Come Back (26 page)

Monday September 16

Worked, managed one lit class, students silent. TC came to office, PhD student, talked about death of her baby—she’s all alone. p.m. went with Yo looked at a silver caravan, almost made a deal. Dave left work, came to U, we walked bush trail down, sat on edge of NSask, watched water. Dave said: About time for the ashes. We’re all exhausted.
Three areas of G’s life: images/music/words. And all the love he gave and got—nothing enough to hold him   kept him less than empty

Tuesday September 17

Boxes of letters, cards, more letters in mail, at home and U. So easy to open, such good people, good     Got pickup regist. from RCMP and traded it + loan from bank for caravan     Evening with Miriam and Leo   wedding impossible this weekend but nothing will ever change, why wait? So next week Sat. 28. Mir looks pale as a spirit / talked into morning     told/retold all we all saw but didn’t see, why couldn’t—had we?

(3 days blank)

Saturday September 21

Wedding/Mir & Leo   
NO

To Aspen Creek     new caravan drives silent as a ghost yellow fall leaves falling in small rain   walked woods, dug up potatoes, carrots by myself. The everlasting life of relentless earth forever there. Got pickup bedding from town RCMP—very bad (both) that evening / all boxes, furniture stacked in home garage now, all his “stuff” he collected, made, loved

Sunday September 22

(blank)

Monday September 23

Dreadful day       a bit of work routine

(4 days blank)

Saturday September 28 across Sunday September 29

A.m. arrivals, p.m.
Wedding at Aspen Creek
lovely, in semi-circles of (funeral) friends, lovely music, loving words. All poplars golden now in brilliant sunlight. Miriam’s ethereal beauty     Leo’s Latino band music so lifting   heartbeat   ceremony (Herbert has to do it all, life, death) and pictures and eating. Gabe could have enjoyed some of it. Bits of laughter     sudden hidden weeping

Words crammed together, or blank gaps. 1985 endured. But photocopies do end.

Abruptly Hal’s overwhelming basement concentration split, exhaustion slugged him. He sagged among the boxes, the pages fell, but he found himself still clutching Gabriel’s black-taped blue Bible and his hands opened it instinctively, his mother said the Bible always has a verse gift from God—and in the middle you’re sure to hit either Isaiah or Jeremiah—there it was, Lamentations 3—with two verses on facing pages underlined so heavily not even his burning eyes could miss them:

O yeah.

And again:

Judge, O judge … always the God Almighty judge.

And then, in mercy, the indelible prayer of his childhood came to him, singing on the memory of sweet Yo’s midnight piano:

S
unrise burned in the slats of his living room windows. Staggering a little Hal reached his front door, twisted the bolt lock and pulled the door open: the
Edmonton Journal
lay as usual on the doormat and, holding onto the door grip, he stooped carefully—a khaki parka hood beside the newspaper. And a human body. Stretched out the length of the porch to the edge of the steps; on its left side, knees slightly bent and booted feet—a hole worn open in one toe—boots stacked neatly right on left. No head visible, hood pulled over tight, fur edge worn to fruzz and khaki gleaming with grime, sleeves crumpled empty—no arms?—they bulged the parka at the stomach. Was he breathing?

Never before. Not in twenty-three years.

The body moved. Twisted over onto its back and the jean legs kicked out, the hood opened to half a bristly face: coarse hair, black but trimmed, and tan skin, a thin bent nose with its tip still hidden in stubby fur. The eye was shut. A car swished by on the street; the sunlight was bright as ice on the strip of skin between parka and jeans, the narrow track of hair above the navel.

Hal lifted the newspaper and closed the door softly; turned the bolt. The house hummed with freshness, warmth. Never before.

His night on the basement floor dazed him, his body as saturated as aching stone. What is to be done?

He dropped the paper on the couch and swayed across the room between furniture, grabbed for the railing to hoist himself up the stairs, steady, swing the right arm in rhythm. Inside the second floor closet, below the bedding shelves he found the box, and inside it the Hudson’s Bay point blanket Gabriel had bought the first winter he worked and often slept alone in the Aspen Creek cabin. Canadian boreal forest, he said, you sleep under HBC wool. Later, Yo could not let it go. Finally she and Hal slept together under it every winter, until her heels grew too tender for its weight: the full four-point blanket, white with four broad stripes of indigo, yellow, red, green, queen size thick and heavy. Brought from England to trade for fur since 1799. He felt the wool against his bristly face as he walked step by careful step back down into the living room; for a moment he could hug this comfort tight.

The weight Plains Cree Chief Big Bear felt hanging over his body when they forced him to sit on a stool with his ankles chained, surrounded him with four policemen and took his picture. Prince Albert, North-West Territories: 491 river miles down the North Saskatchewan from Edmonton. July 4, 1885.

He unlocked the front door again and pulled it open.

The man lay breathing in the crisp, ironic sunlight. His midriff still bare. Hal spread the heavy blanket gently over
him, carefully covered his boots. The point blanket draping Big Bear had only one stripe. What colour had it been? The man’s legs twitched, but his eye did not open.

