Labrador Read online

  “‘Nevertheless,’ the girl insisted, ‘she’s my sister.’ And she slipped out from under the heavy garment and fled.

  “The old woman tried to run after her, but so many years of inertia had taken their toll. She was dense as pudding, intricately marbled with fat. Under a vast and starry sky she put her head in her hands and wept.

  “Meanwhile, the girl made her way southward. After many weeks she came to a road. Of course, she didn’t know what this was, but after toiling through alder swales and muskeg, she could not believe her good fortune at finding such a pleasant surface on which to walk. Perhaps this leads to a city, she thought.

  “She had walked several miles when suddenly a horse-drawn carriage pulled up beside her. The driver motioned for her to get in and so she did. She was a tender morsel, stark naked, and the driver’s eyes glowed like coals in his tidy, round head. ‘Giddyap!’ he shouted, and the horses sprang forward into a canter. There was no one else in the carriage and the girl curled up on the plush red seat and fell asleep.

  “When she awoke it was dark and the carriage was rolling through the streets of a city. She pulled back the curtains and saw the graceless stone buildings of government agencies arranged around a central square; street lamps exuded a vague, yellowish glow. The driver pulled the carriage up outside a three-storied house, its entrance partly obscured by the protruding arms of potted boxwood, clipped to resemble human figures.

  “The girl stepped out of the carriage and into the house, whereupon she was taken by an elderly servant—either a man or a woman, she couldn’t tell—into a huge ballroom. Here a small orchestra played waltzes, as gentlemen cupped the ladies’ waists with their gloved hands, guiding their partners expertly across the polished floor. Upon her arrival the most beautiful of the ladies, whose yellow hair rose up high above her forehead, and was crowned with stephanotis, left her partner and approached the girl. ‘Come with me,’ she said, leading her by the hand down a hallway and then up a flight of stairs, the banisters of which were carved out of whalebone. At the head of the stairs stood the host, a tall man with heavily-lidded eyes. ‘Look what I’ve found for you,’ the lady said, pointing to the girl. ‘This is my body, exact as to every detail. You will have to take my word for it. Under the circumstances, it is the best that you can hope for.’ Whereupon the hoods of the man’s eyes lifted. ‘You narcissistic bitch,’ he said, laughing. Desire divided and branched as the man ran his hands along the girl’s body. For several minutes the beautiful lady stood watching; then she gathered her shimmering skirts up and swept away, trailing her thin fingers along the banister.

  “Far to the north the old woman was looking through a whale’s blowhole. It was like a little window through which she could see the bone-colored flash of one of the girl’s arms across the man’s dark back; the sharp peaks of her knees, the triangle of her throat and chin. ‘Go ahead,’ she whispered, and she dropped an emerald ring into the blowhole. ‘For you, my darling,’ she whispered. The ring fell and fell and when it hit the bottom a tiny spark of light jumped out of it. This tiny spark of light rose up, higher and higher—high up into the air—and eventually it lodged in place. It was heaven. The old woman stared at it—it was so pretty, she thought, winking down at her. But it was so far away; it justified nothing!

  “She called out then, and the empty garment lurched towards her across the ice, raising its empty sleeves. Its hunger for love was now insatiable. On this account it had learned the rules for motion. And, one day, after much effort, it learned the rules for speech as well. ‘Mother,’ it said, ‘I would like a sister.’

  “And then, from deep inside the earth and from under the oceans the angels rose up, their flanks shining and hard. And all traces of the future evaporated—like wet footprints on a wooden floor, marking the lover’s passage down a corridor towards the beloved, who wakes screaming in a bath of light. And all that was left was a dark imp, hunched in the corner, sucking on a marrow bone. And the imp’s name was Romance.”

  Oh, it is true—as I came to understand in time—angels are avid for their stories to have endings. But it is also true that as storytellers they are unencumbered by the idea of motivation. Motivation is a purely human invention and, if I was oddly qualified to accept Rogni’s stories, it is because I grew up in a household similarly devoid of that quality—a household where explanation was reserved only for the most trivial matters. “Don’t eat your soup while it’s hot,” Mama would say, “or you’ll burn your mouth.” I don’t have to tell you this; you lived there, too. “Wear your hat, Willie. Most of your body’s heat escapes through the top of your head.”

