Given (39 page)

I drove past the Uncle's place, Matt's Yaka-Way, past Lawlor Moon's memorial pole. When a raven flew across the road in front of me by the church, a piece of red and green ribbon in his beak, I thought of my mother's ashes in the ice cream bucket back at the farm and that's when it came to me what Rainy had done: when she let go of her twins, somewhere inside that broken brain of hers she had decided it was time to let Frenchy go, also.

It wasn't cat litter she'd spread under the rear wheels of the hearse, it had been Frenchy. Frenchy, who, in Rainy's tragic mind, had manifested herself in my mother's ashes.

I supposed my mother wouldn't have minded being backed over by a hearse; the idea might have amused her in a morbid way. Hadn't she always said that in death she still hoped she would go on being useful?

I parked at the end of Dead End Road and got out, making sure every part of Given's body was covered, except his nose. I sang to him as I broke a new trail, the sun shearing off the snow, and heard wind high in the trees and knew it was the dead out there, singing back to me, their bottomless love. He didn't look anywhere near ready to sleep, but I think my lullabies were to soothe
me
as much as they were to keep him from fussing as we walked.

We stopped, briefly, so I could introduce him to all his relations, especially Baby Born and Died. I had begun to feel an attachment to those whose graves I passed by each time I had come this way, as if it took death to awaken my feelings. Somehow it was easier to love those who had left us, the way I'd begun to love Rainy and Frenchy after they were executed (and before I knew they'd be coming back). How much easier to admire not only those we will outlive, but those who could teach us, who have ceased to speak to us, their closed mouths full of dirt.

Today, with the way the snow had tiptoed up to some of the graves and dusted them, and come down heavily, obscuring others and weighing the cedar branches, I felt in awe of the world again, as if it were no longer death, but Given's presence that had awakened me, halfway through my life, to the unbearable loveliness of existence.

The dry, bitter air slapped my face. My boots squeaked in the snow. I held tight to the Bomb's leash, and he kept getting underfoot, the snow going
crunch crunch crunch,
as I approached Hooker's cabin; I suspected the Bomb had never been in a forest before. Charlie and Ralph, so shiny they looked like they'd been polished with bootblack, took flight from the raven-feeder, but didn't sound off the way they normally did. I liked to think they recognized me.

There was no smoke coming from the chimney — I figured no smoke, no Hooker. I didn't knock, but used Given's weight to push the door open. Toop lifted an ear and then sat up and began licking himself, as if he were embarrassed to have been caught sleeping on the job.

The Bomb and I made a great fuss over him, lots of where have you beens, you had us worried half to deaths. Toop began panting enthusiastically when I told him I was going to the beach — I wanted to take my shoes off and walk in the foam, let Given taste the salt on his tongue. “If you're coming with me, you look out for the Bomb,” I said, bending to unclip his leash. “He's a city-slicker, not like you.” Toop stopped panting and gave me his “do I have to?” look.

I felt the tickling moisture of Given's breath falling softly on my neck, his chest heat-fused to mine in the sling I carried him in as I set out over the mossy point, still covered with deep snow in places — the rays from the late afternoon sun turning the white surface to a faint salmon — and then down onto the sand.

The sea glittered with jumpy light, as if someone up above had scattered a box of shiny new pins across the surface. Foam covered the whole beach, right up to the tideline, as far as the ocean could go before being pulled back out. A crust of snow still clung to the driftwood making it too slippery to walk on. Given dozed on my chest, his body wrapped around my heart. My heart felt safe with him. I felt holy.

I remembered one of my last days on Tranquilandia when I climbed Nevada Chocolata, with Angel in my arms, to have him baptised. It was a day clearer than any other, from that time in my life — the ten-foot sorrowing Virgin in white and blue plaster presiding over the Church of Our Virgin of Mercy as a small white coffin was unloaded from a garishly painted truck.

Angel had Holy Water sprinkled on his head, and the Salt of Life on his tongue. When the baptisms were over, the priest prayed to God Almighty for the babies' souls. Afterwards he held a funeral, as if birth and death, like tears and laughter, were born joined at the hip. And I guess it's true, they are joined. Only when you're holding a baby, you don't remember death.

When the coffin was carried from the church to the Cementarios de Ninos with its endless rows of forsaken graves, sulking up the slopes of Nevada Chocolata where the crucifix orchids bloomed, a black mass of clouds appeared suddenly over the peak of the mountain and I swear I felt Angel's small body shrink beneath his white robe, as if to say can there be any place lonelier on earth than this? I remember the earth cracked, as if those down below had moved over to make room for more, and the priest asking us to help him pray, as if that cracked earth had taken his courage away. That time I even prayed with him.

I was lost in my own remembering, wasn't watching the dogs, so that when the eagle swooped and plucked the Bomb out of the foam, I didn't see it happening until the Bomb was no more than a white blur, with bobbing antlers, in the eagle's talons. Toop raced back and forth at the water's edge, whipping the foam into suds, hurling himself as far out into the surf as he could before the waves dragged him back. The eagle flew with the Bomb in a straight line towards the thin pink rind on the western horizon. And then, when the giant bird disappeared from sight, everything was the same as before.

