Guide to Animal Behaviour (3 page)

Then I see that the woman is my wife, that the carver has etched her hair to make it seem blonde, that he has captured in some crudely perfect manner her look of hopeful dignity.

I begin to sweat. This is the secret of the secret, a story carved in stone. The statue is a thing of icy beauty, a piece of shore rock, sawed and chipped and rubbed into life. Its implications for Glenna twist and swirl in my mind. Nothing holds. I have only a sense of her passion, her wonder, her unerring certitude and the undeniable fact that she has come back, that she has torn herself away from this man, this frozen world, to return to Ragged Point.

I am only half aware of Mama as she stubs out her cigarette on a saucer and brandishes the claw-hammer. I have only time to form the words “No, Mama. No!” But the words die on my lips. With a hiss of rage, she smashes the hammer down, hitting the statue squarely, shattering and pulverizing it.

Dust and shards fly everywhere, onto the floor, the kitchen counter, the Firbanks' laps, clinking against drink glasses.

Something strikes my chest above the heart. Without thinking, I stoop to retrieve the tiny ivory spear.

In the morning, as we pack the van, an air of celebration, of dignified festivity, settles over Gulf Haven. Bubba and Effie help carry loads to the van. I have hired them to manage the place while we are gone. Needless to say, Mama is against this, but since destroying Glenna's statue she has been unusually quiet. She and the Firbanks skulk in the pine shadows by her cabin like a nest of timid, viperish snakes.

Cars have been pulling up since first thing, disgorging well-wishers. Something is happening to Ragged Point, it is generally agreed. For once, there is a feeling of hope, a feeling that things may turn out all right. The forces of love and adventure, of passion and courage and virtue are in the ascendant.

Elder Ottman returned home the day before to find his wife hunched over a stack of books on the deserts of Australia. Sheriff Buck allows that his wife, Trudy, wants to pay us a visit up in Canada one of these days. Three of the five hang-gliding mothers are pregnant again and speak of taking their unborn infants on a walking tour of Nepal before the season is out.

Glenna still does not talk much. But her silences no longer wound me. When Mama's hammer fell, I realized I too had been silent, not knowing or refusing to say the words that would unlock the secret places of her heart.

In bed last night, she told me a little about the place where we are going. The Eskimos, she said, do not use that name for themselves. They are Inuit, which means the People. For centuries they thought they were the only human beings on earth.

“When they meet a stranger,” she said, “they run forward holding their bare hands in the air, shouting, ‘We are friends. See, we have no knives. We mean you no harm. We are friends.'”

She said they have eighty-nine words for snow, and that in the long summer day they will stand on the shore for hours, staring out to sea. Sometimes they are watching for seals or walrus to hunt, but other times they are just staring. Itlulik, the man in the statue, also the man who carved it, is a hunter and an
anguloq,
a sort of medicine man.

“I didn't want you to find out like that,” she said, holding me tight against her breast so I wouldn't turn away. “I didn't know if you loved me enough to hear me out. I missed you the whole time. He's not kind like you. Even the other Inuit don't trust an
anguloq.
I told him I had to come back and find you.”

Before getting into the van for the last time, I embrace each of my friends from the Dunkin' Donut. We are brothers, fellow unravellers of the mysteries of existence. They wish me good luck. They tell me to send back messages so that the world will seem a little more clear to them. It is a sad, yet happy, moment. Bubba dances me a step or two. Effie crushes me against her enormous breasts and laughs.

I don't know where we are going really. I have to trust the luminous stranger beside me. For courage I press my shirt pocket, where amongst the pens I carry Itlulik's ivory spear which my wife has let me keep. In my mind, I practice the words of greeting which, in my heart, I have always known.

“I am a friend. See, I have no knife. I mean you no harm. I am a friend.”

SWAIN CORLISS, HERO OF MALCOLM'S MILLS
(NOW OAKLAND, ONTARIO),
NOVEMBER 6, 1814

I
n the morning, the men rubbed their eyes and saw Kentucky cavalry and Indians mounted on stolen farm horses cresting the hill on the opposite side of the valley. The Kentuckians looked weary and calm, their hollow eyes slitted with analysis. We were another problem to be solved; they had been solving problems all the way from Fort Detroit, mostly by killing, maiming and burning, which were the usual methods.

The Indians were Cherokee and Kickapoo, with some Muncies thrown in. They had eagle-feather rosettes and long hair down the sides of their heads and paint on their faces, which looked feminine in that light. Some wore scalps hanging at their belts.

They came over the hill in a column, silent as the steam rising from their mounts, and stopped to chew plug tobacco or smoke clay pipes while they analyzed us. More Kentuckians coming on extended the line on either side of the track into the woods, dismounted and started cook fires or fell asleep under their horses' bellies, with reins tied at the wrists.

