My spinning had not gone well; the plants I collected were immature, the cellulose fibres were short. The product seemed to card up decently, but the spinning was disastrous. The threads were weak, lacking integrity. I couldn’t make a thin thread without it breaking and I didn’t want a thick thread. I began over again, harvesting what seemed this time to be large enough nettle stalks for my purpose. The plants were about a metre high and the reaping of them was arduous. I kept a knife with me and reaped while waiting for Willem to catch up; the crew was on a four-and-one cycle and so, for me, it was four days of planting, one of reaping. I harvested along the logging road to and from camp, pulling nettle wherever I saw it. I couldn’t hide the project anymore. Everyone knew what I was up to; everyone was too profoundly exhausted to care.
I kept my shirtsleeves down to avoid contact with the barbs. I still had shadowy white webbed scars up my arms and over the soft tissue of my belly and chest. One small patch refused to heal over so I bandaged it, salving it with calendula ointment that Clara lent me. I took comfort in the fact that the pus was clear. Each day after planting I gathered a small bale of fresh nettle and placed it under a seat in the crummy. My pail was too small, so I borrowed a few industrial-sized plastic buckets from the cook tent.
You look tired, I said to Marilene. Her chest was shrunken under her apron; her eyes were wide raccoon eyes, rimmed with sleeplessness.
It’s the bear. I can’t sleep.
Actually it’s not the bear exactly. It’s Osho’s fear of the bear. He’s tossing and turning. He’s paranoid the bear is after me, that it’ll get between us.
An irrational fear of death, I said.
He sweats all night; he can’t meditate. She put her hands up and touched her fingers to her thumbs in feigned supplication, little zeros held up to the gods.
Ah, I said, an irrational fear of inner harmony.
Marilene smiled.
It was around that time that out of boredom I began to tell Willem more about the Nettle Spinner. I give him only enough to whet his appetite, keeping my resolve to dispense the story in pieces and so save the whole for myself. I described to him the little cottage of my dreams in French Flanders, the blue gingham curtains fluttering, a warm spring breeze enticing me to push open the tiny leaded windows and air out the place. I told him about the chinking needed to seal the north wall from the insipid humidity of winter in Europe. I was convincing.
I have an extra wood stove. You can have it, he said.
Thank you. The house is near La Quesnoy.
Nice, he said. Why not give me the telephone number?
No, I don’t have a telephone. In fact, I’ve never actually been there.
But the curtains? he said.
It’s just a story.
Willem pushed me and I tripped over a tray of container stock trees, barely caught myself from falling by grabbing onto his arm. I shoved him by way of repayment and we tussled for a bit, laughing.
Crazy-girl.
Hey!
He planted faster now but still refused to lower his personal standards. I outplanted him by double. He yelled at me when he came across a leaner, a tree ineptly planted at more than five degrees off a right angle to the earth.
Murderer. Tree hater, he yelled. You should replant.
I looked at his neck, the solid trunk of it, the sinew of muscle; it was a logger’s neck. Joe and Ed had them too. I said, I don’t cut them down, at least. You’re the logger.
He shot me a mock sneer. You kill the babies instead, he said. Are you going to pay for that cottage with this killing of baby trees?
Absolutely. I’m gonna pay for it however I have to.
Not so nice, he said. Not so good for the trees. He pulled his tobacco out, rolled up a cigarette and stood there for a time drawing in clouds of smoke and looking down at my work. Then, he flicked the butt away and leaned over, grabbed the leader of the culprit spruce. He pressed his foot into the earth by the side of it, trying to urge the soil to hold the tree up. Joe and Ed flitted by in their duct-taped Y-fronts, skin shining with greasy insect repellent and the baby oil they slathered on each other to trap unsuspecting blackflies.
H’lo there, they said in unison.
Why don’t they wear any clothes? Willem glared at them.
They want attention, I explain. Isn’t that right, boys? You crave attention?
No, Alma. Joe tucked his hand into his underwear waistband, sang, Oo-Oo-Oo.
Actually, we wanted to get a tan. Ed was pulling his underwear down in the back to show his tan line.
Just one between you? I asked.
