Home Schooling (29 page)

He remembered sitting with his mother in her room at the nursing home on a hot day in July, watching television news coverage of the return to St. Petersburg of the remains of the last tsar and tsarina of Russia. His mother had wiped her eyes and had said look, look how small the coffins are. He, too, had felt moved, although he kept telling himself if he'd been there he would have been on the side of the Bolsheviks. He'd never believed his mother's stories of White Russian ancestry, and why should he; his mother had been born in Moose Jaw in
1919
. But he was beginning to understand this: for his mother it had been Russia, Imperial Russia, a pale winter sun glinting off the frozen Neva, horse-drawn sleighs gliding across a gold-tinted bridge, while for him it was South America, or it was Costa Rica, a beautiful green jewel of a country — but in both cases, he now saw, these visions came out of a desperate yearning for an unknown landscape, a place where it was possible to begin over and just maybe, with luck, get it right this time and thus avoid being irredeemably damaged by the simple process of living and making choices. But possibly such dreams had a thinning effect — by which he meant they dulled the mind and diverted attention away from what really mattered.

He got a jacket and a flashlight and took the dogs' leashes from a hook by the kitchen door. He went outside and walked across the lawn to the edge of the forest. He loved the hour before twilight, long blue shadows across the ground, his own shadow supine at his side. He knew he looked like his mother: the same long, thin nose with a bump, the same slightly prim mouth and narrow downturning eyes. It was almost as if he had inherited nothing from his absent father, and yet in many ways his father had been a powerful
influence in his life. He used to dream of his return. In the dream his father wore an open raincoat over a dark suit and carried an attaché case he kept shifting from one hand to the other, saying he had only thirty minutes to spare before his flight departed. Graham had to talk fast, trying to convey to his father how much he regretted not having known him better and how at school he'd got into a little trouble with drinking and so-called soft drugs, and other, less soft drugs, and had indulged in way too much partying, but then he'd married a lovely girl and had two daughters and he'd done all right, all things considered. His father gave him a smooth, unperturbed look. He consulted his watch. Graham wanted to grab him and shake him, but even in a dream he couldn't do that. His father had died more than a decade ago, in Ottawa, where he'd retired with his second wife, information Graham had gleaned from a newspaper clipping a former employer of his mother had slipped inside a Christmas card.

Graham walked around the yard, stooping for a closer look at what appeared to be fresh prints in the bark mulch. Were the dogs nearby, taunting him? He stood, thinking of how Sarah had driven from San Diego with two strange dogs in the car breathing down her neck and getting carsick and losing their balance whenever she turned a corner or accelerated. Near Bellingham, she'd detoured to the town of Fairhaven and had gone into a restaurant beneath a bookstore. She'd ordered something to eat and had sat near a window, where she could keep an eye on her car. Then she'd gone upstairs and browsed quickly through the books, on the lookout for new names for the dogs. They had names already, but those names were inextricably linked to their unfortunate prior histories and were, she believed, no longer suitable. Finally she'd settled on Hamlet, from Shakespeare, and Quinn, from a romance novel she'd nearly bought, then decided against, because it had seemed to her the owner of dogs like Hamlet and Quinn wouldn't read paperback
romances. She could feel herself morphing into a new creature, a new being. She'd described it as a truly physical process: it gave her little electrical sparkly feelings on the back of her hands. She went outside and got the dogs out of the car and took them for a walk. A wind was blowing and the sea was all churned up. The dogs tugged at their leashes, tangling her up, and she laughed at the picture they must have made. Sometimes Graham could see this scene so clearly it was as if he'd been there, too.

In the evening light his house was beautiful, the proportions pleasing to the eye, the front door appealingly recessed, the pitch of the roof precisely right. He'd cleared just enough land to hold it, like a bird in a cage. He remembered the raw wood taking shape, the roof timbers against a clear sky. Every nail he'd hammered in place himself, or he and Annette had, the two of them working side by side. He dreamed of travel, yet there was nowhere else he wanted to be.

In the forest there was a cold mist rising from the damp ground, a smell like incense. The last time he'd made it this far into the woods, scouting for fallen trees to use as firewood, he'd discovered a crude circle of stones around a pile of ash, tin cans, a couple of plastic water bottles. Someone had constructed a shelter, branches and boughs leaning against the trunk of a Douglas fir, a tarp to keep out the rain. Furious, he'd kicked the rocks and ashes around and shoved the lean-to over. If he'd asked, whoever he was, Graham would have said go ahead and live in the woods, make yourself at home, just don't leave garbage around or start a forest fire. Sometimes Graham had the odd feeling the squatter in the woods was in fact a younger, hardier version of himself, a self that had somehow sheared off after Annette died and had established a risky ephemeral independence, refusing to participate in a world he didn't understand or like. And how did you exorcise a ghost like that, even supposing you wanted to? A ghost named
Aravin;
no one.