Here’s the archives’ photo, Gabe said. Red for sure.

That afternoon Hal and Owl hunted the Strathcona, Mill Creek and Cloverdale banks of the North Saskatchewan River valley. All the places Owl knew, and some they were told about by people they met, and some they discovered together. They began with the high arch of stones layered on the ground beneath the concrete Saskatchewan Drive bridge across 106A Street ravine. The stones were too massive to move by hand, but they found shapes among them where people had nested high up beneath the roadbed, behind the concrete arches, crumpled cardboard in cradles of rocks as it seemed levered into hollows for human shapes to curl or stretch out. Also discarded grocery carts, knapsacks and torn garbage bags and bright ripped polyester jackets, gnawed rib and chicken bones. It was possible a couple, or a tiny colony, of people had lived there dry and close under the ceaseless traffic before winter, though not yet after.

Hal was breathing hard, all this walking, climbing, scrambling through snow patches with the air snipping cold in his nostrils. Such a beautiful spring day; so empty. A winding strip of boreal forest through the centre of his city; naked of any leaf. He had walked the manicured park paths so often, but this wildness, he realized, he had never truly seen; living high on the riverbanks, he had always, simply, looked over it.

A long valley ridge of snowy spruce and wind-shattered brush; farther below them they could see the disintegrating gape of Queen Elizabeth Pool through masses of bare trees standing, trees leaning and smashed against each other. And suddenly, on the ridge, they came upon a grey plastic mound. A valley resident lay inside between layers of canvas and sleeping bags and blankets, grizzlied and alert, a pot steamed on the three-stone firepit just inside his shelter. He never lived under bridges, he said, snow’s nothing you gotta stay clear of that, too much noise under streets, bridges shiver in traffic you can’t sleep, sleep is the last thing and the best thing and only thing you got, you feel them bridges sing at night from cars running them all day long, stay away from bridges. Okay, orange. Why should he tell them anything anyway?

Owl said mildly, “Because we’re looking.”

“So look. It’s no shit to me.”

“Hiy hiy, keyam.”

Walking the narrow track of melting snow in the draw below the ridge, Hal had not recognized a possible human shelter among the grey brush. Only if you knew what you were looking at, like Owl.

They climbed up stairs to 99th Street and ordered coffee in a shop they had never entered together. They rested at a table along the front window. On the sidewalk outside was the usual city garbage can, and a broad-shouldered man in a thin blue jacket bent there, looking into it. He reached far down, his left hand came up with a paper cup, his body straightened, he tilted his head back and poured the contents into his mouth. Hal could see his bristly
Adam’s apple move. The man dropped the cup back into the can, but in the same motion bent down even farther, and after a moment his hand came up holding a half-eaten apple. No, Hal thought, not—the gnawed edges of the apple were rank brown. The man’s right hand took the apple between its thumb and forefinger, in his left hand a knife appeared, a long blade flicked and he began to chip away brown bits, they fell into the gaping can, the man turning the apple and paying no attention to the pedestrians staring at his quick skill. When the apple was trimmed to white, he lifted it to his mouth and began to eat, bite by thoughtful bite. He ate it down to the thinnest core.

Through the window Hal and Owl watched him together, drinking their coffee.

The point blanket, carefully folded to reveal its stripes, lay beside the doormat on the front porch. Hal shoved his arms under and lifted it to his face. He thought he smelled wood smoke. He raised his head, sniffed—cars swishing past all day on 104th Street—he bent to the blanket again. Perhaps.

No Miriam or Dennis numbers on the phone; but other messages:

“Hey Hal, it’s John, missed you at Coffee and Conversation yesterday. Hope the Papaschase land-steal talk last week—or the full moon, ha!—wasn’t too much for you! Call when you can or—”

Work on your Sunday sermon, John.

Ben’s voice: “I got a genealogy for that Isaak Wiens, third cousin twice removed but there’s a
Rundschau
entry I can’t read, of course, when will you—”

Maybe never—bumble it out with your computer translator.

“Hal … Al at Double Cup, you’re where? Becca says she hasn’t seen you in four—”

Becca we agreed, don’t lie.

Nothing police yet, good! so forget it, leave it all, especially phone, computer, e-mail—in what was life now there was always maybe later, sometime—he poked the speaker off. Tired. Exhausted actually. But good exhausted, the sharp air of valley walking, the good body ache and right hip no worse than usual and he felt no need for food, already eating forever for seventy-five years, who needs it? He poured a glass of cherry juice, drank it slowly and beneath his feet he felt the basement, waiting. All day it had sifted through his mind, always there, even when he was concentrating on some rotten log not to stumble over the basement like an irrepressible song reeled through his head, he had not been able to shake it, tramp it into the snow-spongy mud, discard it in any of the numberless city garbage cans. So … okay … only skim, touch here, there, just enough to sleep deep tonight, all that back and leg work, arms swinging, just skim …