Labrador Page 12

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He was looking for you.”

  “Money, probably,” Daddy said. “Well, he’s come to the right place. All this money’s just burning a hole in my pocket.” He reached down and drew forth a handful of change, which he tossed onto the floor at Grandfather’s feet. “More?” he asked. “Well, of course.” And he pulled out his wallet from his back pocket and threw that down on top of the coins, where it landed with a thunk. “The key to the safe-deposit box is upstairs, but if you can hold on a minute, I’ll go get it for you.” Then he stormed out of the room.

  Mama was whimpering—the strange dry noises she made in place of weeping. I never actually saw her cry; even later, when good reasons presented themselves one after another—that cloaked retinue which passes relentlessly through the landscape of adulthood—all she could do was place her face in her hands and move her shoulders up and down. “What are we going to do?” she asked.

  But I was only fourteen years old, Willie. I didn’t have a clue.

  Later I was sitting at the kitchen table, trying to memorize the principal imports and exports of European countries for a test the next day. Mama and Daddy had disappeared upstairs, and Mrs. McGuire’s nephew—a fat man with freckles and a merry demeanor, reminding me of the Ghost of Christmas Present—had arrived to drive her home to her apartment over the Tamworth post office. “I have done what I can, my darling,” she’d told me, as she stood fixing her black straw bonnet in place on her head, jabbing in hatpins energetically, through hair and cranium alike.

  “Come along now, Aunt Rose,” the fat man had said, and he extended his arm, which she’d seized upon, collapsing against his bulk in an unconvincing version of delicate old-ladyhood.

  “Be careful,” she’d intoned, and then they were gone.

  “Liechtenstein,” I was saying, “grain, fruit, grapes, wood; cattle, pigs, chickens; cotton, wine, leather; false teeth, pottery, woodcarving,” when Grandfather walked into the room.

  “I thought I heard voices in here,” he said. “Is your father home?”

  “He’s upstairs,” I said.

  “Oh.” Grandfather sat down with me at the table and picked up my book. “Geography,” he said, companionable, turning pages. “Did you tell him I was here?”

  I nodded my head, wondering what to say.

  “This is Labrador,” Grandfather told me, pointing to a blue wedge sticking out from the northeastern coast of Canada. He ran his finger down the coastline, tracing the intricate ins and outs of the fiords. “Nain,” he said, pausing on a small black dot. “It’s all right, Kathleen,” he said, smiling at me. “You don’t have to make excuses. I’ve known your father for a long time.”

  “What’s Nain?” I asked.

  Grandfather closed the book and looked around the kitchen. “Some things never change,” he said, “you know that? Nain is where I live. You’d like it there. And your grandmother would be crazy about you. You look just like her. She’s getting old now, but she’s still strong as an ox.” He reached out and felt my upper arm approvingly. “You spend a lot of time outdoors, don’t you?”

  “Uh huh,” I said. He was still smiling; his teeth were neat and shiny, like yours. “But I thought Nana was my grandmother,” I said.

  “You call her Nana? She probably eats that up. Lessie was always big on things like that. When your father was a little boy she tried to send him off for his first day at school in a velvet suit.”

  “She’s in a nursing home,” I said. “That’s where they were when you got here. Mama and Daddy. They were out visiting Nana.”

  Grandfather rubbed his knuckles into his eyes and blinked. Something happened then to his body: the skin softened as the whole skeleton snuck inwards to hide itself—a pronged fork of lightning concealing itself in a cloud. “I haven’t been honest with you,” Grandfather said. “When I said she was strong as an ox, that wasn’t the truth. The truth is, Bella’s sick. This whole thing was her idea. She’s not like other people, Kathleen.” Grandfather took my hand and held on to it tightly.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s not your fault,” Grandfather said. Then, suddenly, he let go of my hand and stood up. “What in the name of God is this?” he asked. He picked up the brown teapot nestled within a quilted tea cozy—one of Mrs. McGuire’s gifts to our household. “How can you live in a place like this, Kathleen?” he asked.

