There was a letter from Mum I didn’t want to talk about. My charge — big baby Willem — didn’t notice anything was wrong. If he did, he didn’t mention it. He was a boor because of this, I decided, even though I was pleased he hadn’t seen or remarked upon the swollen skin around my eyes, their exceptional bloodshot quality. I showed him how to plant but left out certain helpful strategies because I was in a bad mood, because like most people I was selfish at heart. I learned the hard way. Why shouldn’t he? Fact was, if he couldn’t improve by mere observation, why should I feel responsible? Planting trees wasn’t born in the blood, it was acquired. Willem dug holes in the ground as if his life depended on the survival of each and every tree. Commendable but foolhardy. I asked him questions about his life. His answers implied a level of misunderstanding.
You have brothers and sisters? I said.
Yes, I am trying, he said, eyebrows slanted in . . . something . . . concentration, maybe.
I asked if you have family.
I have two brothers, big ones, he said. I am the baby. And you? You are lonely?
He was down on his hands and knees, pulling a clump of sod away from a site. When the hole was made, he got back down and broke up the earth with his hands.
Give it air, he said, as he carefully tucked the tree into the hole. He stood up and brushed away the horde of blackflies that had settled on his forehead.
It is chaos here, he said, with these animals.
You should tuck your pants into your socks. I pointed at his feet and he looked there in apparent deep thought.
There is something wrong?
Willem bent over and pulled his pant leg up over his boot, then pulled his boot off. There were scores of suckling blackflies there, and little runnels of blood oozing down, dodging the bristle of black hair.
Uh, fuck, I said. You need better socks. What are these?
These are socks. His socks were ribbed and made of a shiny nylon material. They were bunched down around his ankles.
These are businessman socks, I said. You need thick, impenetrable wool work socks. Christ Almighty, will you look at that?
With my thumb, I ran the length of his calf, smearing a trail of insects under it. I took out an aerosol can of DEET and began to spray down his legs, around the cuff of his pants. I had a roll of duct tape in my planting bags and I unwound this and wrapped tape around the bottom of his pants. He watched me as a child might, in wonder, taking it in as if it were a lesson.
Be thanked, he said. You are very kind to me.
Ortwin didn’t tell you what to bring? I stood over him swatting at the flies that hung in the air all about me.
He said there was maybe going to be something, some bugs, that’s all. It is fine, Willem said. I am really good. Really, really. He squatted down and patted the soil all around the tree and then stood up again, took two calculated, equal steps, almost precisely six feet, long gangly legs bringing their own comedy to this effort, and cocked his face, searching out the optimum location for his next tree, even if it appeared he was seeking a distant shoreline. I laughed and inhaled several blackflies, which caught in my throat, causing me to rasp and cough.
You are funny? he said. Why?
Your system, I said, horking up little black carcasses and snot.
That is how we are planting trees where I am coming from. For hundreds of years and some are already still living. You think I am so fun?
It’s just that it isn’t particularly economical. You won’t ever make any money at it that way.
Yes, seven cents is not much money for all that work I’m doing. I am thinking that Canada must be cheaper than Belgium for seven cents each tree.
I don’t know. Is Belgium very expensive?
Yes, many, many taxes. Much?
The cost of living is very high here too, I said, and what I said bent in two directions and depressed me. Willem saw the pall of sorrow pass over my face; his eyebrows shifted but still he did not ask.
He said, It doesn’t matter. I want to come and live in this big country where you can get lost and nobody comes to look for you. I will immigrate here one day, I will do it. You know, when I was a little boy I used to go for many walks alone in the forest, hitting sticks against the trees to make a nice noise and all the while talking to myself in English.
In English?
I thought it was the best language in the world. Very romantic to my ears. He waved his hands around his ears.
Willem looked down then at his treebags, grabbed a tree and held it up. Treeplanting is not so romantic, though, he said. I am wondering why they don’t pay more for each tree.
You have to do it faster. You have to take less care. Do it good enough. That’s all. Look. I cut a quick gash six feet from his spot and tossed a tree in, all in roughly ten seconds.
But they maybe will die then.
Yes, but some will live and that’s what they count on — that some will live and not all. Look, I said, in the time you plant one tree, I plant ten. If nine of mine die, we’re still even.
Strange.
Except I’ve earned more money than you have — ten times more.
They should pay to me ten times more for my one good tree than your nine dead ones.
They will never do it. It is a system based on waste; waste is factored in.
Not honest.
