Labrador Read online

  “Look!” Jobie said.

  At first the young girl didn’t know what it was she was seeing—were those disembodied arms and legs of snow, tossed around by the wind, actually the ghosts of doomed explorers? They were so far away! And then, squinting her eyes, they began to come into focus: reared up on their hind legs at the exact place where the snow and the sky came together—great white bears, dancing, swaying their thick torsos from side to side, the pleated fur of their chests and shoulders tapering upwards into tiny heads, the dark tips of their noses. That is where such bears are most vulnerable to attack: the colorless nerve of ice which threads through their bodies is exposed there, frayed and moist.

  As Jobie and the young girl watched, horrified, the old man began walking closer and closer to the bears. What could he be thinking of? Slowly, his little body erect, he approached the world’s edge; he approached the place where the bears’ bodies shifted and revolved, occasionally thinning down at the extremities into single flashes of light.

  The largest of the bears stopped dancing and started to move in the old man’s direction. The young girl could hear a tiny click as Jobie released the safety on his rifle; his long, dark arms were perfectly steady as he raised the rifle to his shoulder, sighting through the scope.

  But now the bear was on all fours! Is it possible there was something familiar about it? How else can we account for the old man’s eagerness, for the way he almost stumbled in his rush to move closer to the thing? He needn’t have bothered: the bear’s advance was rapid. Soon they could all smell it, its heavy carnivorous stink; and they could see the yellowish cast to its fur—the dense plates of fur separating, as if by fissures, with each step—and they could see the dark holes that were its eyes; they could hear the intestinal churning as its appetite awakened.

  It was a real bear filled with the breath of this world, putrid and immense, its tongue a grayish pink, its teeth crusty with green sediment. Believe me when I tell you it was not a story bear; not a legend bear; not a bear preparing to shuck off its skin and reveal itself to the youngest sister as a suitor—the prince, at last, static as paradise and requiring only admiration.

  The old man pulled a little gun from inside his anorak. He fired once, and the sound was festive, like a champagne bottle being opened. For a second the bear stopped, poking its dark nose down into the fur on its chest.

  “Did he hit it?” the young girl asked, and Jobie nodded.

  But it didn’t make any difference. The bear kept coming closer and closer. Meanwhile, the old man had stopped moving; he just stood there, firing his gun again and again: pop! pop! pop! pop! If anyone could have seen the expression on his face they might have been surprised: he was smiling, even as miniature tears pricked from his eyes.

  Finally, the bear’s mouth swung open on its hinges and, as it did, Jobie’s gun went off. He was aiming into the vault of that ridged and moving throat; that was his only hope, to be able to send his bullet through the throat and into the brain, where the bear worked at turning information into slobber. The gun went off again, but as you might have suspected, it was too late. The bear was eating the old man up.

  In many of the tales which we all know, bears ingest human beings whole, making way for the denouement of regurgitation or excision. Jobie grabbed the young girl and held on to her tightly, pressing her face into his chest. The idea was that she shouldn’t see what was happening. But, nonetheless, she could hear the crunching. For years afterwards, that would be the sound she remembered—that and the high-pitched coaxing voice of Bella Tooktasheena, which seemed to drain, out of nothing, directly into her ear.

  “I don’t understand you!” the young girl wanted to scream.

  “Of course you don’t,” the voice replied. “I don’t expect you to.”

  For a single instant the young girl hesitated at that portal beyond which her story did not extend, beyond which the glittering plates of ice stretched themselves to impossible thinness underneath a blue-black sky. She thought she could see her sister, seated rigidly in a wicker chair, combing her long red hair with one hand and reaching out with the other. Some kind of a choice had to be made. Kathleen, the young girl’s sister whispered, and their hands came together, the fingerbones pliant and a little damp, warmed by the pumping of those two odd, isolate hearts.

  “But I don’t know what to do,” the young girl said.

  “There is nothing you can do,” Jobie said.

  High, high above their heads the raven flew, its wings beating against the air—flap! flap!—and, for once, the echo preceded the gesture. At any moment such things can happen. If they did not, it is very likely that the world would have ended long ago.

