Labrador Read online

  What she did not understand was that he had never seen anything like her before, with the exception of those pale creatures scurrying like fish in a weir, trapped within the television set in Nain’s only bar. There had been a woman with hair the color of a fox’s winter pelt, splashing water up onto her face out of a white basin! Jobie Aleeki was only nineteen years old, and he was as susceptible to desire for the unfamiliar as any of us.

  Hadn’t it been on account of such desire that Lucifer himself had chosen to drop like a plumb, straight from heaven to hell, rather than sacrifice his talents for invention and imagining the impossible?

  The young girl, I am sorry to say, was too much caught up in her own desires to be aware of any of this. She wanted to be the heroine of a story out of which rapture radiated; she wanted that story to float southward in a glass sphere, distracting her sister at the precise moment when she lay, avid, beneath her lover’s body. But the young girl did not understand the law of rapture. She did not understand that, in order for there to be rapture, she must first love her soul more than her body. If she had known to ask him, Jobie Aleeki could have told her, for it was just such understanding which informed his genius as a trapper. He could have explained how such an artful creature as the fox might be snared, tricked into thinking hunger took precedence over freedom. Still, even if he had told her, I suspect the young girl would not have believed him.

  “Impossible,” she would have said, and then the Devil would have laughed out loud, recognizing evidence of his first, and favorite, invention. “I think I’ll have a little fun with this one,” he would have said.

  And so he did.

  To begin with, he made Bella Tooktasheena’s heart wither into a jealous, many-pronged root. If it was true, as the children of the town agreed, that Bella was over three hundred years old, then she had probably been jealous before. Hadn’t there been an explorer from Jutland—a tall man with a red beard whose misfortune it had been to whisper Julla, Julla, as he was drifting off to sleep? And what about the young missionary who had confessed, under pressure, that his first passion was for Jesus Christ? Whether Bella had actually caused the explorer to be buried in an avalanche, or split open the missionary’s skull to pluck out and eat that tiny gland shaped like a pine cone which is said to be the seat of mystical vision, we cannot know for certain. What is important, for the purposes of this story, is that the root of Bella’s heart sent out its tentacular, star-nosed tips everywhere within her body: she could not hold on to anything without feeling them there, waggling through her palm’s flesh.

  How could she keep her Blue Willow plate—that most prized of all her possessions—from leaping out of her hand when she bent down to serve the old man his supper? She wasn’t blind; she could see the way he never took his eyes off the young girl. It made no difference that she had given him the choicest cuts of caribou meat, nor that she had kept the meat from the hock, through which ran cartilaginous and rubbery tissue, for herself. To the young girl, finally, she handed the tongue. Eloquent, Bella thought, but the young girl’s sense of etiquette was strong: even when the tongue curled up from the plate to lick the length of her forearm, Bella could not overlook the fact that she did not cry out in disgust.

  Nor could Bella overlook the girl’s impressive size and strength—those collarbones the size of juggling pins! It was as if she was seeing herself, before the skin around her eyes had puckered into crevices so deep that the old man, if he’d wanted, could have slipped his fingers through, extracting her foul, squirming thoughts, holding them up for everyone to see. Bella enjoyed a reputation for indifference, but, the truth is, she was vain. And despite her gift for transformation, the one thing she could not change into was a younger version of herself. That was not allowed.

  Still, it is possible that the old man’s betrayal, alone, might not have been enough to make Bella vengeful. Capricious, she might have caused a wen to rise from his forehead, the usual sebaceous matter replaced by a hatching of flies. Something simple—playful, even. But there was the additional betrayal of Jobie Aleeki. And this was much worse, betraying, as he had, nothing so basically unreliable as another person’s trust. Jobie, Bella thought, had betrayed that natural order whereby a frail link exists between decorum and magic. Together, she knew, they made compartments which couldn’t be seen—compartments without which all things would run together into a primeval pudding, comprehensive and deadly.

