The teacher’s crawled to the sofa and fallen fast asleep. She’s hugging herself. Try as I might, I can’t help but pause between pages and stare. “You-two,” says the time-bird. I shift my gaze as the teacher wakens. “You-two, you-two, you-two.”
“Mmmm.” She sits up, opening her arms in a stretch. I grab the next drawing, snip hastily down the first of its lines.
I was still hitting myself, the blows more inevitable than deliberate. The teacher consulted her books, then dug in her closet and produced a round of pale bristles on a long wooden arm. Keeping her distance, she reached out to brush my elbows, my forearms, the backs of my rigid hands.
I sang to her strokes. I couldn’t help it—my blood thronged to the surface like minnows to the water’s skin. There had been no retribution, no mention even of ruined clothes. When she stopped, I laid my hand on her shadow, a dark bust on the table’s face. Her hair slipped forward. Burnished by the lamp, it curtained her eyes. It wouldn’t kill me. It was dead, after all. Rooted in her, true. A conductor, no doubt, but nothing like living flesh.
My fingers climbed. Closed. I held a hank of it in my trembling fist. The teacher didn’t breathe. Her hair crackled, and I let go. Felt the lack of it unfold in my hand.
Carl can’t get over the idea of it—Mary and her father stuck out here all on their own, with nobody but each other, year after year. Until the father passed on, that is. After that, Mary would’ve had nobody but herself.
“Mary,” he asks, before he has time to think better of it, “how old were you when your father died?”
“Eighteen. I came home with a bucket of cloudberries and found him curled up around a bottle on the floor.”
“I’m sorry.” The words seem feeble, inadequate to the sorrow in her voice. “Where was he—I mean, did you—?”
“Bury him? Sure.”
“Where?”
After a moment it dawns on him what her silence means.
“Out there?”
“What do you think I did, call in a doctor to tell me he was dead? Or a preacher maybe, or maybe the Mounties? Of course he’s out there. Probably all in one piece, too, still got that look on his face.”
“What did you tell people?”
“What people? Nobody ever visited him. A few of them noticed he was gone once I showed up in town, but even then all I said was that he’d disappeared. The Mounties asked me a couple of questions when they got wind of it, but you couldn’t help feeling it was just for the books.”
“Surely they looked for him?”
“You got any idea how many ways an old drunk can die in the woods? How fast a body gets picked clean and scattered?”
“Scattered?”
“That’s what I said.” Her voice is suddenly at mattress level.
“What are you—” He’s silenced by a dragging sound from beneath the bed.
“Hold out your hands. Both of them.”
She lays something across his palms like a sceptre. His hands seek each other instinctively, walking inward along its gently arching shaft. They meet, then separate in search of its ends, the left tracing a gradual thickening to twin porous knobs, the right stumbling over a skewed and bumpy spool, an abrupt narrowing, and finally a ball like the bed knob on the four-poster he slept in as a child.
“Human?” he asks softly, his spine thrilling.
“I told you people have died out here. Know where it fits?”
Without a word he rotates the femur, laying it carefully atop his own.
“Bingo. Must’ve been a tall bugger. It sticks out a good inch past your knee.”
He gropes for the distal end.
“Seems skinny, too,” she adds, “even for a bone. Feel here.” She guides his fingers to a series of indentations around the centre of the shaft. “Teeth marks. God knows how far it was carried—it was the only piece Castor found.”
Carl worries the deepest pit with his thumb. “He found it?”
“Uh-huh.” She pulls the long bone gently from his grasp, shoving it away beneath him, slapping the dust from her hands. “A few weeks after I was born.”
The teacher was seated at the table, staring dry-eyed and desperate at the photograph you’d left behind. She possessed no couple shots, had to content herself with a portrait of you alone.
I gleaned certain drawings from my pile, crept up beside her and laid them out. Bits and pieces of you, Preacher—the pipe of an organ with a fleshy pink head, a slippery, sickle-shaped scar. She knew them in her fingers, if not in her eyes. It troubled her. Gazing deep into my wax mystery, she struggled to place your parts.
The morning paper lay unread atop the stack in the front hall—three weeks of news delivered and ignored. I fetched it. Dropped it banner-side up in her lap.
“What’s this, Clare?”
Mother Nature Protests, said the headline, and beneath it a photo, curling birchbark nailed to a pole. There was writing on the silvery scroll, only the heading bold enough to be read. Mercy.
Skimming the article, she shrank down in her chair. You and your precious camp. Apparently the town’s mayor was behind you one hundred percent. She was a real powerhouse, the reporter felt bound to note, athletic, with striking green eyes.