  The bear picked the old man up—what was left of him—it picked what was left of him up in its long, furry arms, with the curved black claws digging into the small of his back, as if carrying forth from the drawing room a tender young thing who had just fainted, from shock or out of a sense of duty to her sex. The old man’s heels dragged through the snow, leaving a path marked by surprisingly little blood; a path we could follow if we were stupid enough to want to find all of them—the whole repulsive bear family, devoid of little tables and chairs, of candles dripping tallow onto royal nightshirts—if we were so stupid as to want to track them to the place where they strew their leavings, a few hipbones and the heart, having been taught that the human heart is poison, as we have been taught that their livers are poison, across the ice and snow.

  OUT OF THE ICE

  It was snowing as we walked down the road together. I saw snow gathering into pinions, pinions into sleek beating wings: white birds, their whiteness chaste and eyeless, settled down all around us, marking our passage, hemming us in. I walked down Nain’s only road with Jobie Aleeki. The snow obliterated our footprints. We were so shy, Willie, holding hands, and I don’t think that either of us knew whether this gesture was meant to be romantic or consolatory. Perhaps both—perhaps any difference between those two urges is illusory, and this is why the poor, legless soldier falls in love, over and over again, with his nurse. The air was so cold it smelled blue. It was so cold that, with every breath, I expected my body to break apart, releasing a faint thing such as I saw flying out of Jobie’s lips.

  He was escorting me to the rectory belonging to the Reverend Schwenk and his wife, Lotte, conveniently adjacent to the house of God. It was the only two-story dwelling in a town of shacks and prefab boxes; its front windows glowed yellow ahead of us, and thin skins of yellow light lay across the front yard. I thought of the time when I’d peeled back a skin of birchbark from the forest floor and found, under it, the skeleton of a bird with clusters of small white flowers growing up between its ribs. Then I began to shiver, and Jobie put his arm around my shoulders. The lights of the rectory were arranged in the shape of a face, and as we approached the front door, I could hear the sound of a record player. Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, it turned out—the reverend was a fan. Before he knocked, Jobie bent down and kissed my forehead.

  “Why can’t I stay with you?” I asked.

  Jobie shook his head. “Hey, Kathleen,” he said. “Please.”

  “But I want to,” I said. I could feel his hands holding on to my shoulders, the fingers pressing in tightly—the whole weight of his dark head bent towards me. I took a deep breath and blurted it out: “I want to stay with you forever.” I knew, as I said it, that it was a ridiculous thing to say; I realized, as well, that I didn’t even mean it. What I meant was, I wanted to go home. What I meant was, for the first time in my life, I understood the power of hope. And I understood it, Willie, by its absence.

  Then the front door swung open and there was Mrs. Schwenk, the branches of her arms swaying from out of the plaid blanket wool of her bathrobe, a nest of rollers high on top of her head. “Hurry up, child,” she said. “You’re letting all the heat out.”

  Jobie stepped back, his hands moving off from my shoulders and into his pockets. Through the open door I could see t
he dissolving contours of thickly-varnished paneling, the pawed feet of chairs and tables inching towards me across a liver-colored rug. The music was louder now, and two large dogs simultaneously raised their heads—their eyes were golden and frighteningly rational.

  “I’m never going to see you again,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” Mrs. Schwenk said. “You can see him tomorrow. The plane never leaves on schedule, if it leaves at all.” She took hold of my wrist and began pulling me inside.

  “We could write to each other,” I said, looking back over my shoulder. He was so far away; the snow fell faster and faster between us, actual and cold, touching my face, as if to distract me from that secret process wherein the sensory details of those we love withdraw into memory.

  Only a little while earlier, I could tell, the Schwenks had eaten boiled cabbage. “Welcome to the present”—that is the message implicit in the smell of boiled cabbage. It is the message implicit in such furniture as the dark green horsehair sofa on which Mrs. Schwenk urged me to sit, its insistent fibers sticking into me all over my body.