  Circling and circling high in the air above them, Bella-the-raven watched Jobie’s and the young girl’s small bodies—their prints in the snow infinitesimal and stained red where they trod on hidden cranberries—join at the hands. How she screamed, Cree! Craw! Cree! Craw! making them look upward, encouraging them to see it as beautiful: her black wings flapping across the wide sky, flapping across the moon, the moon’s face swimming slowly to the sky’s surface, like the face of the boy’s own father, just before his sons pulled him from the sea.

  And so it came about that Jobie Aleeki asked the young girl to ride with him on his boat, far up the coast past Aulatsivik Island where, on sunny days, the puffins liked to perch, watching for fish. He told her that he would show her the locations of his most cunningly hidden traps, but only after she had tried to uncover them herself. Did the Devil have a hand in this invitation? I doubt it very much, although I suspect it was his voice the young girl heard, pleasant and matter-of-fact, chattering inside her head. “Such glory!” the voice said. “He has singled you out, my dear. It is a pity that your only spectators will be the rocks and the sea and the sky.” No one can deny the fact that the secret life of a romance is enhanced when it is observed by those from whom its secrets are withheld.

  As it turned out, this was not a problem. Bella insisted that she and the old man be included in the excursion. She became, suddenly, maternal. “And who will remember that your feet must be kept warm and dry?” she asked. “Who will see to it that you have nourishing things to eat?” Fulsomely, drawing herself up in her bundle of clothing—so that the girl thought, if only for an instant, Why, now she is turning herself into a walrus!—Bella alluded to future events of great magnitude, in which it was essential that she play a part.

  Nor were she and the old man the only other passengers: Jobie Aleeki’s three brothers wheedled and cajoled. “Let us come with you,” Ben said, “and I’ll give you this shirt.” It was the color of labradorite—the native gemstone, iridescent-blue and gabbroic—printed all over with the noble heads of dogs. Ben had stolen it from Nain’s only store, in which it was possible to buy a can of Spam, or a sofa, or a clarinet; he had stuffed it up under his anorak when no one was looking. Jobie refused to take the shirt; he refused to acknowledge, as well, the pistol which Obiah held pointed at his face. Still, in the end, he acquiesced. “If the weather turns bad,” he said, “I’ll be able to use the help.”

  Of course, he never really believed that that would be the case; the day on which they set out was perfectly clear. Jobie didn’t know that far to the north, in the place where the Torngat Mountains rise up straight out of the sea—those huge horned presences looming miles above the little waves—a storm was being born. The Devil tugged, and out it came, from a pocket of air, furiously revolving its many arms and legs.

  The trap boat rode low in the water, its narrow decks filled with ropes and bottles of orange soda, a pile of rubber boots, oilskins, and drums containing gasoline. Four rifles stood propped against the cabin: a small, three-walled house as haphazardly constructed, the young girl thought, as the boat itself. But she wasn’t scared—not a bit!—because there at the tiller was Jobie Aleeki, smiling at her, eating bright yellow cheese snacks out of a cellophane bag. As they left the harbor she could see all the dogs of Nain arranged along the shore, their plumed tails waving elegantly above the snow in which their legs were hidden.

  Now they left Nain behind. They left behind the abandoned mission building, with its rooms storing kayaks, mildewed hymnals, harpoons, old Bibles and their spidery genealogies;
they left behind the hospital, and all the tiny houses; they were in the ocean now, so that they could no longer remember the streambeds and gullies choked with debris, with rusting parts of machines, cans and bottles, wires and bones.

  The trap boat swung north, past the walls of mountains and the mountainous islands increasing in size on either side; old-mountain rocks, toughened in the early days when they lay hidden under ice. Then, from the earth’s heart, burning metals welled up, intruding themselves into the cracks and seams, solidifying into shining black ribs which remained visible, even now, millions of years later. If you stared too long at these mountains, you might begin to forget that there was such a thing as human personality. And once you had forgotten personality, you might begin to forget morality as well.