Very funny, Alma.
Ha ha.
Alma?
Oh, Alma? Don’t you think we’re well-endowed?
They opened their arms and stood to face me, buttocks pushed forward to accentuate bulges barely concealed beneath the thin polycotton underwear made in some inconsequential country where small people heaved around massive bolts of gleaming white fabric and snipped and sewed the long day for a pittance so that these two morons could prance about in it, shoving their genitals more or less in my face to get a reaction. So unfair. I stared. I stared and stared and stared.
Alma?
I’m not done, I said. I stared on, a grin breaking victoriously along my lips. I was curious to see if they’d get embarrassed and turn away, become fed up with the loss of time, time during which they could be earning a decent wage, or whether the attention would affect their manhood, whether a pair of simultaneously erecting members would entertain its audience. I was not disappointed. Joe and Ed rose as one. Willem turned away and started digging about in the dirt. I clapped my hands together.
Wonderful! Wonderful performance!
Thank you.
Thank you.
They bowed, as best they could under the circumstances, then smirked a bit and curtseyed. Off they went. I could hear Osho’s voice on the wind, fuck you, fuck you, as Joe and Ed started a low rendition of a Pink Floyd song they had been practising all week; they had managed to sing it as a round — a really astonishing accomplishment. They were moving away into the distance, their erections, I supposed, slowly dying in their underpants as the song rose in volume toward its inevitable climax, Osho’s fuck-you a static metronome pulsing in the background.
I am embarrassed of man, Willem muttered, shaking his head. It is terrible to be a man. He squatted, huddled around a little sapling, placing handfuls of black soil in clumps around its base, soil he had gathered from under a severed root.
Ach, it’s just a joke, I said.
Not funny, he said.
I didn’t mean it badly. Besides, they don’t mind. They like it.
That is even more worse. Willem patted the black soil around the miniature tree trunk.
I’m sorry, I said. And I did feel sorry for my behaviour now that it was too late to do anything about it.
No sorry, he said, looking up at me. It isn’t your fault.
I said, It isn’t theirs either. They can’t help it.
You must hate them to treat them like this.
No, I love men. I do, I love them to pieces.
Ortwin came wandering though the corridors, climbing over the slash heaps using his shovel as a walking stick, pushing burdock aside with it. He was checking quality, trying to maintain a level of camaraderie with the crew. He had sensed creeping demoralization in the air. The bear had snubbed the delicate reek of dead meat in the cage for the warm scent of the cook’s tent. It’d been witnessed waddling away from the cook-shack on its hind legs, like some live animation, clutching a garbage can in its paws. We were advised to keep in groups or pairs at all times on the campsite; the forester came by and read a couple of bear mauling anecdotes to us. Ortwin had his own story about bears — a hungry west coast grizzly that had treed him and a tree runner. The brown bear had sat at the foot of the tree waiting for them to fall like ripened cherries. The tree runner never lived to tell the tale. These anecdotes were gruesome reminders of the food chain and where exactly we fit in. Ortwin dug up a couple of trees to check the roots. He walked the spacing. He tested the tightness of a few trees; everything was okay.
What’s up with the bear? I said.
They’re going to shoot him.
I thought about how the bear would look as it lay dying and dead, thought back a few summers when I had watched some hunters up from Pennsylvania moving in slow dance-like patterns around a bear carcass they had strung by the hind legs in a tree outside their lodge. They had cut the animal down the belly and removed its entrails.
That was a male, one of the hunters said, his accent memorable for its whiny shrillness and its nasal pronunciation.
I’m keeping his dingle as a trophy, he added, smiling, holding up the small glistening pink shaft. He was a happy infant with a new, as yet unexplored toy.
You’re going to stuff it?
I ain’t gonna stuff it. Can’t. I’ll just let it shrivel up. Atrophy, if you’ll excuse the pun, little lady.
His buddies laughed and raised their beer bottles in salute to the bear.
Fine bear, they said.
Goddamn fine animal, they said, shaking their heads and tilting back their beer.