  “He can’t write,” Mrs. Schwenk said, laughing cheerfully, shutting the door and turning off the porch light. “Well, he can’t,” she said, when I turned what I suppose must have been my sorrowful face towards her.

  Lotte Schwenk had been one of the first people I had met that day two months ago, when I dropped from above the clouds straight into the blue eye of the harbor. “I can’t imagine what your parents were thinking of,” she had said to me then. I remember realizing how much she reminded me of the women who used to come to our house from time to time, trying to interest Mama in community-improvement projects. She had the same way of speaking, breezily, out of the corner of her mouth; the same rectangular smile, when dispensing uncalled-for advice.

  “You just sit right there, Kathleen,” she said. “I’m going to fix you a bowl of soup.”

  There were things hidden under the sofa cushions. I found wadded-up tissues—little pink balls—and paperback romance novels, their covers showing beautiful women in cloaks standing alone, as their long hair blew back to point towards the houses in which their fates assembled themselves. Who read these books? I admit, it was easier for me to picture the Reverend Schwenk, with his filamental hair and tenderhearted ways, dabbing with pink tissues at the breaking cloud of his face, than it was to picture the obdurate Lotte similarly affected. I replaced the books and tissues carefully under me and then, like a compulsive eater, I looked around frantically for something to stuff my eyes full of. I was just beginning to discover that if I didn’t, what I would see was the white skin of a neck with a bite taken out of it, a pinkish bowl filling in, little by little, with red. On the table in front of me there was a framed photograph showing about twenty Eskimos in dark uniforms, standing near the dock in summer sunshine, playing band instruments. The tuba, as usual, predominated: I was staring into that yawning orifice, trying to see if I could make out, from the liquid and elongated reflection slipping down the tuba’s throat, the identity of the photographer, when Mrs. Schwenk returned, tray in hand. Such a close call, Willie! The reminders were everywhere, even in my own mouth’s saliva, rising to meet the smell of tomato soup. How often had I eaten tomato soup in the kitchen at home, as the sun came—just at lunchtime—right through the window over the sink, making my spoon glitter? It would heat the ink on the newspaper as Daddy shook out the pages, filling the room with that inky and diligent smell, which mixed with the friendly smell of the soup. I could feel tears burrowing upward from their hiding place underneath my breastbone.

  And I could tell by the way that she stood there, the hot air from a vent in the floor ruffling the surface of her robe—exactly as the fur along the backs of the two dogs stood up whenever I moved around on the sofa—that Mrs. Schwenk was waiting. Just one tear! If I would only let drop one little tear, then she would have me. Then there would be nothing else to do but allow it to unfold, the usual tragedy: the changeling child, amoral and potentially disruptive, would be, once and for all, delivered over into the hands of the childless human woman.

  I was stone; I was ice. The two dogs came over to breathe on me while I ate my soup, and it seemed only fair that as punishment for my coldness I should have to endure the sight of those two wide-open mouths, in each of which the tongue draped across the lower row of teeth. Well, of course, I thought—the dogs were waiting, too.

  Eventually I fell asleep. When I woke up it seemed to me that it was very late: I could hear the murmuring sounds of human voices, the sound of human shoes walking across the kitchen floor, a great groaning yawn which I knew was human only when it did not finish with that wrenched click characteristic of the yawns of dogs. Something was poured down the drain. A light was switched off, and then I squeezed my eyes shut because I heard them walking into the living room; I knew that they were both standing there—the Reverend and Mrs. Schwenk—looking down at me.

  “It’s a wonder she can sleep at all, poor little thing,” the reverend said.

  “Well, while you’re handing out the sympathy,” Mrs. Schwenk said, “don’t forget who’s got to deal with this mess.”

  “Caritas, Lotte, caritas. Look at her. She’s just a child. It isn’t her fault what happened.”

  “I’m glad you can be so certain.” There was a brief moment of silence, during which some changing of position occurred. “The hosta is infested with aphids,” Mrs. Schwenk said. “It’s going to need a good soaking.”