  Gradually, the sky began to fill in with clouds, all that empty space having left God’s hand itchy for completion. The clouds were ragged and pearl gray; they occupied the whole tall, darkening sky, as the sea, in turn, became the color of nickel, through which rang chords of silver light. Obiah picked up his rifle and started shooting. Bang! Bang! Was he trying to put a bullet into the pillar of the wind, to halt its dancing approach? Or was he shooting at the birds—hundreds of them—beating their wings like crazy, as if they could fly faster than the storm? The wind shoved itself against the boat’s prow, mean and hectoring, and all at once a hand of water reached over the rail, plucking Bella’s cigarette from between her lips.

  It was a very bad storm. It killed a geologist, just as he was reaching up to tap off a chunk of hornblende, tossing his body into the air; it disengaged the wires of the missile-tracking station on the hill above Hopedale; it hooked the trap boat, wildly flapping, to a course that made no sense. Jobie Aleeki might have been a skillful sailor, and his arms, in accordance with the young girl’s dream, might have been strong, but he could not control the tiller. The boat was heading towards shore. It was heading towards the cupped fingers of an enormous hand—a wall of rock curved as if about to close down over them all.

  The Devil, as you have probably suspected, took pleasure in this situation. But it was not his intention that the boat should crash. His plan was more artful: there, at the very top of the rock wall, he knew there was a raised beach, the thinnest, gray smear of sand. Eons earlier, this beach had provided sanctuary at sea level, but as the glacier released its grip on the land, the beach rose higher and higher, like those visions of heaven designed to torment the sinful. The Devil delighted in imagining the expressions on the faces of the people in the boat, as they sped closer and closer to the wall, their necks craned backwards, their frightened faces looking up. Although not all of them were frightened. The old man, for instance, felt the gloved fingers of Ecstasy—she who prepares the body for Death’s inspection—running up his spine, dusting the keys, both the black ones and the white.

  Then, at the last moment, the boat’s hull dragged itself across a submerged rock and stuck there. The young girl could see, all around them, other such rocks, unnaturally smooth and seductive in their arrangement, appearing and disappearing as the waves rose and fell; even though they were close to shore, the water was still deep enough that a person’s body could slip in and be gone.

  Jobie Aleeki gathered up an armload of rope. He stood, briefly, one foot pressed into the deck, the leg rising up from it a leg of flesh and blood, recognizable and human, as his other leg extended out into space, a spirit leg, joint-less and glimmering. Then he leaped. Would you believe me if I told you that he is leaping still? Would you believe me if I told you that the space between two rocks—the one on which the boat was lodged and the one on which he landed—remains printed with the bright arc of his form? There are places like this all over the world, but they are only visible to those who recognize, in moments of pure transition, evidence of the infinite.

  A narrow shelf of rock, small particulate bits in their sheaths of ice, stretched along the base of the wall, and it was onto this shelf that Jobie climbed. I cannot tell you how he did it: pulled and pulled the boat in towards himself; perhaps it was because he had heard the soft splintering noises from where the hull rubbed itself against the rock, because he knew that, at any second, the whole boat might crack into small pieces, just as the porcelain teacup had, in the rectory, when his hand closed too tightly around it. He did not want the young girl to die. And he saw that she was terrified, even as she tried to smile, to let him know that she trusted him, even as he lifted her across the black and convulsive water. How many times had Jobie slept wrapped in skins on a bed of rock or snow, while a storm paraded with giant purpose across the landscape? His sense of peril was constant and familiar, whereas, for the young girl, this was a place without coordinates, an idea in the mind of a madman.

