Chapter Two

It was autumn. The fields were golden stubble, the stooked flax would soon be brought to the riverside and soaked until the outer wood softened and stank and disintegrated so that the retters could get to work and draw out the woolly linen. The burial entourage made a parade through the fields. The maidens were dressed in white, like virgin brides, witnesses to the dead’s now presumed innocence. The bishop was there, mitred, dressed in the shiny vestments — flashing red, blood-red — that he wore each spring during the benediction of the fields. He had administered extreme unction the day before, as Burchard finally collapsed onto the just-finished shroud, kissing the little hand of the girl-weaver Renelde in gratitude. Strange to think a twelve-year-old girl could weave so finely; strange, too, to see sweet youth standing in the midst of putrid death.

Since the cloth was wound around the corpse, it was impossible to see the thing of a piece. Only Renelde, her grandmother and her great-grandmother, who all lived together in a little fieldstone cottage on the edge of the forest, had witnessed the progress of the death garb. Renelde’s mother was long dead of a strange illness no one, not even the ancient healer, had been able to cure. So just these three and one more knew what story wove its way through the threads of that shroud.

Burchard’s wife, she had seen it too. These four had the luxury of time before the thing was laid out and wrapped about the anointed cadaver. These four had marvelled at the intricacy of the weaving, the subtle details — white on white, shuttled in with ever-so-finely spun nettle thread — of his life and Renelde’s and how these twined around one another.

Even the strange becomes normal over time. I move in, occupy the bedroom, and out of wariness behave queenly and austere. Jake laughs whenever clumsiness or inexperience blows my cover. I don’t trust him because I don’t know him, and I can’t know him because I don’t trust him. He is ancient, so old he’s lost his gender and looks like an old woman, an apple doll, a shrunken head. He disappears for days and returns with groceries, for which I am running out of money (he steals from me while I steel myself against him). I’ll have to make a decision soon, I know. Time is passing.

Shit or get off the pot. Jake yells this to me every morning when I go seeking privacy.

Waiting is fraught with neurotic inclination, weakness of personality, amplified tragic flaws, bereavement, longing, inertia and pure love. I’ve begun weaving the story cloth, reciting and recreating the old story in fragments. This focuses my work. Maybe there is something magical in the battening down of thread on a loom. The nettle thread is as silk, strong and delicate. It lies in tautly wrapped clews at my feet. I draw it through the warp, and thud-thud, thud-thud, the rhythm draws me in. Evelyn taught me well; the threads are true and the images emerge livelier than they would on a page. My Nettle Spinner cloth will recount the story in its totality, panel by panel, like an oblique cartoon. This first panel is bordered with a pattern, a cheeky reconstructed nettle leaf repeater. The central image is the corpse wrapped tightly. The nettle thread I have used here is very fine and elsewhere rougher, so that the body seems to float on a square of gossamer. It is astonishing. The beauty of it chills my heart. Jake peers over my shoulder, gasps and puts his tiny hand over his mouth.

What is it? he says.

It’s an old story.

Tell me.

I tell him a little bit and then I stop. I don’t want him to have any more. He urges me to go on, starts poking my shoulder, but I shake my head and tell him I have to keep working and to leave me alone.

Later. Later, I say.

He snarls vaguely at me. There are many varieties of escape, he says.

We have had some time by now to get to know one another, and I am not taken in by his snarl. Jake likes buoyancy and all things lighthearted. His mood is put on, a manipulation. I attend my weaving, leaning back to create tension. The loom I have is simple and attaches by a strap around my back; I hook the other end to a bent nail I’ve hammered into the wall. When all the panels are complete, I will sew them together into an episodic quilt. It will be an abstraction of infinity, a repeating image. It will be the shroud telling the story of the shroud, which tells the story of the shroud. Conceptually, it will be like the picture on the cocoa tin that is perched on the kitchen shelf. The tin shows a sexy nun holding a tin of Droste Dutch chocolate, detailing a smaller sexy nun holding a tin of Droste, and so on.

I do miss good cocoa. The tin is empty. I chew on chicory root when I can find it. Jake is crouching in the corner by the door; now I’ve put him off. He’s come back recently from a grocery run, two days missing. He pulls out a Kit-Kat, unwraps it and waves it about. The smell of it entices me so I let the weaving drop onto the mattress and go to him. We are vultures when it comes to chocolate. Later, we’ll suffer through generic hot chocolate, which is overly sweet and underly chocolate. Jake and I agree on this. He is old enough to have tasted hot cocoa on the Titanic, or so he claims. Stowaway — he claims that too. And I can almost picture him there, huddled in the engine room, his face camouflaged by a smear of machine oil, his hand snatching at dropped morsels and, late in the night, his body surreptitiously locating the scullery, enjoying a respite from hiding, two chilled palms cupping a mug of purloined choco; the ecstasy of a yearning fulfilled plays across his face.

In essence, Jake is a stowaway. It is his theme, if a person can be said to have one. He is furtive and sneaky, as if the very act of stowing himself on the ill-fated ship was itself predestined. He is a thief of small inconsequential spaces, of physical gaps, and what he steals is barely noticed, like what a mouse steals, yet the effect is felt in ripples and causes untold fear, for what is a stowaway to the captain of an epic boat but fear of the unknown? Fear embodied. Also, Jake’s got one foot in the grave and what’s more he always has had. He hides between a rock and a hard place, neither here nor there, relying on everyone’s forgiving nature. He hid on the ship, then on the lifeboat.