Graham made it as far as the ravine, a strange geological feature, an abruption cutting deep into the earth. He was looking down at huge moss-covered erratics, rocks deposited here centuries ago, at the end of the last ice age, and luxuriant bracken fern, downed trees, mossy and rotten — nursery trees, they were called — host to an astonishing variety of life forms: hemlock and maple seedlings, ferns and lichens and fungus. How beautiful, he thought. What a beautiful, holy place, even to an agnostic like him. He crept closer to the edge. It had rained earlier, a brief downpour, and then the sky had quickly cleared, but the ground was still wet, and his foot must have slipped. Before he knew what had happened, he was falling. His arm struck a tree, or rather the tree struck him, the pain astonishing, as if the arm had been ripped from the socket, and then he almost landed on a rock shaped like an anvil, which just might have given him a platform he could use to climb back up from, but he merely grazed it, and he was still falling and he kept thinking this couldn't be happening, and at the same time he knew it was.

He came to rest on a relatively unencumbered stretch of ground, but still the impact must have knocked him out briefly, because there was a gap in his consciousness, and the next thing he knew he was looking up at a scrap of dusky sky as from the bottom of a well. With a little effort, he sat up. He feared his arm was broken, a simple fracture, nothing that would impede him too badly, as long as he did the impossible and ignored the pain. He rested a while, concentrating on breathing and staying calm. He'd lost the flashlight and the leashes. He didn't blame the dogs for any of this. Let the dogs be in charge of the world, for a change. Let them have their way. He waited, gathering his resources. Then he began making his way up the face of the ravine, gaining a foothold in rocks, on branches, trying to use his legs and his one good arm-although even his good arm hurt like hell. His ascent acquired a workable rhythm and he marvelled at how quickly he was able to adapt to such strenuous, unaccustomed labour, and to the pain,
which had acquired the mass and solidity of another being, a truculent, unshakeable companion.

There was a time when he actually thought he had it made. All he had to do was hoist himself somehow up and over the embankment and onto solid ground. But when he took hold of a root to use as leverage, he precipitated a shower of dirt and rocks. What looked solid was fragile, tenuous. He rubbed at his eyes, to clear them of grit. Just to survive until morning — nothing else was required. In the morning Sarah would look for him. The dogs would return home, their little game ended, and they'd lead Sarah here and he'd be rescued.

He thought of extinction, what it meant when the place you'd taken up in the world was empty, when there was nothing there. He was looking at his life and he saw the value of it, its irreplaceable fugitive nature. He thought of Annette, her smile, her dark curls tumbling around her pale face. Kathleen. Sarah. His daughters. His mother, Renate. He thought of Father Dimitri, with his compassionate smile and kind eyes. Forty days, he had said, before the soul severed its connections with the living. He thought of how people came into his life and enthralled him with their laughter, their need-iness and kindness. He thought of the forest drifting above him, like an elevated, sleeping city.

Each year his students would get in the habit of lightly tapping the Elvis poster, before an exam or a basketball game, for luck. Perhaps he, too, should pray to Elvis, the reading Elvis, his surprisingly delicate-looking hand resting on the open page, the text made blindingly plain to him, the words an avenue of escape, a way up into another world:
Some days I would rather read than sing.

He thought of Elvis. Elvis back on Earth. He thought of Elvis walking up and down on the face of the Earth. He thought of the Earth going about its process of subtraction and addition, taking away, building up, taking away, a planet that operated like a god, hoarding and spending, and people trying and failing and trying
again to accommodate themselves to this process. For a moment he thought he glimpsed his mother in the trees, her dress leaf-green, dappled with the last faint rays of evening light, her hand stretched forth, saying:
Why are you always afraid, Graham? What is there to fear?

I wish to thank Thora Howell and Kathryn Mulders for their encouragement and assistance, and thanks also to Irene Mock, Kim Goldberg, Joan Skogan, Jennifer O'Rourke, Cynthia Cecil. Special thanks to the Canada Council for financial support with the writing of these stories.

“What Saffi Knows” received a
Western Magazine
Award for Fiction, appeared in
Event
and
Best Canadian Stories;
“Felt Skies,” appeared in
Event;
“The Joy of Life” appeared in
Paper Guitar: 27 writers celebrate 25 years of Descant Magazine,
edited by Karen Mulhallen.