  The angels’ stories, on the other hand, are about desire, for which there is no good explanation. Their stories always begin in the same place, with that old hag in the housedress, cooking up something on her stove. Do you know what she smells like? Salt and mercury, Willie—she smells like sex.

  And that is what the angels love about her; without her there would be no stories. It would all just be more of the same thing: God poised, holding the world in His big hand, admiring His work. How could such a thing—a precious, frozen stone—yield any surprises? Of course, God is watchful. Some people have said He is a voyeur. I swear to you, even as He saw fit to punish Rogni, consigning all of that desire for you to a bodiless head, it is ultimately His own doing that the stone cracked open, revealing inside a nest of worms. After all, He is the one who made the angels.

  Not too long after Grandfather’s arrival, you came home for the weekend. Do you remember? You brought me a pair of golden shoes with pointed heels and then stood there watching as I struggled to squeeze my big feet into them. “You look just like a hooker,” you said, delighted. “Dad’ll die.”

  I paraded from one end of the house to the other. Click click click—the sound of the heels on the bare floor made me feel like a small horse with neat, polished hooves. I loved those shoes! I thought about how I would wear them to Mrs. Wick’s ballroom-dancing class—a torture I was made to undergo every third Thursday of the month—and how I would become, in them, finally, the object of passion. At Mrs. Wick’s, trim and understated Capezio slippers were the acceptable footwear, whereas these were the shoes of legend; these were shoes whose heels could pierce a young man’s heart.

  “Of course,” you said, when I returned to the kitchen, “they’ll look a lot better with a dress. You do have a dress, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Thanks, Willie.”

  You yawned and walked over to the refrigerator. “Where is everyone?” you asked, yanking open the door and looking inside. “I don’t believe this,” you said. “This is the same fucking leftover stew that was here when I left.”

  “They’ve gone to town,” I said.

  “All of them?” You poured yourself a glass of milk, smelled it, and then dumped it in the sink. “The Mouse Queen tells me the family’s gotten bigger since I left.”

  “I don’t know where Grandfather is,” I said.

  Suddenly I felt uneasy, wondering what his reaction to you would be. Yours to him, I thought, was more predictable: that combination of amusement and scorn you usually reserved for anyone whose objectives were so clearly different from your own. I looked at you where you stood, staring out of the window, absently rising up onto your toes, and then settling down onto your heels. Routinely, my jealousy unfolded. Could you see it? I thought it must be as noticeable as ostrich plumes, agitating the room’s air.

  “What’s he like?” you asked.

  “Oh,” I said, “he’s very nice,” and you spun around to face me.

  “Christ, Kitty, you sound just like Mom.”

  “Well, he is,” I said. Then I sat down and removed the shoes, because it had occurred to me that if Grandfather saw me wearing them he would think it a kind of betrayal. “These shoes smell funny,” I said, to get back at you.

  You bent your small head down to sniff. “You’re right,” you said. “They smell like meat. The guy I bought them from
had a whole pile of shoes right there on the sidewalk. It was in the Italian market—you know, goat and pig bodies swinging from hooks in the breeze. Maybe something dripped on them.” You grinned. “If Mrs. McGuire was here, she’d tell you to take those shoes off the table. In case it’s slipped your memory, shoes on the table are bad luck.”

  In Labrador, Grandfather had told me, everything is filled with light: the mountains rising straight up out of the sea; the sky; the sea itself. He told me it was like a land carved out of crystal. How could he fail to fall in love with you?

  “When he goes back north,” I said, “he’s going to take me with him.”

  “Kitty, wake up. You’re just a kid. You should be out having fun with people your own age. Besides, he’s Dad’s father. You know what they say about how the fruit never falls far from the tree?” You reached out and touched my shoulder, making me shiver. “Can’t you do something about your posture? If you keep sitting like that, you’re going to have a hump on your back when you’re an old lady.”