  From its place on the kitchen floor one of the dogs got up, the noise of its toenails disturbingly tiny in comparison with the dog’s actual size. I didn’t think I could keep my eyes closed too much longer. Already the lids were twitching, so that, in narrow and jumpy segments, I was beginning to see things I didn’t want to see: a dark hair sticking, like a scimitar, out of a mole on Lotte Schwenk’s chin; a pink eruption at the nape of the reverend’s neck; Lotte Schwenk’s mouth, out of which she pressed, one after another, bricks of speech; the reverend’s hands grappling in the dark around his wife’s body, as if he had no concept of its dimensions. Oh no, I thought, he’s going to kiss her.

  “The eldest Aleeki was here earlier,” Lotte Schwenk said. “If you ask me, the whole family’s nothing but trouble.”

  “Lotte,” the reverend said.

  Was this my punishment? Was it possible that, if I hadn’t been so busy kissing Jobie Aleeki, I might have been able to help Grandfather? I wondered whether, for the rest of my life, I would be cursed by my proximity to those sexual events in the lives of others which we are, for the most part, happy to know nothing about: the endless boring conversations; the snagged hooks and eyes; the graceless collapse of limbs onto carpet. In this way, I thought, I would be constantly reminded of the foolishness of my choice; I would be reminded that beneath the flashing wings and musical breezes of romance there always lurks a gloomy, dull, and flatulent resignation.

  “The child is awake,” Lotte Schwenk said.

  The reverend reached into his vest pocket. “How about a lemon drop?” he asked.

  Actually, it was only eleven o’clock: as we climbed the stairs to the second floor I heard the hour announced by a cuckoo clock in a far-off part of the house. The upstairs hallway smelled even more strongly than the living room of cabbage, and when Mrs. Schwenk stopped to remove bedding from a linen closet, the odor of camphor sprang loose, making me feel the combined exhilaration and melancholy of summer’s alteration into fall, the woolen clothes removed from their trunks, making your eyes water if you got too close.

  After Reverend Schwenk disappeared into a large square room—his study—at the front of the house, Mrs. Schwenk led me to a tiny bedroom at the farthest end of the hall. The bed was white metal, like in a hospital, and although I offered to help make it up, she waved me away. I had to stand there, perfectly still, watching her work. A picture of Jesus hung over a washstand and his hands were raised as if he’d just washed them in the basin and was waiting for the scrub nurse to h
elp him put his gloves on. Mrs. Schwenk turned back the top sheet in a neat white V and then set a pile of dark-colored blankets at the foot of the bed. “Here,” she said, handing me a flannel nightgown. I understood, by the way she discreetly wandered over to scrape a little hole in the frost on the window and to peek out through it, that I was meant to put on the gown, then and there. If ever a woman had eyes in the back of her head, this was she.

  “Charlie McPhillips will be coming for you after breakfast tomorrow,” Mrs. Schwenk said. She turned around at the precise moment the gown slipped into place on my shoulders, just as a shiver ran up my spine and burst through the top of my head like a fountain—it had occurred to me that Mrs. Schwenk’s body had been, before mine, naked under this same tent of flannel. “The Mountie,” she explained. “He’s going to take you home.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Mrs. Schwenk held my hand and I was shocked to feel how warm and soft her fingers were. “Kneel down with me, Kathleen,” she said. “Let us pray together for the immortal soul of your grandfather.”

  The tone of her voice implied that we had a big job ahead of us. I was fourteen years old, Willie, and not about to argue. Mrs. Schwenk explained to me that there were irregularities in this situation. She had read, in a religious tract, that in the event of atomic war a person at ground zero would lose not only his body but also his soul. Was this true, she wondered, in cases involving digestion? Perhaps, she speculated, lacing her fingers together, getting ready, this might explain our disgust with cannibalism. The Eskimos, of course, would say that Grandfather’s soul was in the bear. She made a face, but I thought it was an optimistic approach to an otherwise apparently meaningless event. I was still in shock, Willie.

  “Our Lord Jesus in heaven,” Mrs. Schwenk said, “listen to the voices of two sinners raised in supplication. We are as but the poorest lambs of your fold. Have mercy on us. Have mercy on us—”