Chapter Nine

The shroud would be made of bleached nettle thread, uncannily soft and bright, with a sober integrity. Renelde thought about the slick friction of silk upon her body, its cold allure evoked by the cold water. She did not know as she hummed quietly to herself, hands numb as she washed and rewashed the uncarded nettle, the chill running to bumps down her limbs and along the skin of her chest and stomach, did not know that Burchard had begun to cough, a shrill, brutal cough that resisted the draught of cognac he took nightly against illness. She did not know that deathly sickness fermented deep within his body, growing hourly.

Guilbert stopped by, smelling of woodchips and sweat and the moss that crept up the north side of each tree. He had a sack, the remnants of lunch, tied by a cord to his suspenders, and a clean sharpened axe hoisted over his shoulder. He held Renelde by the chin and kissed her lightly on the lips, and when she turned away so briefly and so subtly, he knew.

Burchard the Wolf has been to see you, then? Guilbert’s chamois breeches were black along the thighs from rubbing his hands there. He rubbed them even now. The tears welled up in her eyes, and he understood these as only he might.

The poor girl, Guilbert thought. Would the menace never leave her be? I have half a mind . . . Guilbert finished his thought by heaving the great splitting axe from his shoulder and swinging it a bit too wildly in the direction of the castle.

Think of my dead mother, Renelde pleaded. Think of the countess and what will become of her without her wolf to keep her. Please, Guilbert . . .

I can’t be bothered at all. He’s beyond understanding. Guilbert checked himself at a strange glimmer of unspoken truth in his girl’s eye. Guilbert tried to see beyond it to what was hidden there. And the look on his face unsettled her.

Do you suppose you are the only girl? he said finally.

She had not considered that there were others. She imagined them — a harem of sweet young girls standing one after the other — each wearing a dress more fantastic than the next; what cost? The imaginary cloth fluttered like the moths from which it was produced, up and down her arm, reminding her of the bumps from the morning’s washing as they travelled wantonly down to her belly.

Have you begun the shroud, my love?

I have, although I dislike the effort.

What?

There is a chill to it, Guilbert, that I do not like at all.

He held her, then. Comforted Renelde.

Within days, the first inches of the shroud completed but with only a hint of its narrative in place, Burchard returned. His voice was wheezy, his eyes full of sickening realization. He gestured at the loom, at Renelde herself, and ordered her to halt the work.

You are killing me, he said. Burchard’s vocal cords were almost silenced by the germ that threatened to strangle him. His clothes were in disarray, the collar of his shirt open and yellow with the stains of his fever.

I am under your orders, sir, she said.

Witch! I beg of you, he said. Talking caused him untold pain, and he clutched at his throat, mortified by the searing misery. In the name of God. What revenge is this?

Only for the sake of the countess would Renelde stop. She left the work in place on the loom and set herself to some other task. She went to the garden patch and pulled up the plantain for medicinal tinctures and the lamb’s quarters for soup, simultaneously weeding the sugar beets. Time was not to be wasted. Guilbert found her there when he came to call. He didn’t like to see her bent over the gardening. Surely the old women were capable of this work? The girl should be at her weaving. But when he heard her story, he whirled her around to face him.

Has he permitted our marriage in that case? he asked her.

She could not meet his gaze. He has refused permission, she said.

Guilbert pulled her by the hand back to the loom. It was the only solution, and let misery beget misery. The man must be forced to consent. Guilbert the woodcutter would see to it. He sat beside her and, to while away the time, he sang her a little song that his mother had taught him. He sang it to the thump of the batten tamping the threads into the forming cloth, for the sound of weaving inspired nostalgia.

Jake’s playing with the boy’s penis. He’s holding it down and then letting it go. Up it springs! I shouldn’t let him touch the child. The boy is laughing, so Jake laughs and does it again. If he were doing it with the baby’s arm or ear, I wouldn’t mind. The boy pulls his feet to his chest and kicks them out again and again, and so he sets himself in motion.

What’s his name?

How should I know?

We will call him Moses, after my paternal great-grandfather.

We?

Jake is pressing down on the child’s penis again and rocking his face back and forth. Ha, ha, ha.

Will you stop that?

But he likes it.

And so do you, I suppose.

He bundles up the baby, cooing, Hello, Moses, your mother will rob you of all pleasure, hello Mosie. And when all the clothes are on and the child is hidden in a heap of rags, the boy draws in all his face muscles, concentrates and shits. Off come the clothes.