General McArthur rode in with his staff, all dressed in blue, with brass buttons and dirty white facings. He spurred his mare to the front, where she shied and pranced and nearly fell on the steep downward incline. He gave a sign, and the Indians dismounted and walked down the road to push our pickets in. The Indians had an air of attending their eighty-seventh-or-so battle. They trudged down the dirt road bolt upright, with their muskets cradled, as though bored with the whole thing, as though they possessed some precise delineation of the zone of danger that bespoke a vast familiarity with death and dying.

The men who could count counted.

Somebody said, “Oh, sweet Baby Jesus, if there's a one, there must be a thousand.”

I should say that we had about four hundred — the 1st and 2nd Norfolk Militia, some Oxfords and Lincolns, six instructors from the 41st Foot and some local farmers who had come up the day before for the society.

Colonel Bostwick (the men called him Smiling Jack) stood higher up on the ridge behind our line, watching the enemy across the valley with a spyglass, his red coat flapping at his thighs. He stood alone mostly. He had been shot in the leg at Frenchman's Creek and in the face at Nanticoke when he walked into the Dunham place and stumbled on Sutherland and Onstone's gang by accident. The wound on his face made him look as though he were smiling all the time, which was repellent and unnerved his troops in a fight.

Injun George, an old Chippeway who kept house in a hut above Troyer's Flats, was first up from the creek. He said he had seen a black snake in the water, which was bad luck. He said the Kickapoo had disappeared when he shot at them, which meant that they had learned the disappearing trick and had strong medicine. He himself had been trying to disappear for years with little success. Later, he shot a crow off the mill roof, which he said was probably one of the Kickapoos.

A troop of Kentuckians came down the hill with ammunition pouches and Pennsylvania long rifles and started taking pot shots at McCall's company hiding behind a barricade of elm logs strung across the road. We could not reply much for lack of powder, so the Kentuckians stood out in the open on the stream bank, smoking their white clay pipes and firing up at us. Others merely watched, or pissed down the hill, or washed their shirts and hung them out to dry, as though fighting and killing were just another domestic chore, like slopping pigs or putting up preserves.

Somebody said, “They are just like us except that we are not in Kentucky lifting scalps and stealing horses and trying to take over the place.”

The balls sounded like pure-D evil thunking into the logs.

Someone else tried to raise a yell for King George, which fell flat, many men allowing as it was a mystery why King George had drawn his regulars across to the other side of the Grand River and burned the ferry scow so that they could not be here when the fighting started.

Thunk, thunk
went the balls. A melancholy rain began to fall, running in muddy rivulets down the dirt track. Smoke from the Republican cook fires drifted down into the valley and hung over the mill race.

Colonel Bostwick caused some consternation coming down to be with his men, marching up and down just behind the line with that strange double grin on his face (his cheek tattooed with powder burns embedded in the skin) and an old officer's spontoon across his shoulders, exhorting us in a hoarse, excited mutter.

“Behold, ye infidels, ye armies of Gog and Magog, agents and familiars of Azazel. Smite, smite! O Lord, bless the children who go into battle in thy name. Remember, boys, the Hebrew kings did not scruple to saw their enemies with saws and harrow them with harrows of iron!”

Sergeant Major Collins of the 41st tried to make him lie down behind the snake fence, but the colonel shook him off, saying, “The men must see me.” The sergeant took a spent ball in the forehead and went down. The ball bounced off, but he was dead nonetheless, a black knot sprouting between his brows like a third eye.

A sharpshooter with a good Pennsylvania Dutch long rifle can hit a man at three hundred yards, which is twice as far as any weapon we had could throw, let alone be accurate, So far we had killed only one crow, which might or might not have been an enemy Indian.

Edwin Barton said, “I dreamt of Tamson Mabee all night. I threw her down in the hay last August, but she kept her hand over her hair pie and wouldn't let me. She ain't hardly fourteen. I'll bet I'm going to hell today.”

Somebody said, “You ever done it with a squaw? A squaw'll lay quiet and not go all herky-jerky like a white woman. I prefer a squaw to a white woman any day.”

And somebody else said, “I know a man over at Port Rowan who prefers hogs for the same reason.”

This was war and whisky talking.

We lay in the rain, dreaming of wives and lovers, seeking amnesty in the hot purity of lust — yes, some furtively masturbating in the rain with cold hands. Across the valley, the Kentuckians seemed like creatures of the autumn and of rain, their amphibian eyes slitty with analysis. Our officers, Salmon and Ryerson, said we held good ground, whatever that meant, that the American army at Niagara was already moving back across the river, that we had to stop McArthur from burning the mills of Norfolk so we could go on feeding King George's regulars.

Trapped in that valley, waiting for the demon cavalry to come whooping and shrieking across the swollen creek, we seemed to have entered some strange universe of curved space and strings of light. Rain fell in strings. Some of us were already dead, heroes of other wars and battles. We had been fighting since August 1812, when we went down the lake with Brock to the relief of Amherstburg. At times like these, we could foresee the mass extinction of the whole species, the world turned to a desert of glass.

