I find a beautiful flapper-style dress in the heap of clothing Jake brought back from the Sally Ann. I’ve rummaged through the pile trying to find something pretty with which to patch my jeans and out pops this. It’s bright red and covered with sequins. I hold it up to myself when he comes in the shack. I’m standing right in front of him. I brush myself up against his hand, through the scratch of fabric.
What’s this, then? I say.
He actually takes a step back.
Hello, he says.
Remind you of anyone?
Ha ha.
This is . . .
Yes, he says, Salvation Army. When I went to town to buy scraps of clothes for insulating the floor of this shack, I saw this dress and I remembered everything. This is like the dress I was wearing on the lifeboat on the cold night of the sinking of the Titanic. The dress of the fat lady, whose smell was still on my fingers as I sat holding my broken arm and thinking about her last moments of bliss. Is this so bad, I thought, to die at such a peak? Maybe I did her a favour. I stood over the bin of dusty, mouldy clothes and I ran the dress through my hands in the direction of the sequins, like a cold cat I thought all of a sudden, and I realized, that is all that really happened to me in my whole life. That is my whole life. One night, maybe one minute of life on the Titanic. I am alive then, that’s it. While the other men were rowing away from the tilting ship, I cradled my hand and the sweet smell was more powerful than the smell of the big ocean. After that and before is nothing. My childhood was getting ready for this moment, my life — the mining, the shack, the hiding — is all trying to forget it.
Why?
It is too big. I won’t take responsibility for it. There are houses, I stay in the alley; there is society, I am outside; you throw the baby, I don’t catch him.
No.
It is too late.
You shouted at the wolves when they came after me. You scared them away from me and the boy. You swam in the cold mine shaft.
Yes, I swim in dead water, hoping for rebirth.
Yes, but you are not dead. I’m scared I’m losing him. I need Jake. I need him engaged in my game. I say, You don’t need rebirth. You’re the most alive person I’ve ever met. You laugh. You do. You act. You are, really are.
Alma.
What?
I don’t exist.
I’m talking to you. You do exist. You do.
I can evaporate. You made me up. I’m made-up. Take the dress; it is yours. I bought it for you. A gift. Something pretty. Now I’m going. So, goodbye . . .
Wait, Jake. Don’t go. The day. When the wolves were at the door baying and you barked at them and you were scared. The bugs were crawling down your shirt and you ran to the shack and you said . . . you said you were not afraid. It was a lie. You were. And — follow me here, goddammit — fear is a manifestation of being alive. Deny this.
I deny this.
I was not afraid of wolves. I saw someone, a blur of someone. A man watching?
A bad man . . .
A good man, I’m sure. It was Willem . . .
. . . waving.
Quickly, I pull my clothes off. Jake looks intently at me, concentrating to keep the frayed edges of his vision clean. I take the dress and pull it on over my head. The fusty stink of it catches in my throat. It is silk, I think, the slip beneath the sequin outer shell is, and clings like water, like what Jake said, a cold cat.
I’m wearing it, I say. Touch me.
He says, I’m old, I don’t know. And so I take his hand with its strange curving fingers and I run it down my body and, when I am done and I let it go, it drops down by his side, swinging slightly. I take it again, I hold his fingers slightly apart and I run it down me again. I have not felt a mouse’s stir of sexuality in the months since the baby was born. I have been a mere conduit for food to his greedy, selfish mouth. Jake stands there like a mannequin. That is fine. I don’t care for old men. I like the feel of the gown, I like the feel of another warm body touching me. And I have a good imagination. I begin to have stirrings in my body I had forgotten about. I take his index finger and I draw a line over my breast and down into the double-u of my sex. His hand, I turn it around and use it to hold myself. I am just becoming thoroughly wet, the wet is surging through my body, the wet is accumulating and driving more wet forward.
Jake. I am gasping. I knew you would be useful to me. Then I hear it.
I hear another gasp, an almost inaudible sigh and something sliding along the wall of the shack. It is not me. It is not Jake. Jake stands stock-still and I stop and drop his hand. The cloth of the dress is stuck briefly in my cleft. I rush to the window and I see him. It is him. I see him running, stooped like a robber, running back into the forest. Jake points and shakes his head. I hate him. I hate him. I would like to kill him.
Who is he? Jake asks. Is it a man? Who is he?
I almost tell. I catch myself in time. You are old, I say. And your eyes have become rather dim. You don’t know. I’ll tell you what I see. I see a scrawny bear lumbering off to the forest. It is a bear that has scented us, a bear that has become used to the salt of human food.