  I shook my head, because I didn’t have an answer. Red light welled out from between the trunks of the pines and a gusty wind set all the windowpanes in the house to rattling. Kitty Kitty Kitty Kitty, they chattered, seductive, implying that I might have some choice in the matter. But their voices were drowned out by the water pump switching on in the cellar—that liquid and eruptive note, a prelude to regurgitation. Fat chance, it said.

  Much later, after I’d been sent to bed earlier than usual—my dinner a solitary communion with one of Mrs. McGuire’s stews, out of which I’d fished with my fork the kind of gelatinous tube you find in canned dog food—I was awakened by that same dialogue: the windowpanes now hysterical; the water pump far off and malevolent, its message rising on its stalk from the bottom of the house, prodding against the underside of my mattress. I lay there stiff and miserable, listening, and eventually I heard the other sound: human voices this time, raised to a high and nasty pitch. At first I told myself, Ignore them, but then I heard my name—Mama was saying my name loudly—and I pulled on my robe and tiptoed down the stairs.

  They were sitting in the west room on their opposing chairs; a fire was burning in the fireplace: this might have been a picture in a magazine promoting the good life, were it not for their faces, the features a hasty application of plasticine. I thought if I shook either one of them they’d rattle, the pods of their bodies filled with dry seeds.

  “What are you doing up?” Daddy asked coldly.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I said.

  “Go back to bed, sweetheart,” Mama said. She didn’t look at me but, nobly, at the far wall—a version of St. Joan on the tumbrel.

  “This is between your mother and myself, Kathleen,” Daddy said.

  Kitty Kitty Kitty Kitty—the windowpanes would not shut up, and my desperation emboldened me. “Where’s Grandfather?” I asked.

  “I’m hoping he’s asleep,” Daddy said.

  Suddenly infused with dangerous warmth, like a log on the verge of combustion, Mama opened her arms to me. “Kitty sweetheart, come here. Give me a hug, sweetie. You’ve gotten to be such a big girl, you hardly ever hug me anymore.”

  But I stood my ground. “Daddy,” I asked, “Nana’s your mother, isn’t she?”

  “Of course.”

  “And her name is Lessie?”

  “Celestine.” Daddy swallowed down the last of his highball and stood up. “Constance,” he said, “the kid should be in bed.” He walked out of the room and, in no time at all, I could hear the musical fall of ice cubes into his glass.

  “Kitty, please?” Mama whined. “Come sit here with me. Let’s not pay any attention to him. Sweetie?”

  I moved closer and kisses began flying up out of her like moths. “Stop it! Stop it, Mama!” She smelled slightly sour and powdery, like a baby.

  “You’re all the same,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with this family.”

  “Mama,” I said, “listen. Grandfather said something. I don’t think Nana’s my real grandmother. He was talking about a woman named Bella.”

  “Your grandfather’s an old lush. He’s probably hallucinating ninety-five percent of the time.”

  “I like him,” I said.

  “You haven’t known him as long as I have. You haven’t had to put up with what I have. He broke your poor nana’s heart, not to mention the misery he’s caused your father.”

  Daddy came back into the room. “You want to see misery?” he said. “I’ll show you misery. Kathleen, my patience is wearing thin. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, Dad,” I said.
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  I think it was then, Willie, climbing the stairs back up to my room, that I decided I wanted to go away with Grandfather. I wanted to get away from the creaking ship of our house; from the embarrassing scrutiny of Mrs. McGuire, her damp little eye trained, as if through a spyglass, on my female organs; I wanted to get away from our parents’ nibbling, restless souls; I wanted to get away from all of you. The air in the house felt thick, as if there was a storm approaching, yet when I looked out my bedroom window I could see that the sky was clear—the Big Dipper marking the place above the pines, the bushes extending their shapeless shadows across a lawn the color of verdigris. Grandfather’s truck, canted to one side at the end of the drive, was radiant in the moonlight.

