All the Voices Cry (4 page)

Afterwards, Brian walked on into the woods a few paces in order to stretch his legs. He kept his eyes on the ground in case there was treasure to be discovered. Leaves of dogtooth violet
slanted in fat green stitches across the leaf mould. Brian had always envied the retired electricians of Great Britain, swinging their metal detectors over the sodden furrows, drawn to the unmistakable edge of metal rising out of the dull clods. Nose guards, helmets, pommels, cinctures: the biting beast and its winking garnet eye; words that spoke of gold warmed by a good grip had always excited him.

He stopped before a pool of snow water. An object lay at the bottom of it. It was a metal disk, dull and serrated: a winch, a gear, cog-like. It could have been Champlain's Astrolabe, only that had already been found.

Astrolabe sounded like one of the drugs that Cynthia had been prescribed for depression. Cynthia's psychotherapist had been as dedicated to ending Brian's marriage as any divorce lawyer. As it turned out, Brian was the one with the problem, and Cynthia just needed a boyfriend.

After she got herself into therapy, but before she reduced Brian to driving a car without cupholders, Cynthia had discovered that Brian was the reason why their son Kelvin had buried himself in the basement, draping his shoulders with the pixilated garments of the medieval role player. With the blessing of her therapist, Cynthia had called Brian immature: until he took control of his own life he could not be a proper father for Kelvin, or, by happy coincidence, a proper partner for Cynthia. Brian had never met Cynthia's therapist. He had a thing or two he would like to say to her.

Brian prodded at the metal disk with his foot. It was junk. Champlain's Astrolabe, now that had been a true treasure.
Brian would have liked to have been the boy who found it, but at least he had not been the man who dropped it. Poor Champlain, vertiginous with anxiety as the pole star came up and he found himself in a land whose known reach extended no further than the length of his bug-bitten arms. The feeling of visceral dropping away would be as bad as misplacing your keys in the forest, or locking them inside the – and here Brian had a moment of clarity – locking them inside the car in the middle of Quebec.

Brian stood very still, trying to think what to do. He looked around him, as if the very trees were about to start making incomprehensible sounds.

What did Champlain do after he lost his astrolabe? He walked on into the unknown. Brian walked on. He came to the edge of a cleared field and saw ahead of him a tumulus-shaped hill topped by a Quonset hut, its front end ringed in lights. A large billboard dominated the corner of the field.
Danseuses 7 Jours
. Brian's French was improving.

He set out across the field towards the building, his boots sinking into the ridges between the cold stubble of last year's corn stalks. Clods of earth attached themselves to the soles of his boots until he felt weighed down like a giant. With a bit of luck
Danseuses 7 Jours
might also mean women dancing at eleven o'clock in the morning.

He crossed the gravel parking lot, pushed open the metal door under the lights and ducked as a sparrow came flying out. He wondered what other problems the building had apart from animal infestation. A cleverly curved wall of mirrors ran
down one side. In front of the mirrors were a couple of empty risers and three vacant aluminum poles. The bar was at the far end of the room, beyond the high tables and a jukebox that glowed in a rainbow of light. Brian peered into the dim distance where a dash of red moved rhythmically near the bar. Could it be the glimmer of light on a ruby tassel?
How little I really know about Quebec,
he thought.
Gallic societies are so much more generous than Anglo-Saxon ones, when it comes to tassels.

No tassels. Just a woman wearing the longest red and black plaid overshirt that Brian had ever seen. She was mopping the floor with sullen strokes. Her eyebrows met head to head like embattled tadpoles, squaring off at each other whenever she frowned over the tanned arrow of her nose. Her ears and nostrils glimmered with pierced gold. Every so often she stopped and sucked in her cheeks, as if life had given her a drink with a disagreeable taste, to be taken through a straw at regular intervals.

Brian took his boots off to show his goodwill towards the woman with the mop. He put his hands up in a gesture of submission while he walked in slowly, saying “anglaisie anglaisie.” All he wanted was a drink and a chance to use the phone, although the thought occurred to him that mopping might be part of her routine.

She must have read his thoughts, for she pulled him half a pitcher of Rickard's, poured the first glass and brought it over to the table. Brian was glad for such generous, speechless understanding. Under the plaid thing she must surely be
narrow-waisted, full-breasted. What did Champlain do when he met strange women? He addressed them cheerfully.