You see, he likes it. Mosie likes it, doesn’t he? It works so good.

His chubby’s full, I say. I warn.

He’s a man.

Seriously . . .

But it’s too late. The urine arcs out of him, a golden rainbow, and sprays over Jake’s chest. I don’t like to admit this, but Jake’s humour reassures me. I can’t help it. His optimism is compelling. When he’s done chuckling, he dresses the boy, takes him out to the pit and props him up so he can watch. I follow. Jake removes his jacket and rinses it in the water.

It’s warm, he says when he first touches it. It isn’t yet May and so I know he’s lying. It must be just above freezing.

I watch as he pulls each layer off, the gauzy undershirt more holes than thread. His old body is sheathed in a leathery skin, which hangs like useless batwings from the muscle and bone beneath it. Dwindled in age. I am curious, though. His body is not disgusting, as I expected it to be. It is simply him as he lifts off the edge of the pit and, with a surprising athletic finesse, plunges into that dead water. The turquoise surface opens to swallow him. The boy squawks and holds his hands up as if to catch Jake’s leaping form.

When he comes up for air, Jake smiles broadly at me. Conspiratorially.

Who’s the father? You can tell me, he says.

It’s a toss-up.

Wizened eyebrow lifts.

Uh, change topic, I say.

Sure.

So, what does she look like, your Titanic lover?

Ha. Yes. Change topic, sure. My lover? She is immense. She is titanic. Jake’s eyes have brightened with nostalgia. He says, She is two continents.

Yes, yes, Jake. And you are the divide, right?

Jake lifts himself out of the pool and wipes the water off his skin, using his hand as a sort of spatula. Let me tell you my story, he says. Maybe you’ll tell me yours then. And he pulls on his filthy clothes and squats down facing me, close, and begins.

I have only to run my finger up from her ankle, he says, hands gesturing, and make a small tear in her stockings and already she is ready for Jake. This lady is very unhappy, I think. The night is still. Where is her husband? When you see her in the corridor, on the deck here and there, you don’t see her passion. She is like a dead person all dressed up, talking from a dead mind. Nothing comes out. It is all talk of nothing. She pays me in food and drink. I don’t need money; I have my pride. I touch her and she comes alive. I go to her for many nights — well, I was young, so young. Her husband is playing cards or billiards or drinking. There is no risk of detection. I am the master of hiding. I am the stowaway! I enter her and she is happy. I go away and there is not a trace. Jake waves his hands like a magician, all pretence.

The night was still? I say.

Nothing moving except my lady, back and forth. He holds up his bent fingers and smiles naughtily, so I hit him.

Jake?

Yes?

The wolves? Are you worried?

No.

Days later, Jake emerges from the forest behind the pit pool with a coil of something.

Mulch, he says, holding up the coil.

Hey! I say. It’s you!

He is dragging a roll of slightly mouldy indoor-outdoor carpeting over to the garden plot. Standing in this place now, for the first time, I begin to see what he’s done. Planted a narrow row of radish seeds and laid strips that he’s cut from his carpet on both sides, banking the little furrows. It is the most unnatural thing I’ve ever seen, a marvel of industrial genius.

Do you vacuum these?

We don’t have electricity.

It was a joke.

He hands me a shovel and I stare at it, the pong of spring earth suddenly hitting me straight in the heart. I turn toward the road, if you can still call it that with the encroachment it has undergone, the quagmire, the streamlets meandering through it, the lamb’s quarters cracking it apart. The road out. And I recall, for I cannot see, the decline of man-made forest along its edge, the blocks of trees planted fifty years ago, then forty, thirty, becoming smaller and smaller, down to those Willem and I planted last year, some eight kilometres away. Forestry in perspective.

They were there, right now. The treeplanters’ presence was almost tangible, a racing palpitation, channels of my body running in that direction. Would they look for me? Had they looked for me and, exhausting all possibility, given me up for dead? I asked myself these questions for the first time. I watch Jake carefully turn the soil, glimpses of earthworms flicking themselves back into the darkness, the primal, prototypical miner turning shit into gold.

I tie the boy onto my back in his bedsheet sling, grab seed packets from the hut. I hold my favourites up to Jake and he discourages me. Too early, needs soaking, striation. He lets me plant only lettuces, sunflowers and peas. I want to give planting all my concentration, but I can’t help looking up from time to time to the little forest rustlings or the strange call of geese returning in lonely singlets, no V for them, these few diehards that won’t join the rest down south in the city parks, and I squint down the old road that I came up so long before.

