Labrador Read online

  The prayer went on and on in this vein, establishing relationship and, before we got to the part about Grandfather, I fell asleep.

  The next day was terribly cold, although windless and clear. While I stood on the dock, watching the plane fill in more and more of the colorless air in front of me with its red shape—even while I watched the dark body of Jobie Aleeki approaching me—it was as if nothing moved. The Mountie consulted a piece of paper in his gloved hand.

  “We’ll fly to Goose Bay,” he told me, “and if the weather holds we’ll catch the plane to Montreal at one o’clock.”

  I’m going home, I thought. I could see Bella Tooktasheena emerging, momentarily, from the doorway of her shack; it was like seeing the naked body of a turtle as it slid out from its shell. She stood with her arms folded across her chest, staring at the plane as it taxied down the runway—that flat stretch of ground at the end of the town where, on nice afternoons, the young mothers would drive their babies around and around on the backs of their snowmobiles, shouting gossip at each other over the noise of the engines.

  “Okay,” the Mountie said, “let’s get going.” He picked up my pack and began walking away from me, kicking lumps of snow into powder with the toes of his high, polished boots. “Come on,” he said.

  But the only part of me capable of motion was my heart, red and polished as the plane, tiny and blunt-nosed, its attempts at flight constantly thwarted, as if there was nothing inside my body so vast as a soul. I felt Jobie’s arms closing around me; he hugged me hard and I let out a little oof!—a little puff of air that he swallowed right up.

  “You be careful, Kathleen,” he said.

  “I will,” I said. I could see every single hair growing from out of his head, even the individual hairs of his brows and lashes. If there had been time, I would have been able to count them; I knew that. And then the future appeared to me in the way the future sometimes does, washed clean of desire, repetitive and perfunctory. I saw myself in the kitchen at home, writing in my spiral notebook, my arm reaching out at regular intervals to pluck from the waxed-paper-encased tower in front of me one saltine after another. Jobie’s lips tasted like salt. Would I remember that? My own lower lip was chapped and split open in the middle: the kiss stung. “But I’ll come back someday,” I said. “I promise.”

  Of course, I never did. For a while I wrote letters—long letters filled with promises and adjectives—and then, finally, because I received no replies, I gave up. I suppose Mrs. Schwenk was correct: Jobie didn’t know how to write. In this way he became a character in the story of my life—graceful and silent, requiring no revision.

  The Mountie rented a car in Montreal; the only time I saw him smile during that whole trip was when he took the keys from the woman behind the yellow counter and slipped them into his coat pocket. He was a big man, neck-less, with a wide flat head, and he looked so much like a wooden clothespin that it surprised me whenever he bent to sit. “Miss Mowbrey,” he called me, his manner excessively polite, so that it was impossible to tell whether he was being ironic or sincere.

  It was a long drive from Montreal to Conway, down along the dangerous highways where we stopped, regularly, to be directed to windowless washrooms by attendants with their names scrolled over their hearts in red. My stomach was upset. I would race to unlatch those stiff locks while the Mountie stood beside the shining green Buick, smoking a cigarette. To the north, pieces of trash were moved by the wind along the concrete; farther south, the sun dropped down behind fir trees. Now in the houses that we passed I knew there were ordinary families eating dinner; mothers, and fathers, and children seated around tables, handing bowls heaped with mashed potatoes to one another. We rode in silence, moving onto increasingly smaller roads, our passage marked by the ticking of the turn signal. In Conway, the Mountie stopped to buy cigarettes, and I sat catching my breath, as if I’d been running every inch of the way from Labrador.

  A young woman walked by the car and then stopped, turned around and came back to tap on the window. I rolled it down and there was her face, so close to mine that I could smell spices in her open mouth; I could see tiny black dots along her cheek where the eyeliner had flaked off. She pointed towards the license plate. “My brother lives in Quebec,” she said. “In Three Rivers?”

