9

SKELF

Grif lay listening to the water slapping the belly of the boat, applause for his daring. Or for his trusting nature. His gullibility? That he could ride in a boat at all amazed him, but what other way was there to escape the imprisoning shore of this island, since he couldn’t sprout wings and fly, and Jean wouldn’t be making a supply run for months. He was not like the light-keeper, who had achieved a solitary and saintly contentment. Grif was abraded by the calm, unnerved by the quiet, which was not pure quiet at all but infested with small, indefinable and accusatory sounds. Nor could he shake the feeling that he was being stalked, hunted. Which is how he came to be stretched out in the bottom of a homemade skiff, one that was held together with a lick of paint and crossed fingers for all he knew, and skimming through the night like a bug on a leaf.

It was his hope that the lake was going to be as selective as lightning, in that it wasn’t going to strike twice and send him to the bottom. Never again did he want to be caught on the wrong side of the waterline, like an image trapped in a mirror. The lake had rejected him once, had not wanted his body defiling it. No place was reserved for him in its army of the drowned. And if he believed that, he really was gullible.

Grif had in fact invested his trust elsewhere: in Ned Hawke, who was at the helm and had let it be known that he was unsinkable.

“I’m a floating man,” claimed Ned, explaining how he had discovered this talent when he went overboard on a sidewheeler up near Spanish, carried either by the wind or by sheer exuberance. At the time, ashes and burning motes from a shore fire were being blown onto the deck and the passengers had been placed on “spark duty.” Issued with wet mops, their job was to extinguish those bright spores before they burst into full flaming blossom. Ned pitched in, and with such enthusiasm that he also pitched over into the North Channel and floated away like a pine chip, a wee skelf riding buoyant on the waves as if he were adrift in the salty Dead Sea.

“Ah,” Jean had said, watching Ned’s caddis-fly contraption slide ashore and the man himself leap nimbly out onto the beach. “A visitor.” He had expected a search party, but this was better, much better. “Come,” he said to Grif, who was about to melt into whatever background would have him, “he’s a good man, you’ll want to meet him. You might want to bring those buckets again, too. Now that the stairs are washed so beautifully, we could use a little of that wet stuff to cook with.”

“Ned.” The man doffed his name like a hat, informally, drawing it right off the top of a longer nominative—Edwin Tobias Hawke. The hand he offered to Grif in greeting was small, warm, dry as a stick. He was slight and weathered, and gave an impression of living lightly in himself. To Grif’s young eye, Ned had reached an age where age no longer mattered—his hair white as a dandelion clock’s, his skin tanned as a boot; his body had arrived where time intended to take it. He himself had arrived on a whim, in his whim-built boat, having travelled a great many miles across the water for nothing more complicated than a cup of tea with the light-keeper.

Ned ranged widely over the north, walking or sailing, and more or less lived out of doors, having at one point in his life gone outside and discovered that he had no inclination to go back in. He might squat on an uninhabited island for a while, dragging his skiff ashore, flipping it over, propping up the bow with an oar and setting up house underneath. It didn’t seem to trouble him to sleep on the rocks like a handful of earth scattered overtop. Ned would leap from his stony bed, limber as a child, fossils imprinted on his cheeks. Ammonites, he would say, fingering the shapes before they faded like stars in the morning light.

That cup of tea Ned came for was more complicated, as it happened, and outsmoked the usual Smoky Oolong and Darjeeling. Declaring that leaves were for the cloven-footed, Jean rooted around in the shed until he’d collected up the tailings and tag ends of several orphaned flasks and bottles. He then poured these into a bailing tin, indiscriminately marrying the grain, the grape, the juniper berry and the lowly potato. An evil brew it was, a bilge cocktail, and they sat on the dock in the beneficent afternoon light passing it from hand to hand, bailing it in with a gentlemanly relish.

Ned also passed on what news he’d picked up of late, telling Jean about a mutual acquaintance of theirs who had contracted blackleg at a logging camp in Blind River.

“Landlubber’s scurvy,” he said to Grif. “They eat nothing at those camps morning and night but salt pork sandwiches smothered in corn syrup.”

He told them about a couple of young fellows who broke into the light at Mississagi Strait and downed a crock of wood alcohol, and by the time the bodies were discovered they had turned completely black.

His news had a restlessness, a propulsion of its own, and Grif noticed how it moved outward, further and further afield. He related a story about a ship in port at Windsor that had exploded and sent a two-hundred-pound radiator sailing into the town’s funeral parlour, where it flattened the director and made blood squirt out his ears, like a man who’d had a date with Skevington’s daughter. (“Who?” said Grif. “Torture device,” Jean explained.) Ned then ranged across the river to Detroit, where a prominent senator was himself boiling mad. The local papers were having a field day with a story about a boat named after the senator’s daughter that was in dry dock having her bottom scraped.