“Here's to the heroes,” said Brian, waving his glass at a newly framed photograph of Les Canadiens holding aloft the Stanley Cup. The woman turned away unsmiling and began spraying the counter out of a squeeze bottle.

Brian watched her, entranced. Perhaps the problem with Kelvin was that he had yet to find a girlfriend. What he needed was a woman whose touch shocked him, whose presence confused his thought processes, who rendered his entire body as brilliantly lit as a landing strip. Brian had felt that way about Cynthia, at the beginning. Once he had narrowly escaped a collision between his bike and a car. At the time he had been thinking about the way Cynthia's eyelashes cast shadows on her cheeks.

Maybe a brush with mortality was what Kelvin needed. Not the serious kind of brush that would leave you armless or tin-faced or worse, but the positive kind of cathartic full-length body shiver that made you relieved to be alive; eager to find out what was next. Initiation. Was that what it was about? Scarification rituals, raiding parties, controlled bloodletting and long walkabouts in cracked dry lands. Surely every culture had a way of galvanizing teenaged slothfulness into energetic adulthood? Brian had only to think of the Canadian way. He considered himself to have had his own brush with mortality at eighteen, when he'd worked a summer for his grandfather, a lumber-camp foreman in the age of the mechanized saw. Arguing and chain-smoking they had driven for hours into
northern Ontario until the cratered bush road finally brought them to a settlement of Quonset huts in a clearing. There a tribe of rank sweaty bears with chainsaws drove themselves day and night in the single-minded testosterone-fuelled ecstasy of a back-country lumber camp in full swing.

A blaze had broken out in an adjacent sector and Brian remembered his entire body shaking as he stood mesmerized by the sight of crown fire leaping from tree to tree across the crest of the hill, roaring like a locomotive on the move. They had made a run for it in the truck, and days later Cynthia, still in her gin-fizz waitressing days, had wrapped her long arms around him when she heard the story, and had murmured something into the still smoky shirt (he had not washed it) and he had said,
what?
She had repeated the words, and he still had not understood, but he had pretended to. That had been the beginning of their relationship.

Yes, a good galvanizing brush with death, that was what Kelvin needed. Not role-playing HriÞkringle the Bard of the Basement; not altercations with the pizza delivery man. But wait, hadn't there been a school friend of Kelvin's who had been sent home in a box from one of those places where you are thirsty all day? Now that Brian thought about it, that kind of thing could throw you off balance. Somalia or the Sudan? Cynthia would know. It was a pity that they were not talking.

Obviously the woman behind the bar was not going to do anything but clean. Brian downed the last of the beer and, as he felt for his wallet, recalled tucking it under the floor mat of the car.

He looked at the mopping woman, raising his open hands in a multilingual apologetic and exasperated shrug. Then he opened up his jacket and pointed at the empty space where the wallet ought to be. Surely she would understand that. He was just bringing his hand up into the gesture of an imaginary telephone and was considering how to mime that he would be back to pay after the automobile association had unlocked the car, when a man built like a fire hydrant emerged from the shadows, head butted him off his stool, shoved him back towards the door, grabbed him by the arm and tossed him out into the parking lot.

Life flashing before your eyes and all that: there's not as much time as you might think when you are being flung through the air. In Brian's case all he experienced was a brief sensation of passing through a cool column of air followed by the impression that the gravel reached up and pulled him down, blasting its sharp points into his shoulder. All he managed to think was:
and now my head goes down,
which it did, hard.

For some minutes Brian found himself unwilling to leave the horizontal world where the vertical mottled stripe of the parking lot softened into bulging green hillocks and where the rain apparently fell upwards like bubbles in an aquarium. Meanwhile the last battle of the cosmos had come upon him. Giants were uprooting burning trees out of his left temple and tossing them into a frazzled prism that had appeared in his right eye.

He flinched and rolled as his boot struck him in the chest. He grabbed it, and rolled over to avoid the other boot, which
did not follow. Finally he sat up, rubbing his shoulder and the side of his face. It felt as if his arm had been wrenched out of its socket.

What had Brian been thinking about? That Kelvin needed a brush with death. Maybe so.