The teacher let out a small, sick breath. Let the newspaper slip to the floor, drew her knees up and hugged them, hard.
Mary had always known she’d have to return to Mercy sooner or later. In the last years before his death Castor had taught her the layout of the downtown, the basics of begging for money or a meal. “Don’t let ’em look down their noses,” he’d told her, “and don’t you never shrink down in their sight.”
Still, once he was dead and buried, she held out for as long as humanly possible, surviving on half-rations for over a month, exhausting even the emergency supplies.
When the day finally came, she took the same route she had as a girl. Only this time, instead of crawling into a hedge, she made her way straight to the southbound road. Faces came to windows, a few even ventured out front doors. By the time she reached the first shops, they were coming out of the cracks in the walls, lining up along Fourth Avenue as though she were some kind of one-woman parade.
It helped a little that she’d grown up hearing their darkest secrets. She had yet to put faces to names, but once she did, she’d know who among them had preyed upon friends and family, and who preferred to take things out on themselves.
A handful of them had been good to Castor, and those were the ones she went looking for, though not with handouts in mind. A few odd jobs a month were all she needed to get by—cleaning out coops, digging weeds, washing storefronts, shovelling snow. Scrubbing the church steps turned out to be the best—just get one of them to go for it and the rest had to follow to save face. She’d be down on her knees in front of St. Andrew’s Anglican and old Mrs. Stitchen from St. Mary’s would come waddling by. “You come and see us when you’re done with this place.” Then one of the Uniteds would spot her over at St. Mary’s. By the end of the day she’d have one hell of a backache and a month’s worth of kerosene and flour.
The butcher turned out to be the kindest of the lot. That initial bewildering day, his shop was the first one she braved.
“Are you Castor’s girl?” he asked, and when she nodded, he knew better than to ask any more. There was no sign of a woman about the place, but the ring on his finger made Mary remember something Castor had seen.
“There’s Tommy Rose,” he’d muttered over a bottle one night. “Poor bugger. Big as he is, still keepin’ to his side of the bed.”
The butcher wrapped up four soup bones with more meat on them than Mary had seen in a week, and refused to hear of her working it off. “It’ll only go to the dogs,” he told her. “I’ve got more bones than I know what to do with. You take a few off my hands whenever you’re in town.”
Every page is divided now, the floor a sea of colour, the teacher and I adrift. Squatting, I clear an island of rug, tip forward and select the initial shape. The teacher watches, her heart in her mouth. After a moment I stand, pick my way through the paper like a long-legged bird, stoop and choose the second fragment—its top a half-diamond, its bottom a scalloping skirt. I rotate it slowly in my hands, return to centre, lay it flat where it fits precisely along the first.
The teacher gasps.
“You got any pets, Reverend?” Mary asks.
“Me? No.”
“How come?”
He shrugs. “I got my fill of animals growing up on a farm. If you’re not feeding them, you’re cleaning up their mess.”
“Junior’s cleaner than me.”
“I’m sure she is.”
“Cleaner than you too, smartass. They’re great preeners, they do themselves all over every day. Mates preen each other, too. It’s something to see, two big owls nibbling each other all over, sighing and grunting the whole time. Poor little Junior’s stuck with me.”
Carl frowns. “I beg your pardon?”
“You have to catch her in the right mood. It’s best when she’s kind of dopey, got her eyes half closed, face feathers pulled back. Then all you have to do is lower your head and nudge it at her beak.”
“And she—preens you?”
“Yeah, she kind of nibbles along your scalp and tugs on the hair. Not so it hurts—well, except for the odd yank. Hey, we should see if she’ll do you.”
“Me?” He shakes his head. “No thanks.”
“Come on, Reverend, you’ll like it. It feels good.”
“I’ll take your word on it.”
“They mate for life, you know.” Her voice startles him, suddenly close.
“Oh?”
“Uh-huh. It’s quite the courtship. Mid-winter the male spots the female he wants, and what’s the first thing he does? Brings her a gift. A vole maybe. Dives into the snow for it, flies up with it hanging from his beak. He lands right in front of her and starts tilting his head side to side, showing it off. If she likes him, she makes herself little—starts bobbing her head, shifting on her claws, mewing at him—just like a chick. Then she tilts her head, too. Their faces are so flat it’s like two halves of a single head when they meet. Once she takes food from him, that’s it. That first offering makes the bond.”