  I looked at my face in the mirror. I removed my glasses and peered in close. The cheekbones were high; my hair, straight. Otherwise, there was nothing of the Eskimo about me. Did Grandfather live in an igloo? I opened my geography book and looked up Labrador. “Part of the Labrador-Ungava peninsula,” it said, “Labrador forms the northeastern tip of the Canadian mainland. It is bounded on the east by the Atlantic Ocean down to the Strait of Belle Isle, and on the south and west by Quebec. Cape Chidley, Labrador’s northernmost point, is on the Hudson Strait. The province is almost completely unpopulated.” And that was all, except for a small photograph of a bear reared up on its hind legs—some past prisoner of the Conway school system had drawn trousers on the animal and given it a beard and a mustache. Under the photograph was the caption: “The King of the North. Polar bears are essentially aquatic and get their food from the sea.”

  I dreamed that night about white things. I dreamed about the downstairs of our house, all the furniture sheeted, drawn in away from the walls. I was sitting at the little rosewood desk in the living room, staring down at a piece of white paper and, when I looked up through the window, I saw that it was snowing. Animals like reindeer were walking into the meadow, in the center of which was a round blue pool. The animals approached the pool; they bent their necks to drink. They were very beautiful and their horns were long, twisting intricately outwards; their horns locked together and then I saw that they were not animals at all, but small children, their hands joined, making a circle around a reflecting pool in a formal garden. Thin white sunlight coated over their fingers, over their faces. They held on to each other’s fingers tightly—they could not let go. In their white clothing they bent over to look at their reflections.

  In the morning I woke up very early—the word “destiny” kept forming on my tongue, and each time it did I imagined a cowboy’s lariat spinning through the air, its loop about to close down over something. I sat up in bed and looked out my window but, of course, the pool was gone and the meadow was bare of snow. A narrow pinkish cloud hung in the sky on the other side of the pines and I could hear, as they gathered thickly on the branches of the apple tree, the screams of grosbeaks fighting over the seeds in my feeder. A truck shifted gears as it hit the curve in the hill just east of the foot of our driveway; I imagined the driver pulling down his visor, momentarily blinded by the first rays of the sun as it rose up, far away, out of the ocean. He was probably listening to music on his radio—a long song with guitars that told a story about the wages of love. From downstairs came the sound of water drumming against the shower stall, and then the sound changed as a body inserted itself there.

  Now I saw a man made out of cracks in the ceiling. A stick man with a wobbly nose and a squashed bug for an eye. As I lay back and looked up at him, he began to change shape: the cracks momentarily radiated outward, like the lines we used to be taught to place around our drawings of the sun, to show heat. Then, suddenly, these lines flew together and knotted into a tight small ball, which pulsed crazily, before assuming the contours of a face, with tiny white wings sticking out on either side. The face’s lips were pursed and the blue eyes stared down at me coolly, dispassionately. I stared back, frightened that if I looked away, even for an instant, the face would move closer.

  “Kathleen,” the lips said, and I heard a clattering sound on the floor—a small object hit the wood. When I twisted around to see what it was, the voice got louder. Rogni’s voice. “Leave it be,” he said. “It’s just the ring; I don’t need it anymore. I made a mistake, it was the wrong thing.” I could see it glimmering in the corner, lodged against one of my socks.

  “You’re scaring me,” I said.

  It was only a face—there was no body attached to it—but the impression I got was of a hand reaching down towards me. “I’ve watched her dancing,” Rogni said. “She practices in the attic of a house on Lombard Street in Philadelphia. Up on her toes and around and around.” I felt the lightest pressure: light itself, in the shape of a finger, brushing across my cheek.

  “Go away,” I said. “She isn’t here.”

  “I’ve touched her, Kathleen.”

  “Why’re you telling me this?” I asked.