Defence strategies against angry bears included making yourself large by jumping around maniacally and yelling; bears have bad eyesight and are generally timid. After you had made yourself enormous, screamed like a banshee, thrown whatever large, hard object you may have at hand, then you were meant to play dead. This inevitably confused the bear into thinking you were dead. This last bit worried me. First of all, bears were known to store away fresh dead things for future use. Like humans, they preferred the taste of slightly fermented flesh. They’d be doubly pleased by a sudden, if inexplicable, demise. Second, why would a bear be convinced of your death if you had, just moments before, been tossing clumps of earth and sticks in her direction? Third, it made you an easy target. But for all that, I would follow the strategy, not because I thought it sane, but because I knew in situations of intense fear, my natural instinct was to acquiesce, to freeze. Black bears almost never attacked humans. This was a comfort.
Why kill the bear? I said to Ortwin. He only wants to eat.
He’s already habituated to our camp garbage. He will get braver.
Yeah, I said. Like a bear goes into a bar joke. He comes into the dining tent and sits down at one of the tables, and using human utensils, he eats, politely and without spilling, an entire human meal in the correct order, beginning with an aperitif and ending with a cognac and a moderate portion of fine dark chocolate. Afterwards, if the mood strikes, he will cut the snub end off a Havana cigar and smoke the entire stogie down without inhaling, before retiring to bed. My Fair Bear.
Ortwin laughed. He had taken a bundle of my trees and was firing them into the ground. With no apparent struggle, showing a delicate respect for the tools and the job, he moved silently, shovel-screefing the turf and duff away and slipping the trees into the ground. His arms were bare and brown, the muscles undulating naturally beneath the skin; his eyes were glinting with amusement and focus as twenty-five trees slid into new homes. In fifty years, these saplings would be a crop to be harvested, tree on tree in perfect array, soldiers waiting to be hewn down for the greater good of what? See, though, the arms, the rippling muscles. I kept my attention there, even as I felt the miserable, futile beauty of the scene overwhelm me.
Who will kill the bear?
The only guy’ll do it’s an Indian from way over in Powassan. Otherwise the season didn’t start yet, no permits. Indian’s gotta be able to see the bear’s eyes before he’ll shoot.
Willem said, We should move our camp.
It wouldn’t make any difference, Ortwin said. Then he said something in Dutch to Willem that made Willem click his tongue in disapproval. That moment, Paul burst through a scraggy patch of undergrowth, his face shining with dirt, insect repellent and sweat, the look of a psychotic in his eyes.
I can’t see my tape, he whispered. Where is it? I’m lost, lost.
Calm down, Paul. I’ll get you back on track. Ortwin held him by the shoulder. I wanted to cry from looking at his forearm, the ripple of motion along it.
Calm down? Paul said. Calm down? His ruddy beard stubble stuck out like a half-inch lawn perpendicular to the topography of his face. He was mud-splattered, his pupils so dilated it was impossible to distinguish the colour of his eyes.
We waited for him that night, not so patiently, in the crummies. The windows were slightly open. Karl drew his thumb over single, unlucky blackflies as they tossed themselves on the windows, trying to get out, smearing them into small streaks of who knows whose blood. It was Clara who found Paul and pulled him out of the muck. His corpulent body had fallen through a sinking pool of swamp mud, and the struggle to get free had mired him up to the waist in cold earth. He had spent hours trying, to no avail, to grasp whatever weeds and small trees might provide some anchor, some leverage, but his dwindling weight was still too much to be pulled out that way. He was frantic by the time she hauled him out.
For hours, I just stayed very still, he said. Tried to remain calm. It was Clara saved me, really. I’d a been a goner, I s’pose. I’ve got Clara to thank.
He drank down the dregs of everyone’s canteens, said he was dead thirsty, hadn’t had a spot to drink, no water at all, and in that hot sun. The mud had already dried in blotches here and there on his trousers; the wet pants clung to his chubby legs. He glanced affectionately at Clara, patted her discreetly on the head as one might a small child.
Don’t mention it, she said, with a certain pride. She straightened her workshirt, fiddled with the buttons, undoing the top one and then, apparently on second thought, doing it up again. She looked up to see me watching her and flushed pink. Paul was watching too.