  The early explorers, after months on the open sea, claimed to be able to smell approaching land; then the shore birds would hang in the air over their boats, swooping to grab at garbage—later the dim, round hills would appear. The woman waited expectantly, and I thought, nervously, that what I was smelling was the first whiff of you, Willie, queer and exotic. I had no idea how close to you I actually was.

  “I live outside of Conway,” I said.

  “His name’s Warren,” the woman said. “Warren Posner? He owns a topless joint in Three Rivers. The Kit Kat?”

  I smiled and shrugged, but when I began to roll the window back up, the woman stuck her hand—the fingernails painted dark red—on top of the glass and wouldn’t let go. “Hey!” she said. “What’s your rush?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I don’t know your brother.”

  “That’s no excuse for rudeness.” Abruptly she let go of the window and backed off; she was still standing there, apparently without a car, when we drove away several minutes later. I could see her in the blue light cast by the windows of the supermarket, her face angry and dramatic, her mouth opening and closing, her arms raised and gyrating, as if she was hurling stones.

  “Who’s your friend?” asked the Mountie.

  This was January; snow was piled all along our driveway, cut off cleanly at the edges by the plow. I’d almost forgotten how many times the driveway curved through the trees before coming out, finally, into the open. January: the world faced away from the brightly-lit rooms in which a father might bend down to kiss his youngest daughter’s cheek under the mistletoe. This was the time of year when things were hoarded and forgotten. I felt myself slipping down, lower and lower, onto the seat of the Buick; I felt myself slipping into a little pouch—a receptacle with a slit for an opening, such as you might find in the satin lining of a father’s dress jacket, where an old ticket stub, pale blue and rubbed to illegibility and softness, had coexisted since the dawn of time with a foreign coin of mysterious denomination.

  The Mountie slowed the car, staring ahead, and I saw, for the first time, his gaze tighten, as if drawn on purse strings—he was looking at our house, and I wondered what it looked like to him. Did the stone pillars holding the porch roof aloft impress him with their weight, or could he see the delicate roots of creeper digging in, loosening the mortar? Could he hear that constant powdering, or the moaning sound as thousands of shingles were pried up by fingers of ice? As we approached it in the dark, the house looked as it must have looked years earlier: big and important, a place where people who had money lived. A shape hurried from window to window, moving towards the back door. Was it Mama? The porch light switched on, revealing her body of twigs and froth—I realized that I didn’t want the Mountie to come inside; I didn’t want a stranger to watch love’s failures flying around our rooms like a shower of needles and pins.

  “Sweetheart!” Mama said. “Oh, let me look at you!”

  But then she grabbed me and hugged me tight, so that it wasn’t me she was looking at but the night behind me, filled with its winds and perilous stars—with saints and crackpots and criminals, all of those people who, in their dark clothing, consumed God’s attention.

  “We’ve been so worried about you,” Mama said.

  The Mountie edged past the clot in the doorway that was me and Mama, and I could hear him setting things down on the kitchen floor.

  “Mom, I’m cold,” I said.

  “Of course you are, darling.”

  I felt her fingers reluctantly slipping away. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a wire plant hanger padded with sphagnum moss swinging from the porch eaves. “I love you, Mama,” I said, as we walked inside. Just for a secon
d I could smell almonds—the hand lotion she had used ever since we were little children, Willie—and I thought my heart would break open then and there, a tight bud exploding into petals.

  The Mountie stood near the refrigerator, his hand halfway to his mouth. Was he hiding something? Or was he succumbing to the process of petrifaction, which appeared general? The 1956 calendar, with its picture of a very large horse-drawn sleigh heading for a very small opening in a covered bridge, still hung where I remembered over the plate rail; a ball of gray yarn connected by a strand to an incomplete gray sleeve cast onto a knitting needle, reaching across the table—was it possible that this was the same sleeve Mama’d been knitting three months ago? Was it possible that when Daddy appeared I would notice that one of his arms was a wing, that he’d been unassisted by his wife in making the transformation from animal to human?

  “My baby,” Mama said. “My poor baby.”

  “I’m all right,” I said. “Really.”