Talk then turned to the disaster of the Maine, blown up in the Havana harbour in February, and to the trouble in the Transvaal following the Jameson raid on the Boers. And honestly, it surprised Grif to hear them go on. These old hermits, how removed they were from the world’s troubles, free of it all, and yet they were keeping such a close watch, canny as small animals in a large predatory field.

“You know,” said Jean, “some say we will soon be seeing the end of war, that humankind is getting to be too advanced for such barbarism.”

“Some say, yes,” Ned laughed, slapping his hand down on the dock. “Arbitration is the new way, and reason. We’ll all sit down together and talk things over. Somebody might have told the Yanks that, though. Never seen a country more feverish for war.”

“Canadians were happy enough to join ’em. Signed up by the thousands, I hear.”

“A noble cause, the Spaniards being an inferior race. Like the French, eh, Jean?”

“Hah! Here’s to the French. Least they had the sense to scupper that temperance plebiscite.”

“What I don’t follow, boys, is how this idea of everybody working in factories and making a few industrialists rich contributes to mankind’s moral progress.”

“Everybody’s too worn out working sixteen-hour days to fight. Makes them less aggressive, you see.”

“Is that it? Well, here’s to reason, then.”

“To world peace.”

“Did you say peach?”

“Peace. Clean out your ears, man.”

“Ah, I guess that’s why those factories overseas have been so busy.”

“Read about that new Maxim machine gun. Sixteen rounds a minute it can fire.”

“They’ve improved the field gun, too. Has an automatic recoil.”

“And now there’s smokeless powder.”

“Torpedoes, mines.”

“Hell, we must be in for a whole shitload of peace.”

“Hmph, a new century, hard to imagine. Never thought I’d live to see it.”

“Don’t count your chickens, Ned.”

Ned spat into the water and they all sat in silence watching the foamy topped-up gob gently undulate, until out from under the dock a quick, shadowy form emerged, darted to the surface and snapped it up.

“Did you see that? A bloody great sturgeon.”

The sight reminded Grif of someone taking communion, a greedy beast gorging on the insubstantial—for all the good it would do him.

Ned patted his vest pocket lightly, reached in with two fingers and pulled out a harmonica, a small, thirteen-cent, nickel-plated Hohner, which he put to his lips. Those chickens he had been advised not to count—they appeared. He pulled them out of their tiny roosts, the harmonica’s ten slots, birds beaked and feathered and rounded with pure sound to peck and scratch on the dock before them. Then, as instantly as they had appeared, the shape of the musical creatures changed, metamorphosed into a form less comic, more graceful, and, compact as sparrows, they lifted into flight and vanished.

Appreciation was as hearty as two happy sots could produce, and Ned inclined his chin in a modest bow. He told Grif that he was the occasional organist in a settlement on the north shore, by which he meant mouth organ, the only instrument the congregation could afford. There was no church, either, and the services were held in the schoolhouse—Methodist in the morning and Anglican in the evening, but everyone in the community attended both.

“Let your Sabbatarians fight it out in the city,” he said, “some people just want to get along and have a good time.”

Ned then played a few of his sacred tunes, lively and raucous, more suited to a saloon or a sporting house Grif was clearly thinking.

“Son, the Lord can hardly find the place on the map.”

An appealing approach to sacrilege, but what struck Grif even more was the appeal of this music. He couldn’t see how it was accomplished, how Ned, simply by blowing on a sliver of wood and metal buried in his hand, by sucking the weightless substance out of it, could produce such antic or sad or languorous melodies. He looked to be drawing music out of his very flesh and bones.

Listening, letting it pour into him, Grif felt roused, lightened. Jean, too, leapt up, hurried back into the shed, and returned with a bashed-up two-string fiddle and a homemade bow, which he began to saw away on, extemporizing with a few yips and howls.

Grif gazed at his empty hands, wanting to add something of his own devising. If he could just widen it, hold it open, make room for more pleasure to flow in. He was untalented, untutored, but he could clap along at least, could build a bracing, echoing cairn of sound with his bare hands.

Ned, eyeing Grif, paused for a beat and said to him, “Why don’t you show us which one of those shoes of yours is a better dancer? I’d put my money on that hobnail one on the left.”

“Dance? I can’t.”

“I’ve never played this thing before,” said Jean. “Come on, lad. The fish won’t laugh. Not so loud as you’ll hear them, anyway.”

So Grif rose to his feet and, what the hell, partner to himself, started to stomp around on the dock, trying to chase down what the other two were recklessly tossing out. He clumped and shuffled, awkwardly at first, a foolish grin on his face. Then he began to lose himself in concentration, the grin dissolving into intentness. The feel of the air swirling around him, pouring through his widespread fingers, the groaning sounds the wood made under the punishment of his heels, the dock’s vibrations, Jean’s boat bumping up against it, the disturbance he was creating in the water—how the proximate world was being pulled into his orbit.