Willem’s pants were safely taped up at the bottom but there were still frayed holes running horizontally along the knees and thighs; these had been patched here and there with embroidery thread and what appeared to be old flannel workshirts, but even these patches had begun to wear and in places were thoroughly ripped open as well. I pulled off pieces of tape and handed them one by one to him and he covered the entry points. In the end, the jeans were more duct tape than material. He sat down on a log then and pulled out a packet of Drum tobacco and a little cardboard cigarette paper dispenser on which was written Rizla Automatique and rolled with one hand the most cylindrical homemade cigarette I had ever seen. It was then that I noticed it. Willem was missing half his index finger and the fingernail joint of his next finger.
What happened?
I was cutting it off, he said. It was accidentally.
I hope so. How?
With a chainsaw. If I moved so or so, then I would have fallen on the saw and be cut in half. Instead, I cut these little pieces of me and so I can live. Everybody in the forest misses a finger or a toe. Not so nice, I think, but it is like that. Then he shoved the finger stumps into his nostrils so that it looked as if his fingers were fully embedded in his nose.
The forest? I said. What forest? What do you mean? You work in a forest?
He took his hand away from his nose. Yes, I am a Belgian woodcutter. I am working always in the forests around Belgium and Germany and Holland. He held the cigarette between his thumb and stumpy finger and he flicked it away in an arc.
Hey, wait. I thought you were Dutch.
Not so. I am Flemish.
The third son, I said. An honest Flemish woodcutter. Hmm. Of course. I was in for it, I knew. I looked over at his smouldering cigarette. I said, You’re going to start a forest fire like that.
Overnight, the weather changed from cold squalls to desert heat. Mist hung over us for days while the earth sucked in the last moisture there was to be found in the air. The ground began to crack in places, baked by the wind and sun. The dry air by day, combined with freakish dry lightning storms by night, made the northern forests into a tinderbox. The fire marshal visited the block and demonstrated basic fire education, how to dig long, thin retaining trenches into the upper duff right down to the unignitable mineral soil and a foot or two wide to keep the fire, which travelled quietly, snake-like, underground, contained.
Each tree stash had a couple of regulation water tanks attached to harnesses; little ineffectual pumping hoses extended from each plastic tank. When bored or hot, Willem and I strapped them on and sprayed one another, the water droplets forming rainbows, cooling us. There were fires raging all around us, we heard, but we couldn’t smell or see them, and so after the initial training period no one thought much about them, and except for the miserable fact of having to haul all that extra gear in — a daily chorus of grumbling quite apart from the unreal danger of death by fire, that rising meltdown of self — the horror was entirely beside the point.
When I saw one of Willem’s rollies smouldering in the only patch of wet birch leaf mulch around, the last of last year’s now-gone canopy, I went over to it and heeled it into the earth in order to extinguish its potential. He shrugged and smiled at me.
There’s nothing to worry about here.
No, I said. But just in case.
As soon as the air dried and the atmosphere heated up, the bug problem dropped off. Our clothes dropped off too. I wore a thin T-shirt caked with weeks of Muskol, sweat and pesticidal slurry splashed on me by the sprawling root systems as I drew them out of my sacks. I discarded the suspenders from my planting bags and let the bags hang down, cinched tightly at my waist. My hips had developed massive calluses, a band of thick skin where the belt of the bags rubbed. We threw the fire gear down at the tree caches and bagged up, Willem smoking and neither of us saying much. We weren’t expecting anything but the mundane, the grind of endless bending and, if we were lucky, the euphoria of mindless repetition. We weren’t expecting fire.
Forest fires happened on television. The animals fled, wild-eyed. We would too if it happened. We would run in uncivilized terror, fearful of the encroachment of death as it hedged us into this man-made labyrinth. Animals were animals, not to be anthropomorphized; they weren’t like us, of course. It was the other way around entirely, except we were smarter than they were, in a stupid sort of way. But there we’d be, running beside them, desperate for any escape, forgetting momentarily, in the heat of the situation, that we alone, of all the animals, had tamed fire.
Fire was beautiful. Campfires. We stared into them and found ourselves mesmerized. But because of the fire warning, they were forbidden, and so the nights were still and dark; sometimes people stayed up drinking and smoking pot in the cook tent, in the glow of battery operated flashlights or Coleman lanterns. I heard murmurs on the still air. They came to me as a soothing drone, the fabric of my overheating dome a barely safe barrier to their conversation. They spoke of nothing, I knew — they spoke of love, homeopathy, reflexology, god(s), Keats, and whether school was good or bad.