How long have you known? I say.

It was the chips reminded me. The salt and vinegar.

What happened to your car?

The car got eaten up by the road one day. If you walk down there you can still see it. Upside down or almost. It was pretty much dead anyway, though it came in handy. Had to haul that damn table for a solid mile. That kitchen table in the shack. Found it in the trash by the highway one day.

People’d throw out their own grandfather if he got too old, I say. But he doesn’t get my rib.

This is my last good mulch you see here, he says. I have it stored in another, uh, shack back through there. He’s pointing with his weird hand, so I have no idea if he means straight ahead or thirty degrees to the left.

There’s been something at it, you see. He shows me. The edge of the carpet has streaks, marks along it.

Bear?

Why’d a bear be interested in that?

Smell?

Smells of oil, not food, he says and raises his eyebrows at me. For the first time, I see his eyes are blue, flecked with brown. He changes tack here, points out the mould. Smaller critters too, he says.

Microbes. Coming at us.

Jake’s face breaks open. He says, Maybe they’re coming for you. He pokes me on the shoulder, a bit too hard. But it’s true, something is bugging me. With all the bending, the boy has become heavy on my back, so I shift him around in the carrier and pull him out. He begins to cry as soon as he sees me, either out of hunger, which is the rational concern, or out of sheer hatred, which is the irrational. I vow to myself to make a better effort.

Jake reaches out for the baby. You should try harder, he says. This irritates me. I throw the child in his direction, toward him. It is calculated and I know Jake will catch him. I know it more deeply at that moment than I know anything. The baby hovers in the air as if he is made of wind and feathers. But Jake does not reach further to catch him and he falls and does not cry. And then he does cry, a great, earth-shattering howl of betrayal.

You didn’t catch him.

No.

I meant you to.

I’m not really here. You forgot that.

Jake’s already walking away in disgust. I’ve got the boy by now and am soothing him, lifting my shirt and helping him latch. He sucks and sucks and then lets go to sob his bottom lip into his mouth and to look at me with that ineffable sorrow. His eyes say only, Why? I slump on the moist ground, wondering why this child expects something other, wondering why he hasn’t yet figured me out. As he sucks, I am depleted. There will be nothing left. If Jake can disappear at will, I will disappear against mine. Sucked into oblivion. The boy sucks to calm but I am still not calm.

What happened to the woman? I call. It’s a cruel question.

Woman? Jake is planting carrots at the other end of the garden.

Your Titania?

Well, he says. Maybe she was eaten by sharks. Or by time and salt water. Or red herrings, I dunno. Jake is on to me. But I will draw him in; I will try and try.

And the effect?

Oh, her jewellery was recovered, he says. It’s in a display case in a travelling archive.

I meant how did it affect you, I say, not what happened to the effects. Effect, affect. Fuck, you’re so stupid.

Jake is repulsed by me, I realize. He is pointing and backing away from me. He almost falls and then catches himself. A low grunt comes out of his mouth and he gesticulates toward me as if I am somehow frightening him. This cannot be so. We have gardened together all morning. My throwing the boy was a provocation, a test, nothing more. Have I failed?

Jake yells now.

Run.

Run? I turn my head and see the massive grey creature sitting on its haunches, tail looped up between its legs, yawning as if bored or tired, then smiling, its long canines bared. A cloud of blackflies rises around me as if out of the earth and begins to hunt. Jake, I see, is tortured by them too; he twirls and runs his hands up behind his ears. Carnivorous angels. I am more afraid of these minuscule black teeth on wings than of the wolf. I cover the boy with my shirt and run to the safety of the shack. I hear Jake barking behind me. The wolf stares at us, a pantomime put on for its pleasure. Flies have followed us into the house; I hear the wolf panting under the window, and then it is gone, returned to its pack, perhaps, beckoned by a call so far off, so high-pitched I am not able to hear it. I lean over the sink, there is a glare on the window. I press up against the glass. I cannot be sure but I think I see a form, the form of a man as a shadow just inside the edge of the woods. He makes no effort to hide. I think I see him lift his hand and I believe he waves at me. I am seeing things, perhaps. I shake my head to dislodge the sighting and look again. I see nothing but the faint memory of a shadow waving.

It was rabid, says Jake, when he can speak again. He’s been panting, trying to catch his breath. I’ve never seen him so scared.