He had attended a dance in Ingersoll once. Coaxed into dancing with a friend’s kindly and patient sister, he had clumsily rattled through a two-step like a squirrel caught in a cage. The rules of that damn measure were understood and adhered to by all except him, and here was his chance to smash those rules to pieces. He let his shoes, with their differing dispositions, argue it out. His heels hit the planks of the dock like mattocks as he danced, truly danced, an anarchic northern flamenco. His shoes filled with fire; beads of sweat flew off his forehead. Peculiar noises were struck out of the wood like cries. His performance (he thought) was sheer artistry. Certainly it was ephemeral, never to be replicated, evaporating the very moment of its expression, an escapee’s choreography that vanished straight into his soles like a high-noon shadow the second it was laid down.

The music ceased when he began to spin, and the two older men watched, impressed, as Grif followed himself around and around, faster and faster. They half expected him to bore a hole through the dock, or fly off twirling like a spout across the lake. Instead, he fell flat on his face, and a sharply pointed splinter of wood, about three inches long, shot up his left nostril and pierced clean through the skin, decorating him like some exotic South Seas native carried in the high winds and dropped suddenly out of the sky.

Grif reached up to touch his nose, which still throbbed, although it had finally stopped bleeding. Once the splinter had been plucked out, he had spent the rest of the day with various objects stuffed up his “nose-thirl,” as Ned called it—handkerchiefs, cobwebs rolled into soft gauzy balls, even a cork. Jean offered to sew up the gash with one of the violin strings, a medical procedure he’d seen performed on a horse, but Grif declined the doctoring, saying the fiddle needed the string far more than he. It was no more than he deserved anyway for his prideful hoofing. The way he saw it, his blood was so embarrassed to be found in his body, as in some collapsing structure, that it wanted out, and had crowded through that small portal of a wound in a panic to escape him.

As evening had drifted toward them out of the forest on the bluff above, so had clouds of mosquitoes—and what a sound they made, like someone honing an axe to drive a wedge into their party. Hands that earlier had made such sprightly music and had birthed stories right out of the air now turned on their owners, swatting and slapping. Grif started hitting himself so aggressively his partners wondered if there wasn’t something else he was after, some other thing cleaving to his skin that required punishment. They were afraid he might do himself more damage than he had already done.

“I’d say it was time to go,” Ned announced, jumping up.

“It is getting late. I have to attend to the light,” said Jean, holding out a hand to Grif, then hesitating. “Wait, there’s one more thing before you leave.”

Leave? Apparently some understanding had arrived more surreptitiously than the droning insects. But of course he had to leave—flight was what kept him alive. Gently, with the light­fingered touch he had once used to make the sign of the cross, he felt his jacket pocket for the journal, still bound in its protective canvas wrapping. It was a square of ice cut out of the frozen past, a small black window that admitted a limited but thrilling view of a lost and haunted country. His view, his book. He was packed and ready.

Again Jean had ducked into the shed, and this time he returned with a woman’s change purse, which he held out to Grif.

“It’s not much,” he said. “Corpses are poor employers. Might help along the way, just the same.”

The purse was made of a gunmetal mesh that poured into his hand, and the design of its clasp was that of a mermaid stretched out and feeding a lobster with a spoon. It had a pleasing weight, like a sack of plums, and surely was of some value in itself, for it was a striking object.

He smiled and slipped his hand into Jean’s, and now wondered, as he lay stretched out in the bottom of Ned’s boat, why his hand didn’t glow. He was suffused with warmth, radiant, a human lantern ignited by the light-keeper. Perhaps it was only a shirker’s surge of relief he was enjoying. Or the unexpected decanting of an ideal into his physical being, and the sense that he had achieved something impossible—a true freedom, however brief it might be.

Ned advised him to settle in, to sleep if he wanted, and not to worry about travelling at night, for he knew every rock and shoal in these waters.

“I’ll be, and that’s one of them right there,” he said, as the boat made a sudden grating noise. He slid an oar into the lake, gave a push, and they continued, gliding over the smooth black water.

Grif wasn’t worried. He didn’t care. Wasn’t that the secret of being a floating man—jettisoning all care? He thought of a story Jean had told him, about sailors in treacherous seas throwing statues, their resident saints, overboard when all supplication and prayer had failed to calm the waters. This spiritually brazen act must have been intended as a warning to the powers above of a more acute danger: that the divine will lose their hold on the earthly if they do not better serve.

Grif slid down and stretched out, making himself comfortable. He didn’t even glance back to watch Lonely Island, its lighthouse and keeper, recede from view. Open and receptive as a flower, he stared up at the immense sky, the stars beginning to appear. The chill of the lake penetrated his back. He lay shallow­rooted, a dreaming keel, at one with Ned’s claptrap skiff as it headed further and further north.