I watched the sun go down, almost audibly, into a gulf of gold, but I don't remember racing back through the foam, or the sky darkening around me as if the eagle's wings had blocked out the last of the sun's glow. I don't remember stumbling into Hooker's cabin, or the door being ajar; I don't remember registering any of this at the time. It still surprises me how much memory is framed by things we might not notice, or pay much attention to, when it is happening. I stood in the doorway, holding Given, squeezing him so hard that if he'd wanted to cry, right then for any reason, he wouldn't have been able to.

Hooker and I-5 lay entwined on the mattress in the middle of the floor. I could barely make out their faces beneath the white clouds of their breath, the steam rising off their naked bodies like little wispy ghosts into the cold cabin air. I didn't feel shocked, or jealous, when I think back on it, or even betrayed. Just in awe: how hot would a body have to be before sweat turned to steam!

Given made a sound like the newborn killer whale I'd heard on the radio, crying for his mother. Toop lifted his head and howled. Clutching Given to my breast, I stumbled back outside into what remained of the day.

By the time I reached the hearse the sky had turned black in the north. I drove home, with Given next to me, erecting a chain-link fence around my heart. I didn't remember that it was New Year's Eve: what did it even matter? I tried not to think about the Bomb's last moments as he was carried out to sea, or of Hooker and I-5 either, how their bodies became one flesh, the colour of white and dark chocolate melted together.

When I reached the house an icy rain had begun falling. I got out with Given's basket under my arm, and took the front steps two at a time, nearly tripping over Aged Orange's crucified body, stiff and cold on the doorstep, his head in an Afro of blood. I dropped the Moses basket and fell to my knees, kissing the cat's liquid eyes where the dark blood had pooled.

Rainy heard me wailing on the verandah and flew to the door. Her face turned bare light bulb white when she saw me, kneeling before the bloody crucifix.
Best we bail ourselves on out of here,
she said,
' fore Son Jesus end up bein killed on down.

“Who would do this to a cat?” I cried, until my voice grew hoarse. There was only one person I could think of. The man at the Christian vegetable stand.

I left Rainy holding Given, ran upstairs and stuffed all my belongings in my prison-issue duffel bag. The radio was on: police were close to making an arrest in the case of the abducted baby, and the mysterious slaying of an island man. A RCMP spokesperson said it was too early to say for sure, but they had reason to believe the kidnapping and the murder were connected.

The ice rain pecked at my window. I grabbed my bag and ran back downstairs, shouting to Rainy to get in the car. Everything — the trees, the birds, the wind — had been silenced by the hard, cold rain.

Rain be like needle stickin,
Rainy said, as I sped down the treacherous driveway.
Take me where I don't want to go.

I turned right at the driveway's end and headed towards the Bend. As I braked for the stop sign I saw the billboard with its big question looming up in front of me where, hours ago, there had been a sale of poinsettias at the Christian vegetable stand. I drove straight at it as the world began whirling away from me into that familiar weightless dream. Rainy screamed
pump yo brakes
as the hearse went into a spin on the icy road, hit the billboard and back-flipped in mid-air through

ETERNITY
WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING?

I flew headfirst through the windshield, with nothing to hang on to, as if I were freefalling towards the earth that was moving away from me even faster than I could fly.

Afterwards there was the usual, the morbidly curious crowd — neighbours, motorists who swore they'd seen it happen. When the police arrived I felt the world darken as if their gunmetal uniforms had just sucked up any light there was left to me. I had known all along they would find me, but it had taken them so long I could no longer remember what they wanted me for.

At first I assumed they'd come for the baby, or possibly because the hearse had been reported in an incident involving the theft of a Christmas tree. But then the heavy one with the greying moustache looked into my face and said, “It's me, Earl.” In the shattered mirrors of Earl's sunglasses I saw the blood on my face reflected. “Do you know who I am? he said. Tell me who you are.”

I like to look back on a situation and think about what I should have said, but whoever gets life right the first time? Officer Jodie Lootine, wearing Eternal aviators, said “how the fuck's she supposed to know who she fucking is?” as she bent over and kept asking me in loud, over-enunciated words, if I could hear anything she said. If they didn't know who I was, they couldn't have come to arrest me.

I let her words rain around me until they began to echo in repetition,
fucking doesn't know, who the fuck, doesn't know, who she is.
The Latrine had a fistful of Kleenex and kept trying to wipe my face. I could hear sirens. Another officer said “there's been an accident, an ambulance is on its way, don't try to move, we only want to help you.” Why, then, did they have to put me in handcuffs? This meant I couldn't hold Given, and that's when I started fighting back and they put me in restraints. The Latrine kept saying they weren't going to hurt me, and every time I shouted for Rainy's help I saw the two officers exchange glances.
Cops got a way of turning everybody into nuttin,
Rainy said.

I heard people shouting in the streets, the sirens coming closer and closer. And I heard Given crying — he needed me, and I couldn't reach him. I thought of the mothers leaving the
curandero's
clinic on Tranquilandia, wrapping their babies in cheesecloth so they looked like little mummies in their coffins, how the women wailed at the gravesite: I would never forget that sound. Or the tears that made rivers in the dust on their faces as they stretched their arms toward their dead children they couldn't reach. How they crawled on their hands and knees, filling their mouths with dirt, stuffing the fresh grave-dirt into their ears and nostrils.