Everything seemed familiar and inevitable. We had marched up from Culver's Tavern the day before. We had heard firing in the direction of Brant's Ford at dusk, and awakened to see Kentucky cavalry and Indians emerging from the forest road and smoke rising from barn fires behind them. Evidently, given their history, Kentuckians are born to arson and mayhem. Now they sniped with passionate precision
(thunk, thunk
went the balls), keeping us under cover while they moved troops down the steep bank.

Shielding our priming pans with our hats, we cursed the rain and passed the time calculating angles of assault. The mill pond, too deep except to swim, protected our left wing. That meant Salmon's boys would get hit first, thank goodness. Mrs. Malcolm and her Negro servant were busy moving trunks and armoires out of the house in case of fire. No one paid them any mind. All at once, we heard shouts and war cries deep in the woods downstream. Colonel Bostwick sent a scout, who returned a moment later to say McArthur's Indians had out-flanked us, crawling across a deadfall ford.

We stared at the clouds and saw fatherless youngsters weeping at the well, lonely widows sleeping with their hands tucked between their legs, and shadows moving with horrible wounds, arms or legs missing, brains dripping out their ears.

Someone said, “I can't stand this no more,” stood up and was shot in the spine, turning. He farted and lay on his face with his legs quivering. His legs shook like a snake with its back broken. The Kentuckians were throwing an amazing amount of hot lead our way.

The colonel smiled and shouted additional remarks against Azazel, then ordered McCall to stand at the elm-tree barricade while the rest retired. This was good news for us. We could get by without the mills of Norfolk; it was our bodies, our limbs, lungs, nerves and intestines we depended on for today and tomorrow.

McCall had Jo Kitchen, a noted pugilist, three of the Austin brothers, Edwin Barton and some others. We left them our powder and shot, which was ample for a few men. At the top of the valley, Swain Corliss turned back, cursing some of us who had begun to run. “Save your horses first, boys and, if you can, your women!” He was drunk. Many of us did not stop till we reached home, which is why they sometimes call this the Battle of the Foot Race.

Swain Corliss hailed from a family of violent Baptists with farms on the Boston Creek about three miles from Malcolm's. His brother Ashur had been wounded thirteen times in the war and had stood his ground at Lundy's Lane, which Swain had missed on account of ague. Swain did not much like his brother getting ahead of him like that.

He had a Brown Bess musket and a long-barreled dragoon pistol his father had bought broken from an officer. He turned at the top of the hill and started down into the racket of lead and Indian shouts. Musket balls swarmed round McCall's company like bees, some stinging. Swain took up a position against a tree, guarding the flank, and started flinging lead back. Edwin Barton, shot through the thighs, loaded for him. Men kept getting up to leave, and Captain McCall would whack them over the shoulders with the flat of his sword.

Swain Corliss, pounding a rock into the barrel of his gun with a wooden mallet, kept saying, “Boys, she may be rough, but she sure is regular.”

Bees stung him.

That night, his father dreaming, dreamed a bee stung him in the throat and knew. Swain Corliss was catching up to Ashur. He killed a Kentucky private coming over the creek on a cart horse. Then Swain Corliss shot the horse. Smoke emerged from the mill. Mrs. Malcolm ran around
in a circle, fanning the smoke with a linen cloth.
(Thunk, thunk, buzz, buzz
went the balls.) Though we were running, we were with them. It was our boys fighting in the hollow. Colonel Bostwick sat on his race horse, Governor, at the top of the track.

The company gave ground, turning to fire every few yards. Martin Boughner tied a handkerchief to his ramrod and surrendered to an Indian. Swain Corliss tied up Edwin Barton's legs with his homespun shirt. Deaf from the guns, they had to shout.

“By the Jesus, Ned, I do believe it ain't hard to kill them when they stand around you like this.”

“I mind a whore I knew in Chippawa —”

“Ned, I wished you'd stop bleeding so freely. I think they have kilt you.”

“Yes.”

They were in another place, a region of black light and maximum density. On the road, sweating with shame in the cold, we heard the muskets dwindle and go out. We saw Swain Corliss, white-faced, slumped against an oak amongst the dead smouldering leaves, Edwin's head in his lap, without a weapon except for his bayonet, which he held across his chest as Kickapoo warriors came up one by one, reverently touching Swain's shoulders with their musket barrels.

The Kentuckians had lost one dead, eight wounded and a couple of borrowed horses. That day, they burned the mill and one downstream and sent out patrols to catch stragglers, which they did, and then released after making them promise on the Good Book not to shoot at another person from the United States. The Indians skinned and butchered Edwin Barton's body, Ned having no further use for it.

During the night, three miles away, James Corliss dreamed that a venomous bee had stung him in the throat. Rising from his bed, he told the family, “Yonder, yer baby boy is dead or something.” Then James Corliss went out into the darkness, hitched his horse to a stoneboat, placed a feather tick, pillows and sheets upon it, and started for the scene of the battle.