Carl’s breath catches in his throat. He was standing at his office window the first time he laid eyes on Jenny. The rush was unprecedented, located for the first time ever in his chest rather than his groin. Banks of Morden Blush roses crowded the church doors. He tore his hand badly ripping several blooms free, his legs carrying him across the grounds to the bench where she sat waiting for her bus. She was twenty then, less than half his age. And yet she smiled at him, extended her delicate hand.
“He keeps it up, too,” Mary adds. “Feeds her all through winter, all the time she’s brooding. Once they’re hatched, he brings food for the babies too. That one out there now’s a hell of a hunter. You’ll see. He’ll be off at the crack of dawn.”
Lavinia’s bedclothes are downstairs in the washing machine now, twisted in a sodden ring. She lies spread-eagled on the naked duvet, having traded in the apricot glow for a white, knee-length number the catalogue called a spa wrap, though any idiot can see it’s just a bathrobe.
How long could she lie like this before somebody came to cover her up? A few days? A week?
Mama was always kicking her covers off, sedated or no. Lavinia learned to check on her three, even four times a night. No matter how cold it was, the quilt would be back on the floor. It took vigilance, being the one in charge. That and hard work and a lot of planning—things like making shopping lists during recess, stopping off at Conklin’s or Rose’s on her way home from school.
Rose’s Fine Meats. Lavinia can still picture the old hand-painted sign with its lacklustre, peeling rose.
Two nice pork chops, please.
She said it in her best grown-up voice, but Mr. Rose just stood there, looking past her with troubled eyes. She heard the bell jangle, turned in time to see a man in ragged clothing stumble through the door.
“Castor,” said the butcher.
“Tommy,” said the man.
Lavinia would have known who he was even if she hadn’t seen him arguing with Mama on that terrible night. She’d have known because he had Daddy’s hair. And Daddy’s cheekbones. And Daddy’s eyes.
“Tommy,” he said again, “I seen this girl through your window, and I come in here to pay my respects.”
“That’s fine, Castor.”
The man swayed a little on the spot. Lavinia could smell something like medicine coming off him in waves.
“Lavinia,” Mr. Rose said gently, “this man is your uncle.”
It had been two long, hard months, but Lavinia remembered well what she’d witnessed—Mama’s dark, screaming mouth, the man crying like a baby as she backed him away from their house.
“Lavinia?” Mr. Rose tried again. “Honey, I know it’s hard to lose somebody, but—”
She turned back to the counter. “Two nice pork chops,” she said again. “You can put it on my mother’s account.” The butcher’s face fell. Behind her she heard a sad shuffling, followed by the brassy tinkle of the door.
Lavinia feels a tear snake down her temple. He was a good man, that butcher. Far too good to go the way he did.
He could get away with feeding the dogs when it was only now and then, but the town got wise to him once he started tossing scraps out every night. Something else they picked up on—in less than a year the pack of strays had doubled in size, and they were cockier, too. No more slinking through the shadows, now they came marching down Train Street bold as brass.
Angry letters appeared in the Mercy Herald. Complaints were lodged with the RCMP, with the town council, but none of it made him stop. Then people started buying their meat at the new supermarket out on the highway. It wasn’t long before the butcher pulled down the blinds, not much longer before he let the dogs in to clean the place out. He was getting on in years by then. People figured maybe his hip gave out, or else one of the big ones knocked him down.
Lavinia was part of the crowd when they carried him out. There was nothing to see, really, just a lump covered over with a sheet. It was the din that made it awful, the relentless baying that arose from inside the shop. She cringes, recalling how she added her voice to that of the mob. Of course they have to be killed! What are we going to do, wait until they take a child? She cheered along with the rest of them when the men shouldered their guns and went in.
Little pools well up in her ears. Can she really be crying for a pack of feral dogs, for the sad old man who invited them in? At least Mr. Rose went quickly. At least he didn’t deteriorate year by year, hanging on for decades, spoon-fed and slobbering at the Mercy Retirement Lodge.
Lavinia sits up suddenly, as though responding to an alarm. How long has it been since she visited? Not since Carl showed up. Maybe even a couple of weeks before that. What if they’re not treating her well? Oh God, what if she’s dying?
She leaps to her feet, scarcely noticing the heel. Dropping the robe, she shoves the closet door away on its rail. So what if Mama won’t know her—she can still sit beside the bed, still hold the poor woman’s hand. Besides, who better to visit on your birthday than the woman who gave you life?