I was restless, exhausted from the extra work it took to get the trees into the ever hardening soil, frustrated with the death rate behind me as tree leaders went in yellow and brittle and seemed to burn by the end of the day into a dry, unfortunate brown. My arm was rattled, the muscles running up and down it were shocked and tender. I gasped in pain each time I jabbed the surface of the earth with my shovel, each time I had to use my body to swivel and grind the ground open just wide enough to cram the roots in. I was tired of the vespiaries which swarmed regularly out of dead wood or out of tiny holes in the ground itself, like some exhalation from Hell, to sting — the radiating poison pulsing beneath my skin. The blackflies ate us in the early mornings, giving way to fewer and fewer mosquitoes and larger blood-sucking creatures as the day heated up. They came and fed.
I felt like quitting but could not muster the energy to proceed on this thought. I was pathetic, trying desperately to ignore Willem’s beseeching questions — What is it you are doing in that Toronto? What is it you are hating about me? — feeling annoyed with myself for selling out for fifty dollars a day in order to mind this overgrown baby, this seemingly retarded mythic woodcutter, who slowed me down in my work just enough to make me examine it and therefore hate it, as if only in the slowing down it became real. The relentlessness of the day refused to give way to meditation, to fleeting sensation, an incantational grunt of effort signifying slow prosperity. I looked around and all I saw was the bleak landscape with no way out. The extra fifty bucks did not compensate for the grief of dealing with Willem. I vowed to ignore him as best I could just as soon as he was fast enough and just as soon as he internalized the simple fire rule of putting out his damn cigarette. After that I would plant out of earshot — Why aren’t you caring for the nature? What are you so happy smiling always about? There’s nothing to be happy about, anyway. Smile. Smile. Smile. It never stops with you.
Was he flirting?
Fire started very slowly. Ignition was in no way an obvious event. It could take days for the ember of a hastily butted cigarette to light a large stick or catch on wet sod, eventually reaching threshold heat and combusting, racing, devouring, as they say, everything it met, until it ran out of fuel and, contented, died. The earth cooled, the animals returned, new life urged up in the wake of the destruction. Of course, certain forests relied on cataclysm for survival. In my tent, I took my mother’s letter out of my backpack and unfolded it. I had read and reread it, sought between the lines, read tangentially. The letter itself was full of banalities, betraying my mother’s willingness to suspend disbelief in the world alive around her, a conscious and unconscious purposeful inattention to truth. In it she outlined the prettiness of her crossword-filled days, but by the end it was obvious she was in her cups. In tiny letters the PS read: come home soon.
I was homesick, in a way. I was needy. My body hurt, I was stiff and tired, I was bug-eaten, I was horrifically in the moment and wanting respite. I heard Willem walk by my tent, whistling, and I put the letter away and was asleep.
A bear was sighted in the camp the next day nosing around at the garbage. Marilene came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands down the front of her apron, grease stains in two streaks along her small breasts and down her thighs. It was spaghetti night, she recalled, describing the bear as a large male — curious and fairly unscathed, therefore likely young. She was unnerved by the sighting but not traumatized. She told Osho that she hoped it would come back so she could take a photograph, hoped it would come back when she had her wits about her. Osho said she was crazy (man) and told her to move the garbage cans out of the cookshack so she wouldn’t be trapped in there with it. He let Ortwin know that Marilene should have the camp rifle with her in case anything happened.
Marilene screamed at him. You aren’t exactly copacetic, Osho. Hey, he said and held his palms up submissively.
Paul gave Marilene a hug and said, There, there.
She wept, wheezing, I’m okay, I’m okay.
Ortwin stood up after dinner and told us all to keep food out of our tents and that the Ministry of Natural Resources was going to set a bear trap. I pictured a huge, jaw-like apparatus with massive teeth clutching a bear as it went through its agonizing death throes. But they brought in a humane trap — an immense circus affair, built out of steel, already rusted to burnt orange and baited with rotting meat and decaying kitchen leftovers. It was designed to trap a bear in order to make shooting it foolproof — nobody wanted to shoot at a moving target, especially not if he happened to miss first time round. The trap was put into place the next day behind the cookshack in the path the MNR figured the bear took to get from the forest to the garbage.
The forester wore a tidy beige workshirt, crisp cotton, pressed creases down the arms. They all dressed like that, clean, in vaguely military costume, like parcel couriers or unionized plumbers. The mere whiff of a forester raised the invisible hairs on my neck and down my spine. He threw the mauled garbage can into the trap too in the hope that the bear would be enticed by his own handiwork. But the bear stayed away, the stink of decomposing meat and mouldy vegetables carrying on the late spring air through the campsite like an anxiety that would not go away.