  A long time ago we began trying to capture the images of angels, painting them into borders of manuscripts, or carving them across tympanic arches, their garments falling in rigid folds along their flanks. What we didn’t know is that they have been doing the same thing with us. This is what Rogni told me as I lay there on my back, my eyes squeezed shut, my fingers plugging up my ears. But I couldn’t keep him out. The angels see us as snakes of light, plotted against the dark backdrop of eternity. We can be differentiated, one from another, only by our shapes, and it is these upon which the angels seize, inventing stories. Our lives, Willie.

  Only, sometimes, the wash of sunlight across a particular set of features—of that woman named Mary, for example, whose baby forms the centerpiece of our greatest story of hope and despair—such details will undermine detachment, and then an angel will well up from out of a slot in the solid angles and curves of this world, assuming a form that is, at least, partly human.

  “But we can’t understand mutability,” Rogni said. “Our stories have to have endings.”

  “Go away,” I said again, but the face dropped down, closer to my own, so that I could feel the fanning of the wings across my skin, like light falling through beech leaves.

  Sometimes the angels fall in love with us. But I don’t have to tell you that.

  “Listen to me, Kathleen,” the angel said.

  “Once upon a time there was an old woman who lived in a small house in the middle of the tundra. She was huge and fat and she got fatter by the day, mysteriously, because all she ate was spring salad—the partly digested lichens and mosses she scraped from inside the intestines of caribou. She never touched their flesh, but piled carcasses up behind her house, to tempt the predators. She was lonely. She was a million years old and what she wanted more than anything in the world was a child on whom to lavish her riches. Because, you see, she was very rich, this old woman. Inside her house she had boxes and boxes of jewels and gold, which she’d stolen over the years from out of the pockets of the men who came north to map her kingdom. They starved to death, or they froze, resorting to boiling their own clothing, choking, naked, on the tongues of their boots.

  “This old woman knew that for the purposes of breeding these men were less than useless, even if she was lucky enough to find one of them alive. They were too tender and thin, like the shoots of cotton grass that came up in the early summer. And besides, they would have found her repulsive. She knew that. But she also knew that the King of the Bears was her designated mate; she’d planned it that way herself, in the beginning. So she waited. It took a million years, but eventually one day, when the snow was blowing around her—a glamorous effect, she thought, like a cape, and then, again, it felt so good—he appeared. He was tall and white. He was whiter than snow, which is where that cliché got its original meaning. Their congress was brief: he mounted her from behind, leaving the marks of his claws across her breasts. And when he was done he left her panting in the snow and lumbered off to the carcass pile, where he chipped off whole frozen chunks of meat with those same claws. He ate and he ate a
nd he ate. The meal had been waiting for him for a million years. And as he ate, his hide began to strain; it began to get thinner and thinner, thinner than membrane, thinner than the wall of a single cell. The old woman could scarcely contain her merriment; never before had she seen such a sight. And then—boom!—he exploded. Pieces of him flew off in all directions. It’s been suggested that this is how the land animals were made, but that’s just wishful thinking.

  “The old woman crouched down to shield herself from the putrid fallout: his privates, with a remote and mindless irony, hit her in the rump. Finally, when she thought she was safe, she looked up. And there, where only moments before he’d stood gorging himself, was a child. The old woman was filled with rapture! Here was a beautiful girl-child—as beautiful as the old woman was hideous. Here was a creature of flesh and blood to keep her company throughout the millions of years to come. She made her a dress out of fur and sewed to it jewels and gold: it was so heavy the child couldn’t move, but stood fixed to one place like a statue. The old woman worshipped the child; she pricked her own finger and fed her the blood.

  “One day, after many years of silence, the girl spoke. ‘Mother,’ she said, ‘I am discontent. I would like a sister with whom to share my thoughts.’

  “This took the old woman off guard. After all, the King of the Bears was dead, and she saw no further suitors on the horizon. But the old woman was cagy. ‘Daughter,’ she said, ‘you already have a sister. She lives far south of here in a place called a city.’

  “‘Then I must go and find her,’ the girl said.

  “‘But she’s a useless piece of trash. Hardly worth the effort.’