You can’t know this.

Otherwise it wouldn’t come so close.

Conjecture. Oh, my heart beats in fear.

I whisper, You left her to die, didn’t you?

I am a harpy for asking this. But I wonder. It bears asking what a person is capable of, doesn’t it? In light of the situation. I can only catch glimpses of imaginary water pressing in at the door, the far-off scuffling of gentlemen trying to escort the weaker sex onto the deck and dubious safety. I reason suddenly that I threw the baby up in the air to test this principle. What would Jake do for me if I were in need of protection? At best, he’s a worrisome guardian. His age signifies not prowess of survival but something less. An ability to evaporate at any sign of trouble. And luck in the face of danger. But there is another reason I’m curious. I don’t care what the answer is, for any answer is half lie. I want Jake to know I’m apt to think like this. That I’ve got his morality in the balance. That I’m watching his behaviour. I hope this tactic works, for by it I aim to give Jake a moral centre, for his own sake and my own.

I checked her pulse, he says. I put my ear on her chest. I heard nothing.

Above the roar of water? I laugh. I say, The sudden silence of the ship? You listened for her heartbeat? You’re a liar.

I am a farmer. He’s whimpering. I’m not buying it.

You don’t much like the sight of blood, I say.

No. I am just a farmer.

How Edenic, I say. Was she pretty?

Jake is furious. I can see it in the way his body begins to camouflage against the brick yellow of the hut’s kitchen wall. I won’t let him go, though. I need him. I see that now.

He says, I wanted to settle down in the new country, that’s all. I wanted only a piece of land in which to dig, to grow things, to harvest. I heard things about free land in Canada so I found a way. I risked everything.

Except being discovered. Answer true or false. He is looking at the floor, his head shaking disconsolately.

I could not risk detection. Then it would have been all for nothing.

I weigh this for a moment, pull my nipple away from the boy, whose suck has become more habit than need, whose eyelids are heavy, drunken, and whose body has already begun to slacken into sleep — a state so preferable to wakefulness in a baby it is a wonder babies bother to waken at all. I’ve made a little bed for him out of old blankets and scrap fur that Jake has amateurishly tanned. It still smells beastly. The baby himself always has a reek of dead animal about him, which one gets used to.

At the risk of being discovered, you abandoned your lover.

You misunderstand, he says. She was not my lover; I was hers.

Jake looks at me with such guilelessness, I am undone. I begin to laugh and wake up the baby. I mean really. Recall I’ve seen him naked. Jake has shrunk to a raisin, he is not five feet tall, and besides, I’ve seen him naked. It’s a joke that even I cannot resist. Jake is soon laughing too, and with the laughter, he emerges out of the wall and into the room again. There, we are friends now. The baby cries and together we clear a spot on the floor. I move the thread balls and Jake pulls the bundle of blankets and fur over and settles the boy by rubbing his belly.

There’s something more to tell, he says, quietly.

What?

The shack where I keep my mulch carpet. There’s an intruder.

What do you mean? An animal, you mean.

Well, it’s not a shack, really. It’s an old dry mine shaft about a mile in the bush. It was a copper vein in my day. Nothing much, a private enterprise, only lasted a couple of years, but it’s dry and it’s a perfect storage place.

And there’s been a what? A bear?

No. When I pulled the carpet out, I smelled ash. No bear. Man.

As I try to fall asleep that night, it occurs to me that I knew all along. That pong of alluring earth, the draw of the tree-planting clan toward itself like a communal magnet, offering only just barely that — it was false, a false lead. It was coming to get me, and my waiting was not illusory. I was not making it up as I went along. He was coming back.

Jake?

I call across the dark room, and my one word hangs there so long it becomes nebulous, changing form and meaning until his answer comes, and I no longer remember what I’ve been thinking.

Yes?

You would have made a good farmer.

Thank you. To tell the truth, I grew up in the city. Playing in the alleys between the houses with my friends. He’s talking peripherally again, about nothing. He goes on talking, clearly talking to himself. My mind wanders. I am not much of a listener. I’ve almost fallen asleep but Jake keeps talking. I can barely hear him mumbling outside my room. He says, Something happened to you. There is darkness now.

What?

You had joy before, in the parking lot, where I met you. You could laugh. And it’s true, I can recall joy.

What is the conduit for happiness? I say.

You just make it up. That’s how I’ve always done it.