressed him for news of Ned and of his own travels, and listened with rapt expressions to everything he said.

They were such a lighthearted family, and so gracious, and yet he didn’t feel much at ease. More the opposite—a niggling sense of alarm was growing in him, a tiny screw of apprehension tightening in his gut. That baby, so sober and silent and unregarded, troubled him. Wasn’t Rumwold the saint who had preached a sermon when only three days old? This child looked as though he could easily be the guardian of some terrible secret that he would reluctantly but dutifully divulge to the world as soon as the shattering power of speech was conferred upon him.

At dinner that evening Grif was surprised to find the dining-room table cleared, set and displaying a range of savoury dishes that might well have appeared there by magic. After spending the early part of the afternoon with the Cormanys, he had not had the sense that work took up much of their day, nor had he encountered any hired help. Yet the room he had been given on the top floor was clean and pleasant. Someone had set out a change of clothing for him on the bed, and a bowl and pitcher filled with hot water sat on a pear-wood washstand, along with a bar of caraway-scented soap, an ivory comb, a pair of scissors, a silver-handled shaving brush and mug, and a straight razor. He took the hint.

As he laboured away, shaving, snipping, combing, divesting himself of his vagabond guise, watching with a sinking heart as the same old Grif Smolders showed his face in the mirror, he puzzled over the nature of this household. It was possible that the Cormanys did all the work themselves, but secretly, keeping the indignity of it hidden, as people kept hidden the procreative act. Given their manner, dress and possessions, they did appear to have a social position, or pretensions to one, but this was a remote place in which to enact it. He had expected to find stalwart homesteaders, or poor scraping farmers, or trappers living in windowless wattle-and-daub shacks, with a rifle slung on a peg in the wall, and a squaw for a wife. And mouths full of carious teeth, not at all like the ones that flashed at him throughout dinner and, frankly, had begun to give him a headache.

“Mr. Smolders, are you pained?” asked Victoria.

“Not at all, Miss Cormany. Only a bit fatigued, I think.”

“You should rub your head with an onion, then,” offered Albert.

“Oh?”

“Father’s cure for complaints of the head.”

“I thought that was your cure for baldness, Father?” said Maud.

“Bad dreams, my dear. A superlative cure for bad dreams.”

“Pop the old incubus on the noggin, eh, Pater?” This was Edgar, smirking.

“You know that ancient couple who live down the road. . . ?”

“The Buckles.”

(Laughter.)

“Yes, the Buckles. They wash their feet every morning in the contents of their chamber pots.”

(More laughter.)

“Good heavens.”

“Polly, I don’t believe Mr. Smolders—”

“Are you sure?”

“You’re inventing.”

“It’s supposed to cure chilblains.”

“Can’t do much for their smelly feet. Or their souls.”

“Haw, haw. Albert made a joke, Mother.”

“Fancy that.”

The dinner conversation skimmed along in this nonsensical way, glib and quick, plumbing no depths. No talk of politics or worldly news. For all their teasing they did obviously take pleasure in their own company. How different this was from the dinners in his own forsaken home, which were achieved in complete silence as he and his parents shoved food heavy as earth down their throats—except that there was something equally airless and crushing here, perhaps just the relentless cheer itself. He had certainly heard more varieties of laughter, more range, than he’d thought possible in one sitting: booming, gulping, chuckling, samples great and small, a selection broadly peculiar enough for a lunatics’ museum. The baby might have been cleared out with the rest of the clutter, but a nursery atmosphere prevailed. At one point William Cormany had been chastised by his wife for not finishing his dinner—“No dessert for you, Father!”—and not long after Grif spotted him slipping a piece of ham into his pocket, and harrying a slice of turnip under his plate. When Victoria, the eldest daughter, began buttering a slice of bread, the activity so beguiled her that she didn’t stop until she had buttered her arm clear up to her elbow. This made Albert laugh so hard he snorted ginger beer up his nose.

“I’ve seen Albert squirt milk out of his eyes,” said Polly to Grif, as she wiped her face with a bun. “Do it, Albert.”

“Not with this stuff, it stings. Stop kicking, Maudie.”