Lavinia pokes her head through the neck of a sweatshirt and shoots a glance at the clock. A quarter to five. Not visiting hours, certainly, but just let them try and stop her. She’s the mayor, for Christ’s sake. That’s got to be good for something.
The Reverend is showing signs of recovery. The swelling around his eyes has gone down considerably, but it’s more than that—his colour is good, and there’s a gentleness about his mouth and jaw. Mary plays with the idea of trusting him, of telling him what she’s never breathed to a living soul.
She could start with how she knew about him and Lavinia, how she managed to witness their little excursion, the pair of them dogging their hired expert, plotting to take down the bog. Or she could go further back, to how she learned the bog’s history—its evolution flashing before her eyes, compressed like the life story of something about to die. No, she’d have to go further still. How could he begin to believe her—to understand what she was saying, even—without knowing how it all began?
It was spring, perhaps a month before she would turn twenty. One step the moss was solid and the next she was sinking, up to her waist in a hole. She should’ve hauled herself out immediately—she knew how fast the bog could suck a body down—but for some reason she held perfectly still, letting the water creep coldly up her legs.
Castor had spoken of the bog water often, telling her how it preserved things like pickles while it tanned them like hides. “That’s history down there, Mary. Whole moose and marten and lynx, animals we got no names for, ones we never even seen.”
She didn’t plan it, just cupped her hands and dipped them and drank. It was unlike any water she’d known, brown and gritty, with long slimy strings, and so acid it burned her tongue. In an instant her bearings were gone. A dark wave came crashing, forcing her to shut her eyes.
It was a simple vision, brief and still. The woman was curled on her side as though sleeping. She’d bloated up badly, turned all coppery from the tannin—her skin, her dress, her hair. Her eyes were closed, her mouth wedged open with peat. Even her teeth were red.
Mary had never owned a mirror, but she’d caught sight of herself in enough shop windows and little pools to know. She wasn’t frightened. It was a comfort to be shown where she would one day rest.
Dragging herself out of the sinkhole took every ounce of strength she had. She had to lie face down on the moss for ages before she could manage the short walk home. Stepping into the empty house, she felt a flood of sadness, followed by an eddying sense of relief. She was glad not to have to tell Castor. It would have grieved him to learn he’d passed the gift along.
The teacher can see now how the frames deceive, how an arm sprouts in one panel and grows under the black border to the next. Mere roads across country, these lines, the land carrying on beneath.
It’s impossible, she knows, for anyone to have done this, let alone a disturbed child of three. Each segment its own conception, drawn separately, yet somehow designed to be cut free and mated to make sense on all sides. Savant, she thinks. Human calculators, mnemonic miracles, a blind slave boy at the piano, separate songs in his cotton-flayed hands.
I lift up a finger and point. She understands me, touches several fragments until I signal by letting the gesture drop. She picks up the next piece, handling it carefully so as not to disturb its design.
When Mary approaches again to examine his eyes, Carl reaches up impulsively, instinctively—as an infant would. His fingers brush one of her breasts. She doesn’t lean into him, doesn’t pull away.
“You want to know why I made all those scrolls?” she says quietly.
He lets his hand drop. “Do I have a choice?”
“Have you thought about what it would look like, Reverend? What would actually happen if you were to tear out this bog?” He feels her settle beside him on the bed. “They’re felling the trees, nests and all, the eggs and fledglings smashed. The parents are circling and screaming overhead—”
“All right.” He folds his arms over his pounding heart. “I get the idea.”
“But the birds are just the beginning. All kinds of animals go down with the forest—least weasels, fishers, martens. Moose and black bear stampede for the borders, only to find nothing but farmland or road or town. Then come the stumpers, ripping up dens as they go. Cutters slash up the peat, and a million trails through the litter get sliced to ribbons, the lifelines of the voles and the mice, the shrews and the wood frogs and the hares. Of course, they don’t need those lifelines any more, because they fall under the cutter blades too, and get crushed or split nose to tail, and even the ones that somehow escape end up drowning when the bog water rises to fill the wounds. Next comes the giant vacuum, sucking up the centuries, all the old bodies—the birds and the beasts and, hell, a few people too. Not to mention the newly dead. Talk about your Apocalypse. Maybe not rivers of blood, but there’ll be plenty of it flowing all the same.”
He gives in to the picture, covering his face with his hands.
“Don’t touch, Reverend.”
“Could you please,” he says weakly, “please stop calling me that.”
“What, Reverend? Isn’t that what you are?”
“My name is Carl.”
“Okay.” She lays a hand on his heaving shoulder. “Carl.”