  I melted down farther into the chair. “I don’t remember you being so crazy about people your own age,” I said.

  And then the back door swung open and they were inside: Mama and Daddy with their arms full of grocery bags, the expression in their eyes—before they had a chance to make the quick adjustments essential to conveying a spirit of delight at your presence—haunted. We have been to hell, their eyes suggested, and we are none the wiser for it.

  “Willie darling! Let me look at you.” Mama set the bags down on the table and hugged you. “Those people aren’t giving you enough to eat,” she said. “You’re just skin and bone.”

  “Have you ever seen a fat ballet dancer?”

  Daddy, meanwhile, stood hanging on to his bags for dear life, as if they might protect him from his urge to embrace you in a way that would embarrass us all. “Don’t listen to your mother,” he said. “I think you’re looking just fine.”

  As it turned out, my worries were groundless: Grandfather was, apparently, immune to your beauty. He appeared in the kitchen when he smelled the bacon Mama was cooking to make sandwiches and, although he was cordial enough, I didn’t hear the quickening of breath that would have signaled conquest. In fact, if he was attentive to anyone, it was to me. I was so relieved I almost burst into tears. The truth is, Willie, that since he’d been staying with us, I’d felt my loneliness draining out of me. Sometimes I could almost see it: the dark spoor of an ungainly beast courting extinction; the matted trail by which Grandfather and I would trace our way back to the house, after a day spent walking through the woods. On these occasions we would sit in the moist V between two glacial erratics the size of houses, eating the lunch Grandfather made for us—sharp cheese and onion and hot mustard sandwiches—chewing in companionable silence and breathing in the thin blue air. For a little while after our return I’d be able to smell it on me, that air by which I was distinguished from all other people in the world.

  “This is for you,” he said, handing me a package wrapped in brown paper. “It just came in the mail.”

  Everyone watched intently as I tore off the wrapping paper: as you probably recall, the opening of gifts in our family was always a drawn-out procedure, releasing us all from the burden of conversation.

  “Thanks, Grandfather,” I said. It was a book: A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador. I opened it and immediately came upon a picture of a tall woman staring gravely into the camera, lifting her long skirts as she stepped out of a canoe. “Who’s this?” I asked.

  “Mrs. Hubbard,” Grandfather said.

  “Let me have a look at that,” Daddy said, reaching out and grabbing the book. “What’s she doing? Getting her poor dog a bone?”

  “Grandfather gave it to me,” I said, trying to get the book back, but Daddy drew it in close to his chest, peeking down at it and then looking up slyly, like a poker player.

  “The writing style leaves a lot to be desired,” he said.

  “It’s Kathleen’s book,” Grandfather said. He picked up a paring knife and jabbed it once, lightly, into Daddy’s lower arm, making a tiny incision out of which a drop of blood welled up, and when Daddy yelped, he smiled. “Just checking to make sure you’re human,” he said. Then he drew a large plaid handkerchief out of his breast pocket and dabbed at the cut. “When you were born, the midwife swore you were made of wood. She said when she held you up and hit you on the back, you didn’t cry like most babies. You just made a hollow sound. Like knocking on a door, she said.”

  “I don’t have to put up with this,” Daddy said.

  You sat with your face propped in your two hands, your eyes moving from side to side, bright with the faint sheen of moisture that I knew indicated pleasure. “You didn’t tell me things’d gotten so lively around here,” you said.

  “Ah, but you do,” Grandfather pointed out. “You do, Nicky. Or have you forgotten that this is my house?”

  “Of course we haven’t forgotten,” Mama said. “Can I get you something to drink, Father?”

  Daddy slammed the book down on the table. “That’s right, Constance. Go ahead and grovel. The old bastard’s got us right where he wants us, as usual. What do you want, Dad? Dom Pérignon? If I leave now, I think I can make it to the liquor store before it closes. How about you, Willie? Anything I can get for you while I’m out?”

  “The milk’s sour,” you said. “The cow it came from’s probably been dead for about a year now.” You opened up your sandwich, set the bacon off to one side, and began picking at the lettuce.