“That’s not me.”

“’Tis so.”

“Mother, Edgar flicked a pea at Mr. Smolders with his knife.”

“Did not.”

“Children, children.”

“Mr. Smolders,”—Polly addressed him again—“aren’t you ever going to enquire about the two vacant place settings?”

Naturally, Grif had noticed them—the unoccupied chairs, the empty plates, the unused crystal and silverware sparkling in the candlelight—but he had no intention of setting himself up by asking who was missing. He had come to suspect that he had been welcomed so warmly into this household because what this family needed most was a dupe, a gull, some living fool to feed into the voracious maw of its humour.

“The one is for Hattie,” Polly told him.

“And who might that be?” he said.

“Our sister.”

“Another?”

“Hattie’s the shy one. She’s been hiding behind the wood stove since you arrived.”

“Oh.”

“The other setting is for Grandmother Cormany.”

“And she is. . . ?”

“Dead.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” he said softly.

“Two whole days now.”

“I beg your pardon?” He knew she couldn’t be serious, that she was pulling his leg; otherwise the house would be swathed in crepe, and the women too. A wreath on the door, black ribbons tied around handles, all the usual paraphernalia that signifies a death in the house.

“Yes, we were all so fond of her. She’s in the larder. We didn’t know what to do with her. I mean, we always play games in the drawing room after dinner, so that wouldn’t work.”

“Darling,” said her mother, “you know very well that Grandmother Cormany is in Toronto.”

“As good as dead, then,” said Albert.

“Mother,” said Polly, her cheeks colouring, “you know she’s not.”

Grif glanced around the table into faces indifferent, unreadable, strange in the candlelight, while keeping the muscles around his mouth tensed for laughter, waiting for the joke to strike.

Readying himself for bed that night, Grif tried to concentrate solely on a pleasure that awaited him: oblivion. After sleeping rough for so long, he knew that stretching out on this feather tick mattress was going to be like sinking into a bed of cream. The servant who operated silently and invisibly in this house had even turned down the covers for him, and had placed a warmed stone at the foot of the bed. His clothing, washed and folded, had been set on top of a pine blanket box, along with the Reverend’s jacket, which looked as if it had been given a good thrashing with a rug beater. He might wonder if this shy sister, Hattie, was the resident Cinderella, but he avoided the thought, not wanting to be roused by perplexity. Wetting his fingers and pinching out the flame of the candle by the bed, he found sleep almost immediately, a pure self-dissolving dark, absolute as the night around him.

Not long after, however, he was awakened. Something small and soft, a paw it felt like, smacked him on the temple. He lay there, disoriented, blinking himself awake, listening closely. Whatever it was, he could hear it thudding into the walls, bumping up against the ceiling. It was not large enough to be a bat, he thought, but was likely a fair-sized moth, a noctuid of some sort. He knew he should light the candle and properly identify the creature, but only lay listening to its intermittent searching patter. His journal. He hadn’t turned to it once during the course of this unusual day. His reason for coming here in the first place—to borrow a pencil—now struck him as being utterly ludicrous, like travelling halfway around the world to borrow a cup of sugar.

He pulled the covers up over his head, not liking the idea of that moth parking in his snoring mouth, and prepared again for sleep. He might have been close to it, too, his mind drifting off the path of logic, for he suddenly saw Avice. More particularly, he saw that pattern of moles she had on her left cheek, fast by her ear, and the few freckles that trailed onto her throat, the lesser stars in this constellation. More might even be concealed beneath the black velvet ribbon she wore cinched around her neck. The remarkable thing was how similar this pattern was, this insignia of imperfections, to the figure of O’Brien he had often watched striding across the night sky. How horrible. What if he were to gaze up into that sky henceforward and see not the glorious open space between the stars, an eternity of the undefined, but her, gigantic and lowering, the scattered diamonds of her wedding band embedded in her cheek, and her furious black eyes forever staring down?

After this, Grif tossed and turned in the bed until the sheets were wrapped around him like a tourniquet. When he did finally drop off, he was visited by dreams, brutal in their intensity and cunning, that pressed him to the very edge of wakefulness without granting him release.