Felt like bloody Tantalus, he said. Up to me arse in muck, not a drop in sight.
Stanley came up from Powassen and waited in camp for the animal to show. The bear complied in this way only, for in all other ways he refused to cooperate in his own death. He wouldn’t turn to face his maker. Several times Stanley had the rifle cocked and ready, sights lined up, but the bear shifted his face away and turned, waggling his ass, some wicked bear joke. Once he curled his behind, arched his back and, wild berries and human food mixed in a messy cascade, evacuated his entire colon. Stanley lowered his sights.
Goddamn smart bear, he said. I don’t like to kill him. He won’t face me. I doubt if it’s going to work out for us, me and him.
The weather was baking hot. Out in the field, the plots ranged from swamp to dry clay beds, the soil either so wet you got a soaker before you began the day, or so dry the dust puffed up and choked you. The earth, as you opened it, cracked like an unfired clay pot. How anything was supposed to grow in this was beyond the understanding of mortal man, but the foresters were experts, eh? The foresters and the pulp mill owners who were obliged to replant the harvested tracts.
Keep planting. It’s on the map we got, they said.
I just did what I was told, cog in the wheel. Willem moaned about it — not the work, the drudgery, the pain of the weather, the bugs and the blisters that had formed even on his logger’s calluses but the simple plight of little trees as they dried up and died behind us.
This is so stupid, he said.
We kept finding Clara and Paul together in our corridors, lost. They had joined ranks, Paul because he felt indebted and figured he couldn’t beat it, so why not join it, and Clara because she liked to feel needed and be indebted to and because she liked the feeling of feeling sorry for someone. Love? She’d taken to wearing her day-off shirt — a crisp, pale purple cotton blouse with ruffles down the front. She was out of place and marvellous as she flounced about putting trees in randomly wherever she sensed they were needed.
Hi guys, how are you doing? she said as she planted up to us.
Paul sighed, We’re in your corridor, then, aren’t we? Come on, Clara. And as they turned around and walked back to try to find their own area, he muttered, Hey, Alma. How many trees so far? And when I answered, he said, I can’t bloody believe it. You must be stashing.
There were many forms of stashing. There was the unavoidable angst-stash in which the planter, out of sheer frustration at the endless horror of the job, hurled a tree or two into a thicket by way of relief. There was the stash in which the planter calculatingly opened a gash in the closest quagmire, usually by the roadside where the earth was pretty churned up by all-terrain vehicles bringing trees into the site, and jabbed several bundles into this opening. This sealed straightaway, earthly lips shutting forever. There was the stash in which the crew boss quietly beckoned a planter or two to stay in camp for a per diem bribe and set them the task of physically macerating bagloads of saplings, had them stuff the debris into green garbage bags, load these onto a crew truck and toss them into a pit at the local dump. There was the subtle unspoken stash in which the boss left the planter in an isolated landscape with a certain number of trees, too many for the site, gave the planter a knowing wink and said, in passing, that he wasn’t planning on bringing any trees back out. There was the stash in which at the end of a contract an uncalculated number of leftover trees had become slimy with fungus. These were unceremoniously dumped in a backwoods hole. The waste factor at work. Of course it was all illegal. Of course everyone was guilty — guilty at least with the peripheral knowledge that this was done.
Stashing? I said. What do you know about stashing?
Poor little trees. Paul looked forlorn. I noticed the hair on his face had lost its natural lustre. It looked dead.
One way or another, I said, it’s seven cents, isn’t it?
I like to think of it as a quarter-ounce bend, he said.
You do look fine, Paul. Wait until your wife sees you.
She’s filing for divorce, actually. No worries. I’ll manage.
He looked over at Clara and smiled. She smiled in return.
So much for secrets.
Ah, well.
I set the mass of dry nettle stalk to ret and within days the rotting enzyme began its work. I laid it in a semicircle on the grass outside my tent to dry. That went pretty fast, the weather was so bloody hot. I had my scutched, carded product in no time and began to spin again, this time long, increasingly perfect coils of thread. It had nubble and snubs of bark and would never be considered a fine yarn, but I didn’t care. I was that close to success.