  “But you’re thin as a rail.” She lifted her hand and touched my face. “This world is a mess,” she said. “Nothing makes sense anymore.” Wearily she yanked open the refrigerator door, on which someone had taped the postcards I’d sent back from Labrador—the mission buildings of Hebron, enormous and fanciful as dressage stables; a herd of caribou browsing on lichen; a bright yellow arctic poppy cupping a clear drop of water. She took out a jar of mayonnaise and held it up. “Your nana used to make mayonnaise,” she said. “Every afternoon at four-thirty we’d have tea, with cucumber sandwiches. She’d salt the cucumbers first, to draw out the moisture. You and Willie were just little things then. But Willie had to have her tea black, like a grown-up.”

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” I said. And I was, even though I didn’t know what for.

  “But she wouldn’t eat the sandwiches,” Mama said, sniffling. “She had this idea that the seeds would grow in her stomach. Where did she ever get an idea like that?”

  I watched the Mountie watching Mama. His judgment is so harsh, I thought; her narrow, speckled hands shook as she sliced meat loaf.

  “Jojo Melnicoff,” I said, and Mama nodded.

  “He’s married now, you know. To some girl he met at Hampton Beach.” She turned to the Mountie. “You’ll have to forgive me,” she said, “for not fixing you a proper supper. These last few days—”

  “No need to apologize,” the Mountie said, although I suspected that he didn’t forgive any of us for anything. He leaned back against the counter on his elbows, his hair lapping down over his forehead in one thick, russet-colored leaf.

  “Sweetheart,” Mama said, “there’s something you should know. Your sister’s here.”

  “Willie?” In the place where the two halves of my rib cage almost met two claws dipped in and pressed down hard. “Where is she?” I asked.

  The Mountie was staring intently upward at the tin ceiling. Even though he was standing right there in the room with us, the impression he gave was of an eavesdropper.

  “In the west room,” Mama said, and then, when I dropped my fork onto my plate and began walking towards the door—wildly drawn in your direction, as if I were beating my way through alder swales at night, drawn by a faraway pinprick of fire—she stuck out her arm and I caught there. “She hasn’t been very well,” Mama said. “She’s—” And then she paused, confused. “Kitty, she’s cut off all her beautiful hair. How could she? How could she go and do a thing like that?”

  I found you sitting tucked into the corner of the sofa, your feet bare and side by side on the mossy cushion, your head tipped back, revealing a white channel of skin from throat to neck, the skin rippling and liquid as you swallowed. You were asleep. I stood in the doorway, looking in, trying to make out the details of you, but the room was dark. A fire had burned down to coals in the fireplace, assigning to objects that dark glow that seems to come from the objects themselves, from that secret place inside objects where stored-up heat is transformed into light. You were wearing a pale pink bathrobe and, if possible, you were more beautiful than ever: your hair clung in a cap of goldish-red feathers to your skull; your skin was the thinnest wash of moonlight on snow, the snow across which the rabbit leaps at the sound of approaching footsteps.

  I walked into the room cautiously. I didn’t want to wake you up. So long as you were asleep, I thought, you were mine, as if I were the one asleep, and you were the dream sister, the one whose love was uncomplicated and durable, bending down to wake me with a kiss. I tiptoed across the rug, being careful not to step on the sheets of newspaper scattered randomly around, nor to set them rustling with my body’s light breezes. You made a little noise in the back of your throat, like a stone dropping into water. Why had I ever thought that I’d be happier far away from you?

  In the blackest corner of the room something stood up, expelling breath. I remained perfectly still, willing whatever it was to go away. Why was it that every time I caught a glimpse of happiness something had to rise up, unbidden, casting a length of shadow across the landscape? In this case it was Daddy, tall and drowsy; he came to stand in front of me, holding an empty highball glass in one hand. His hair was pressed flat against one side of his head, springing outwards little by little as I watched; lit from beneath, his face was anything but nice-looking, like Godpapa Drosselemeyer’s in the Nutcracker, on the verge of calling forth infernal life from toys.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said shyly, and he continued to stand there, shy and frightening, like a boy my own age, trying to figure out whether or not to ask me to dance.