  Together, Jobie and the young girl climbed the cliff. The wind set itself to prying their bodies loose; the knobs of rock that were their hand-and-toe holds shone with ice and popped out: the higher they climbed, the more of the wall fell away behind them, rumbling into the water. But despite her terror or, perhaps, inspired by it, the young girl proved to be a skillful climber; she got to the top first, so that it was her reward to be able to reach down and, summoning all her strength, bring her heart’s desire right up into her arms, that dark body smelling of wet fur and salt. They lay there, side by side, high above the sea, looking down to where the boat rocked, still studded with pale, upwards-pointing faces. If he had kissed her then, would things have turned out differently? Because, believe me, he wanted to. It is difficult to know, in fact, what stopped him—there she was, so close to him that her warmth made the ice melt from his hair and lashes, running down his cheeks and into his mouth, where it tasted pure and sweet, as he imagined the inside of her mouth would taste, kissing her. Perhaps what stopped him was that most common of all human afflictions—another of the Devil’s proud inventions—the great delight we take in the thing imagined, at the expense of the thing itself. For whatever reason, instead of kissing her, he let down the rope and, one after another, up the others all came, huffing and puffing, the expressions on their faces uniformly passive, as if they had decided that getting to the beach was no longer their responsibility. Certainly this would account for the annoying heaviness of their bodies.

  At least, the young girl thought, as they struggled to pull Bella over the edge, she could turn herself into a bird and fly up. The young girl was exhausted, and it did not make her feel any better the way Bella glared at her, ominously, as if reading her mind. Nor did it make her feel any better that, within minutes after her arrival on the beach, Bella seemed to vanish. Where had she gone? Was it possible that the young girl had failed to notice the precise instant at which Bella slid, a tusked, damp, black sausage, back into the sea? Why had no one called out to alert her when the tufts of fur first began sprouting from Bella’s face, and her eyes shrank to the size of raisins?

  In fact, the other members of the group all stood together at the farthest end of the beach, where a small hunting tilt had been erected. Tilts are houses of wood and stones and skins, as mutable in their composition as trap boats, and equally subject to revision. Now Jobie Aleeki was engaged in the act of breaking off parts of the tilt, in order to make a fire, and the young girl thought, Those hands have held on to me. Everyone else thinks that those are hands dedicated to the performance of useful tasks, but I know better. She became smug: she thought this was, finally, the long-awaited story of which she was the heroine; she did not notice the ptarmigan, its body so skillfully hidden against the snow, until it flew up all at once into the air and Obiah shot it.

  This should have warned her to be on the lookout for other hidden things as well. But the young girl was too much caught up in her own story’s abundant, unfolding details to be watchful. She didn’t notice the storm’s abrupt passage, the sun slit through by one of the toothed peaks to the west, spilling red liquid all across the sky. She didn’t notice when the old man left the group around the fire. Or, at least, she didn’t notice until it was too l
ate.

  Behind the largest of the rocks with which the beach was ringed, the young girl stood leaning into Jobie Aleeki’s arms. Now, at last, he kissed her. She had been waiting so long for this, can we blame her that, for as long as the kiss lasted, she was nowhere but in the small pocket their mouths made? Indeed, it became her curse, forever after, to judge all other kisses by that standard. Jobie held her shoulders lightly; they both kept their eyes wide open, and if it is true that eyes are really windows, then theirs were without panes. What they saw, looking at each other, flowed out into the air between them, distinct and feathery at first, and then pervasive, like ink dropped into water.

  It was an innocent kiss, almost chaste—it didn’t last very long. And yet, by the time they drew apart and looked out at the world—surprised and enchanted by what they saw, as if they were agents of its creation—the old man had already pushed his way through high drifts of snow and stood beckoning to them. What could he possibly want? There was the safe enclosure of the beach, where the fire spat as juices dripped onto it from out of the ptarmigan’s roasting body; there was the endless white plateau, off the rim of which a person could step to fall, endlessly, among the faint blue tubes and cones of eternity. The old man stood there, in the middle of that plateau, waving and waving his arms, pointing.

  Jobie and the young girl looked around, confused. From out of nowhere a raven swooped down at them. It came so close that the thick, sharp whiskers of its ruff brushed against the girl’s cheek; its smell was sorry and pungent, such as swims forth from an old woman’s underthings. The bird cursed once—a terrible word that cannot be transcribed—and then raced off towards that place where the girl’s grandfather pointed, its dark body getting smaller and smaller, disappearing like a piece of ice on a hot stove.