No, it’s too thin to be a bear.
Yes. I say it, I yell. I say it and it is true. It won’t be long, I say. The baby has awoken and is gurgling in a way I know will escalate to air sucking and then wailing if I do not soon pick him up.
Jake.
I am here.
Thank you. I am glad you are here. Will you change the baby’s diaper for me?
He unswaddles the boy and I see it. A bruise from his fall has formed along his buttocks and upper leg. Jake brings his face in close to inspect it, draws his finger along it. We share an unspoken remorse, Jake and I.
I name the baby Adam, which even I must admit is obvious, but I can’t help it. Earth. I am finding it easier to think of the baby in this light, as if he sprang up like the lettuces that are doing just that in the garden. I joke with Jake that his early crop has an oily, trodden-on, indoor-outdoor aftertaste. These jokes take the form of an interior monologue, since Jake is gone. As soon as the garden was in, he got restless and left. I realize how much he looks after Adam, now that he’s disappeared again. I’m resigned to accomplishing nothing at all.
I am nursing, changing, rocking, carting. Adam grows fat. And the weaving moves along by sheer force of will. Consequently, the weeds in the garden are taller than the seedlings. I’m afraid of the garden. It’s too close to the forest, which has an ominous presence of late. The foliage on the trees has suddenly opened and the small ground cover plants are filling in the negative space. It is an impenetrable black wall of unplaceable, horrifying rustlings and perceived, or perhaps real, eyes watching my every move. I no longer hear the wolves, but something awaits me, at least, at most, in my mind’s eye. I am anxious. The weaving calms me. This square has a spindle whorl hanging by a thread that runs around the panel like an unravelled clew. It has a chaos to it that projects my anxiety. For added security, I have locked the cabin door from the inside.
Burchard’s reprieve was short-lived. His throat closed almost mortally, his skin ran cold and hot without abatement as the fever raged and fell away. He made his house servants bear him to the hut on a litter. So weak was he that he could not walk, could barely speak.
You are my undoing, he murmured.
She did not look up from her work. She would have seen his limp form, half hanging from the bed, itself a sweat-wicked stench of sick and damp linen, his hand entreating her to stop. The skin was deathly pale, his dark essence visible beneath it. But she did not look up; she opened the warp threads and shot the bobbin through and tamp, tamp. The story of his death unfolded, slowly, certainly.
Take her, he commanded. His words were hardly audible through his wheezing. Take her and drown her.
The stones that Burchard’s housemen tied to her ankles were of a goodly size, small boulders, unearthed for the purpose. The woodlice scuttled out and dropped down and hid as the stones were fitted to her. She looked like a great spindle of thread still tied to its spindle-whorl as they hurled her off a small bridge, where the Mormal stream ran lustily in a bulge through the forest at a spot where it was impossible to cross otherwise. She was left for dead.
All Burchard’s servants denied rigging the knots in such a way that they might unravel as if by magic and allow the prey to escape unscathed from the fate assigned her. No man would admit to this. Indeed the men vowed that they had each personally inspected the other men’s handiwork. One of the men was a noted net-maker to the count, hired annually for the river trout season, and was apparently beyond reproach. Nevertheless the bonds had untied; the girl surfaced only metres from where she first sank.
Scaling the muddy bank proved a treacherous ordeal, and by the end of her escape, not an orifice was uncaked with soil; she found clay in her ears days later. Renelde pushed as much water out of her dress as she could, sliding her palms down her figure. She wrung out the hem and then walked home. No one saw any of this. She told the story to her grandmother and it went out and spread about as stories will. Renelde sat down, once she had bathed and changed her clothing, and went at the shroud now with fervency and determination; her very life depended upon its speedy completion. The ordeal had a positive turn — the clay had refreshed her complexion and she looked more beautiful, more pure than ever.
It was the countess who finally put an end to it, who managed to extract from Burchard enough of the events and who sought on his behalf to stop the shroud manufacture. Once again, she beseeched Renelde in the name of Renelde’s dead mother, in the name of God — the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, all three — swearing that she would use all the power at her disposal to convince Burchard to allow the betrothal to be sanctified by marriage.
In the inside pocket of my backpack, I have discovered the broken compass given to me by that itinerant Brit a lifetime ago. It is stuck at north. I use my Swiss Army knife to pry it open and find the problem. The pointer has become mired in grime around its pivot. Cleaned, the thing works perfectly. Now I know where I am, relative to where I used to be. This is helpful in a limited sort of way but I proceed along the ill-advised thought: better than nothing.