“But not my death,” he said in a low croak, breaking into a hunch-backed run, feeling strangely exhilarated by the lacerating bite of the gravel through the thinning soles of his socks.

I
HATE TO ADMIT IT, but I missed the turnoff. So many trees came down in last summer's storm that I may have mistaken the markers. The landscape looks different when it's all humps and mounds and puffed out sails of snow. A person lost in the woods walks in a curve, so perhaps I will return to the cabin, eventually.

Otto would never have cut back in a loop through the woods. He would have persevered in a straight line across the lake, headlong into the howling wind, even if he'd had to crawl, frosted to the ear tips.
Freya, Freya, don't be a darlink idiot.
Czech gave his English a glinting edge that could cut my polite Canadian vowels to shreds in an argument.

It has been eight years now since Otto's death and I often catch myself acting without consulting him. The first mechanical movements are long past, when I begrudged my own body's instinct to continue breathing. Indoor plants have come and gone. I have bought a bicycle. All the life-sustaining illusions about the importance of winter hats and true love have begun to reassert themselves. But after thirty years together it is not surprising that I should still be prone to phantom conversations. The mind twitches, remembering.

It is a difficult thing, to know when one is ready to lay aside the cloak of widow's weeds, and to seek a new mate, a lover, or perhaps to begin with, someone to stand beside at parties. This idea of setting out to find someone new, for example. Otto would have considered it predatory, the kind of thing the witchy Baba Yaga side of me would do. Whenever Baba Yaga made an appearance—usually when I got angry about the spread of zebra mussels and the wicked passage of purple loosestrife through the waterways—Otto would disappear outside to the woodpile, take up his axe and chop, leaving Baba Yaga to fume and clank about in the kitchen.

These days, Baba Yaga is feeling quite proactive. She has wheel-clamped the chicken foot that holds up her house. She does not want potential suitors to be nauseated by intemperate spinning. In the evenings she stands before the mirror speaking nicely to the imaginary princes who have arrived at her door clutching bouquets of blue roses.
Oh but how lovely. Let me just get a vase.
She notices a fragment of squirrel flesh caught in her tooth, hurries off to find a toothpick.

Oh, but I have accepted that Otto is not here. Like Baba Yaga's princes, he is also imaginary, even though I can see him walking beside me in his heavy plaid coat. How many times did I sew the buttons back onto that coat? Baba Yaga and I have a right to regenerate our lopped off limbs. Yes we do.

This walking is such work. My snowshoes are failing me. Each step is a voyage downwards into the icy shadows that swallow me up to mid-thigh. Pushing against the sucking softness, I heft my foot out and make a tiny moonstep before
falling headlong into the drift. When I stop I hear my heart beating and the plump sound of snow pushed out of the trees by passing gusts of wind. There is snow in my eyelashes and up my sleeves. Sweat makes its way between my breasts in silver runnels. This is as juicy, as marinated, and as edible as I get.

What if a curious accident were to befall me? What if a bear, awake with spring hunger pains, should shamble out of the woods? There is a book about a woman who takes a bear for a lover, isn't there? Baba Yaga could take the bear home to dine on blueberry cobbler and salmon pie. Better that than a quick clobber and the hot fang of death.

Is a bear in the bed better than two lovers separated by death? I don't know, but I would not mind finding out. The next time I find myself seated at the library computer terminals beside the man in Red Suspenders, I will ask him out for coffee. And I will smile a lot, for despite the glitter of platinum in my back teeth, the smile on the outside is still good. And no matter what Red Suspenders does, no matter if he tells me about online tax calculations or compares long distance phone plans, Baba Yaga will say,
why yes, do tell me more.

A deer has just come out of the woods. Dainty best describes the pattern of spots on her sides, like icing sugar on a coffee cake, and the tender white flame of a tail.
Let nature lead you, Freya.
My father used to say that. He was a wise man, a woodsman, and well read. He kept a notebook filled with his favourite Norse sayings, like
the forest is the best teacher for a boy.
So, following Papa's advice, and ignoring Otto's, I will follow the deer's tracks. She has been running high on the
banks beside the road where the purple brusilla grows in the summertime, and I have been struggling along in the ruts. But now I know where I am. I have arrived at the artists' colony.