Jake has a sugar rush, a fit of the giggles, and then he crashes. Oh, he is old and horrid. Better, he is old, therefore horrid. I will nurture this revulsion. Jake is dangerous. He loves to disappear. I’m scared of him, but one must make use of fear. I watch him sleep on his heap of skins, and I find myself shuddering in anticipation of his usefulness. I look out the kitchen window. I see the smaller structure. I see the edge of the sunken mine shaft pool, the vestiges of this dead town, wooden monuments, collapsed structures. And beyond, the anorexic forest one finds this far north, what dares to grow on permafrost and shield or what is forced upon this earth — only tenacious trees. And beyond that, the sky, its clouds drifting elsewhere, away.

The cold is upon us before the last summer sun drops. September brings snow, and as I look desperately out the door, the wind hurling it over the threshold, Jake cackles.

All the convenience of a deep-freeze, he says. City folk pay for that.

We have made a trail over to behind the hut, making our regular trips there so that the snow stays packed. I am heaping mittfuls of snow to hide my creation. A sudden thought: God created Adam out of mud, did he not? What is mud but the most primal of creations? Shit and life itself. Shit or get off the pot, indeed. There is little separating life and death, creation and destruction. In between, there is only routine. Through the early winter, I weave in the morning while the early day gives me light. I weave and feed the hearth. For reasons of light and warmth, I’ve moved my work into the main room. There is a small stack of cloth forming beside me. Jake comes and goes, bringing food and forcing me into conversation, into his past, as if speaking of it is retributive.

My arm was broken, he says, trying to draw me in.

I roll my eyes. We’ve been through this territory ad nauseam. How he wrapped himself in a shawl and pulled a party dress out of that red leather valise, the one that didn’t belong to him, just as nothing belonged to him anymore, and he tugged it on, in horror, absolute horror that he had to stowaway again. The ship offered no salvation, no escape, only waves and waves of brutal, piercingly cold water. He disappeared into that act and only emerged an hour out, made a sad go of it with the oar but had to relinquish everything. For the pain. The pain! They did not count him as a passenger. He wasn’t a paid fare. He was historically insignificant, not entered onto any list. The arm broke with the lurch of the ship itself as it filled with ice-cold water and heaved in two.

Like the ship, he says, I broke.

He wags his head while he speaks to me. His eyes are trying to find my crisp outline. He does not see well.

I’m not your crutch, I say. I’m not interested in helping him come to terms with this crime.

It was a broken arm, he says, not a broken leg!

My pregnancy is announced mid-January. I recall the wind beating against the shack, the thin walls barely able to withstand it, the construction shuddering and seeming to wave about as if we were on the open sea. Jake notices first. It comes as a shock to admit my belly has expanded, to come to terms with the eventuality of a labour, a child. I didn’t ask for this. There were signs I ignored for too long, the missed periods I believed due to starvation, the strange foreign thrum of life I mistook for diarrhea. The equation for pregnancy is not so random, I know, and I ought to have considered this possibility, but, as bent as I was on re-establishing myself in this phantomscape, this wretched undone land, it did not enter my mind until, having made something of a friendship, however tempestuous, with Jake, and fattened up on whatever kill he brought home, and he is pretty adept at the hunt, I could no longer avoid the obvious changes my body was undergoing. I’m not keen on motherhood; it has been thrust upon me. Jake tries to convince me that I ought to leave, but leaving is not really an option. The snow is past my hips in some places and escape will certainly seal my fate. I figure I have until March, that I’ll get out then.

I foretell a son, he says. Jake has grabbed my hand and dangled a threaded needle over my open palm.

Wha?

Really, three boys over time. Three sons and one daughter, later.

I stare at him.

It’s a lie, he admits. There will be no daughter. I only wanted to see you smile.

I do not smile. I piece together the facts while watching the needle make diminishing circlets in space below his garden-callused paw, wondering exactly what this might mean, and how I might fit into that same meaning. I wish I could say I find myself falling instantly in love with this self within myself. I do not. I am spooked, even more so in realizing that there is nowhere to run. I look for my wild edibles book and frantically research abortifacients, only to discover I’ve brought the wrong book. I weave and, dissatisfied, undo my weaving — like Penelope, though without the suitors. She had to keep the horny throng at bay; I must only preserve my limited supply of nettle. I enter the work and successfully ignore my body. I ignore it.

The dead guy, Jake says, what happened to him? He’s holding up the corpse panel. His eyes are truly going. I notice him clutching a pair of drugstore reading glasses, which I believe he has stolen on one of his long trips away. They have fantastic black frames, offset with yellowing plastic around the curl where the arms sit on his ears. He puts them on and squints through them at the weaving. His eyes are inches from the cloth. He acts as if he doesn’t resent it that I’ve more or less taken over the cabin. He acts as if he wanted this. There are a hundred, hundred ways in which he has shown he doesn’t like my presence, yet we are bound, tethered by the communal fear we share of the wilderness and its encroachment.

A little boy stood tugging at the edge of the shroud. What’s it say? What’s it say? Renelde had to unclasp his little fingers from the cloth and pull him away. Do you know the story? he begged. What happened to Burchard the Wolf?