I’ve been going into the bush with it on little inconsequential journeys as a way to acclimatize myself to my creeping fear. I know something or someone is watching me. I know it profoundly and as surely as I know that all this could just as easily be paranoia. My aim is to get myself far enough that there’ll be no turning back, and then I’ll be obliged to find the mine shaft of which Jake has spoken. I’ll be able to deduce from whatever I might find there who calls it home. I want to believe against all reason it’s Willem. There may be a sign.
Adam has begun to sleep through most nights and I begin to feel myself again, or more precisely, I begin to feel a reasonable facsimile of myself returning. I know I will never be the same, and this knowledge bends two ways. On the one hand I lament the passage of time, the loss of the bower of childhood I may never have properly experienced. On the other hand, I have come to witness a strength in myself I did not previously recognize, the strength that comes from accepting that all one can reasonably expect from life is a series of fragmented episodes, the ephemera of experience. When I’m finished the story cloth, I intend to sew it together, not into a fabric book, which would make some sense, but into a quilt, a running tableau, a tragicomic. When I hold the cloth up to the window, I can see right through it.
It has been many days since Jake left and I have truly begun to fear for him. I make up stories about what has become of him. I imagine I hear muffled screams dying on the breeze, imagine his little shrivelled body half buried under leaves and the aimless, lazy attempts of the murderer to hide him. Who would look for him? A final, perfect disappearance. All this indicates that I have grown attached to Jake. I have begun to recall — relive, I might say if I were sentimental — moments of our time together as if they are snapshots or little, lovingly edited film shorts. I see him swimming again. I watch his wrinkled body transform under the toxic dead liquid of the mine pit into that of a smooth brown prince. If I weren’t so starved for company and sex, so impatient with waiting for the impossible, so newly rejuvenated with sleep, so reborn into my own body, I would say I was in love with Jake. This is absurd, of course, but how easy it is to be attracted to a man you imagine to be dead. It requires almost no skill whatever.
I’ve been walking deeper into the underbrush, day by day, letting myself get utterly lost in the infinity of root and shrub and tree. I walk away from civilization, away from the static array of planted forests behind me and into the tangle of old growth, however meagre and spindly it is this far north. I sink at times into little swamps and come across the scat and nests of forest creatures. I hear them run for their lives. I sense their fear and am in turn afraid. Am I, too, afraid of me? I am afraid of the smell of their fear. Yet I continue because I must find the thing I seek. I’ve been at it for more than a week, making furtive and ever longer forays into the dense bush. Adam is strapped onto me. He has become a settled baby. His eyes are wide open as if to drink in the very atmosphere. He smiles unexpectedly, for reasons beyond my capacity to understand. He likes the light play in the forest and makes pleasant noises. I wish Willem could see him, wish for there to be some identification. Adam looks around and is content.
I’ve had almost nothing to eat of late. A stew Jake made before he left has gone rancid, and I’ve been eating comfrey out of the garden. I go in and out quickly, more truly afraid of this garden than the bush; someone else is eating out of it, I’ve noticed. There are little cylindrical pipe holes where once grew carrots and the lettuce has been picked through. Someone has pinched the tiny suckers off the tomato plants. I take solace in the thought that Jake is sneaking back for food. But sneaking back from where?
Today as I meander through vines, pushing them aside without seeing them, I keep my eyes on the compass, which finds me heading further north. I imagine a new scenario. Jake is living in the mine shaft. He has disappeared again and this time from me. He has a quaint little set-up in the mine, complete with a kerosene lamp. I see him sitting calmly of an evening, pleased to have me out of his hair, away from my obvious manipulations. He thinks, How frightful that girl was, how difficult. He sighs in a pleasant way that indicates how much more room he has in his head, his heart, his den, his underground alleyway, now that he is alone. Tears begin to stream down my cheeks. I can’t help it, I’m that lonely and desperate. And it is with this manifestation of my imagined grief so evident on my face that I literally trip over him. Jake is sitting reading a newspaper, a recent national newspaper. He is sitting in what looks like an old rotten dugout canoe and is much surprised to discover me so far from home.
Oh-ho, he says. Do you like my boat?
I had you dead, or run away, I say. I hold my hand above my eyes, ostensibly to block out the sun, really to hide my tears.
I paddled it by land. It is a land canoe.
Then I realize, as if reality can be simply plucked out of thin air, that I have come very close indeed. The mine shaft must be right here, and I begin, in a squint, to scan the area.
Paddled from where? I say. Where is the mine shaft, Jake? Where is it?
It is under surveillance, he says.
Really?
Right now, it’s empty.