It was hot at night, hot by day. The sky had been blue-white and open for days; the blackflies were in hiding, but the horseflies and the deerflies, like miniature fighter planes, dive-bombed our heads. The only relief was the journey to and from the worksite. We sat half asleep in the orange crummies — large work vans rented from Hertz of the north and designed for the trashing we gave them. The chill morning air kept the windows shut. Karl sat in the back and ate whole cloves of garlic, not to ward off Satan, although he may have needed that precaution too, but to keep the bug life away. He burped loudly. Garlic, mingled with his toxic breath, permeated the closed space. Either Paul couldn’t stand garlic or he couldn’t stand to reminisce about creamy Caesar salad dressing. The stink was more than he could handle.
Oh for feck’s sake. Stop the van and set the bastard out. The unmerciful stench of him. Paul was strange in his ever-slenderer body, as if it did not really belong to him.
It keeps the skin very clear, protested Karl. He peeled a clove between his forefinger and thumb and offered it to Paul. The ends of his fingers — they were disturbingly, perplexingly large.
Paul scowled, hunkered down in his seat with his hand over his nose. You’re ruining the air quality for twelve people, for Christ’s sake.
Karl sat up straight as if he suddenly realized something. He looked indignantly at Paul and said, I don’t see that Christ has anything to do with it.
So you’re a stinkin’ born-again, are you?
Not born again, no. Only born once and not yesterday. He popped the clove into his cheek.
Idiot, said Paul.
Paul? I leaned out of my seat and craned around to him. Leave Karl alone, would you? It’s hopeless, really. He’s just eccentric.
Oh no. Karl was bellowing from the back of the van. There’s no need to change me. I’m just fine like this. And I want to mention that I appreciate your standing up for me, Alma. I always knew you would come around to me one of these days.
Uh, no, Karl. Just trying to . . .
No, no, Alma, thank you, he said. He lunged out of his seat and brushed his face against mine, first one side then the other. It is inevitable, he muttered in my ear. Our paths are linked, wouldn’t you say? The garlic odour oozed from his pores. He brushed his hand over my chest and up in such a way that no one else noticed, or if they did, it might seem accidental. He popped a clove of garlic between my lips and into my mouth. This taste of earth and bitterness caused me to salivate unwillingly; I spit the garlic at Karl, pushed past him and moved up one seat beside Willem, crossed my arms over my chest. Karl fell back. I could hear Paul intervening, yelling at him, haranguing him. I tried to ignore this.
Willem was quietly, carefully dabbing Watkins along the cuffs and around the collar of his shirt. The very few blackflies around all seemed to flock to his sweet, fresh Euro-blood. He had little scabby pocks, blackfly torment, all over his forehead, which had swollen, giving him the subtle nuance of a monstrosity. His hands were road maps of criss-crossing red tear lines, and his nails were cracked and black with earth. In short, he looked haggard and bewildered. He had a T-shirt lying in a heap in his lap that he would soon pull on over his head in a vain attempt to keep the flies off his neck. By day, in the field, he looked from far off like a lost nun wandering about post-apocalypse. When he bent and scratched at the earth, he appeared even more lost, lost so badly that he might be looking for clues, through some narrative written on the ground, to his own whereabouts. Clara sat beside Paul but stared openly at Willem as he medicated his shirt with bug dope.
I hear you have your own company, she said. That’s quite interesting.
Willem didn’t look up from what he was doing. He muttered, It’s just regular, actually.
Clara batted her lashes and frowned at him but he didn’t see it. His face was turned to his task. She looked over at me and caught me watching her.
What? she said.
What on earth brought us here together? We were snippets of people; who were we really? What separated us from each other? What made us us? Were we swatches, little throwaways of other people — a hand gesture here, a twist of the lip there — genetic, some of it, but the rest? Were they just simply found objects, appropriated behaviours? I expected this was it. This was the crux of everything. I was my mother’s acquiescence and my father’s twitchy fear of settling at all. Oh, the list of influences was of infinite length, beginning from the start of time, the weaknesses and the strengths of my ancestors, these held in the code that was me and handed down until, like passed-on clothing, they became faded, brittle, moth-eaten, hardly worth wearing. I am nobody! Odysseus had shouted to the Cyclops as he returned home. There Penelope worked at her never-finished story tapestry, her unweaving, her lack of story in the face of his. I am nobody! he shouted with pride and vigorous manliness. He might as well have shouted, I am everyone. Each man is but a collage of all that came before. Hardly the stuff of a hero.