  “Milk,” Daddy said, shoving his chair away from the table and standing up. “That’s simple enough. And you, Kathleen? You haven’t said a word.”

  I felt Grandfather’s fingers close around mine: warm and rough, they squeezed gently, and my body, which had been swelling outwards—the skin thinning, just like the beast’s in Rogni’s story, as if I had been feeding on something unspeakable—fell back into its normal shape.

  “All Kitty wants,” you said, “is one red, red rose.”

  But Daddy didn’t hear you; already he was out of the room, although it became clear to all of us that he wasn’t planning to leave the house. We could hear him upstairs, stamping down the hallway; when he slammed the bedroom door, something fell from a shelf in the pantry, breaking into pieces on the floor.

  The next morning I slept late. By the time I came downstairs the kitchen was empty; dishes were stacked in the sink, their various patterns smeared with egg yolk; the Sunday paper lay across the table, portions of certain articles circled, as usual, and marked with arrows or exclamation points—this was, as you will recall, our father’s method of accumulating evidence against the world. The windows were all open, and a mild breeze turned the pages of the magazine section, as if, even in his absence, Daddy’s quest continued, his invisible eyes trained on pictures of women in evening gowns, or pictures of immaculate living rooms, their glass coffee tables supporting bowls filled with unblemished fruit. It is true, I guess, that the evidence might have been found in these pictures—if anywhere—for a universe in which the idea of entropy had not yet been invented. I shook some cereal out into a bowl and then, remembering what you’d said about the milk, I ate it dry, with my fingers.

  Grandfather was in the barn, bent over the front end of his truck, staring into the engine. When he heard me approach he looked up, smiling, and called me over. “We’ve got a little work to do,” he said, “before we can take off. Nothing major. I think I’ve narrowed it down to the generator.” He pointed, with a screwdriver, at a dark object nestled in among wires. “How do you like the book?”

  “It’s great,” I said. In fact, it was because I’d stayed up half the night reading that I’d slept so late that morning.

  “Mina Hubbard was a remarkable woman. They don’t make them like that anymore. Big and strong and adventurous.” Suddenly he straightened and stared at me, speculatively. “The wilderness is hard on women,” he said. “The wilderness is a female s
pirit and, as we all know, the female of the species is inclined to jealousy. That sister of yours, for instance—it’s eating her up. If she doesn’t watch out, there’ll be nothing left for the crows.”

  “Willie?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Willie isn’t jealous of anyone.”

  “Hold on to this,” Grandfather said, indicating the generator. “I’m going to see if I can’t loosen these bolts. Get a good grip, Kathleen—once it comes loose the sonofabitch weighs a ton.”

  I wrapped my hands around the cylinder and stiffened my shoulders. Above us, in the eaves, swallows swept their iridescent bodies through the dust-speckled air; the air in the barn smelled of humus and old hay—the pony’s legacy—mixed in with the truck’s smells of gasoline and rust.

  “Okay,” Grandfather said, “hang on tight now. I’ve almost got it.”

  For a moment I felt my body being drawn down into that complicated, metallic mouth—like a person bent on suicide, her dive accelerated by the mass of the stone held between her hands. And then Grandfather’s hands were on top of mine; together we lifted the generator out of the truck.

  “There used to be a man in Tamworth—Brian Stenk—who knew how to rewind these things. A real ladies’ man. You wouldn’t happen to know if he’s still around, would you?”

  I shrugged. “What did you mean,” I asked, “about Willie?”

  “He’s probably dead by now. Shot by an irate husband.” Grandfather set the generator down on the barn floor and walked over to the door. “I’d guess it’s about eleven o’clock, wouldn’t you say?” He no longer used the cane, although he still limped—his right foot had been badly mangled when he’d stepped, unsuspecting, into a trap. “What I meant,” he said, “is that your sister is so jealous of you she can hardly see straight.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said. “Why would Willie be jealous of me?”

  But he didn’t answer; he merely waved his thin, dark hands around, agitating dust motes, as if the answer was too obvious to require language—as if, God forbid, I was actually fishing for a compliment. “Kathleen,” he said, “you are planning to come with me, aren’t you?”