He folds the paper nicely and tucks it into his jacket. As we speak, the mosquitoes hover about us. I have covered Adam and slathered myself in chemical protection. Jake has discovered the art of walking through them as if they are a parting sea. In this he is Biblical. He brings me to where I most wish to go, to the place of which I am most frightened. It is a small slanted square opening in the side of a hillock of earth, large enough for a single man, a small dragon, or a cart of precious or semi-precious metal. A rude door on corroded hinges covers the opening. There is a pole with a tattered black flag of cotton tied to it.
This belongs to me. It is my prospector’s flag.
Very official, I say. I miss Willem. A pang hits me. I want to enact the return of the honest woodcutter.
By yanking on a rope handle, Jake heaves the door open, and as I peer into the gape, I am aware only of darkness, of the shadow of the great earth upon itself. I can smell something frightful and I back away out of instinct.
Go in, go in, Jake says. He hands me a flashlight and his long gutting knife by way of reassurance and I take these. The knife I tuck into the back of my jeans. The flashlight I point into the hole.
That smell, I say.
I’ve hung garlic. Just in case.
Garlic?
It’s crazy but just the same. The voice of my dead mother is persistent on this point.
You hear voices?
Go. Jake pats my back supportively.
He hears his dead mother. Can we never rid ourselves? Jake pulls the harness from my shoulders and takes the baby off me. Adam’s eyes are sudden pools of meaning. He knows everything. I wish I could recognize him. Wish I knew what bits and pieces formed him. Wish by that knowledge I could feel he was rightfully mine and not something forced recklessly upon me. I go in, swinging the light back and forth in an attempt at understanding. I’m on my hands and knees, for god’s sake. Water leaks along the walls and I see no sign of life, nor copper. Nothing. It is only a tunnel into the bottom of the earth, housing nothing and nobody. Willem is imagined, Jake is imagined, my whole life is nothing but a fabrication. The smell of garlic, the smell of metal and earth and lingering sweat, or am I imagining this too? How long will the reek of man hang in the air once industry is abandoned? And then I spot it. I am probably two hundred metres into this rabbit hole. I sense the hole closing, and indeed when I look behind me I know I have turned an ungodly corner, for there is no longer any light of day. I hear nothing now but the motion of blood thickening inside my ear. I am as if buried. Carelessly, lazily, by some uncounted murderer. I have fully projected. I reach for the object of my desire. It is a book. The cover is off, lost to time, the pages are damp and illegible. Water and insects have eaten away its meaning.
Who’s here? I whisper.
There is a scratching that, even as I hear it, seems a pretence of fear. I begin to back out, unable to find the space to turn around. Deep in the earth, I think I hear a collapse. The tunnels are falling in. It sounds like a monstrous yawn. The earth is bored. There is no light. Jake has thrown the door over the opening. I try to kick it open but this is useless. Behind me, I hear Adam gasping for air in between wails of abandonment. Jake is laughing. He jumps up and down a few times on the door, laughing, crazy laughing. He is beside himself. Then, the door opens and a shaft of light shimmers against little particles of quartz I had not previously noticed, embedded in the wall of the tunnel.
You are born, he says.
Why the fuck did you do that?
A breech birth, he says. Ass first.
Fuck. Really.
But didn’t you see it? he says. The old book?
I saw nothing with my eyes that see, I say.
And do you know what was written in it?
Nothing. Nothing written in nothing.
Oh yes, something. You had to flip through and read it carefully. We are being watched. Everything is being noted.
Jake, you’re blind. The tunnel is empty, nada.
Don’t believe. Let Jake believe it for you.
He hands me back the boy, whose wails have thinned to exhausted whimpers, whose eyes are dropping shut. He hands me Adam, and he smiles at me. I have company again. I think about the book as we walk back to the shack. I think about not thinking about the book. I am afraid of what is written there, for it can spell only disaster. I have it tucked into my pants, can feel the edge of the pages rubbing at the upper line of my pubic hair. If I destroy this artifact, will it still be real?
May 31. Watching her prance off into the bush was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Her ass swayed like a glossy-coated mare’s, back and forth. I thought I was going to explode. I thought my hard-on was going to rip my pants open. Just her perfect, round cheeks shifting back and forth and me knowing my seed was therein. I’ve loved her for a long time. I didn’t recognize it as love at first that’s how hopelessly out of touch I am with myself. I thought I was sick and I actually had physical signs, intestinal cramps which I thought might be giardia. Beaver fever all right. I let my eyes travel up her body from her lovely snatch, the line is sublime. It’s like a fantastic vertical landscape. I would plant my trees all over her.