  “Kathleen,” he said, “stringbean.” And holding the glass aloft and to one side, he gave me a short, fierce hug.

  “Mama said Willie’s been sick,” I whispered.

  “You might say that,” he said, but it was obvious he didn’t want to elaborate. “What’s important to me is that you’re home in one piece. If we’d only known—” He looked at me and then over at his empty glass. “Don’t go away,” he said, “I’ll be right back.”

  I watched as he wandered off towards the kitchen, blowing tuneless notes from his mouth—the sound that he always made when on the trail of alcohol, as if to make his obsession appear casual. What had I expected? Wreaths on the doors, everyone garbed in black, weeping inconsolably into handkerchiefs? I sat down opposite you in one of the wing chairs and waited.

  It took a long time: the coals got cold, unlocking into ash; then the moonlight from outdoors entered the room, like the water that seeps out of rocks, encasing the tables and chairs in glass. At some point Daddy returned to tell me that it was very late, that Mama had made up the bed in the spare room for the Mountie—whom he referred to irritably as Sergeant Preston—and that he thought it was time for all of us to get some sleep. “It’s been a long day,” he said, but I shook my head.

  “I’m just going to sit here a while,” I told him. I was wondering what, exactly, was a long day?

  There was something restless, like intelligence, circling the room. From moment to moment an object or a face would swell up into prominence and shine: the bright ovals of your fingernails clasped across your stomach; Daddy’s glass, from the bottom of which bubbles rose in a string, as if the glass contained something alive; the quick, flat ticking of the clock. When Daddy bent down to kiss me good night, a yellow pencil fell from his breast pocket, landing in my lap. He obviously didn’t trust himself to remove it.

  “Don’t stay up too late,” he said, and then he was gone.

  Still, I didn’t wake you. You moved around a little and your robe fell open, revealing a nightgown thin and grayish as newsprint, with a knob or a paw of the stuff lodged between your breasts. I could see your nipples—dot dot—and, when you raised one arm to rest it behind your head, I could see the tuft of red hair under your armpit, which I understood to be evidence of your strange new life in Philadelphia. Aside from the fact that you slept so soundly, I couldn’t make out any signs of illness on your body. Your breathing was regular; I moved closer to peer at the blue vein of your temp
le, through which the blood appeared to be moving; you smelled sweet, like melon—like a slice of melon sprinkled with a little bit of salt.

  “Willie,” I whispered. “Hey, Willie!”

  And then, like two wings, your eyelids lifted, and there was the flight of your vision rising to meet my face.

  “Oh, Kitty,” you said. “Thank God. I was beginning to think I’d never see you again.” Your arms floated upwards, white and soft from out of the pink sleeves of your robe, and the next thing I knew we were hanging on to each other on the sofa, hanging on so tight that I could feel the sharp points of your bones, the mysterious clusters of bony tissue under the soft flesh of your breasts.

  “I missed you,” I said.

  “Me, too,” you said.

  Do you remember? My glasses fell off and one of the earpieces broke, so that for days afterwards I walked around looking lopsided and vaguely threatening, like the man with the American flag pinned to his lapel, the one who used to accost us on the streets of Conway with his stories of how he had been cheated by the patent office. But, for now, the effect of my glasses falling was to turn the whole room into a blue and shifty aquarium, where the only thing I could see was you, your face swimming back a short distance from my own.

  “You look so pretty,” you said. “One of these days you should get contacts.” You ran your hand over my forehead, smoothing the bangs away from my eyes. “It’s a perfect heart-shaped face,” you said. “If I had a widow’s peak like that, I’d make sure everyone could see it.”

  I ducked my head down, so that the bangs fell back into place. “I hate it,” I said. “It makes me look like a raccoon.”

  “Oh, Kitty,” you said, and you smiled your off-center little smile. A door slammed shut upstairs, making the walls around us come to life in an internal drizzle of plaster dust; I could hear the crystal droplets of the wall sconces in the dining room softly chime; in the cellar the furnace expelled a single loud houf! “No one’s told me,” you said, “what happened. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”